Thomas Ady

Thomas Ady (fl. 17th century) was an English physician and humanist who was the author of three sceptical books on witchcraft and witch-hunting, using the Bible as the source.

His first and best known work, A Candle in the Dark: Or, A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches & Witchcraft, was used unsuccessfully by George Burroughs, a Baptist preacher, in his defense during the Salem witch trials. The second book, published in 1661, was A Perfect Discovery of Witches, named in honour of Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, the first book of its kind in the English language; his third was The Doctrine of Devils (1676).

In A Candle in the Dark, Ady attacked current ideas of witchcraft by arguing (as did his opponents) directly from the Bible. In the first of the book's three parts, Ady argues that the well-known prohibition against witches in Deuteronomy 18:10-11

should be read to define witches as "the popish (Catholic) rout, the contrivers of charms to delude the people. (emphasis in original). The second part questions why contemporary proofs of witchcraft do not have biblical support.

The third part attacks contemporary writes on witchcraft and demonology. Ady suggests the book Daemonologie attributed to King James was ghostwritten by the Bishop of Winchester. He also disagrees strongly with Thomas Cooper ("a bloody persecutor of the poor"), author of the book The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617) and with Matthew Perkins's Discourse (1608), calling it "a collection of mingled notions" from Jean Bodin, Bartolommeo Spina, and "other popish blood suckers" who wrote "great volumes of horrible lies and impossibilities." Ady also corrects John Gaule (author of Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646) and Mysmatia, the Mag-astromancer (1652)) and George Gifford (author of A Discourse of the Subtle Practices of Devils by Witches and Sorcerers (1587) and A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593)).

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