Daemonologie.

In 1597, the future King James I of England composed one of the most notorious texts in the history of supernatural belief: a systematic defense of witchcraft persecution written in the form of a philosophical dialogue. As a Scottish monarch obsessed with demonology, James had personally overseen the North Berwick witch trials, and Daemonologie emerged from this dark obsession, a meticulous argument for the reality of witchcraft, the power of the devil, and the divine right of kings to exterminate practitioners of dark arts. The text takes the form of a conversation between Philomathes (a curious student) and Epistemon (a learned scholar), dividing its inquiry into three sections: necromancy and divination, witchcraft and sorcery, and the nature of spirits. James wrote in explicit response to skeptic Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, determined to stamp out what he saw as dangerous doubt. The book would become infamous as both a primary source for Shakespeare's Macbeth and a justification for executions across Scotland and England. Today it stands as a chilling artifact of early modern paranoia, a window into a world where a king's personal fears became doctrine.