The Secret Commonwealth and Satan's Invisible World Discovered

George Sinclair (1630-1696) - Protestant Scottish mathematician, engineer, demonologist - the nice career summary on his Wikipedia page 

Robert Kirk (1644-1692) - Protestant Scottish minister, Gaelic scholar, folklorist - also from Wikipedia

I won't right now say that I plan to write such a piece, but I will say that there ought to be a piece where someone -- preferably an occultist -- undertakes close, comparative readings of George Sinclair's Satan's Invisible World Discovered and and Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies.  

I read both of these short works over the past year because they have been cited as source material for early modern witchcraft lore, and that they are. Taken together, they are remarkable because they deal with contemporary beliefs in and experiences of the supernatural but have basically opposite theses. 

Sinclair seems to accept the demonological views of supernatural experience, that -- generally speaking -- supernatural things encountered are likely to be diabolical. Given the Christian theology that has attempted to get rid of all ambiguity concerning various beings and the fate of the human soul, it becomes difficult to explain the complexity of people's actual experience except by recourse to demonic delusion or attack. (Protestantism had even gotten rid of Purgatory, which traditionally provided leeway such that churchmen were obliged to accept that ghostly visitations, e.g. in nocturnal processions like the Wild Hunt, might be souls taking temporary leave from Purgatory and carrying out unfinished business on the hither side.) 

Kirk, on the other hand, takes a broad-minded or liberal approach. He accepts the basic Christian cosmology. However, he knows very well that some among his rural parishioners possess ''second sight,'' being able to perceive various beings known as fairies, elves, etc. He is aware that people routinely experience premonitions and the like. While not necessarily denying the existence of demonic powers, he sees these various beings as part of a spiritual and natural ecosystem within a Christian cosmology. Just as God created humans, so he created fairies. And people have experiences of them. This is not a bad thing for him, just another variety of human experience. 

The two men were writing in roughly the same time and place and from a Protestant point of view. Albeit highly religious, both were proto-Enlightenment sort of figures, with wide-ranging scientific and intellectual connections. Both undertook a kind of proto-anthropology or folklorist approach, with Kirk perhaps embodying this more so, since he seems to have actual rapport with the rural people he describes and records their understandings. (Sinclair, again, relies more on elaborated theory of witchcraft or learned theological explanations to characterize second and thirdhand stories, which are nevertheless still compelling.) 

These readings could be a centerpiece for a larger exploration, or really meditation on the problematic of supernatural experience in Christian history. Or rather, in Christian society. 

Briefly: Especially from our post-Enlightenment perspective (or, haven taken onboard modernist assumptions that categorize supernatural experience as ''superstition,'') it seems natural that Christianity and its truth claims rest on a belief in supernatural experience. That is true in a sense. But for doctrinal religion, which didn't really exist until late antiquity, these experiences are a problem. 

As early as the first or second century Christian text, the Didache (which didn't make it into the cannon) it was clear that people having visionary experiences and prophesying or evangelizing was problematic because it is easy to depart from whatever was consolidating as orthodoxy in a given moment. These early texts, as in the Acts of the Apostles, give a view of an early Jesus movement made up of itinerant ascetics who went from house to house preaching as the spirit moved them. This was how the movement spread, but it was not ultimately conducive to the institutional needs of what became Christianity. The Didache itself is very much concerned with the ''false prophets'' who depart from their particular sect's views, and also outright swindlers who are taking more than the accepted level of alms. 

A way around this was the development of hierarchies of bishops, and monastic orders could place the visionaries and mystics within safe physical and institutional enclosures, different from the early sort of heroic ascetics, anchorites, etc. 

Popular impulses around ancestral veneration, need to ensure fertility of crops, and more, could likewise be integrated into the cults of the saints and the cyclical experience of the liturgical year. Again, Catholic Christianity accommodated the common experience of ghosts and other supernatural entities, in part via the doctrine of Purgatory. 

Protestantism stripped everything down and presented much starker options, in general, but this was never fully possible, as both The Secret Commonwealth and Satan's Invisible World show.