*I wrote this article in mid-December of last year, and I'm just not getting around to posting it. It's sort of an overarching view of what I learned in much of witchcraft class, specifically the relationship of gender, feminism, and New Age religious belief on witchcraft historiography and the popular perception of witchcraft among lay audiences. Little did I know that this article would be published on slate.com a mere three days after I completed this article. If you have neither the time nor inclination to read it, it may be summarized, briefly, as an article designed to debunk many of the "demonstrably false historical claims" made by Wiccans, Neopagan, and other New Agers, who have based their growing new faith on a hodgepodge of ancient and medieval myths. Mark Oppenheimer's piece defines religion as a "madman's fantasy" that has simply failed to die out, though he castigates Wiccans in particular for their penchant for making a historical fact out of apocryphal mythology. Oppenheimer cites numerous examples of Wiccan tenets that can simply be proven wrong, and he warns that adherents to religions that rest on shaky foundations face a difficult battle to justify and validate their beliefs. For the most part, I agree with everything Oppenheimer writes, yet we come to two very different conclusions. While Oppenheimer sees a danger for Wiccans in continuing to believe easily falsifiable claims, I find this to be among the most important ingredients in most religions. As Rebecca Collins writes in "Concealing the Poverty of Traditional Historiography: Myth as Mystification in Historical Discourse", "myth and history are typically construed as antitherical approaches to the past" but goes on to say that all histories "contain some element of myth" and that the embracing of these myths "reinforces the shared values" of a culture. Myth-making bonds those who ascribe to its deeper meaning, regardless of its historicity. Oppenheimer writes that "it's one thing to have faith in things unseen; that's human. It's a whole other thing to have faith in an easily disproved historical conceit." True, but aren't all major religions engaging in exactly that? Most religions that rely on texts (essentially all major modern-day religions that are not animist) seem to have at least some basis in a history that has been molded to suit their spiritual needs. Wicca is no different, except that it has the perceived misfortune of emerging at a time when many of its historical claims can be refuted. Essentially, the argument I've made here is that, so long as Wiccans don't co-opt the historical reality and replace it with their own mythology, there seems to be no harm in believing something that is "demonstrably false"--as I said, I feel this is what all people of all religious traditions end up doing to some extent anyway. As with most posts of research papers and essays, I have removed many of the citations, though I have attempted to give credit for direct quotations. This was not originally meant as a research paper but a reflective essay, so I have not directly quoted very often.
It is impossible to discuss the history of witchcraft without addressing the question of gender. In many ways, however, it is even more difficult to assess the role of gender in the historiography of witchcraft studies because successive generations of scholars, feminist writers, and Neopagans have assigned importance to it based on diverse philosophical, political, and personal reasons. The twentieth century has witnessed a reinterpretation of the meaning of witchcraft as each of these groups have endeavored to assimilate the “idea” of witchcraft either to suit their own purposes or correspond to their preconceived notions of the past. Some feminist writers and philosophers have recast the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a “holocaust of women” and inseparable from modern domestic violence, spousal abuse, and misogyny (Purkiss 17). Others have declared that the persecution of witches should be retroactively regarded as a historical facet of the modern legacy of violence towards women and historically treated as such. Likewise, many modern Wiccans and Neopagans regard the witch hunts with reverence, esteem as martyrs those who were executed, and redefine the past in mythic dimensions. This modern-day reclamation of the past allows followers of the burgeoning New Age religious traditions to imbue their beliefs with deeper narrative hermeneutics and interpret past persecutions with symbolic, spiritual meaning. Of course, many scholars have taken issue with these cavalier revisionisms. For example, Diane Purkiss criticizes these self-serving affirmations as a disingenuous form of narratology. She blames not only radicals and New Agers for this historical apostasy, but also careless academic historians of the early and mid-twentieth century for their failure to assess witchcraft by the standards of its practitioners. Without these academic reassessments, the feminist and Wiccan revisions would likely have taken very different forms. In all of these varied definitions, gender looms large. By examining the evolving notions of gender in the turbulent era of twentieth century witchcraft historiography, we can better appreciate these politically and philosophically charged reinterpretations of the past.
Twentieth century witchcraft historiography traditionally begins with Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Murray’s thesis, enunciated in The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921), argued for the enduring existence of a pre-modern fertility cult that was overshadowed by the façade of Christianity during the Middle Ages. This faith, predating all of the major world religions, hearkened back to the worship of a mother goddess, became conflated with the Dianic cult, and persisted into the Middle Ages until a concerted campaign by Church authorities attempted to eradicate it. Despite her difficulty in “grasp[ing] the historical method” and her “highly selective” use of sources, Murray’s appraisal of the subject became authoritative for nearly fifty years (Purkiss 62).
The first serious attempt to call her views into question appeared in the 1970s. Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer challenged the notion that a cult existed underground and outside the mainstream of established social structure. Kieckhefer demarcated a specific chronology of witchcraft persecutions and noted the incorporation of diabolism, the pact with the devil, and heresy in the elite conception of the crime of witchcraft. Cohn recognized that events in antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least in part, provided a template for later witch hunters in their persecution of witches. Just as the Romans had accused the early Christians of cannibalism and infanticide and the medieval Church had accused the Waldensians and Cathars of devil-worship, so too did the elite authorities of the early modern era accuse women of witchcraft. While Cohn and Kieckhefer utilized the historical record more effectively than Murray, their results yielded accurate information about only one component of the story. Cohn’s treatment of the high-level, theological legal discourses employed among the clergy failed to accurately represent the beliefs and practices of the persecuted women themselves. Though Cohn’s discussion of the upper class impressions of witchcraft marked a vast improvement over Murray, women were reduced to mere scapegoats and victims without a voice of their own. Gender was addressed, insofar as Cohn acknowledged that women comprised the majority of the accused, but it did not become a concentrated topic of study until the next generation of scholars.
As Cohn tacitly admitted in this exemption, the dialogue between elite and peasant varieties of witchcraft had little in common, but one familiar factor for both was the expectation that most witches were women. Modern historical research into gender in the early modern era has prompted a reevaluation of its significance in the witch hunts. In what ways did gender affect witchcraft? In the terminology of Christina Larner, the early modern crime of witchcraft was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” because femaleness was not necessarily a requisite for witchcraft. However, early modern persecutors and prosecutors clearly conceived of the crime as archetypically female. In he article “Who Were the Witches?” Larner contends that witch-hunting was woman-hunting specifically when women deviated from the societal norms delineated by masculine authorities, and prosecutors were armed with a deep tradition of medical knowledge, religious doctrine, and culturally inculcated expectations to denigrate women. Authorities who persecuted witches deferred to the Bible in order to bolster their claims that women constituted the weaker sex. As daughters of Eve, masculine elites believed women were prone to temptation, lascivious in nature, and more easily deceived by the devil. The Bible contained direct passages referring to the power of witchcraft. One regularly quoted text details the account of the witch of Endor. The Israelite king Saul visited this necromancer to summon the ghost of the prophet Samuel in order to divine his future. Samuel admonished Saul for defying God’s will, and Saul, despondent and fearful, ultimately committed suicide (1 Samuel 28:3-25). Even more frequently quoted was the simple command from Exodus that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18). Clearly, the Bible warned the elite prosecutors of the dangers of the crime of witchcraft, and these prosecutors increasingly equated it with women.
The greatest impact on the archetypal image of the female witch derived from the Malleus Maleficarum. This work was the most influential of the so-called witch hunting manuals and it corroborated scriptural conceptions of this increasingly female crime. First published in 1486 by the German Dominican professor of theology, Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus promulgated, for the first time, a codified definition of witchcraft for the elites. This work sought to defend the existence of witchcraft from its critics, describe the activities of witches, and explain why the greater preponderance of witches was to be found among women rather than men. The Malleus asserted that women were “chiefly addicted to evil superstitions” because the devil more easily “corrupts their faith,” and affirmed that “their slippery tongues are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know." For the clergy, witchcraft came to encompass heresy, and it constituted the most heinous variety, since it involved a rejection of God and a compact with the devil. Deferring to St. Augustine, Kramer argued that “the abomination of witchcraft arose from this foul connection of mankind with the devil,” and this interweaving of diabolism with the idea of the witch signified the dire consequences of the crime. The Malleus also drew from more sources than simply Biblical and patristic—the Western classical heritage of Cicero, Seneca, and Aristotle substantiated these negative stereotypes of women as witches. The potent combinatio
n of scriptural authority and classical precedent entrenched the idea of female weakness in the minds of the elite clergy. The Malleus also discussed the crime of maleficium, or harmful magic, which became increasingly intertwined with the particularly female crime of witchcraft. By the early sixteenth century, the typical witch had emerged as a woman, usually lower class, and often devoid of any male figures in her life. Historiographically, the impact of the Malleus often denotes a point of divergence among more traditional male historians who view the Malleus as one among many important early modern primary witchcraft sources, and feminists who accentuate its preeminence among lesser works (Purkiss 11).
Modern witchcraft scholarship has emphasized the role of gender in the witch hunts through simple statistical analysis of the historical sources. While precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, almost all trial records demonstrate that a majority of those prosecuted and executed were female. According to Darren Oldridge, the average number female witches across Europe and North America between 1560 and 1660 amounted to roughly seventy-five percent (WR 8). Both H.C. Erik Middlefort and Christina Larner claim a higher percentage at eighty percent for Europe as a whole, and Middlefort remarks further that perhaps as many as ninety percent of witches were women for lands under German control during the height of the witch hunts. The numbers for North America are similar. According to Richard Godbeer, up to seventy-nine percent of all witches and eighty-four percent of demoniacs were female (Godbeer 68 and 114). Obviously, at the very least, the statistical evidence demonstrates a correlation between witch-hunting and women-hunting.
Numbers, however, can be skewed to stress a particular ideological message or to affirm a particular identity contingent upon these quantitative extremes. While the ratios of men to women in the early modern witch hunts have been well established, the raw numbers themselves have not. Purkiss quotes feminist writer Mary Daly, whose drastic inflation of numbers in Gyn/Ecology expresses her desire to compete with more notable massacres in the past. Daly cites the witch craze as an event that decimated “millions of women” in early modern Europe and America, and Purkiss criticizes her for quoting these number as if they represented a mark of distinction in feminist history (Purkiss 13 and 17). Similarly, Wiccan spiritual leader Starhawk, in her original publication of The Spiral Dance, estimated the number of women executed at nine million, or nearly one hundred times higher than even most liberal of scholarly estimates (Starhawk 208). In a later edit, Starhawk revised this figure to “a low of one hundred thousand” while still allowing for the upper range. She qualified the original approximation as “probably high” and averred that “nobody knows exactly how many people died in the persecutions” (Starhawk 208). This augmentation, whether purposefully misleading or not, indicates a desire on the part of both feminist writers and Wiccan spiritual figures to sympathize with and find personal meaning in the tragic historical event. Unfortunately, their embellishment of these quantities diminishes the seriousness one can afford them, and it situates these revisionist authors in the awkward position of consciously striving to surpass more recent and well-documented violence. Purkiss has criticized both radical feminists and Wiccans for attempting to cast the murky events of the past as a “holocaust of [their] own” and for directly opposing the more “paradigmatic atrocity” of the Holocaust of 1942-1945 (Purkiss 6 and 17).
The rhetoric employed by early modern persecutors and prosecutors of witches and the sheer numerical data available certainly lends credence to the thesis that witch hunting is “sex-specific,” but as E.J. Kent argues, the evidence for the prosecution of males for similar crimes indicates that “sex-related” is a more accurate descriptor. Though maleficium remained a particularly female offense, men were often accused in England and New England of harmful practical magic in the economic sphere. Just as women faced accusations over property damage to household items, livestock, or crops—items related to domesticity and fertility—men skirmished “over rights to land and resources.” Males accused of witchcraft generally encountered allegations from other males who regarded their activities as misrepresenting normative masculinity. For example, John Godfrey of colonial Massachusetts met opposition to his peripatetic lifestyle because it failed to conform to the standards of late seventeenth century colonial behavior for males. What may appear to modern sensibilities as the prototypical masculine male—unmarried, unsettled, and without a family—appeared to colonial observers as a “poor practi[tioner] of patriarchy” and this “cut across the paradigmatic idealization of masculine virtue.” The existence of male witches, even if their numbers were small compared to women, confirms Larner’s explanation of witchcraft as “sex-related” rather than “sex-specific.”
How have modern feminists,
wiccans, and Neopagans come to understand gender given the reinterpretations it has undergone among academic historians? Purkiss stresses that each group has used the concept of the witch to “construct [an] identity” conforming to the features of its past most relevant to the individual exegete. Historians themselves are not immune to this criticism, and Purkiss performs a postmodern deconstruction of many of their arguments, especially those arguments that appear entirely unaware of their own biases and shortcomings. For example, Purkiss is severely critical of the “Enlightenment” bias that characterizes a substantial amount of early witchcraft historiography. These historians not only ignored the importance of gender in defining witchcraft but also gave prominence to the rise of skepticism and the decline superstition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While important, this aspect of witchcraft continues to focus too narrowly on the resolution of the “problem” of witchcraft while obscuring the actual participants in the trials (Purkiss 59-60). In a way, Murray can be read as a reaction against this form of Whiggish historiography. The emphasis on the progress of science and reason over superstition and irrationality constituted one of the many important chapters in this school of history. By positing a timeless, unbroken link with a religion from the ancient past, Murray essentially denied the progress of religion from “primitive” to more advanced forms—the fertility cult of the pre-modern era was only subsumed by Christianity rather than replaced by it.
Paradoxically, though Murray’s theory has been soundly rejected by modern scholars, at least one historian has erected a theoretical framework similar to Murray’s but on a much smaller scale (Purkiss 44 and 61). Carlo Ginzburg’s focus on the peasant classes and folk religious beliefs of the Friulian region of northern Italy implies a similar undercurrent of popular folk beliefs largely ignored by centuries of elites. However, these peasant attitudes are vitally important for understanding the local culture of the region. Following the political and religious restructurings of the Counter-Reformation, the clergy—and with it the Inquisition—took a much keener interest in the beliefs and practices of the lay peasantry. In the case of the benandanti—an actual agricultural fertility cult in Friuli, Italy—Ginzburg stresses that it was the elite process of integrating contemporary peasant practices with preconceived notions of the witch cult and sabbat that created the specific classification of witchcraft. The benandanti believed that their spirits rose out of their bodies at night and traveled to do combat with witches and demons in what they referred to as “night battles.” It would take the Inquisition to conflate the benandanti’s own concept of a “night battle” with that of the witch’s sabbat and thus equate them with the very evil they believed they were exterminating. Unlike Murray, Ginzburg discovered a popular religion that likely existed in concert with Christianity. Rather than two completely divorced spiritualities, these folk beliefs fused with peasant interpretations of Christianity to create a distinct regional, religious culture. In some ways, twentieth century faiths that rely on both ancient and modern precedents are undergoing the same types of acculturation.
Neopagans and Wiccans h
ave co-opted this strategy for their own religious purposes. As self-defining associations, these groups have essentially utilized the historical record as their scripture. Religions almost always must interpret their histories symbolically in order to approach their deepest meanings. Purkiss discusses the psychoanalytic trend among historians who study the supernatural, but it seems even more applicable to the discourse that Neopagans and Wiccans employ to express their extremely varied belief systems (Purkis 77). Neopaganism draws on myriad historical traditions in a conscious attempt to revive, in modern form, the pre-Christian and non-Christian religions of now extinct ancient cultures—Celtic, Nordic, Egyptian, Native American, and so on. The “disorganized” appearance of this fluid set of beliefs does not imply that it is not a legitimate faith. Rather, this appeal to cultures disparate in time and place indicates not only the ease with which new traditions may be assimilated but also that those who adhere to these new (and old) faiths tend to be suspicious of organized religion in the first place (Purkiss 31-32).
The question remains: to what degree can one alter the past to gratify one’s own spiritual needs? At what point in comprehensive reinterpretation does logos become mythos, dissociated entirely from the historical record from which it draws? Purkiss criticizes these approaches when the alteration of the historical record to suit the symbolic needs of the religion becomes so extreme that it confounds all coherent meaning. For example, Purkiss chides those Wiccans, such as Zsuzsanna Budapest, who contend that their religion draws from a spiritual well that extends back in time to an ancient matriarchal society where women ruled fairly and effectively, coexisted peacefully with nature, did not go to war, and emphasized beauty over cruelty (Purkiss 41). This myth materialized out of the discoveries at the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete by Arthur Evans, and despite the lack of conclusive evidence for a gender-equal, nonviolent society, many modern Wiccans attest to this past as factual in order to legitimize their own beliefs when coaxed by others (Purkiss 41). Is this selective scholarship akin to Murray’s? Or, is this the kernel for a new, modern-day mythology?
This process of self-definition remains ongoing at all times—from the benandanti, caught between Friulian folk beliefs and a lay peasant version of Christianity in sixteenth century Italy, to Wiccans and Neopagans, many of whom must rebuff allegations of Satan worship and child abuse. Perhaps the most successful example of this type of self-definition in action is Starhawk’s appropriation of witchcraft to describe the goddess religion she and her cohorts practice. From a historical perspective, Starhawk’s Spiral Dance is rife with errors. For example, Starhawk states that “the rising male medical establishment welcomed the chance to stamp out midwives and village herbalists, their major economic competitors” (Starhawk 208). However, most historians today recognize that very few midwives were ever persecuted for witchcraft, and these historians have, in a sense, dismantled that myth (Purkiss 21 and WR 59, 258). In this case, myth carries the negative connotations of a mistakenly-held conviction. For Starhawk, it denotes a literature signifying a deeper truth. She readily acknowledges that “witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for that That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told” (Starhawk 210). By approaching Starhawk’s works as primary sources of a new religious tradition rather than as misinterpreted historical secondary sources, her assertions cease to be erroneous history and become the mythology of a goddess religion.
Christina Larner posed the question, “was witch-hunting women hunting?” and answered with the now famous hypothesis that it was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific.” Gender was a causal factor as evidenced by the fact that women made up the overwhelming majority of witches, but it was not necessarily the direct cause because the accused were persecuted for being witches, not women. The considerable amount of evidence demonstrating correlation proves that gender was a defining factor in the persecution and prosecution of witchcraft. But this is a historical question, and, as we have seen, not all those interested in witchcraft are specifically interested in the same types of historical evidence. Early witchcraft historians largely overlooked gender in favor of rational and empirical explanations for it decline, while Margaret Murray’s interest in gender corresponded to her belief in the existence of ancient fertility cults. Many radical feminists have so singularly focused on gender that they render the greater dynamic historical mechanisms at work during the witch hunts unintelligible and unimportant. Neopagans and Wiccans have incorporated the notion of gender into their mythology and are in the long, syncretic process of building a religion. Provided that we do not read the admittedly unhistorical as history, these diverse interpretations of gender in the canon of witchcraft studies, literature, and scripture may thrive together.
It is impossible to discuss the history of witchcraft without addressing the question of gender. In many ways, however, it is even more difficult to assess the role of gender in the historiography of witchcraft studies because successive generations of scholars, feminist writers, and Neopagans have assigned importance to it based on diverse philosophical, political, and personal reasons. The twentieth century has witnessed a reinterpretation of the meaning of witchcraft as each of these groups have endeavored to assimilate the “idea” of witchcraft either to suit their own purposes or correspond to their preconceived notions of the past. Some feminist writers and philosophers have recast the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a “holocaust of women” and inseparable from modern domestic violence, spousal abuse, and misogyny (Purkiss 17). Others have declared that the persecution of witches should be retroactively regarded as a historical facet of the modern legacy of violence towards women and historically treated as such. Likewise, many modern Wiccans and Neopagans regard the witch hunts with reverence, esteem as martyrs those who were executed, and redefine the past in mythic dimensions. This modern-day reclamation of the past allows followers of the burgeoning New Age religious traditions to imbue their beliefs with deeper narrative hermeneutics and interpret past persecutions with symbolic, spiritual meaning. Of course, many scholars have taken issue with these cavalier revisionisms. For example, Diane Purkiss criticizes these self-serving affirmations as a disingenuous form of narratology. She blames not only radicals and New Agers for this historical apostasy, but also careless academic historians of the early and mid-twentieth century for their failure to assess witchcraft by the standards of its practitioners. Without these academic reassessments, the feminist and Wiccan revisions would likely have taken very different forms. In all of these varied definitions, gender looms large. By examining the evolving notions of gender in the turbulent era of twentieth century witchcraft historiography, we can better appreciate these politically and philosophically charged reinterpretations of the past.
Twentieth century witchcraft historiography traditionally begins with Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Murray’s thesis, enunciated in The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921), argued for the enduring existence of a pre-modern fertility cult that was overshadowed by the façade of Christianity during the Middle Ages. This faith, predating all of the major world religions, hearkened back to the worship of a mother goddess, became conflated with the Dianic cult, and persisted into the Middle Ages until a concerted campaign by Church authorities attempted to eradicate it. Despite her difficulty in “grasp[ing] the historical method” and her “highly selective” use of sources, Murray’s appraisal of the subject became authoritative for nearly fifty years (Purkiss 62).
The first serious attempt to call her views into question appeared in the 1970s. Norman Cohn and Richard Kieckhefer challenged the notion that a cult existed underground and outside the mainstream of established social structure. Kieckhefer demarcated a specific chronology of witchcraft persecutions and noted the incorporation of diabolism, the pact with the devil, and heresy in the elite conception of the crime of witchcraft. Cohn recognized that events in antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least in part, provided a template for later witch hunters in their persecution of witches. Just as the Romans had accused the early Christians of cannibalism and infanticide and the medieval Church had accused the Waldensians and Cathars of devil-worship, so too did the elite authorities of the early modern era accuse women of witchcraft. While Cohn and Kieckhefer utilized the historical record more effectively than Murray, their results yielded accurate information about only one component of the story. Cohn’s treatment of the high-level, theological legal discourses employed among the clergy failed to accurately represent the beliefs and practices of the persecuted women themselves. Though Cohn’s discussion of the upper class impressions of witchcraft marked a vast improvement over Murray, women were reduced to mere scapegoats and victims without a voice of their own. Gender was addressed, insofar as Cohn acknowledged that women comprised the majority of the accused, but it did not become a concentrated topic of study until the next generation of scholars.
As Cohn tacitly admitted in this exemption, the dialogue between elite and peasant varieties of witchcraft had little in common, but one familiar factor for both was the expectation that most witches were women. Modern historical research into gender in the early modern era has prompted a reevaluation of its significance in the witch hunts. In what ways did gender affect witchcraft? In the terminology of Christina Larner, the early modern crime of witchcraft was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” because femaleness was not necessarily a requisite for witchcraft. However, early modern persecutors and prosecutors clearly conceived of the crime as archetypically female. In he article “Who Were the Witches?” Larner contends that witch-hunting was woman-hunting specifically when women deviated from the societal norms delineated by masculine authorities, and prosecutors were armed with a deep tradition of medical knowledge, religious doctrine, and culturally inculcated expectations to denigrate women. Authorities who persecuted witches deferred to the Bible in order to bolster their claims that women constituted the weaker sex. As daughters of Eve, masculine elites believed women were prone to temptation, lascivious in nature, and more easily deceived by the devil. The Bible contained direct passages referring to the power of witchcraft. One regularly quoted text details the account of the witch of Endor. The Israelite king Saul visited this necromancer to summon the ghost of the prophet Samuel in order to divine his future. Samuel admonished Saul for defying God’s will, and Saul, despondent and fearful, ultimately committed suicide (1 Samuel 28:3-25). Even more frequently quoted was the simple command from Exodus that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18). Clearly, the Bible warned the elite prosecutors of the dangers of the crime of witchcraft, and these prosecutors increasingly equated it with women.
The greatest impact on the archetypal image of the female witch derived from the Malleus Maleficarum. This work was the most influential of the so-called witch hunting manuals and it corroborated scriptural conceptions of this increasingly female crime. First published in 1486 by the German Dominican professor of theology, Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus promulgated, for the first time, a codified definition of witchcraft for the elites. This work sought to defend the existence of witchcraft from its critics, describe the activities of witches, and explain why the greater preponderance of witches was to be found among women rather than men. The Malleus asserted that women were “chiefly addicted to evil superstitions” because the devil more easily “corrupts their faith,” and affirmed that “their slippery tongues are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know." For the clergy, witchcraft came to encompass heresy, and it constituted the most heinous variety, since it involved a rejection of God and a compact with the devil. Deferring to St. Augustine, Kramer argued that “the abomination of witchcraft arose from this foul connection of mankind with the devil,” and this interweaving of diabolism with the idea of the witch signified the dire consequences of the crime. The Malleus also drew from more sources than simply Biblical and patristic—the Western classical heritage of Cicero, Seneca, and Aristotle substantiated these negative stereotypes of women as witches. The potent combinatio
n of scriptural authority and classical precedent entrenched the idea of female weakness in the minds of the elite clergy. The Malleus also discussed the crime of maleficium, or harmful magic, which became increasingly intertwined with the particularly female crime of witchcraft. By the early sixteenth century, the typical witch had emerged as a woman, usually lower class, and often devoid of any male figures in her life. Historiographically, the impact of the Malleus often denotes a point of divergence among more traditional male historians who view the Malleus as one among many important early modern primary witchcraft sources, and feminists who accentuate its preeminence among lesser works (Purkiss 11).Modern witchcraft scholarship has emphasized the role of gender in the witch hunts through simple statistical analysis of the historical sources. While precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, almost all trial records demonstrate that a majority of those prosecuted and executed were female. According to Darren Oldridge, the average number female witches across Europe and North America between 1560 and 1660 amounted to roughly seventy-five percent (WR 8). Both H.C. Erik Middlefort and Christina Larner claim a higher percentage at eighty percent for Europe as a whole, and Middlefort remarks further that perhaps as many as ninety percent of witches were women for lands under German control during the height of the witch hunts. The numbers for North America are similar. According to Richard Godbeer, up to seventy-nine percent of all witches and eighty-four percent of demoniacs were female (Godbeer 68 and 114). Obviously, at the very least, the statistical evidence demonstrates a correlation between witch-hunting and women-hunting.
Numbers, however, can be skewed to stress a particular ideological message or to affirm a particular identity contingent upon these quantitative extremes. While the ratios of men to women in the early modern witch hunts have been well established, the raw numbers themselves have not. Purkiss quotes feminist writer Mary Daly, whose drastic inflation of numbers in Gyn/Ecology expresses her desire to compete with more notable massacres in the past. Daly cites the witch craze as an event that decimated “millions of women” in early modern Europe and America, and Purkiss criticizes her for quoting these number as if they represented a mark of distinction in feminist history (Purkiss 13 and 17). Similarly, Wiccan spiritual leader Starhawk, in her original publication of The Spiral Dance, estimated the number of women executed at nine million, or nearly one hundred times higher than even most liberal of scholarly estimates (Starhawk 208). In a later edit, Starhawk revised this figure to “a low of one hundred thousand” while still allowing for the upper range. She qualified the original approximation as “probably high” and averred that “nobody knows exactly how many people died in the persecutions” (Starhawk 208). This augmentation, whether purposefully misleading or not, indicates a desire on the part of both feminist writers and Wiccan spiritual figures to sympathize with and find personal meaning in the tragic historical event. Unfortunately, their embellishment of these quantities diminishes the seriousness one can afford them, and it situates these revisionist authors in the awkward position of consciously striving to surpass more recent and well-documented violence. Purkiss has criticized both radical feminists and Wiccans for attempting to cast the murky events of the past as a “holocaust of [their] own” and for directly opposing the more “paradigmatic atrocity” of the Holocaust of 1942-1945 (Purkiss 6 and 17).
The rhetoric employed by early modern persecutors and prosecutors of witches and the sheer numerical data available certainly lends credence to the thesis that witch hunting is “sex-specific,” but as E.J. Kent argues, the evidence for the prosecution of males for similar crimes indicates that “sex-related” is a more accurate descriptor. Though maleficium remained a particularly female offense, men were often accused in England and New England of harmful practical magic in the economic sphere. Just as women faced accusations over property damage to household items, livestock, or crops—items related to domesticity and fertility—men skirmished “over rights to land and resources.” Males accused of witchcraft generally encountered allegations from other males who regarded their activities as misrepresenting normative masculinity. For example, John Godfrey of colonial Massachusetts met opposition to his peripatetic lifestyle because it failed to conform to the standards of late seventeenth century colonial behavior for males. What may appear to modern sensibilities as the prototypical masculine male—unmarried, unsettled, and without a family—appeared to colonial observers as a “poor practi[tioner] of patriarchy” and this “cut across the paradigmatic idealization of masculine virtue.” The existence of male witches, even if their numbers were small compared to women, confirms Larner’s explanation of witchcraft as “sex-related” rather than “sex-specific.”
How have modern feminists,
wiccans, and Neopagans come to understand gender given the reinterpretations it has undergone among academic historians? Purkiss stresses that each group has used the concept of the witch to “construct [an] identity” conforming to the features of its past most relevant to the individual exegete. Historians themselves are not immune to this criticism, and Purkiss performs a postmodern deconstruction of many of their arguments, especially those arguments that appear entirely unaware of their own biases and shortcomings. For example, Purkiss is severely critical of the “Enlightenment” bias that characterizes a substantial amount of early witchcraft historiography. These historians not only ignored the importance of gender in defining witchcraft but also gave prominence to the rise of skepticism and the decline superstition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While important, this aspect of witchcraft continues to focus too narrowly on the resolution of the “problem” of witchcraft while obscuring the actual participants in the trials (Purkiss 59-60). In a way, Murray can be read as a reaction against this form of Whiggish historiography. The emphasis on the progress of science and reason over superstition and irrationality constituted one of the many important chapters in this school of history. By positing a timeless, unbroken link with a religion from the ancient past, Murray essentially denied the progress of religion from “primitive” to more advanced forms—the fertility cult of the pre-modern era was only subsumed by Christianity rather than replaced by it.
Paradoxically, though Murray’s theory has been soundly rejected by modern scholars, at least one historian has erected a theoretical framework similar to Murray’s but on a much smaller scale (Purkiss 44 and 61). Carlo Ginzburg’s focus on the peasant classes and folk religious beliefs of the Friulian region of northern Italy implies a similar undercurrent of popular folk beliefs largely ignored by centuries of elites. However, these peasant attitudes are vitally important for understanding the local culture of the region. Following the political and religious restructurings of the Counter-Reformation, the clergy—and with it the Inquisition—took a much keener interest in the beliefs and practices of the lay peasantry. In the case of the benandanti—an actual agricultural fertility cult in Friuli, Italy—Ginzburg stresses that it was the elite process of integrating contemporary peasant practices with preconceived notions of the witch cult and sabbat that created the specific classification of witchcraft. The benandanti believed that their spirits rose out of their bodies at night and traveled to do combat with witches and demons in what they referred to as “night battles.” It would take the Inquisition to conflate the benandanti’s own concept of a “night battle” with that of the witch’s sabbat and thus equate them with the very evil they believed they were exterminating. Unlike Murray, Ginzburg discovered a popular religion that likely existed in concert with Christianity. Rather than two completely divorced spiritualities, these folk beliefs fused with peasant interpretations of Christianity to create a distinct regional, religious culture. In some ways, twentieth century faiths that rely on both ancient and modern precedents are undergoing the same types of acculturation.
Neopagans and Wiccans h
ave co-opted this strategy for their own religious purposes. As self-defining associations, these groups have essentially utilized the historical record as their scripture. Religions almost always must interpret their histories symbolically in order to approach their deepest meanings. Purkiss discusses the psychoanalytic trend among historians who study the supernatural, but it seems even more applicable to the discourse that Neopagans and Wiccans employ to express their extremely varied belief systems (Purkis 77). Neopaganism draws on myriad historical traditions in a conscious attempt to revive, in modern form, the pre-Christian and non-Christian religions of now extinct ancient cultures—Celtic, Nordic, Egyptian, Native American, and so on. The “disorganized” appearance of this fluid set of beliefs does not imply that it is not a legitimate faith. Rather, this appeal to cultures disparate in time and place indicates not only the ease with which new traditions may be assimilated but also that those who adhere to these new (and old) faiths tend to be suspicious of organized religion in the first place (Purkiss 31-32).The question remains: to what degree can one alter the past to gratify one’s own spiritual needs? At what point in comprehensive reinterpretation does logos become mythos, dissociated entirely from the historical record from which it draws? Purkiss criticizes these approaches when the alteration of the historical record to suit the symbolic needs of the religion becomes so extreme that it confounds all coherent meaning. For example, Purkiss chides those Wiccans, such as Zsuzsanna Budapest, who contend that their religion draws from a spiritual well that extends back in time to an ancient matriarchal society where women ruled fairly and effectively, coexisted peacefully with nature, did not go to war, and emphasized beauty over cruelty (Purkiss 41). This myth materialized out of the discoveries at the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete by Arthur Evans, and despite the lack of conclusive evidence for a gender-equal, nonviolent society, many modern Wiccans attest to this past as factual in order to legitimize their own beliefs when coaxed by others (Purkiss 41). Is this selective scholarship akin to Murray’s? Or, is this the kernel for a new, modern-day mythology?
This process of self-definition remains ongoing at all times—from the benandanti, caught between Friulian folk beliefs and a lay peasant version of Christianity in sixteenth century Italy, to Wiccans and Neopagans, many of whom must rebuff allegations of Satan worship and child abuse. Perhaps the most successful example of this type of self-definition in action is Starhawk’s appropriation of witchcraft to describe the goddess religion she and her cohorts practice. From a historical perspective, Starhawk’s Spiral Dance is rife with errors. For example, Starhawk states that “the rising male medical establishment welcomed the chance to stamp out midwives and village herbalists, their major economic competitors” (Starhawk 208). However, most historians today recognize that very few midwives were ever persecuted for witchcraft, and these historians have, in a sense, dismantled that myth (Purkiss 21 and WR 59, 258). In this case, myth carries the negative connotations of a mistakenly-held conviction. For Starhawk, it denotes a literature signifying a deeper truth. She readily acknowledges that “witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology. The myths, legends, and teachings are recognized as metaphors for that That-Which-Cannot-Be-Told” (Starhawk 210). By approaching Starhawk’s works as primary sources of a new religious tradition rather than as misinterpreted historical secondary sources, her assertions cease to be erroneous history and become the mythology of a goddess religion.
Christina Larner posed the question, “was witch-hunting women hunting?” and answered with the now famous hypothesis that it was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific.” Gender was a causal factor as evidenced by the fact that women made up the overwhelming majority of witches, but it was not necessarily the direct cause because the accused were persecuted for being witches, not women. The considerable amount of evidence demonstrating correlation proves that gender was a defining factor in the persecution and prosecution of witchcraft. But this is a historical question, and, as we have seen, not all those interested in witchcraft are specifically interested in the same types of historical evidence. Early witchcraft historians largely overlooked gender in favor of rational and empirical explanations for it decline, while Margaret Murray’s interest in gender corresponded to her belief in the existence of ancient fertility cults. Many radical feminists have so singularly focused on gender that they render the greater dynamic historical mechanisms at work during the witch hunts unintelligible and unimportant. Neopagans and Wiccans have incorporated the notion of gender into their mythology and are in the long, syncretic process of building a religion. Provided that we do not read the admittedly unhistorical as history, these diverse interpretations of gender in the canon of witchcraft studies, literature, and scripture may thrive together.
