After the North Berwick trials of 1590-91, where James VI personally participated in interrogations, he published Daemonologie in three books (1597): a Socratic dialogue proving witches exist, collapsing the distinction between harmful and helpful magic, prescribing torture, dismissing tears as evidence of innocence (women, he wrote, shed tears at every light occasion), and demanding death for all practitioners. Republished in English in 1603 as he took the English throne, it shaped statutes, armed later hunters like Matthew Hopkins, and fed the witchlore Shakespeare used in Macbeth.
The North Berwick story as it was told: two hundred witches sailed in sieves to meet the Devil at a kirk, conjured storms to drown the king's bride's fleet, and confessed under examination to sailing to sea with christened cats. The king called it the greatest miracle of his age and demanded to know how such things could be.
The theoretical reading: James's demonology solved a political problem. A king who rules by divine right faces a logical gap, why do misfortunes strike the anointed? Witches answer it. Demonology makes misrule's evidence vanish into conspiracy, centralizes the power to define reality, and gives the state a permanent internal enemy. Every later ideology with an invisible saboteur class runs on James's template.
Daemonologie insists it is science: evidence, testimony, method. If persecution can wear the costume of rigor, how do you tell inquiry from its disguise?