The superstition of the people of Dibra, a frontier town in Epirus besieged by the Turks, is almost incredible to relate. Because a dead dog had been thrown into the town’s only spring, they would all die of thirst rather than drink that unclean water, and would surrender the city on any terms. Although the magistrate and leading citizens drank first and used every reasonable argument, their superstition was such that no words would persuade them: they must all immediately die or surrender the city.

“I scarcely dared believe such superstition myself,” says Barleti, “or assert so trivial—or rather ridiculous—a cause for so great an event, since I do not doubt it will provoke laughter rather than astonishment in posterity.” The story was too ridiculous: he was ashamed to report it, because he thought no one would believe it.

It is astonishing to relate the strange effects this idolatry and superstition have produced in recent years in the Indies and neighbouring regions: in what savage shapes the Devil is worshipped, “lest they threaten some harm,” as they say. For in the mountains between Alexandretta and Aleppo there now lives a people called Kurds, descended from the ancient Parthians, who worship the Devil and give this reason for doing so: God is a good man and will do no harm, but the Devil is bad and must be appeased lest he hurt them.

It is extraordinary to tell how the Devil deceives and terrifies them, how they sacrifice men and women to him, a hundred at a time, as people once offered infants to Saturn in Crete—the finest children, like Agamemnon’s Iphigenia, and so on.

At Mexico, when the Spaniards first conquered them, they daily sacrificed “living human hearts torn from living bodies”—the hearts of people still alive: 20,000 a year, according to Acosta, book 5, chapter 20, to their idols made of flour and human blood, and every year six thousand children of both sexes.

Equally monstrous to relate is how they bury wives with their dead husbands: fearful to report, and harder still to believe.

For they compete for death—to follow their husband while still alive; It is a disgrace not to have been allowed to die.

And they burn them alive, together with the finest possessions, servants and horses, when a great person dies: 12,000 at once among the Tartars when a great khan dies, or an emperor in America.

And how they torment themselves with excessive fasting, abstaining from everything that has life, like the ancient Pythagoreans: the Banians around Surat, for example, and people in China who, for superstition’s sake, never eat meat or fish throughout their lives, never marry, but live in deserts and remote places. Some pray to their idols for twenty-four hours without interruption, biting off their tongues when they have finished, out of devotion.

Others are driven to such madness by their superstitious priests, who tell them these empty stories of immortality and the joys of heaven in the life to come, that many thousands voluntarily break their own necks. Like the hearers of Cleombrotus of Ambracia in ancient times, they throw themselves from heights to share in that unspeakable happiness in the other world. One poisons himself, another strangles himself; and the king of China, deceived by this empty hope, would have done the same had his servant not restrained him.

But who can adequately recount their many superstitions, vexations, follies and torments? I may conclude with Possevino: “Religion makes the rough gentle, human beings out of beasts; superstition makes beasts out of human beings.” Religion civilizes wild beasts; superstition makes wise people beasts and fools. Even the most sensible, if they give way to it, are no better than fools.

More than that, if Plotinus’s saying is true, “The sole aim of religion is that we should become like the one we worship”—if religion’s purpose is to make us like him whom we worship—what will idolaters come to but to degenerate into blocks and stones? What will those who worship these pagan gods become—for “the gods of the nations are demons”—but devils themselves?

It is therefore “a ruinous and supremely dangerous error,” the most perilous and dangerous of all errors, as Plutarch holds: “a turbulent passion that strikes a person with terror,” a pestilent, distressing passion that utterly ruins people. Unhappy superstition, Pliny calls it, “does not end with death”: death takes away life, but not superstition. The impious and ignorant are far happier than the superstitious. No torment equals it: none is so unremitting, so widespread, so destructive, so violent.

In this superstitious line, Jews may follow the Gentiles in order of antiquity. What they did in ancient times, what idolatries they committed in their groves and high places, what their Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, Essenes and similar sects maintained—I will not even mention.

As for the present, I believe no nation under heaven can be more foolish, ignorant, blind, superstitious, wilful, obstinate and perverse, wearing themselves out with pointless ceremonies. Anyone who reads their rabbis’ ridiculous commentaries, their strange interpretations of Scripture, their absurd ceremonies, fables and childish tales, which they firmly believe, will think them scarcely rational creatures.