Because it's October, and Hallowe'en is just a few weeks away, I think this would be the perfect month to post another series of writings on witchcraft. As many of you may know, I'm mildly obsessed with the history of witchcraft. My graduate writing sample, which has been posted here previously, was a comparison of the legal status of witchcraft and astrology in Western Europe between 1400 and 16oo and I am currently enrolled in a class on the social history of witchcraft in a global setting (primarily the greater Atlantic world). It's been just extraordinary so far, reinforcing the knowledge I had prior to enrollment in this course and clearing away a lot of erroneous information I had on the topic. In general, this class has elucidated for me just how complex witchcraft was and that it doesn't fit into too many molds that we as moderns can foist upon the past. I think I had a common misconception of witches entering this class: that they were simple scapegoats of society, upon whom any problem could be blamed, especially those problems that had no easily identifiable culprit (bad weather, dying crops, etc.); that this was an attempt by oligarchic male authorities to keep women in their socio-economic places; that witchcraft manuals such the Malleus Maleficarum were the most important factor in the identification, prosecution, and execution of a witch, and so on. But at least from what we've read in class, these seem to be the cases in some circumstances, but not in many others. For one thing, most of what I had read prior to this class focused mainly on the elite conceptions of witchcraft at the expense of what common people actually believed. I also, perhaps, focused a but too much on witchcraft as only a crime, when in fact many women (from folk-healers to simple charmers) actually believed themselves to have the power that they were later accused of. In any case, over the next month, leading up to Hallowe'en, I plan on writing five or six posts, based on the writings I've done in this class on various aspects of witchcraft such as the construction of the belief in early modern witch-cults, the structure of witchcraft accusations amidst the backdrop of the Reformation, the concept of inversions and subversions of societal norms versus the scapegoating instinct or "othering," gender as a causal factor, why the witch hunts subsided, and why European ideas jumped the pond to New England. Since these are modified versions of what I wrote in class, they might occasionally not make too much sense without the context. These are largely historiographical writings, critiquing and analyzing historians and their own writings on witchcraft. I'll try to include at least some hyperlinks that clarify where these historians stand on the issues on which they comment. So, here's the first of a few posts on various aspects of witchcraft in world history:
Perhaps the most contentious issue in the historiography of witchcraft is the question of its origins, and it is impossible to discuss these origins without examining the notion of the witch cult in both its elite and peasant conceptions. This dichotomous relationship is key to understanding how the persecutions unfolded. The literate, ecclesiastically and judicially powerful elite, beginning in the late fifteenth century and culminating in the most intense persecutions between 1570 and 1630, envisaged witchcraft primarily as a crime against God and the Church. It began with a pact with the devil, included a subversive sabbat and a denial of the Christian faith, and gave the witches, through the devil, a variety of maleficent magical powers. However, for the average non-literate peasant in late medieval and early modern Europe, the witch inhabited a very different reality. Peasants, among whom the vast majority of witches were to be found, were far more distressed by the practical harm that could befall them if witches succeeded in conducting this magic, and the origins of this power were of little concern compared with the need to stop it. Thematically, Simpson, Midelfort, Clark, Pócs and Ginzburg emphasize the importance of these oppositional models in constructing a dynamic view of the relationship between a witch and society. For some, it is a merger of these schemas that produced a cohesive premise upon which elites and peasants could agree. For others, it is the differentiation and edification of these binary oppositions that constitute the raison d’être for persecutions in the consciousness of both elite and peasant classes.
This begs several questions. When persecutions started from below and were initiated by peasant communities, how important was the witches’ sabbat at all in identifying and demonizing a witch? Conversely, when the elite authorities were at the helm, how did peasants respond to the idea of a sabbat? Did they respond at all? Each scholar comes to distinct conclusions. I will argue that the structuralist theory of binary opposition—demonstrated especially by the peasant/elite, social/antisocial, order/disorder, and Christian/un-Christian dichotomies—serves as a mold for understanding the subversive and antagonistic models in which witches were situated. In considering this oppositional nature of the witch, the aforementioned scholars have constructed the idea of the witch by defining and delineating these oppositions or by deconstructing and merging them entirely.
The dichotomy of peasant versus elite conceptions of witchcraft and the existence of a witch cult is best evinced by the sabbat. Sabbats included promiscuous and indiscriminant copulation with other witches and the devil himself as well as a wide range of other reprehensible activities regarded as perversions of the Christian faith. The sabbat, along with the pact with the devil, formed the backbone of the heretical harassment that defined authoritarian witch hunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, according to H.C. Erik Midelfort, most peasants in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, where the largest witch persecutions occurred, had no conception of the sabbat, the pact with the devil, or any other activities designating a witch in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities. He contends that the lay populace had to be coerced into believing that these were legitimate threats. The peasant population regarded witchcraft as a communal crime since the witch, through acts like crop destruction and weather manipulation, disrupted the shared life of the community. With authoritative input from the elites, witchcraft was oppositionally reconstructed as a solitary offense against God and by association the Church—the better to track down and single out individuals for the crime. In a sense, these authorities made the terrestrial witch phantasmagorical by inserting demonological elements into common witch cult structure. Éva Pócs, by contrast, disagrees and argues that peasants, at least in Hungary, did have a notion of the witches’ sabbat independent of these authorities, though it was decidedly different. Here, if the persecutors had an impact, it was in converting the phantasmagorical, which for the peasant was the “alternate world” of the witches’ sabbat existing in another dimension, into a dangerously real terrestrial occurrence. In both cases, we see oppositional models tuned on their heads in order to merge what were heretofore incompatible visions.
Stuart Clark addresses this chaotic restructuring directly and is the most binary in his construction of the witch cult. He sees the inversion of social norms and the idea of “misrule” or “disorderly behavior” on the part of the witch at the very heart of the witch cult. For Clark, the elite understanding of the sabbat assigned to witches certain ideals diametrically opposed to the Church and Christian faith, and the idea of the witches as demon-worshiping, illicit magic using criminals served to define them as and confine them to the out-group of society. Witch cults were not “bad” because they somehow subverted society but because they supplied an exact reflection in reverse of how a healthy Christian society should function. Thomas Aquinas had centuries earlier addressed the problem of evil in a similar fashion by affirming that evil exists because without it, good would have no reason to assert itself. Clark points to the prefiguring of a witches’ apostasy in the religious example of demons themselves, who in the Christian tradition are fallen angels. And, as an historical example contemporaneous with the height of the witch hunts, he cites James I of England, who remarked that to understand something, one must first understand its opposite. This is not simply a “know-thy-enemy” mentality but an interpretation of the evil of the witch cult as anything diametrically opposed to the supreme good as displayed by the Christian religion, the Church, and the elite secular powers.
Even Margaret Murray, whose scholarship is rightly questioned, emphasized that since witches were accused of causing impotence and destroying crops, this must be an inversion of what were once the opposite rites of a fertility cult. Jacqueline Simpson plays devil’s advocate to an extent and argues that the much maligned Murray, despite her failings as a scholar, attempted to form a middle ground in early twentieth century witchcraft historiography by reconciling the credulous religious viewpoint that the supernatural witch cult was a reality with the skeptical rationalist denial of its existence at all. These uncritical supernaturalists tended to accept the statements and records of prosecutorial authorities at face value. This included the Reverend Montague Summers, an English translator of the Malleus Maleficarum, who by and large believed the very words he was translating represented an accurate account of the witchcraft culture on which it commented. By asserting that witches did engage in religious acts harkening back to an ancient fertility cult but that these acts were not in any way supernatural, Murray attempted to understand this inversion as evidence of a widespread European witch cult dating back to ancient times. Murray contends that the crimes of witches—causing impotence, the destruction of crops, the conjuring of bad weather—were really inversions of their true intention in these fertility cults.
A post-structuralist might ask where this opposition contravenes itself and important questions certainly arise with this model. If Clark’s misrule can be considered a “mockery” or “parody” and necessary to reaffirm the existing social structure, why did witchcraft take on such a heinous form rather than a more benign festival of inversion like Saturnalia in which Roman masters served their slaves? Clark contends that misrule strengthens or subtly protests a social structure; therefore, the power structure in late medieval and early modern Europe must have been especially well established and inflexible. Ginzburg offers a more deconstructionist interpretation of these oppositions and demonstrates a major contradiction in this idea of inversion: it has explanatory power only insofar as the elite viewpoint is concerned because many of those involved in perceived witch cult activities regarded themselves as acting on behalf of Christ. Like Pócs, Ginzburg stresses that it was the elite process of merging extant peasant practices with preconceived notions of the witch cult and sabbat that created a homogeneous prosecutorial classification. For Ginzburg, this amalgamation of ideas is best epitomized by the benandanti, an agricultural fertility cult in Friuli, Italy, who regarded themselves not as an inversion of the social norm but as a weapon on the side of Christianity against the evil forces of witchcraft. It would take the Inquisition to conflate the benandanti’s own concept of a “night battle” with that of the sabbat and thus equate them with the very evil they were attempting to exterminate.
Pócs and Ginzburg, however, fall into Murray’s trap of selective narrative and they both rely too heavily on narrow case studies to demonstrate any pan-European explanation of why witch cults represent either inversions of social norms or conflations of elite and peasant ideas. Pócs’ thesis may be true of Hungary in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and Ginzburg’s of Friuli during the height of the witch craze, but they both examine only a microcosm of witchcraft beliefs. Clark is more a literary critic than a documentary historian, and his inflexible division of witchcraft into black and white bifurcations obscures and disregards its dynamic complexities. Midelfort is more promising if only because his thesis rests on a study of the geographic locus of the largest persecutions. In any case, the exploration of the meaning of the witch cult in terms of the construction and deconstruction of binary oppositions is a hardy formula for understanding the inversions and mergers of it ever changing nature.
Perhaps the most contentious issue in the historiography of witchcraft is the question of its origins, and it is impossible to discuss these origins without examining the notion of the witch cult in both its elite and peasant conceptions. This dichotomous relationship is key to understanding how the persecutions unfolded. The literate, ecclesiastically and judicially powerful elite, beginning in the late fifteenth century and culminating in the most intense persecutions between 1570 and 1630, envisaged witchcraft primarily as a crime against God and the Church. It began with a pact with the devil, included a subversive sabbat and a denial of the Christian faith, and gave the witches, through the devil, a variety of maleficent magical powers. However, for the average non-literate peasant in late medieval and early modern Europe, the witch inhabited a very different reality. Peasants, among whom the vast majority of witches were to be found, were far more distressed by the practical harm that could befall them if witches succeeded in conducting this magic, and the origins of this power were of little concern compared with the need to stop it. Thematically, Simpson, Midelfort, Clark, Pócs and Ginzburg emphasize the importance of these oppositional models in constructing a dynamic view of the relationship between a witch and society. For some, it is a merger of these schemas that produced a cohesive premise upon which elites and peasants could agree. For others, it is the differentiation and edification of these binary oppositions that constitute the raison d’être for persecutions in the consciousness of both elite and peasant classes.
This begs several questions. When persecutions started from below and were initiated by peasant communities, how important was the witches’ sabbat at all in identifying and demonizing a witch? Conversely, when the elite authorities were at the helm, how did peasants respond to the idea of a sabbat? Did they respond at all? Each scholar comes to distinct conclusions. I will argue that the structuralist theory of binary opposition—demonstrated especially by the peasant/elite, social/antisocial, order/disorder, and Christian/un-Christian dichotomies—serves as a mold for understanding the subversive and antagonistic models in which witches were situated. In considering this oppositional nature of the witch, the aforementioned scholars have constructed the idea of the witch by defining and delineating these oppositions or by deconstructing and merging them entirely.
The dichotomy of peasant versus elite conceptions of witchcraft and the existence of a witch cult is best evinced by the sabbat. Sabbats included promiscuous and indiscriminant copulation with other witches and the devil himself as well as a wide range of other reprehensible activities regarded as perversions of the Christian faith. The sabbat, along with the pact with the devil, formed the backbone of the heretical harassment that defined authoritarian witch hunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, according to H.C. Erik Midelfort, most peasants in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, where the largest witch persecutions occurred, had no conception of the sabbat, the pact with the devil, or any other activities designating a witch in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities. He contends that the lay populace had to be coerced into believing that these were legitimate threats. The peasant population regarded witchcraft as a communal crime since the witch, through acts like crop destruction and weather manipulation, disrupted the shared life of the community. With authoritative input from the elites, witchcraft was oppositionally reconstructed as a solitary offense against God and by association the Church—the better to track down and single out individuals for the crime. In a sense, these authorities made the terrestrial witch phantasmagorical by inserting demonological elements into common witch cult structure. Éva Pócs, by contrast, disagrees and argues that peasants, at least in Hungary, did have a notion of the witches’ sabbat independent of these authorities, though it was decidedly different. Here, if the persecutors had an impact, it was in converting the phantasmagorical, which for the peasant was the “alternate world” of the witches’ sabbat existing in another dimension, into a dangerously real terrestrial occurrence. In both cases, we see oppositional models tuned on their heads in order to merge what were heretofore incompatible visions.
Stuart Clark addresses this chaotic restructuring directly and is the most binary in his construction of the witch cult. He sees the inversion of social norms and the idea of “misrule” or “disorderly behavior” on the part of the witch at the very heart of the witch cult. For Clark, the elite understanding of the sabbat assigned to witches certain ideals diametrically opposed to the Church and Christian faith, and the idea of the witches as demon-worshiping, illicit magic using criminals served to define them as and confine them to the out-group of society. Witch cults were not “bad” because they somehow subverted society but because they supplied an exact reflection in reverse of how a healthy Christian society should function. Thomas Aquinas had centuries earlier addressed the problem of evil in a similar fashion by affirming that evil exists because without it, good would have no reason to assert itself. Clark points to the prefiguring of a witches’ apostasy in the religious example of demons themselves, who in the Christian tradition are fallen angels. And, as an historical example contemporaneous with the height of the witch hunts, he cites James I of England, who remarked that to understand something, one must first understand its opposite. This is not simply a “know-thy-enemy” mentality but an interpretation of the evil of the witch cult as anything diametrically opposed to the supreme good as displayed by the Christian religion, the Church, and the elite secular powers.
Even Margaret Murray, whose scholarship is rightly questioned, emphasized that since witches were accused of causing impotence and destroying crops, this must be an inversion of what were once the opposite rites of a fertility cult. Jacqueline Simpson plays devil’s advocate to an extent and argues that the much maligned Murray, despite her failings as a scholar, attempted to form a middle ground in early twentieth century witchcraft historiography by reconciling the credulous religious viewpoint that the supernatural witch cult was a reality with the skeptical rationalist denial of its existence at all. These uncritical supernaturalists tended to accept the statements and records of prosecutorial authorities at face value. This included the Reverend Montague Summers, an English translator of the Malleus Maleficarum, who by and large believed the very words he was translating represented an accurate account of the witchcraft culture on which it commented. By asserting that witches did engage in religious acts harkening back to an ancient fertility cult but that these acts were not in any way supernatural, Murray attempted to understand this inversion as evidence of a widespread European witch cult dating back to ancient times. Murray contends that the crimes of witches—causing impotence, the destruction of crops, the conjuring of bad weather—were really inversions of their true intention in these fertility cults.
A post-structuralist might ask where this opposition contravenes itself and important questions certainly arise with this model. If Clark’s misrule can be considered a “mockery” or “parody” and necessary to reaffirm the existing social structure, why did witchcraft take on such a heinous form rather than a more benign festival of inversion like Saturnalia in which Roman masters served their slaves? Clark contends that misrule strengthens or subtly protests a social structure; therefore, the power structure in late medieval and early modern Europe must have been especially well established and inflexible. Ginzburg offers a more deconstructionist interpretation of these oppositions and demonstrates a major contradiction in this idea of inversion: it has explanatory power only insofar as the elite viewpoint is concerned because many of those involved in perceived witch cult activities regarded themselves as acting on behalf of Christ. Like Pócs, Ginzburg stresses that it was the elite process of merging extant peasant practices with preconceived notions of the witch cult and sabbat that created a homogeneous prosecutorial classification. For Ginzburg, this amalgamation of ideas is best epitomized by the benandanti, an agricultural fertility cult in Friuli, Italy, who regarded themselves not as an inversion of the social norm but as a weapon on the side of Christianity against the evil forces of witchcraft. It would take the Inquisition to conflate the benandanti’s own concept of a “night battle” with that of the sabbat and thus equate them with the very evil they were attempting to exterminate.
Pócs and Ginzburg, however, fall into Murray’s trap of selective narrative and they both rely too heavily on narrow case studies to demonstrate any pan-European explanation of why witch cults represent either inversions of social norms or conflations of elite and peasant ideas. Pócs’ thesis may be true of Hungary in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and Ginzburg’s of Friuli during the height of the witch craze, but they both examine only a microcosm of witchcraft beliefs. Clark is more a literary critic than a documentary historian, and his inflexible division of witchcraft into black and white bifurcations obscures and disregards its dynamic complexities. Midelfort is more promising if only because his thesis rests on a study of the geographic locus of the largest persecutions. In any case, the exploration of the meaning of the witch cult in terms of the construction and deconstruction of binary oppositions is a hardy formula for understanding the inversions and mergers of it ever changing nature.
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