At that point trials and other officially recorded proceedings against witches came virtually to a stop. However, the central beliefs continued in at least attenuated form. And so, too, did the emotional basis continue—the projection of fear, hatred, contempt. This, in turn, was sufficient to fuel informal, unofficial actions against witchcraft, lasting through the 18th century and beyond. Meanwhile, there began a series of events with characteristics strikingly similar to witch-hunts; hence the term itself has survived, as a way to describe these (figuratively) even now. Chapter X offers a close-up account of one such episode, an angry struggle to suppress the Order of Freemasons in the early 19th century. Though ostensibly a political and social movement, anti-Masonry’s moral tone and countersubversive theme strongly evoked the Salem “hysteria” of the early 1690s and the long, bitter “craze” years in Europe. Chapter XI traces the same theme—what some have called, from a different perspective, a “paranoid”
