Witchcraft

I

Introduction

Witchcraft, term for the principal means by which humans have been thought to work magic, that is, to bring about practical changes by their own will and employing supernatural means. Witchcraft needs to be distinguished from religion, in which humans are totally dependent upon divine beings to grant their wishes, and sorcery, in which supernatural skills are acquired by a process of study, usually involving books and apprenticeship to a master. Witchcraft was regarded partly as an innate power, and partly as something that was handed on, by a wholly or largely unwritten tradition.

Most human societies have believed in witchcraft, and indeed the modern Western societies are unusual in their refusal to do so. Traditionally, people have treated witchcraft in two very different ways. On the one hand they have resorted to specialists in it for their benefit: to be freed from suffering, to injure enemies, or to obtain what they desire. On the other, they have blamed it for their own misfortunes, and set out to identify and punish the witch responsible for using the power against them.

Most societies, also, have had a well-developed idea of what a witch should be like; a person living within a community but set apart from it by a reserved temperament and odd habits. Many have believed in addition that witches cooperate with each other in secret organizations, and that they work with, or control, supernatural beings. They were commonly believed to operate mostly at night, and to have the power of flight. These concepts were as common in tribal Africa, Asia, and America as in pre-modern Europe.

II

Early European Witchcraft

The earliest historical records of witchcraft in Europe—law codes, poems, heroic tales, and the writings of Greek and Roman scholars—reveal that it was divided into two distinct traditions of magical belief. In the far north, from Iceland eastward to the Baltic lands and Russia, magic was the preserve of specialists, the shamans, who drummed, danced, and chanted their way into trances in which their spirits left their bodies to accomplish the necessary work. Every tribe or clan needed to have one, and misfortune was blamed on hostile shamans. Most were male, but a female shaman was acceptable if no man with the necessary gift was available.

Across the rest of Europe, among the Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Celts alike, a different system prevailed. Men were regarded as able to learn magic, and to read omens, explain unusual events, and work sorcery. Women, by contrast, were treated as repositories of powerful and primeval natural magic. They were brought in to give advice, as seers or prophets, whenever normal social structures broke down. They also featured prominently as natural healers; conversely, they were especially feared for their ability to use that innate power for evil purposes. Hence to most ancient Europeans witches were usually female.

Hence, also, the pagan peoples of Europe regularly executed people for the alleged crime of witchcraft. This situation was ended by the coming of Christianity, which suppressed witch-hunting with a simple theological argument; if there was indeed a single all-powerful God, then no magic could be worked except by his will, and therefore witches were actually ineffective, and deluded. The result was an almost complete halt to executions for witchcraft in Europe for most of the Middle Ages.

III

The Early Modern Witch-Hunt

Witch-hunts broke out again because Christian theology eventually altered, permitting the idea that God had licensed the Devil to cause real harm so that humans could be properly tested. This theory turned witches into Satan's servants, empowered by him to seduce the weak and attack the godly. It fitted in with other developments in late-medieval thought: a new sense of the power of evil and the helplessness of humans, and a new fear of enemies concealed within society and of the subconscious desires within individuals. These trends drove ruling élites to give fresh encouragement to a popular belief in witchcraft which has never died out, and to enrich a mass of traditional folklore with the novel stereotype of a counter-religion involving the worship of Satan himself (see Satanism).

This new mixture of ideas first surfaced in the western Alps in the 1420s, and claimed its first victims in Switzerland during 1428. It was slow to spread, but became a major phenomenon in the period between 1560 and 1632 when it covered Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. After 1632 it began to wane in central Europe, but moved eastward into Sweden, Poland, and the Austrian territories. Two forces account for its particular intensity at this time. One was a continent-wide rise in population, pressing on resources and making most people much more vulnerable to natural disasters, such as disease or harvest failures. The other was the great division in the Church caused by the Reformation, producing a belief that Satan was putting out all his strength in a final contest with God. Recent estimates of the total number of executions in the hunt range from 30,000 to 100,000, with most clustering around the 40,000 mark. This relatively low overall total conceals some appalling local experiences; thus in 1589 the tiny German state of Quedlinburg burned 133 women in one day.

The normal pattern of prosecution was for ordinary people to denounce a suspected witch from their community, and for magistrates to arrest and try the accused person. In normal circumstances, the trial was careful and the defendant had an 80 per cent chance of acquittal. Circumstances became horribly abnormal where the magistrates were closely associated with the local population and caught up in their fears. In that situation the proportion of acquittals to convictions was reversed, and the magistrates would employ torture to make the victim name accomplices, producing a snowballing pattern of arrests. That is why the worst areas of the hunt were Germany, divided into many little states, and Scotland, with a decentralized system of justice. That is also why there were no executions in the popes' own territories, and why the Spanish Inquisition (see Inquisition: Spanish Inquisition) banned witch-hunting in Spain; the authorities in both cases felt too secure to regard the hunt as other than a nuisance.

Victims were usually female, according to the ancient stereotype, and sometimes included midwives and the traditional magical healers. More often, however, the latter were among the hunters, deploying their specialist talents to detect the person responsible for bad witchcraft. Some of those executed certainly believed that they had committed the crimes alleged against them, if only in dreams, but all were totally innocent according to modern notions of how the universe operates.

IV

The Aftermath of the Witch-Hunt

The hunt began to diminish after 1632 as one set of rulers after another came to recognize that it had yielded no positive benefits, and that the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism had been inconclusive. It appeared now that God had intended different sorts of religion to co-exist, and a reaction set in against the whole idea that he or Satan interfered regularly in human affairs. In one state after another the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished, and the last execution was in Switzerland, where the first had occurred, in 1782. Ordinary people continued to resort to presumed witches for magical aid all over Europe until the 20th century, when a disbelief in magic became general: many of the traditional skills of the magical healer have since been taken over by practitioners of natural therapy and complementary medicine.

Writers of the 18th-century Enlightenment, from Voltaire to Sir Walter Scott, treated the witch-hunt as an episode of horrific collective insanity, which could be used to embarrass the established Churches and states. Nineteenth-century liberals, notably Jules Michelet, suggested instead that the victims had been members of a surviving pagan religion, which had kept the cause of liberty alive in secret through the political and religious repression of the Middle Ages. This view was given some academic respectability in 1921, by Margaret Murray, but belief in it has rapidly declined. In 1951 an Englishman, Gerald Gardner, publicized the existence of a revived pagan religion called Wicca (from the Anglo-Saxon word for a male witch), which he claimed to be the same faith, re-emerging into the modern world. Belief in the literal truth of this has collapsed with the Murray thesis, but Wicca has established itself in many parts of the world as a viable religion, based upon feminism and a reverence for nature. At the same time, the figure of the witch has become very prominent as a positive one in wider feminist culture; it is, after all, one of the very few images of independent female power which survives through European history.