The Witch Read online

  Scholars based in English-speaking lands across the world have drawn upon insights furnished by criminology, psychology, literary criticism, cultural studies and the philosophy of science. They have been especially interested in structures of social and political power and in gender relations. In the process they have produced excellent work, in the British case that of James Sharpe, Stuart Clark, Diane Purkiss, Lyndal Roper, Malcolm Gaskill, Robin Briggs and Julian Goodare being outstanding. They have, however, been much less interested in insights gained from anthropology, folklore and ancient history, although these were especially popular among British historians of the subject in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In many ways the different foci adopted by their successors have represented a reaction, initially self-conscious, against these earlier approaches, created by changes in academic fashion, which will be explored in the book. One result of the shift has been a relative loss of interest in the popular ideas and traditions that contributed to early modern stereotypes of witchcraft, as opposed to those of intellectuals. Some Continental scholars, on the other hand, have retained a strong interest in the ancient roots of beliefs concerning witches and the relationship between these and the early modern trials. They have sought to connect the belief systems that underpinned those trials to pre-Christian traditions, especially as expressed in popular culture. These preoccupations have led them to take a much greater interest in classical studies, folklore and extra-European parallels than their English-speaking counterparts: notable exponents of this approach have been Carlo Ginzburg, Éva Pócs, Gustav Henningsen and Wolfgang Behringer. Their approaches have yielded a different set of valuable insights, but have in turn been susceptible to a different sort of criticism, of making use of modern folklore to fill gaps in knowledge of earlier societies, and of applying general models of archaic and worldwide belief systems without sufficient attention to local variation.

  The purpose of this book is to combine both approaches with a view to enhancing the utility of each while taking account of its limitations. It is designed, in particular, to emphasize the importance of different regional belief systems concerning the supernatural and the way in which these support, qualify or negate universal models.

  Its central question concerns the relevance of ethnographic comparisons and ancient and earlier medieval ideas, as expressed both in the transmission of written texts and in local popular traditions, to the formation of early modern beliefs in witchcraft and the patterning and nature of the trials that resulted. The book is constructed upon three narrowing circles of perspective, represented by its three different sections. The first of these is concerned with very broad contexts into which the early modern data can be, and have been, placed. It commences with a global comparison, based on ethnographic studies, of attitudes to witchcraft and the treatment of suspected witches in societies across the non-European world. It continues by considering the same phenomena in the societies of ancient Europe and the Near East for which we have records, and – as in the global survey – emphasizes in particular the great variation in them between cultures, and the relevance of most of these varieties of belief and practice to later European history. It concludes with a consideration of the question of whether pan-Eurasian shamanic traditions played a significant part in underpinning European beliefs concerning witchcraft and magic; which inevitably involves looking at different definitions of shamanism.

  The second section shows how the insights of the first can be applied to a Continent-wide study of the medieval European background to the early modern witch trials, and the manner in which existing local traditions – and especially popular traditions – contributed to the patterning and nature of those trials. It commences by looking at learned ceremonial magic, a branch of magical activity that was in its origins and nature quite different from witchcraft, and rarely in practice confused with it. It was, however, often to become officially associated with witchcraft by orthodox medieval Christians, and so to provoke a growing hostile reaction, which was to become one of the sources of the early modern witch-hunts. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a concise history of this kind of magic from its ancient roots, using the wide-angle perspective of the first section, but concentrating on Europe and the Near East and specifically on the development of the late antique tradition of this magic into a medieval form. The next chapter deals with medieval beliefs concerning night-roving spirits and their human allies, another complex of ideas that fed directly into witch trials. The third in this sequence traces the evolution of concepts of witchcraft through the Middle Ages, considering successively the impact of Christianity, the incidence of witch trials in the medieval period, and the origins of the early modern stereotype of the satanic witch. The fourth examines the patterning and nature of the early modern trials themselves with a view to determining how far either was affected by regional popular traditions.

  The third section of the book is intended to demonstrate how methods and data drawn from both the first two sections can be applied to a study of them in one particular region of Europe, in this case the island of Britain. It focuses in particular on three specific aspects of British witch trials, which have recently been the subject of interest and discussion, and attempts to make a fresh contribution to an understanding of each. The first is the relationship between witches and fairies in the early modern imagination, and accordingly in British witch trials, which entails an examination of the development and nature of early modern British beliefs concerning fairies. The second considers the incidence of such trials in areas of the British Isles which had Celtic languages and cultures, and asks if this reveals any significant pattern for which an explanation can be suggested using medieval as well as early modern material, and later folklore. Finally, this section engages with the particular phenomenon of the English witch’s animal familiar, and successively applies global, Continental European, ancient and medieval perspectives to it, with the intention of increasing an understanding of it.

  1. An (alleged) nineteenth-century witch-hunt in a native African society in Mozambique. The accused woman is being dragged to her execution, but is about to be saved by a strapping European gentleman bent on eradicating such practices.

  2. An African service magician, known to the British as a ‘witch-doctor’, photographed in the 1920s. The headdress and jewellery would have had symbolic importance. Such figures were prominent both in removing the alleged spells of witches and in detecting the presumed perpetrators.

  3. A Roman curse tablet, inscribed in the second or third century AD and buried at the amphitheatre of the northern frontier city of Trier.

  4. A Greek vase, of the fifth century BC, painted with a representation of a (or the) child-killing demoness, lamia, being tormented by (presumably vengeful) satyrs.

  5. A classic Siberian shaman, from the Tungus family of peoples, whose language gave the world the word ‘shaman’. He is wearing his ritual costume, with decorations representing servitor spirits, and holding the drum that he used to induce a trance state. Both would have greatly enhanced the drama of the public performance, which was essential to Siberian shamanism.

  6. An amulet (actually to ward off the child-killing demoness, Lilith), prescribed in one of the most famous medieval books of ceremonial magic, the Hebrew Sepher Raziel, the Book of (the Angel) Raziel.

  7. The first picture of a witch riding a broomstick, decorating a margin of a manuscript of one of the earlier texts to describe the witches’ sabbath (Le Champion des Dames, Martin le Franc, published in the 1440s). The real significance of it is that both the witches portrayed ride sticks, presumably anointed with a magical unguent, which was the main means of locomotion to the sabbath in the first accounts of it.

  8. A classic early modern representation of the witches’ sabbath, produced by David Teniers the Younger.

  9. The most famous of all witch-hunting manuals, the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Evil-Doers) by Heinrich Kramer, first published in 1487. Despite its mode
rn fame, it is atypical both in some of its beliefs and in its intense fear of women.

  10. A later and more standard manual for witch trials, the Discours des sorciers by Henri Boguet, based partly on his own experience as a judge in Franche Comté, the part of Burgundy then ruled by Spain. The first edition is dated 1590.

  11. A later picture of a typical early modern witch-burning, in this case of Elsa Plainacher at Vienna in 1583.

  12. A woodcut of two witches brewing a potion, made to illustrate Ulrich Molitor’s Tractatus de lamiis et pythonicis mulieribus (1487), a work that actually opposed the concept of the witches’ sabbath.

  13. This famous design by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien, from the early sixteenth century, shows a more animated and dramatic version of the same activity, with a fourth witch riding a demon transformed into a ram and carrying a finished potion.

  14. The notorious, if never legally prescribed, test for a witch of ‘swimming’ her in water to see if it rejected her and she floated. The victim here is Mary Sutton, from the pamphlet describing her trial and published in 1613.

  15. This woodcut decorating the pamphlet of 1612 describing the trial and execution of women for witchcraft at Northampton, shows the alleged witches riding a demon disguised as a gigantic pig.

  16. Another woodcut from Ulrich Molitor’s book shows witches riding the traditional stick to the sabbath, but also transforming into animals themselves.

  PART I

  DEEP PERSPECTIVES

  1

  THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF a quest for a worldwide context for the early modern European witch trials is that it can determine what, if anything, is specifically European about those trials, and about Europe’s images of what a witch was supposed to be. It may answer the question of whether what happened in early modern Europe was something unusual, in a global setting, or simply the most dramatic regional expression of something which human beings have done in most places at most times. To embark on such a course, it is essential to establish from the beginning precisely what is being sought, and what the characteristics of the figure known in English as the witch are supposed to be. The basic usage chosen earlier, of an alleged worker of destructive magic, establishes the first and most important characteristic credited to the people who were prosecuted in the early modern European witch trials: that they represented a direct threat to their fellow humans. In very many cases it was believed that they employed non-physical, and uncanny, means to cause misfortune or injury to other humans, and very often they were accused, in addition or instead, of striking at the religious and moral underpinnings of their society. Four more distinguishing features were embodied in the figure of the witch as defined by those trials and the ideology on which they were based. The first of these four features was that such a person worked to harm neighbours or kin rather than strangers, and so was an internal threat to a community. The second was that the appearance of a witch was not an isolated and unique event. Witches were expected to work within a tradition, and to use techniques and resources handed down within that tradition, acquiring them by inheritance, initiation or the spontaneous manifestation of the particular powers to which they were connected. The third component of the European stereotype of the witch was that such a person was accorded general social hostility, of a very strong kind. The magical techniques allegedly employed by witches were never officially regarded as a legitimate means of pursuing feuds or rivalries. They were always treated with public, and usually with spontaneous, anger and horror, and often associated with a general hatred of humanity and society and with an alliance made by the witch with malignant superhuman powers loose in the cosmos: in the European case, famously, by a pact with the Christian Devil. Finally, it was generally agreed that witches could and should be resisted, most commonly by forcing or persuading them to lift their curses; or by making a direct physical attack on them to kill or wound them; or by prosecuting them at law, with a view to breaking their power by a punishment which could extend to having them legally put to death.

  Few, if any, experts in the early modern European witch trials will find those five definitive components of the witch figure unacceptable; indeed, if there is anything problematic about them it is likely to be their banality. None the less, they do provide a more precise checklist of characteristics than has been employed hitherto, suitable for a comparative study covering the planet. The result of such a study is in one sense a foregone conclusion, for scholars have spoken for centuries of finding very similar figures to that of the European witch in all parts of the world, and indeed they have employed the English word ‘witch’ for those figures. Again, however, it may be suggested that more care can be taken in making the necessary comparisons, and a larger sample of material can be employed for them. Moreover, it is by no means certain that most specialists in the study of the European trials would consider such an enterprise to have any value. The story of the relationship between experts in those trials, and those in what has been called witchcraft in other parts of the world is already a long and sometimes fraught one, with a large component of estrangement. That story must be considered before this latest contribution to it can be attempted.

  Historians, Anthropologists and Witchcraft:

  A Friendship Gone Wrong?1

  In the 1960s a global approach to the study of the witch figure was virtually the norm among British scholars, largely because most of the research published on witchcraft during the mid-twentieth century was by anthropologists working in extra-European societies, above all in sub-Saharan Africa. As British experts in European witch trials emerged at the end of the decade, they not only usually employed anthropological data to interpret European evidence, but acknowledged that their interest in the subject had been inspired partly by the reports coming from overseas.2 Anthropologists reciprocated with gestures of partnership, so that their conferences and collections of essays on witchcraft routinely included papers from experts in European history.3 When Rodney Needham wrote his study of the witch as a human archetype in 1978, he used data from both African and European sources, declaring that a comparative approach was essential to the exercise.4 By then, however, this view was already on the wane. It had not convinced American historians, who claimed that the ‘primitive’ social groups of Africa bore little resemblance to the more complex cultures and societies of early modern Europe.5 Such views also affected some American anthropologists, who were already warning before the end of the 1960s that the term ‘witchcraft’ was being used as a label for phenomena that differed radically between societies.6 Even in Britain, at the height of collaboration between history and anthropology in the field, prominent members of both disciplines urged that such exchanges should be carried on with caution.7

  What really doomed them was a shift within anthropology itself, as the dissolution of the European colonial empires produced a reaction against the traditional framework of the discipline, now perceived as a handmaiden to imperialism. This reaction embodied hostility both to the imposition of European terms and concepts on studies of other societies and the offering of comparisons between those societies which the imposition of the terms concerned made easier. Fashion was turning to close analyses of particular communities, as unique entities, carried on as much within their own linguistic and mental models as possible (which of course also gave added value and power to the individual scholars who claimed a privileged knowledge of those communities). This self-consciously ‘new anthropology’ was reaching British universities by the early 1970s.8 In 1975 an American exponent of it, Hildred Geertz, published stringent criticisms of the British historian who had emerged as the most distinguished practitioner of the application of anthropological concepts to his own nation’s past, Keith Thomas. She accused him of having adopted categories constructed by the British from the eighteenth century onwards, as cultural weapons to be deployed against other peoples; and questioned in general whether cultural particulars could be formed into general c
oncepts and compared across time periods and continents. She did not actually question the value of scholarly categories in themselves, only arguing for more care and criticism in the use of them; but Thomas made the debate an occasion to suggest that Western historians now needed to back off from comparisons with extra-European cultures and concentrate on their own societies, for which their terminology was native and so well suited.9

  In doing so, he explicitly recognized the change in anthropology, acknowledging that its practitioners had become wary of using Western concepts to understand non-Western cultures and preferred to employ those of the people whom they were studying. He accepted that they now desired to reconstruct different cultural systems in their entirety rather than employing terms unthinkingly used by historians, such as ‘witchcraft’, ‘belief’ and ‘magic’, to make comparisons between them. In case any of his compatriots missed the point, it was being hammered home between 1973 and 1976 by an anthropologist based in Thomas’s university, Oxford, called Malcolm Crick, and with specific application to witchcraft. Crick called for the concept of the witch to be ‘dissolved into a larger framework of reference’, by relating the figures whom English-speakers called witches to others who embodied uncanny power of different kinds within a given society. He also asserted that conceptual categories varied so much between cultures that ‘witchcraft’ could not be treated as a general topic at all, and warned historians off ethnographic material, proclaiming (without actually demonstrating) that ‘English witchcraft is not like the phenomena so labelled in other cultures’.10 Historians of European witchcraft generally internalized this message, and the ever-increasing number of studies of early modern witch beliefs and trials which appeared from the late 1970s onwards limited themselves to cross-cultural studies within the European world, sometimes extended to European colonists overseas. When a very occasional scholar did try to compare European and African material, it was never somebody prominent in witchcraft studies or one who continued to publish on them.11