Witchcraft
The witch-hunts
Main
the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to control
people or events, practices typically involving sorcery or magic.
Although defined differently in disparate historical and cultural
contexts, witchcraft has often been seen, especially in the West, as the
work of crones who meet secretly at night, indulge in cannibalism and
orgiastic rites with the Devil, and perform black magic. Witchcraft thus
defined exists more in the imagination of contemporaries than in any
objective reality. Yet this stereotype has a long history and has
constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world.
The intensity of these beliefs is best represented by the European
witch-hunts of the 14th to 18th century, but witchcraft and its
associated ideas are never far from the surface of popular consciousness
and—sustained by folk tales—find explicit focus from time to time in
popular television and films and in fiction.
Witches and Monsters
Meanings
The modern English word witchcraft has three principal connotations: the
practice of magic or sorcery worldwide; the beliefs associated with the
Western witch-hunts of the 14th to the 18th century; and varieties of
the modern movement called Wicca, frequently mispronounced “wikka.”
The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft:
from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced “witchah” and
“witchuh,” respectively, denoting someone who practices sorcery; and
from craeft meaning “craft” or “skill.” Roughly equivalent words in
other European languages—such as sorcellerie (French), Hexerei (German),
stregoneria (Italian), and brujería (Spanish)—have different
connotations, and none precisely translates another. The difficulty is
even greater with the relevant words in African, Asian, and other
languages. The problem of defining witchcraft is made more difficult
because the concepts underlying these words also change according to
time and place, sometimes radically. Moreover, different cultures do not
share a coherent pattern of witchcraft beliefs, which often blend other
concepts such as magic, sorcery, religion, folklore, theology,
technology, and diabolism. Some societies regard a witch as a person
with inherent supernatural powers, but in the West witchcraft has been
more commonly believed to be an ordinary person’s free choice to learn
and practice magic with the help of the supernatural. (The terms West
and Western in this article refer to European societies themselves and
to post-Columbian societies influenced by European concepts.) The answer
to the old question “Are there such things as witches?” therefore
depends upon individual belief and upon definition, and no single
definition exists. One thing is certain: the emphasis on the witch in
art, literature, theatre, and film has little relation to external
reality.
False ideas about witchcraft and the witch-hunts persist today.
First, the witch-hunts did not occur in the Middle Ages but in what
historians call the “early modern” period (the late 14th to the early
18th century), the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the
Scientific Revolution. There was neither a witch-cult nor any cult,
either organized or disorganized, of a “Horned God” or of any “Goddess”;
Western “witches” were not members of an ancient pagan religion; and
they were not healers or midwives. Moreover, not all persons accused of
witchcraft were women, let alone old women; indeed, there were “witches”
of all ages and sexes. Witches were not a persecuted minority, because
witches did not exist: the people hurt or killed in the hunts were not
witches but victims forced by their persecutors into a category that in
reality included no one. The witch-hunts did not prosecute, let alone
execute, millions; they were not a conspiracy by males, priests, judges,
doctors, or inquisitors against members of an old religion or any other
real group. “Black masses” are almost entirely a fantasy of modern
writers. “Witch doctors,” whose job it was to release people from evil
spells, seldom existed in the West, largely because even helpful magic
was attributed to demons.
Sorcery
A sorcerer, magician, or “witch” attempts to influence the surrounding
world through occult (i.e., hidden, as opposed to open and observable)
means. In Western society until the 14th century, “witchcraft” had more
in common with sorcery in other cultures—such as those of India or
Africa—than it did with the witchcraft of the witch-hunts. Before the
14th century, witchcraft was much alike in villages from Ireland to
Russia and from Sweden to Sicily; however, the similarities derived
neither from cultural diffusion nor from any secret cult but from the
age-old human desire to achieve one’s purposes whether by open or occult
means. In many ways, like their counterparts worldwide, early Western
sorcerers and witches worked secretly for private ends, as contrasted
with the public practice of religion. Witches or sorcerers were usually
feared as well as respected, and they used a variety of means to attempt
to achieve their goals, including incantations (formulas or chants
invoking evil spirits), divination and oracles (to predict the future),
amulets and charms (to ward off hostile spirits and harmful events),
potions or salves, and dolls or other figures (to represent their
enemies). Witches sought to gain or preserve health, to acquire or
retain property, to protect against natural disasters or evil spirits,
to help friends, and to seek revenge. Sometimes this magic was believed
to work through simple causation as a form of technology. For example,
it was believed that a field’s fertility could be increased by ritually
slaughtering an animal. Often the magic was instead an effort to
construct symbolic reality. Sorcery was sometimes believed to rely on
the power of gods or other spirits, leading to the belief that witches
used demons in their work.
Jeffrey Burton Russell
Medical treatment at the witch
Witchcraft in Africa and the world
The same dichotomy between sorcery and witchcraft exists (sometimes more
ambiguously) in the beliefs of many African and indigenous peoples
throughout the world. Again, witches are typically seen as particularly
active after dusk when law-abiding mortals are asleep. The Navajo
believe that witches meet at night, wear nothing except a mask and
jewelry, sit among baskets of corpses, and have intercourse with dead
women. In some African cultures witches are believed to assemble in
cannibal covens, often at graveyards or around a fire, to feast on the
blood, which, like vampires, they extract from their victims. If they
take the soul from a victim’s body and keep it in their possession, the
victim will die. Like those in Western society suspected of child abuse
and satanism, in the popular imagination, African witches are believed
to practice incest and other perversions. Sometimes, as in the Christian
tradition, their malevolent power is believed to derive from a special
relationship with an evil spirit with whom they have a “pact,” or they
exercise it through “animal familiars” (assistants or agents) such as
dogs, cats, hyenas, owls, or baboons.
In other cases the witch’s power is thought to be based in his or her
own body, and no external source is deemed necessary. Among the Zande of
the Congo and some other central African peoples, the source of this
evil-working capacity is believed to be located in the witch’s stomach,
and its power and range increase with age. It can be activated merely by
wishing someone ill and is thus a kind of unspoken, or implicit, curse.
At the same time the Zande believe that evil deeds can be wrought even
more effectively by the manipulation of spells and potions and the use
of powerful magic. In anthropological terminology this is technically
“sorcery,” and thus, like the “witches” in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth
who dance around a pot stirring potions and muttering spells, the Zande
practitioners may more properly be termed “sorcerers” rather than
“witches.”
Witch Hang
In many African cultures witches are believed to act unconsciously;
unaware of the ill they cause, they are driven by irrepressible urges to
act malevolently. It is thus easy for those accused of witchcraft, but
who are not conscious of wishing anyone ill, to assume that they
unknowingly did what is attributed to them. This, along with the effects
of suggestion and torture, in a world where people take the reality of
witchcraft for granted, goes far to explain the striking confessions of
guilt that are so widely reported in Africa and elsewhere and that are
otherwise hard to comprehend. It is worth noting, however, that if
witches believe they are unconscious agents, this is generally not the
view of those who feel victimized by them.
Whatever the basis of their power and the means by which it is
exercised, witches (and sorcerers) are regularly credited with causing
all manner of disease and disaster. Sickness, and even death, as well as
a host of lesser misfortunes, are routinely laid at their door. In many
parts of Africa and Asia, epidemics and natural disasters have been
interpreted as acts of witchcraft. For some unhappy candidates in many
less developed countries, the same malign influence is cited to explain
(at least in part) failure in examinations, elections, or difficulties
in finding employment. Members of certain Afro-Brazilian cults, for
example, believe that job loss is due not to economic conditions or poor
performance but to witchcraft, and they participate in a ritual, the
“consultation,” to counter the evil.
However, like their ancient and early modern European counterparts,
modern Africans and Asians who believe firmly in the reality of
witchcraft do not lack the power of rational reasoning. To suppose that
these are incompatible alternatives is a common mistake. In reality
pragmatic and mystical explanations of events usually exist in parallel
or combination but operate in different contexts and at different
levels. For example, anthropological research has demonstrated that
African farmers who believe in witches do not expect witchcraft to
account for obvious technical failures. If one’s home collapses because
it was poorly constructed, no witch is needed to explain this. If a boat
sinks because it has a hole in its bottom or a car breaks down because
its battery is dead, witchcraft is not responsible. Witchcraft enters
the picture when rational knowledge fails. It explains the diseases
whose causes are unknown, the mystery of death, and, more generally,
strange and inexplicable misfortunes.
There is thus no inconsistency in the actions of the sick African who
consults both a medical doctor and a witch doctor. The first treats the
external symptoms, while the second uncovers the hidden causes. Just as
the sick African takes preventative measures prescribed by the medical
doctor, he or she might also take steps against the supernatural. To
protect against witchcraft, for instance, the patient might wear
amulets, take “medicine” or bathe in it, or practice divination.
Similarly, the Navajo protect themselves against witches with “gall
medicine” or with sand or pollen paintings. If preventative measures
prove ineffective for the Navajo, then the confession of a witch is
thought to cure the evil magic, and torture is sometimes used to extract
that confession. Moreover, like ancient and modern Westerners, people in
modern Africa and other parts of the world who take the reality of
witchcraft for granted usually also believe in other sources of
supernatural power—e.g., divinities and spirits.
Witchcraft explains the problem posed when one seeks to understand
why misfortune befalls oneself rather than someone else. It makes sense
of the inequalities of life: the fact that one person’s crops or herds
fail while others’ prosper. Equally, witchcraft can be invoked to
explain the success of others. In this “limited good” scenario—where
there is implicitly a fixed stock of resources and where life is
generally precarious, with little surplus to distribute in time of
need—those who succeed too flagrantly are assumed to do so at the
expense of others less fortunate. The “witch,” therefore, is typically
someone who selfishly wants more than he or she ostensibly deserves,
whose aspirations and desires are judged excessive and illegitimate.
However, there is a narrow, ambiguous line between good and evil
here. Among some African peoples “witchcraft” is intrinsically neither
morally good nor bad, and among others the supernatural activities of
“witches” are, according to their perceived effects, divided into good,
or protective, and bad, or destructive, witchcraft. Traditional and
modern African leaders sometimes surround themselves with protective
“witch doctors,” and are themselves thought to be endowed with
supernatural power. This is the positive charisma of which witchcraft is
the negative counterpart. In the colonial period these ideas were
extended to Europeans, who, in the Belgian Congo and British Central
Africa at the time of independence, were feared as cannibalistic
witches. This was somewhat ironic since colonial regimes, unlike their
missionary predecessors, did not believe in witchcraft and made
accusations of witchcraft illegal in most of sub-Saharan Africa—which
has been largely reversed by their successor regimes.
This ambiguity between good and evil can also be found among the
Mapuche, an indigenous people of Chile. They believe that young women
take up sorcery and as old women become powerful witches who use “bad
medicine” to obtain their ends. They are aligned with evil forces and
use them to harm or gain advantage over others. Their training and use
of plants and animals in their medicine is similar to that of the
shamans who use “good medicine” and other magic against forces of evil.
The distinctions between good and bad supernatural power are relative
and depend on how moral legitimacy is judged. This becomes clear when
the spiritual power invoked is studied more closely. In a number of
revealing African cases, the word that denotes the essence of witchcraft
(e.g., tsau among the West African Tiv and itonga among the East African
Safwa), the epitome of illegitimate antisocial activity, also describes
the righteous wrath of established authority, employed to curse
wrongdoers.
This essential ambivalence is particularly evident in Haitian voodoo,
where there is a sharp distinction between man-made evil magic powers,
connected with zombies (beings identified as familiars of witches in the
beliefs of some African cultures), and benevolent invisible spirits
identified with Catholic saints. This antithesis between witchcraft and
religion, however, is always problematic: after his death, the
malevolent spirits or powers that an ancestor has used for his personal
benefit become accrued by his descendants’ protective spirits (loas).
Magic has thus turned into religion (the converse of the more familiar
process in which outmoded religions are stigmatized by their successors
as magic).
So everything depends on the moral evaluation made by the community
of the victims of misfortune: have they received their just deserts or
is their plight unjustified? Witchcraft and sorcery are only involved in
the latter case, where they provide a moral philosophy of unmerited
misfortune. This is particularly important in religions that lack the
concepts of heaven and hell. Where one cannot take refuge in the
reassuring belief that life’s injustices will be adjusted in the
hereafter, witchcraft indeed provides a way of shrugging off
responsibility and of coming to terms with an unjust fate. According to
these “instant” religions, the just should prosper and the unjust should
suffer the consequences of their evil deeds here on earth.
The psychodynamics here are equally revealing. Those who interpret
their misfortunes in terms of witchcraft will often use similar means to
discover the source of their woes, which is often traced to the malice
and jealousy of their enemies. In Africa and elsewhere, the bewitched
person seeks help from a diviner to establish the evil person
responsible. The diviner, often in a trance, uses a number of different
techniques to discover the witch, including throwing dice or opening a
Bible or Qur’ān at random. Another form of divination involves
administering poison to a chicken and mentioning the name of a suspected
witch. If the chicken dies, then the suspect is a witch. Whatever the
process, the result is always the same, the bewitched “victim” finds the
source of his woes among his rivals, typically neighbours, coworkers, or
other competitors. Accusations often follow the lines of community
conflict and incompatibility. In Chile, for example, the tensions
between the Mapuche and neighbouring Chilean peasants are revealed in
accusations that the Chileans use witchcraft to cheat the Mapuche and
conversely that the Mapuche use it to harm the crops or livestock of the
Chileans. Among the Navajo, competition over grazing lands and water
rights or between jealous lovers is the source of witchcraft
accusations. In some polygynous societies in Africa, these accusations
are particularly prevalent between competing co-wives, but they are by
no means always targeted at women. Ultimately, the effect of successful
accusations is to call into question or to rupture an untenable
relationship.
Ioan M. Lewis
Mikael Herr. Les sabbats des sorcières
The witch-hunts
Although accusations of witchcraft in contemporary cultures provide a
means to express or resolve social tensions, these accusations had
different consequences in premodern Western society where the mixture of
irrational fear and a persecuting mentality led to the emergence of the
witch-hunts. In the 11th century attitudes toward witchcraft and sorcery
began to change, a process that would radically transform the Western
perception of witchcraft and associate it with heresy and the Devil. By
the 14th century, fear of heresy and of Satan had added charges of
diabolism to the usual indictment of witches, maleficium (malevolent
sorcery). It was this combination of sorcery and its association with
the Devil that made Western witchcraft unique. From the 14th through the
18th century, witches were believed to repudiate Jesus Christ, to
worship the Devil and make pacts with him (selling one’s soul in
exchange for Satan’s assistance), to employ demons to accomplish magical
deeds, and to desecrate the crucifix and the consecrated bread and wine
of the Eucharist (Holy Communion). It was also believed that they rode
through the air at night to “sabbats” (secret meetings), where they
engaged in sexual orgies and even had sex with Satan; that they changed
shapes (from human to animal or from one human form to another); that
they often had “familiar spirits” in the form of animals; and that they
kidnapped and murdered children for the purpose of eating them or
rendering their fat for magical ointments. This fabric of ideas was a
fantasy. Although some people undoubtedly practiced sorcery with the
intent to harm, and some may actually have worshiped the Devil, in
reality no one ever fit the concept of the “witch.” Nonetheless, the
witch’s crimes were defined in law. The witch-hunts varied enormously in
place and in time, but they were united by a common and coherent
theological and legal worldview. Local priests and judges, though seldom
experts in either theology or law, were nonetheless part of a culture
that believed in the reality of witches as much as modern society
believes in the reality of molecules.
Since 1970 careful research has elucidated law codes and theological
treatises from the era of the witch-hunts and uncovered much information
about how fear, accusations, and prosecutions actually occurred in
villages, local law courts, and courts of appeal in Roman Catholic and
Protestant cultures in western Europe. Charges of maleficium were
prompted by a wide array of suspicions. It might have been as simple as
one person blaming his misfortune on another. For example, if something
bad happened to John that could not be readily explained, and if John
felt that Richard disliked him, John may have suspected Richard of
harming him by occult means. The most common suspicions concerned
livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual
dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents,
sibling rivalries, and local politics. Maleficium was a threat not only
to individuals but also to public order, for a community wracked by
suspicions about witches could split asunder. No wonder the term
witch-hunt has entered common political parlance to describe such
campaigns as that of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy in his attempt to
root out “communists” in the United States in the 1950s.
Another accusation that often accompanied maleficium was trafficking
with evil spirits. In the Near East—in ancient Mesopotamia, Syria,
Canaan, and Palestine—belief in the existence of evil spirits was
universal, so that both religion and magic were thought to be needed to
appease, offer protection from, or manipulate these spirits. In
Greco-Roman civilization, Dionysiac worship included meeting underground
at night, sacrificing animals, practicing orgies, feasting, and
drinking. Classical authors such as Aeschylus, Horace, and Virgil
described sorceresses, ghosts, furies, and harpies with hideous pale
faces and crazed hair; clothed in rotting garments, they met at night
and sacrificed both animals and humans. A bizarre set of accusations,
including the sacrifice of children, was made by the Syrians against the
Jews in Hellenistic Syria in the 2nd century bce. These accusations
would also be made by the Romans against the Christians, by early
Christians against heretics (dissenters from the core Christianity of
the period) and Jews, by later Christians against witches, and, as late
as the 20th century, by Protestants against Catholics.
Burning
Along with this older tradition, attitudes toward witches and the
witch-hunts of the 14th–18th centuries stemmed from a long history of
the church’s theological and legal attacks on heretics. Accusations
similar to those expressed by the ancient Syrians and early Christians
appeared again in the Middle Ages. In France in 1022 a group of heretics
in Orléans was accused of orgy, infanticide, invocations of demons, and
use of the dead children’s ashes in a blasphemous parody of the
Eucharist. These allegations would have important implications for the
future because they were part of a broader pattern of hostility toward
and persecution of marginalized groups. This pattern took shape in
1050–1300, which was also an era of enormous reform, reorganization, and
centralization in both the ecclesiastical and secular aspects of
society, an important aspect of which was suppressing dissent. The
visible role played by women in some heresies during this period may
have contributed to the stereotype of the witch as female.
The Devil, whose central role in witchcraft beliefs made the Western
tradition unique, was an absolute reality in both elite and popular
culture, and failure to understand the prevailing terror of Satan has
misled some modern researchers to regard witchcraft as a “cover” for
political or gender conspiracies. The Devil was deeply and widely feared
as the greatest enemy of Christ, keenly intent on destroying soul, life,
family, community, church, and state. Witches were considered Satan’s
followers, members of an antichurch and an antistate, the sworn enemies
of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a “counter-state” in the
early modern period. If witchcraft existed, as people believed it did,
then it was an absolute necessity to extirpate it before it destroyed
the world.
Because of the continuity of witch trials with those for heresy, it
is impossible to say when the first witch trial occurred. Even though
the clergy and judges in the Middle Ages were skeptical of accusations
of witchcraft, the period 1300–30 can be seen as the beginning of witch
trials. In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with
the aid of demons and thus was open to prosecution for heresy. Witch
trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries, but with
great inconsistency according to time and place. By 1435–50, the number
of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the
15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIII’s
publication in 1484 of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus
(“Desiring with the Greatest Ardour”) condemning witchcraft as Satanism,
the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1486 of
Heinrich Krämer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum (“The Hammer of
Witches”), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft
chiefly on women. Widely influential, it was reprinted numerous times.
The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known
execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. The number of
trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in
fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for
witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. Although these
figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly
exaggerated claims of some 20th-century writers.
Witch Finder Generall
The “hunts” were not pursuits of individuals already identified as
witches but efforts to identify those who were witches. The process
began with suspicions and, occasionally, continued through rumours and
accusations to convictions. The overwhelming majority of processes,
however, went no farther than the rumour stage, for actually accusing
someone of witchcraft was a dangerous and expensive business.
Accusations originated with the ill-will of the accuser, or, more often,
the accuser’s fear of someone having ill-will toward him. The
accusations were usually made by the alleged victims themselves, rather
than by priests, lords, judges, or other “elites.” Successful
prosecution of one witch sometimes led to a local hunt for others, but
larger hunts and regional panics were confined (with some exceptions) to
the years from the 1590s to 1640s. Very few accusations went beyond the
village level.
Three-fourths of European witch-hunts occurred in western Germany,
the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland, areas where
prosecutions for heresy had been plentiful and charges of diabolism were
prominent. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions
seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. There were additional
hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations
continued even though the differences between the folklore of the
Europeans and Native Americans introduced some minor variations into the
accusations. In Mexico the Franciscan friars linked indigenous religion
and magic with the Devil; prosecutions for witchcraft in Mexico began in
the 1530s, and by the 1600s indigenous peasants were reporting
stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Like the Spanish colonies, the
English colonies repeated the European stereotype with a few minor
differences. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in
1647, after the witch-hunts had already abated in Europe, though a
peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 1668–76 bore some similarity to that in
New England. Although the lurid trials at Salem (now in Massachusetts)
continue to draw much attention from American authors, they were only a
swirl in the backwater of the witch-hunts. The outbreak at Salem, where
19 people were executed, was the result of a combination of church
politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all in a vacuum of
political authority. Prosecutions of witches in Austria, Poland, and
Hungary took place as late as the 18th century.
Soul-killing witches that deform the body
The responsibility for the witch-hunts can be distributed among
theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and
ecclesiastical courts. The theological worldview—derived from the early
Christian fear of Satan and reinforced by the great effort to reform and
conform that began in 1050—was intensified again by the fears and
animosities engendered by the Reformation of the 16th century. The
Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation heightened the
fear of witchcraft by promoting the idea of personal piety (the
individual alone with his or her Bible and God), which enhanced
individualism while downplaying community. The emphasis on personal
piety exacerbated the rigid characterization of people as either “good”
or “bad.” It also aggravated feelings of guilt and the psychological
tendency to project negative intentions onto others. Moreover, just as
the growth of literacy and of reading the Bible helped spread dissent,
so did they provoke resistance and fear. Sermons and didactic treatises,
including “devil books” warning of Satan’s power, spread both the terror
of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him.
Both Protestants and Catholics were involved in the prosecutions, as the
theology of the Protestant Reformers on the Devil and witchcraft was
virtually indistinguishable from that of the Catholics. More differences
existed among Protestants and among Catholics than between the two
religious groups, and regions in which Protestant-Catholic tensions were
high did not produce significantly more trials than other regions.
Because accusations and trials of witches took place in both
ecclesiastical and secular courts, the law played at least as important
a role as religion in the witch-hunts. Local courts were more credulous
and therefore more likely to be strict and even violent in their
treatment of supposed witches than were regional or superior courts.
Crude practices such as pricking witches to see whether the Devil had
desensitized them to pain; searching for the “devil’s mark,” an
oddly-shaped mole or wart; or “swimming” (throwing the accused into a
pond; if she sank, she was innocent because the water accepted her)
occurred on the local level. Where central authority—i.e., bishops,
kings, or the Inquisition—was strong, convictions were fewer and
sentences milder. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities usually tried to
restrain witch trials and rarely manipulated witch-hunts to obtain money
or power.
The witch executions occurred in the early modern period, the time in
Western history when capital punishment and torture were most
widespread. Judicial torture, happily in abeyance since the end of the
Roman period, was revived in the 12th and 13th centuries; other brutal
and sadistic tortures occurred but were usually against the law. Torture
was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it
often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices.
The latter was the greatest evil of the system, for a victim might be
forced to name acquaintances, who were in turn coerced into naming
others, creating a long chain of accusations. Witch trials were equally
common in ecclesiastical and secular courts before 1550, and then, as
the power of the state increased, they took place more often in secular
ones.
Among the main effects of the papal judicial institution known as the
Inquisition was in fact the restraint and reduction of witch trials that
resulted from the strictness of its rules. It investigated whether the
charges resulted from personal animosity toward the accused; it obtained
physicians’ statements; it did not allow the naming of accomplices
either with or without torture; it required the review of every
sentence; and it provided for whipping, banishment, or even house arrest
instead of death for first offenders. Like the Inquisition, the
Parlement of Paris (the supreme court of northern France) severely
restrained the witch-hunts. After an outbreak of hunts in France in
1587–88, increasingly skeptical judges began a series of restraining
reforms marked by the requirement of “obligatory appeal” to the
Parlement in cases of witchcraft, making accusations even more expensive
and dangerous.
The decline of witch-hunts, like their origins, was gradual. By the
late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western
Europe were accused, so that the leaders of society began to have a
personal interest in checking the hunts. The legal use of torture
declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was a general retreat
from religious intensity following the wars of religion (from the 1560s
to 1640s). The gradual demise during the late 17th and early 18th
century of the previous religious, philosophical, and legal worldview
encouraged the ascendancy of an existent but often suppressed
skepticism; increasing literacy, mobility, and means of communication
set the stage for social acceptance of this changing outlook.
Nevertheless, the reasons for the decline in the witch-hunts are as
difficult to discern as the reasons for their origins. The theory best
supported by the evidence is that the increasing power of the
centralized courts such as the Inquisition and the Parlement acted to
begin a process of “decriminalization” of witchcraft. These courts
reduced the number of witch trials significantly by 1600, half a century
before legal theory, legislation, and theology began to dismiss the
notion of witchcraft in France and other countries.
Burning
Explanations of the witch-hunts continue to vary, but recent research
has shown some of these theories to be improbable or of negligible
value. Most scholars agree that the prosecutions were not driven by
political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or
rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local
tensions; they were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other
macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family
structure or in the role of women in society; and they were not an
effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace.
Moreover, the evidence does not indicate a close correlation between
socioeconomic tension and witchcraft, though agrarian crises seem to
have had some effect.
One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained.
No satisfactory explanation for the preponderance of women among the
accused has appeared. Although the proportions varied according to
region and time, on the whole about three-fourths of convicted witches
were female. Women were certainly more likely than men to be
economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too
broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where
witchcraft is absent. The malevolent sorcery more often associated with
men, such as harming crops and livestock, was rarer than that ascribed
to women. Young women were sometimes accused of infanticide, but
midwives and nurses were not particularly at risk. Older women were more
frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women,
because they had had more time to establish a bad reputation, and the
process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman
might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced.
Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many
others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus maleficarum.
Resentment and fear of the power of the “hag,” a woman released from the
constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been
frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. Folklore and accounts of
trials indicate that a woman who was not protected by a male family
member might have been the most likely candidate for an accusation, but
the evidence is inconclusive. Children were often accusers (as they were
at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. Most accused
children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft.
In the long run it may be better simply to describe the witch-hunts
than to try to explain them, since the explanations are so diverse and
complicated. Yet one general explanation is valid: the unique character
of the witch-hunts was consistent with the prevailing worldview of
intelligent, educated, experienced people for more than three centuries.
The Ride Through the Murky Air
Contemporary witchcraft
Academics tend to dismiss contemporary witchcraft (known as “Wicca”), at
the heart of the modern Neo-Pagan movement, as a silly fad or an
incompetent technology, but some now understand it as an emotionally
consistent but deliberately anti-intellectual set of practices.
Adherents to Wicca worship the Goddess, honour nature, practice
ceremonial magic, invoke the aid of deities, and celebrate Halloween,
the summer solstice, and the vernal equinox. At the start of the 21st
century, perhaps a few hundred thousand people (mostly in North America
and Britain) practiced Wicca and Neo-Paganism, a modern Western
reconstruction of pre-Christian religions that draws upon the diversity
of worldwide polytheistic religions to create a new and diverse
religious movement. The rise of Wicca and Neo-Paganism is due in part to
increasing religious tolerance and syncretism, a growing awareness of
the symbolism of the unconscious, the retreat of Christianity, the
popularity of fantasy and science fiction, the growth of feminism, the
ascendancy of deconstructionist and relativist theory, and the emphasis
upon individuality and subjectivity as opposed to intellectual coherence
and societal values. Most modern Neo-Pagans, distrustful of the demands
of traditional religions, eschew doctrine or creed and engage in the
ritual expression of “symbolic and experiential” meanings. Although
Neo-Paganism incorporates the emotional involvement and ritual practices
associated with religion into its tradition, many Neo-Pagans prefer to
think of themselves as practicing magic rather than religion, and
although their emphasis is on opening themselves up to hidden powers
through rites, chants, or charms, most do not call themselves “witches,”
as Wiccans do. Both Wiccans and Neo-Pagans also have strong ecological
and environmental concerns, worship the Goddess and other deities, and
celebrate the change of seasons with elaborate rituals. Whether magic or
religion, these groups reject intellectual coherence and objectivity in
favour of personal experience and dismiss science as well as traditional
religion.
Although some Wiccans claim to be part of the “old ways” and “ancient
tradition,” their religion is new. Wicca is creative, imaginative, and
entirely a 20th-century invention, with no connection to ancient
paganism or the alleged “witches” of the witch-hunts. No cult of the
“Goddess” played a significant role in Western culture between late
antiquity and the mid-20th century. Wicca, in fact, originated about
1939 with an Englishman, Gerald Gardner, who constructed it from the
fanciful works of the self-styled magician Aleister Crowley; the fake
“ancient” document Aradia (1899); the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
and other late-19th and early-20th century occult movements; and
Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and article
“Witchcraft” in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929),
which put forth in its most popular form her theory that the witches of
western Europe were the lingering adherents of a once general pagan
religion that had been displaced, though not completely, by
Christianity. Gardner, backed by Murray, who wrote a laudatory
introduction to his book Witchcraft Today (1954), fixed this erroneous
notion of an ancient witch-cult somewhere in the public consciousness,
and it has been nurtured there by Robert Graves’s The White Goddess
(1948) and innumerable more recent quasi-fictional and fictional
accounts.
Jeffrey Burton Russell
