Also, this kind of reminds me of an anecdote I read recently (I can't remember the title of the book, but it's a study of Russian peasant folk culture). Some time in the early 1800s, the Russian government had determined that witches did not exist, and so official trials of people for consorting with the Devil were discontinued. However, this did not prevent the peasantry frim believing in them.
Pretty late on, around 1910 I think, there was a case in which some peasants decided that a local woman was hexing the cows and confronted her, demanding that she strip naked so they could see her tail (since witches have tails). She refused, and they insisted. Her husband showed up and backed her up in her assertion that she had no tail. The villagers decided that he must be in cahoots with her, and marched them both down to the local police station. To their sorrow, the police informed them that they were no longer in the business of prosecuting witches. From this the villagers concluded that the witch had used her demonic powers to hex the police.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote: Well, I don't know how much developed intellectual capacity they had, but as far as I can tell blood libel was almost universally accepted (among Christians anyway) in Medieval Europe as a fact of the world, like the sun rising in the east, water being wet, and the existence of dragons. If your society has a consensus about x, 95% of the time the members of the society are going to agree with the consensus.
Look at the example of the Beilis trial (the Russian Empire's last blood libel trial, in 1913, in which a Jew was accused of ritually murdering a Christian child). The jury was composed of Ukrainian peasants. That they were not fanged, raving anti-Semites out for blood is shown by the fact that the accused was in fact found not guilty. However, everybody in the jury did believe that blood libel was a reality and did, in fact, conclude that the child had been a victim of Jewish ritual murder, but not by this guy.
Mataiotes mataioteton, eipen ho Ekklasiastes, mataiotes mataioteton, ta panta mataiotes.