Reginald Scot (1538-1599) was an English country gentleman who immersed himself in the mid-1500s with the study of “obscure mystical authors.” Reading deeply in alchemy, astrology, numerology, and witchcraft, he attempted to provide an alternative, rational explanation for any supposedly occult phenomena. He also was attacking the Catholic Church for its “superstitions” as well as critiquing the trials of witches. He summed up his studies in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), explaining away much of magic as tricks or illusions. He explored legerdemain, prestidigitation, ventriloquism, and other forms of illusion. He described the contraptions that magicians used to perform their shows, exposing how they provided such illusions as cutting off a man’s head or cutting someone in two.

As for alchemists, he thought them to be conjurers who had cloaked themselves in authority-granting mystery. Because the practicers of alchemy “would be thought wise, learned, cunning, and their crafts maisters, they have devised words of art, sentences and epithets obscure, and confectious so innumerable (which are also compounded of strange and rare simples) as confound the capacities of them that are either set on worke heerein, or be brought to behold or expect their conclusions.” Scot provided narratives of how various people had been fooled, and other debunkings.

The book offended King James, who was such a supporter of the truth of witchcraft that he published his own rejoinder, Daemonologie (1597), to refute Scot’s views. There is an often repeated claim that the king also ordered copies of Scot’s book to be seized and burned, but this story was a later invention. Scot’s works were frequently reprinted through the 1600s, and became a trove of lore for examples of and arguments against the occult. It is still widely reprinted and available.

Scot is perhaps less known but more widely appreciated for his innovations in the cultivation and use of hops to flavor and preserve beer, published in his A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden (1574).