Scottish demonology and supernatural apologetics

George Sinclair

1630 – 1696

George Sinclair was a Scottish mathematician and the first Professor of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow whose Satan's Invisible World Discovered (1685) compiled thirty-eight accounts of witchcraft, demonic possession, and apparitions as a Presbyterian defense against Sadducist skepticism about the spirit world. Written to counter the growing rationalist dismissal of supernatural agency, the book became an influential and widely reprinted sourcebook for Scottish ghost and witch lore, cited by Robert Burns and others. His work exemplifies the genre of Protestant demonological apologetics that sought to preserve belief in spiritual forces through empirical accumulation of cases.