HKB
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Often appears with: the fear of death · religious superstition · prayer and worship · magic, witchcraft, and the occult · language, naming, and meaning · charms and amulets · abracadabra
Usually: narrative (1) · crisis of belief (1) · indignation (1) · skepticism (1)
“as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots” Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year · insight
After plague fears rise, Defoe describes further “madness” among the poor: reliance on charms, amulets, and magical abracadabra-like words to ward off God-sent plague.
Dr Hodges, Dr Berwick, or any, though the most famous men of the time. And I was told that some of them got five pounds a day by their physic. But there was still another madness beyond all this, which may serve to give an idea of the distracted humour of the poor people at that time: and this was their following a worse sort of deceivers than any of these; for these petty thieves only deluded …