arly in the Middle Ages, almost anything women did could be described
as witchcraft because their daily lives invoked the Goddess with a thousand
small ceremonies as well as the larger ones connected with major holidays.
Martin of Braga said women must be condemned for "decorating tables, wearing
laurels, taking omens from footsteps, putting fruit and wine on the log in the
hearth, and bread, in the well, what are these but worship of the devil? For
women to call upon Minerva when they spin, and to observe the day of Venus at
weddings and to call upon her whenever they go out upon the public highway, what
is that but worship of the devil?"1 Outside the official religion, where they were kept, women passed down their private family recipes and charms,
curses and blessings, telling traditional tales of the past and foretelling the
future from omens and "signs." The Dominican Johann Herolt declared: "Most women
belie their catholic faith with charms and spells, after the fashion of Eve
their first mother, who believed the devil speaking through the serpent rather
than God himself . . . [A]ny woman by herself knows more of such superstitions
and charms than a hundred men."2
Up to the 15th century, women's "charms and spells" were virtually the only repository of practical medicine.
Churchmen avoided doctoring, on the ground that all sickness came from demonic
possession, and the only permissible cure was exorcism.3
Europe's traditional witch doctors were women: clan mothers, priestesses of healing shrines, midwives,
nurses, vilas. In pre-Christian Gaul and Scandinavia, medicine was
entirely in the hands of omen.4 Even in the Christian era, the
village wise-woman was still every peasant's family doctor. Paracelsus said
witches taught him everything he knew about healing.5 Dr.
Lambe (died, 1640), the Duke of Buckingham's famous "devil," was said to have
learned secrets of medicine by consorting with witches.6
In 1570 the gaoler of Canterbury Castle released a condemned witch, citing the popular
opinion that she did more good for the sick with her homely remedies than all the priests'
prayers and exorcisms.7 Agrippa von Nettesheim thought witches superior to
male practitioners: "Are not philosophers, mathematicians, and astrologers often
inferior to country women in their divinations and predictions, and does not the
old nurse very often beat the doctor!"8 The men who learned
doctoring from witches were allowed to practice, but their female teachers were
persecuted. Scot observed that a male "conjurer" was permitted to cure disease
by magic arts, whereas a woman was condemned to death for doing so.9
Ordinary folk had no doctors. Physicians were available chiefly to the rich.
The poor took their troubles to the local witch. Irish farmers still say a "fairy
doctor" is needed for charms against the evil eye. In Greece, "both priests and
witches are available for emergencies created by the evil eye. The priest burns
incense and recites appropriate prayers. The witch also burns incense as she recites
appropriate incantations."10
It wasn't unusual for the witches' healing charms to be preferred to those of
the church, or for the two to be regarded as identical in essence. Ramesey wrote
that the witches' cures were indistinguishable from the "magical and juggling cures"
professed by the clergy, including "saints, images, relics, holy-waters, shrines, avemarys,
crucifixes, benedictions, charms, characters, sigils of the planets, and of the
signs . . . all such cures are rather to be ascribed to the forces of the
imagination, than any virtue in them."11
Officially, women were often forbidden to do any kind of healing. In 1322 a
woman named Jacoba Felicie was arrested and prosecuted by the medical faculty of
the University of Paris for practicing medicine, although, the record said,
"she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than the greatest master or doctor in
Paris."12
Reginald Scot (1538 - 1599) said witchmongers gave the witches as much power as
Christ, and even more, when they claimed witches could raise the dead, as Christ
raised Lazarus; they could turn water into other fluids, like wine or milk; they
could control the weather, the crops, animals, men; they could see into the past
and future. Reading of witches' trials, he said, "you shall see such impossibilities
confessed, as none, having his right wits, will believe."13 Hermann Löher
also declared that the "sins" for which witches were brought to the stake were
such "that they could not possibly commit."14
Churchmen, however, viewed the impossibility of witches' miracles as
perfectly good ground for believing them, "because the performance of the
impossible proved that demons were at work."15 It was never
explained how the performance of a miracle demonstrated the intervention of a
saint in one case and of a demon in another. For example, Marie Bucaille was
burned as a witch, though her "miracles" were saintlike: she healed the sick,
saw holy visions, displayed stigmata, and performed many of the acts that led
to canonization in other cases.16
The same acts were differently interpreted by churchmen in different times.
Witchcraft was allowed through the first half of the Christian era. It was not
called a "heresy" until the 14th century. In 500 CE, the Franks' Salic Law
recognized witches' right to practice. In 643, an edict declared it illegal to burn
witches.17 In 785, the Synod of Paderborn said anyone who
burned a witch must be sentenced to death.18 France's first
trial to declare witchcraft a crime took place in 1390.19
Up to a surprisingly late date, nobility and clergy alike employed the
services of witches. In 1382 the Count of Kyburg hired a witch to stand on
the battlements of his castle and raise a thunderstorm to disperse an army
of enemies.20 This practice was soundly based on theological
opinion that witches could raise storms at will, "either upon sea or land."
21 Churchmen said witches controlled the weather "with
God's permission," and they didn't begin to punish what God permitted
until the beginning of the Renaissance.22
Witches were summoned to court by Louis d'Orleans to cure his brother's
madness, after priestly exorcisms had failed. (The witches also failed.)
Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, used the classic pierced-puppet kind of witchcraft
to kill his enemy. Queen Blanche of Navarre.23
English law was fairly tolerant of witchcraft until the reign of James 1. As
late as 1371 a male witch was arrested in Southwark for possessing magical articles:
a skull, a grimoire, and a corpse's head for divination. He was released after he
had promised not to do it again.24 In 1560, a lenient period, eight
men confessed to conjuration and sorcery, and were released with a reprimand.
Only three years later the same acts were made punishable by imprisonment or a death penalty.25
The Council of Treves in 1310 outlawed conjurations, divinations, and love potions.
26 Further prohibitions seemed to be aimed at supporting husbands who wished to
cast off their wives. Stringent laws threatened a witch to whom an abandoned
wife might apply, for revenge through malefica, since she had no recourse
under law.27 The church distinguished between sorcery, which
was generally acceptable, and witchcraft, which was heresy. Von Nettesheim's
books of sorcery were published under church auspices, accompanied by a
statement of ecclesiastical approval; indeed, his instructor in magic had been
John Trithemius, an abbot. What the distinction between sorcery and witchcraft
boiled down to was that men could practice magic, women could not.28
When the church discovered that common folk couldn't understand the doctrinal
subtleties of heresy and didn't care about theological arguments, persecution was
extended into areas that were accessible to the public mind, so the church could
maintain its control of that mind. For example, in the region of Bonn a late
spring frost of 1610 ruined crops and was officially described as an act of God.
Twenty years later, after the witch judges came to the area, the same kind of
natural disasters were blamed exclusively on witches.29
Churchmen fostered the public delusion that witches were engaged in a vast secret
plot, under the devil's guidance, to overthrow the kingdom of God on earth. They
created and embellished the concept of the black mass, and made laymen believe
it frequently occurred, whereas it was largely a fraud supported only by spurious
"evidence" from the torture chamber. The Inquisition needed this public
delusion, because the work it was created for was finished when the Albigensian,
Waldensian, and other heretic groups of the south of France had been finally
crushed. In order to continue its profitable existence, the Inquisition needed
new victims. The witchcraft mania was the solution to its problem.30 Whatever
secular crimes the witches were supposed to have committed, the one crime that
was decisive in sending all of them to the stake was the one crime of which all
of them were completely innocent, because it was impossible: the crime of
collaborating with a real devil. As for secret continuation of a pre-Christian
religion: that was more often done by the church itself, in the guise of
saint-worship, festivals, healing shrines, etc.
Scholars aren't sure how much pagan religion survived in the form of actual group
worship, at the beginning of the era of persecution. Pico della Mirandola's La
Strega (The Witch) described a cult in northern Italy where a pagan Goddess presided
over sexual orgies; she was said to bear a close resemblance to the Mother of God.31
Another group at Arras was said to have centered on "a prostitute" called
Demiselle, or The Maiden. Her consort was the Abbot of Little Sense, otherwise
known as the Prince of Fools, a composer and singer of popular songs–in other
words, it was a cult of minstrelsy.32
There is a vast body of "information" about what went on at the witches' Sabbat–all
of it worthless, because its source was the torture chamber. The late Renaissance
saw a frivolous interest in "black masses" among the wealthy, who tried to model a new cult
group on what they had read of earlier trials. In 1610, Pierre de l'Ancre wrote
of "great Lords and Ladies and other rich and powerful ones who handle the great
matters of the Sabbath, where they appear cloaked, and the women with masks,
that they may keep themselves always hidden and unknown."33 In
the reign of Louis XIV, half the Parisian clergy and most of the court,
including Madame de Montespan, were involved with a society witch called La
Voisin, who staged black masses for them.34 But their rituals
were based on ecclesiastical literature, not on a true folk tradition.
It has been claimed that witchcraft constituted a coherent underground organization
from the beginning, with well-defined chains of command and communication. "Witch
books" purporting to come from the ancient tradition speak of a Brotherhood
(not Sisterhood): "If you are condemned, fear not, the Brotherhood is powerful,
they will help you to escape if you stand steadfast . . . Be sure, if steadfast
you go to the pyre, drugs will reach you, you will feel naught. You but go to
death and what lies beyond, the Ecstasy of the Goddess."35 But during the real
persecutions, few witches seemed indifferent to their sufferings, and virtually
none escaped.
Monstrelet described a typical early example of persecution in 1459:
Those prisoners who found themselves condemned to death immediately shrieked
aloud that they had been tricked; they were promised a light sentence, such
as a pilgrimage, if they confessed as the inquisitors wanted.37
Witchcraft persecutions picked up momentum when inquisitors were seeking new
victims to keep their organization going. In 1375 a French inquisitor lamented
that all the rich heretics had been exterminated; there were none left whose wealth
could support the Inquisition, and "it is a pity that so salutary an institution
as ours should be so uncertain of its future." Then Pope John XXII empowered the
Inquisition to prosecute anyone who worked magic, and "the Inquisition slowly and
unevenly developed its concept of witchcraft."38 Soon the church was making
sweeping claims, such as the claim that the entire population of Navarre consisted of witches.39
Witch hunting sustained itself because it became a major industry, supporting
the income of many. Local nobles, bishops, kings, judges, courts, townships,
magistrates, and other functionaries high and low all received a share of the
loot collected by inquisitors from their victims' assets. Victims were charged
for the very ropes that bound them and the wood that burned them. Each procedure
of torture carried its fee. After the execution of a wealthy witch, officials
usually treated themselves to a banquet at the expense of the victim's estate.40
Inquisitors were no less zealous in wringing the last penny out of their poorer
victims than in helping themselves to the estates of the rich. In 1256, a woman named
Raymonde Barbaira died before her sentence could be carried out, leaving to her heirs
a chest of linens, her clothes, several cows, and four sous in cash. The inquisitor
demanded from the heirs forty sous for all the property. "Such petty and vulgar
details," Lea said, "give us a clearer insight into the spirit and working of
the Inquisition, and of the grinding oppression which it exercised on the subject populations."41
A history of the Inquisition written by a Catholic in 1909 had to admit that it
"invented the crime of witchcraft and . . . relied on torture as the means of
proving it." At first the Inquisition encountered skepticism everywhere. Even
theologians shocked the inquisitors by attributing natural disasters to chance,
or God, rather than to witchcraft. The public disbelieved witches' confessions,
saying they were extracted only by torture. Peasants in some subalpine valleys broke into open
rebellion against the judges' wholesale burnings. It took decades of ceaseless
propagandizing, and ruthless measures to stop the mouths of critics, before the
persecution could be said to have won public support.42
Severe persecution dated from the bull of Pope Innocent VIII, Summis desiderantes,
wherein God's vicar "infallibly" declared that witches could blast crops and
domestic animals, cause disease, prevent husbands and wives from copulating, and in
general "outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very
many."43 The Divine Majesty being apparently unable to look
after its own interests without human help, the churchmen took it upon
themselves to carry out God's vengeance, which developed into a "hideous
nightmare" as the church's mailed fist stretched over the western world for five
centuries.44
The earlier Canon Episcopi ruled that witchcraft was nothing but a delusion, and
it was heresy to believe in it. But that was before the church discovered how to
profit from the witchcraft belief. After Pope Innocent's reign, it was heresy not
to believe in witchcraft. According to Martin Del Rio, S.J., anyone who thought
witchcraft was only a deception must be suspected of being a witch. No one was
allowed to speak against the extermination of witches. Inquisitor Heinrich von
Schultheis said, "He who opposes the extermination of the witches with one
single word can not expect to remain unscathed."45
Superstitious belief in the "evil" of witchcraft persisted to a very late date.
The last English witch trial took place in 1712. The last official witch burning in
Scotland was in 1727, with unofficial incidents even later. Only a century ago,
an elderly woman in the Russian village of Wratschewe was locked in her cottage
and set afire for bewitching cattle. Her murderers were tried, and sentenced only to a light
ecclesiastical penance.46 In January, 1928, a family of
Hungarian peasants beat an old woman to death, claiming she was a witch. A court
acquitted them, on the ground that they acted out of "irresistible compulsion."47
The real reason for persistence of the witchcraft idea was that Christian
authorities couldn't let it die, without admitting that God's word was wrong,
and God's servants had committed millions of legal murders and tortured millions
of helpless people without cause. Dr. Blackstone, England's, ultimate authority on
jurisprudence, wrote: "To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of Witchcraft
and Sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various
passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every Nation
in the World hath in its turn borne testimony." When skepticism about witchcraft
seemed to be on the rise, John Wesley cried bitterly, "The giving up of
witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible."48 Calvin
and Knox also protested that denial of witchcraft meant denial of the Bible's
authority.49 Joseph Glanvill, chaplain to Charles II, said all
who disbelieved in witchcraft were atheists.50
Despite such protests, skepticism grew with the slow advance of the Age of
Enlightenment. In 1736, Scottish laws against the "crime" of witchcraft
were formally repealed. Yet the church refused to keep pace with the law. Forty
years later, ministers of the Associated Presbytery passed a resolution declaring
their unabated belief in witchcraft.51 As late as the 1920s a rector
of four parishes in Norfolk could still write: "If I were to take a census of
opinion in all four villages I am certain that I should find a majority of people seriously
professing belief in witchcraft, the policy of the 'evil eye,' and the efficacy
of both good and evil spells."52 The churches wouldn't let these beliefs die.
Christianity, then, has been chiefly responsible for the survival and growth of
witchcraft as an article of faith. It seems so still. In the 1940s, Seabrook
estimated that "half the literate white population in the world today
believe in witchcraft"; and the nonliterate nonwhite population attains a much higher
proportion.53 A Galiup poll taken in 1978 showed that ten
percent of all Americans believe in witches.54
But what is meant by "believe in"? It could mean a belief that there
are people who call themselves witches; this is self-evident enough. It could
mean a belief that such people erroneously think they have supernatural powers.
It could mean a belief that such people really do have supernatural powers. It
could mean a belief that, as the church has always maintained, witches are agents
of the devil, seeking to destroy the world out of sheer perversity. Or, it could
mean a belief that witches preserved an older and better religion based on worship
of Nature and the female principle.
Modern witches usually uphold some version of the latter belief. A modern witch,
Leo Louis Martello, says:
Asked how he feels about belonging to a heavily matriarchal tradition, one
male witch answered: "I'd rather be first mate on a ship that is solid than
captain on a ship that has a rotten hull, a ship that is sinking. Patriarchy is
such a ship." Witches have defined patriarchy as "manipulative and domineering."
The matriarchal world view, on the other hand, values "feelings of connectedness and
intuition . . . nonauthoritarian and nondestructive power relationships." It is claimed that
witchcraft tends to correct what W. Holman Keith called the fundamental
religious error of our time: "to substitute force as the divine and ruling
principle in place of beauty and love, to make destruction, in which the prowess
of the male excels, more important in life than the creativity of the female."56
Certainly the history of witchcraft shows men persecuting women in order to
maintain a male monopoly of profitable enterprises, such as medicine and magic.
Women of outstanding reputation in any field were at risk, since almost any woman's
accomplishment could be defined as witchcraft. When the church declared war on female healers,
healing became a crime punishable by death if it was practiced by a woman. Women
were forbidden to study medicine, and "if a woman dare to cure without having
studied, she is a witch and must die."57 Doctors eagerly
participated in witch hunts, to eliminate their competition. It was all done
very deliberately. "Given the number of instances in which the church combined
with various economic groups from doctors to lawyers to merchant guilds, not
only to make pronouncements about the incapacities of women, but often to
accomplish the physical liquidation of women through witchcraft and heresy
trials, one can hardly say that it all happened without anyone intending it."58
Churchmen who availed themselves of witches' services sometimes persecuted even
those who helped them, in remarkable examples of ingratitude. Alison Peirsoun of
Byrehill was so famous as a healing witch that the archbishop of St. Andrews sent
for her when he was sick, and she cured him. Later he not only refused to pay her
fee, but had her arrested, charged with witchcraft and burned.59
The muddy illogic of persecutors' sexist thinking is nowhere better illustrated
than in the notion of the witch's "poppet," (wax doll), which could be
mistreated by piercing or melting in order to make a human victim suffer corresponding
stabbing pains, fevers, and other troubles. When the witch destroyed the doll altogether, the
victim would die. Yet oddly enough, when male authorities discovered the doll
and destroyed it, the victim would not die but would recover. A similar sexist
attitude was apparent in the whole idea of traffic between human beings and
demons. Burton's Criminal Trials of Scotland stated that a male sorcerer
is the master of demons, but a female witch is the slave of demons.60
Yet her offense was usually considered more punishable than his.
Modern witches, male and female, seem inclined to restore the sexual balance of
old romances, where men's magical skills were acquired under feminine instruction.
61 The witches appear to be reconstructing an old religion in a new format,
gradually working out a theology that owes more to ancient Indo-European models than to the
"reverse Christianity" associated with the idea of Satanism. Important points
upon which this theology differs from Christianity are the following:
The Goddess speaks to modern witches in somewhat the same vein as the speeches drawn from her ancient
scriptures:
References and Notes: