ABSTRACT
A large number of pre-modern and early-modern philosophers, theologians, physicians and rhetoricians agreed that the imagination had the power to represent—more or less faithfully—reality. Their opinions, however, varied significantly when they had to assess the extent to which the imagination could change reality or even produce new reality. Even a most unlikely story like the legend of the lost children of Hamelin has him as its main character, for Weyer identifies the piper with the devil: 'people have a case of the devil appearing as a piper who thirsts for blood'. Because of the negative connotations which Weyer attributed to the imagination, De praestigiis daemonum can be seen as a thorough account—a phenomenology as it were—of the human tendency to be deluded rather than a treatise on the actual powers of the imagination.
