Constructing the Identity of a Witch: Feminism and Self-Defining Religions in Twentieth Century Witchcraft Historiography*

*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 combination 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 have 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.

Salem in Social, Cultural, and Religious Context: An Analysis of The Devil's Dominion by Richard Godbeer

When the first colonists began to leave England for North America in the early seventeenth century, they carried a certain subset of beliefs and assumptions with them across the Atlantic which derived culturally from England and religiously from the Calvinist influenced doctrines of Puritanism. In his work The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England, Richard Godbeer examines the complex worldview of these early Puritan settlers and describes their mental and physical realities as far less homogeneous than is often explicated. Although the separation between the elites and the laity was a much smaller gap in Puritan New England than in Europe, many distinctions existed that provided context for their convoluted interpretations of magic, counter-magic, and witchcraft. Godbeer examines the origins of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 through the historical framework of late seventeenth century New England - specifically, the similarities and differences between European and colonial witchcraft beliefs; the impact of occult counter-magic and folk healing on the witchcraft trials; and the historical circumstances contributing to a cultural climate that allowed witchcraft trials to proliferate.

Throughout The Devil’s Dominion, Godbeer describes the nature of magic and occult phenomena, and embedded within this account is an inherent comparison of colonial beliefs and their European counterparts. Despite the distance across the Atlantic, the Puritan cultural and religious links with England were never completely severed during the seventeenth century. From 1620 to 1692, New England provides us with an excellent historical laboratory in which to observe both the continuity of witchcraft beliefs as they traveled from England to North America and the quintessentially Puritan version which arose organically amidst the political and religious turmoil of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The most apparent similarity between Puritan and English witchcraft was the emphasis placed on the witches’ interaction with the devil. Indeed, this was the salient feature of most Protestant interpretations of the crime. Before the accused could be held responsible for the crime of witchcraft, it was incumbent upon the prosecution to prove that the witch had dealings with Satan (153-155). Also like Europe, this explanation of witchcraft as a diabolical heresy pertained primarily to the elite, and in New England the elite class was composed of clergymen.

This elite integration of the devil into the idea of witchcraft was itself an indefinite process. How did one even define the devil? As in Europe, the ministerial fixation on Satan did not exactly accord with the preoccupation with practical magic and counter-magic among the Puritan laity. Satan was not simply evil personified but could also be envisioned as a non-anthropomorphized force or power in the world, manifested most dangerously through the actions of people (87). This apperception of Satan extended to broader dimensions than just the context of witchcraft. For example, demonological rhetoric was employed to attack Native Americans, who represented the great heathen Other (192). The racial, religious, and cultural differences between Puritans and Native Americans were obviously vast, and these differences were often highlighted in ways that portrayed these Native Americans as diabolical. In the demonology of witchcraft, the devil often offered the accused wealth in exchange for her services, and any trade between settlers and Native Americans may have been interpreted in diabolical terms.

Enemies from within the Christian fold were not immune from this line of attack either. The odd piety of the Quakers, who shook uncontrollably as they prayed, easily lent credibility to the Puritan belief that they were possessed by the devil. Their behavior likely seemed little different from those who writhed in contortions under the supposed spell of the devil (194). When the assaults fell within the political sphere, the colonists were not averse to using diabolical language to denounce their enemies. The term “adversary,” for example, was applied to Edmund Andros, the wildly unpopular Anglican ruler of the short-lived Dominion of New England, which deferred, perhaps unconsciously, to the original etymology of the word “Satan” (187). Andros was later demonized alongside Native Americans, with whom he was accused of conspiring against the New Englanders (188). This language of diabolical association would later be applied toward witchcraft in Salem.

The social distance between the laity and the clergy was far smaller in New England than Europe, distinctions were far less entrenched, and interaction between them was more common. As Godbeer mentions, the family, the town meeting, and the church provided the cohesive structures that bound society together. The latter two furnished direct contact between elites and the laity (3). Given this more integrated social structure, why did such a brutal witch hunt occur in Salem in 1692? For one thing, women were excluded from the town meetings (4). The social solidarity that collective decision-making supplied to the male colonists not only may have rendered these women outsiders in their own communities but may also have removed any power they had over their own political and social destinies. The harshness and ruggedness of existence in colonial New England already ensured that women heavily participated in the communal work of a village, but the elite cultural and religious assumptions of female weakness exposed women to a paradoxical existence: they did not participate in the civic or political processes but were fully expected to ascribe to its rules (118). Beyond the level of household, women had social contact with men only in church, and Godbeer contends that their religious conviction left them vulnerable to spiritual crises such as those that rocked late seventeenth century New England (114). Godbeer also reports that seventy-nine percent of all witches and eighty-four percent of all demoniacs in New England were women (68 and 114). By many accounts, this was a greater preponderance than in Europe.

There were significant differences between European and New Englander cultures of magic, counter-magic and witchcraft. According to Godbeer, unlike Europe, folk healers seem to have been at greater risk of being accused of witchcraft in New England (66). Godbeer does not detail specific reasons for this difference, though it may have been due to the fact that no folk tradition of lay medical practitioners existed in New England. The line between magical and non-magical healing was a fine one, and practitioners of folk medicine were often either ignorant of the fact that their work was under suspicion or maintained that it was in no way diabolical (66-68). In any case, the ends may have justified the means in the arena of folk healing, and the merits of the medicine—whether a natural or supernatural antidote—seemed to hinge on its results. In New England there may have been a paradoxical increase in the Puritan use of magic and counter-magic due to the decline of the legal prosecution of witches from the early 1660s to the late 1680s. By taking spiritual matters into their own hands, these Puritans may have inadvertently created the very social conditions that condemned many of them for this use (177-8).

Pluralism, both religious and cultural, also produced different results in New England than in Europe. According to some scholars, pluralism led to greater tolerance in Europe, especially following the Peace of Westphalia, whereas pluralism disrupted the fragile existence to which Puritan New Englanders clung. After the Protestant Reformation began, Catholics and Protestants fought bitterly with one another in Europe, but after generations of living side-by-side, a mutual, if begrudging, respect emerged. Puritan settlers left England for North America, in part, because they desired religious freedom for themselves apart from other Christian sects. The presence of Native Americans, French Catholics to the north, Dutch to the south, and an influx of secular merchants and non-Congregationalist Protestants throughout the late seventeenth century upended their perceived homogeneous environment.

Though its themes come to a head with the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, The Devil’s Dominion is more concerned with the cultural and political climate of New England in the decades leading up to this event. Godbeer is at his most erudite when synthesizing the cultural, political, and religious trends and explicating how they coalesced and contributed to the trials. Historically, he asserts that the years from the founding of Plymouth colony in 1620 to around 1675 were relatively peaceful. This peace was disrupted by a series of events that shattered the Puritan world. King Philip’s War (1675-6), a brutal conflict with the Wampanoag tribe and a following small-pox epidemic, decimated the New Englander population (182-3). During the next decade, the revocation of the Massachusetts Charter and imposition of the Anglican-controlled Dominion of New England (1686-9) eliminated self-rule among the Puritan colonies and for a short time returned them to the very political conditions they sought to escape in England (184). In 1690 hostilities with Native Americans renewed, this time with French support, and shortly thereafter, the new colony charter granted religious toleration to Anglicans, Quakers, and other Protestant denominations, breaking the Puritan monopoly on religious authority in New England. Richard Godbeer convincingly argues that these events, amidst the cultural climate I have detailed above, generated suitable conditions for the witchcraft trials at Salem to flourish.

The Salem witchcraft trials, though violent, were ephemeral compared to the sustained witch craze of early modern Europe. The trials reached very high up the social ladder into relatives of the very people prosecuting the cases and, unlike the more natural progression of events in Europe, the ministerial authorities made a conscious decision to halt the trials. The very act of uncovering a witch undermined the self-proclaimed godliness of these Puritan authorities because the methods for discovering a witch had much in common with the counter-magic for which the laity was accused—trial by water, hot iron, scalding water, or other ordeals (160-1). If supernatural knowledge was required to a investigate magic, it defeated the purpose of the trials in the first place and exposed the clergy to charges of hypocrisy (220-222). Like England, Puritan elites and commoners never came to a consensus regarding the nature of witchcraft, but unlike England, the common ideas were never truly assimilated into the legal process. Ministers seemed to be at a loss to interpret counter-magic as anything other than witchcraft. Godbeer’s sophisticated treatment of the events leading up to the Salem witch trials masterfully contextualizes the cultural, political, and religious circumstances of late seventeenth century New England and their bearings on Puritan ideas of witchcraft.

Skepticism, Science, and Superstition: The Decline of Witchcraft Trials in the Seventeenth Century

The height of the witch craze in Europe occurred between roughly 1560 and 1630, but the decline and eventual disappearance of witchcraft trials transpired in a much more disjointed fashion chronologically and geographically. Several historiographical explanations exist to account for this demise, and emergent cultural and intellectual trends throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provide a context through which to understand these changes. The rise of the mechanistic world view of Descartes, Newton, and others posed a problem for witchcraft because prevailing natural interpretations of previously unexplainable events established a schema into which witchcraft could not easily be assimilated. Greater religious toleration and the acceptance of religious pluralism in many places allowed diverse beliefs to coexist within the same social milieu and thus fears of witchcraft diminished. However, it should also be noted that although the trials themselves ceased, a general belief in witchcraft, especially among commoners, did not. This points to a gradual shift of the import that the notion and term “witch” carried in popular consciousness. The category and terminology surrounding the idea of the witch lost a great deal of cultural cachet during the seventeenth century among the elites in charge of its prosecution and devolved into broader associations with superstition. I intend to critique four historians’ approaches to the problem of witch trial decline and the growing gap between the elite opinion regarding witchcraft “superstitions” and the commoner continuation of belief largely devoid of its legal implications.

In his analysis of the decline of witchcraft, Brian Levack asserts that new legal safeguards and procedures regarding the prosecution of witches accompanied the edification and centralization of the nation-state. In keeping with his overarching thesis that the centralization of authority actually contributed to a decrease in witch trails and helped to restrain more zealous local authorities, Levack argues that new legal protections beginning in the early seventeenth century made it more difficult for authorities to prosecute for witchcraft. He cites four major changes contributing to a decline of witch trials: greater judicial centralization, limited or forbidden use of torture, greater necessity of evidence for conviction, and better legal defense allocated to those accused of witchcraft. According to the new judicial world view, far fewer people were actually capable of being witches. Skepticism grew among elites, but at first this skepticism did not extend to a belief in the authenticity of witchcraft. Rather, it entailed judicially specific skepticism of the efficacy of torture to extract true confessions and to greater doubt concerning the adequacy of evidence presented in the majority of trials. Even while authorities in the early seventeenth century grew more skeptical of the presence of a vast conspiracy of witches, its reality as a crime remained.

This new skepticism was accompanied by a redefining of the term “witch” to narrow its meaning and grant it less power. Johann Weyer, for example, distinguished witchcraft from “magicians, evil-doers, enchanters, and poisoners” all of whom might be charged with witchcraft by less discerning prosecutors. He explained witchcraft as a natural phenomenon and, through textual exegesis and linguistic analysis, claimed that the Biblical witch from the heavily quoted Exodus 22:18 did not directly correlate to those accused of witchcraft in the early modern era. Similarly, John Webster argued over a century later that witches were better classified as “Deceivers, Cheaters, Counteners, and Imposters” and that natural explanations could be employed to explain the persistence of these beliefs. A greater emphasis on natural explanations to describe seemingly supernatural events coincided with this growing skepticism. During the seventeenth century, the intellectual outlook of European elites inclined toward more empirical, materialistic, and scientific visions of the universe, and this has historically been regarded a common justification for the decline of witchcraft trials. There are two problems with this approach. One is that, according to Levack, the rise of this world view came several decades after the worst of the witchcraft prosecutions had already subsided. The other is that, within the time frame of the decline, the “scientific” world view embraced far more natural philosophies than simply the materialistic. Neoplatonism, for example, still exerted a great deal of intellectual influence as late as the mid-seventeenth century, and it much more readily accommodated occult and esoteric ideas. Only the mechanistic weltanschauung would not incorporate witchcraft, and according to Levack, it had not yet ascended to prominence.

Levack acknowledges the problem of chronology and does not specify precisely when the trials came to an end, leaving a very broad time frame for decline—beginning in some places as early as 1600 and not in others until the 1670s. This implies not only that new scientific and philosophical ideas diffused at different rates in different regions but also that the abatement of the importance of witchcraft as a categorical notion depended largely on cultural factors in specific regions. In the case of England, for example, Marion Gibson contends that controversy surrounding particular witchcraft trials caused a hesitance to prosecute on the part of the judiciary. Gibson refers to J.A. Sharpe and recounts a more precise chronology than Levack, tracking skepticism via the decline of witchcraft pamphlets through the 1620s and 1630s. The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, published in 1621, was the last until 1643. However, Gibson claims that the reduction of pamphlets led to a decrease in witch trials though it seems just as likely that declining elite interest in witchcraft hastened the demise of the pamphlet. From the chronological information provided, the two appear to have ebbed simultaneously. In either case, witchcraft simply did not hold the cultural or judicial currency for prosecutors it once possessed.

Owen Davies answers some of Gibson’s lingering questions in his acknowledgment of the fact that witchcraft declined at different rates in different geographical areas for distinct reasons. For Davies, the growing cultural divides between rural and urban spaces most greatly affected long term witchcraft trends. Particularly, the lack of an agricultural lifestyle in urban settings and different levels of contact with livestock may have had an impact on the subsiding trials. Davies attests to the utilitarian nature of the peasant version of witchcraft, noting that nearly half of all witchcraft cases in rural Surrey involved livestock and humans as opposed to less than a third in the comparable urban setting of Southwark, implying that rural accusations still revolved around the hexing or cursing of animals. However, this seems to be a broad assumption because Davies never defines the degree to which urban environs differed from their rural counterparts before the Industrial Revolution. A complete dichotomization of rural and urban settings had not yet occurred in the seventeenth century, and it would not be until industrialization that a substantial divorce arose.

The more convincing aspect of Davies’ argument is his contention that the constant flux of people in and out of cities comprised the greatest difference between rural and urban landscapes: families lived for generations in rural peasant communities whereas cities had a higher turnover rate of inhabitants. This lack of communal cohesiveness made it far more difficult for the type of internal feuds that oftentimes typified witch hunts. The idea that witchcraft ran in families lacked cultural significance in cities where multigenerational contact and continuity was not often the norm.

Davies is also very careful to note, as Levack and Gibson imply, that the decline in witchcraft prosecution does not necessarily indicate an absence of witchcraft belief. He notes numerous accounts of common witchcraft belief throughout nineteenth century England and in France, in one particular incident, as late as 1968. Of course, by this time the trials had long since subsided, and these existed as folk explanations of unusual activities devoid of illicit meaning. This pertains to physical objects as well. Horseshoes, for example, once held specific significance for witchcraft deterrence, but later seem to have dissolved into general superstitious belief. By the time dangerous witchcraft beliefs came to be regarded as innocuous superstitions by the elites, witchcraft prosecutions waned. Later elite contempt for the explanatory power of witchcraft likely contributed to the Enlightenment view of witchcraft as a simple superstition since this was the most immediate and contemporary form of belief educated elites encountered among common people.

Given that the concern for witchcraft diminished in the legal sphere throughout the Enlightenment, why was there a continued acceptance of witchcraft among commoners? It is possible that we see a return to pre-trial era modes of discourse about witchcraft, and the meaning that this term carried may have reverted back to "illusions and phantasms." While it may not have contributed directly to the decline in witchcraft trials, the “disenchantment” of the world throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost certainly contributed to a decline in the acceptance of witchcraft among the educated elite. Among the commoners, Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra concurs with Davies and surmises that a more stable domestic life and a less precarious agricultural system affected witchcraft beliefs because misfortune no longer required a supernatural explanation. This was reserved for “personal” justification of events—beneficent experiences were attributed to God, whereas maleficent ones could still be blamed on witches. However, as the witch hunts decline, this had little bearing on “impersonal” explanations of the mechanistic, material universe.

In conclusion, it was largely the elite perception of witchcraft that underwent a substantial change throughout the seventeenth century. Peasant understanding of its nature continued as it had for generations while a growing skepticism, informed by new ways of thinking about the natural world, issued from elites. This change was gradual and not until science ceased to encompass occult ideas did a marked decline occur. In a sense, just as elites made the crime of witchcraft more serious in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they also made it less serious throughout the mid to late seventeenth. The shifting zeitgeist of the time period is reflected in the morphing terminology used to define and describe witchcraft, in the greater legal protection afforded to the accused, in the waning of pamphlet publications in England, and in increasing distinctions between rural and urban life. For these reasons, among others, witchcraft trials decreased throughout the seventeenth century.

Gender as a Causal Factor for Witchcraft within the Orbit of Early Modern Class Structure

Was gender a causal factor in the witch hunts? The question of causality is in some ways binary, and historians have aligned themselves affirming gender as a causal factor or denying it; but few historians are monocausal, and their answers to this question are far more cautious and nuanced. While this is a straightforward question, it has no simple answers. In posing the question at all, historians implicitly state the obvious: that the majority of those accused of witchcraft were female. If femaleness was a causal factor, how do we explain the fact that there were witches to be found among men? Conversely, if femininity was not a causal factor, why were so many witches women? Is class as important as gender, and if so, does class encompass gender? Certainly, from the raw data alone, the association between gender and witchcraft can be demonstrated, but correlation is not always causation, and we must examine the relationship between gender and the process of accusing a witch, especially the degree to which one informs the other, before we can understand causation. By scrutinizing the historiographical notion of gender as a causal factor, I intend to demonstrate that masculinity and femininity are both integrally important to understanding witchcraft, but only under certain social conditions within the larger configuration of class.

In his landmark work Europe’s Inner Demons, Norman Cohn integrates common and elite ideas of gender and convincingly argues that the archetype of a witch as a woman cut across class boundaries. However, according to Cohn, the reason that elites perpetuated this stereotype was because it was already so instilled in the peasant mentality that identifying women rather than men was expected. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that Cohn never explicitly states whether he regards class or gender as more important. Clearly, for the accused, femininity would be a great hindrance whether it conformed to the ideas of the peasant community or the elites in charge of prosecution.The question we must ask is which informed the other? Were the majority of witches women because elites were already persecuting mostly women or were women being persecuted by elites because the lower classes expected this? This is a very difficult question to answer. On the one hand, Cohn is at least partially incorrect when he asserts that an elite prosecutor, for whom the conspiratorial and subversive acts of witches were of the utmost importance, was equally likely to deem a male or female a witch. Misogynistic elements permeate the Malleus Maleficarum and other witch hunting manuals, and educated authorities were armed with a tradition of medical knowledge, religious beliefs, and cultural assumptions that denigrated women as lesser than men in most ways. On the other hand, as elites became more involved with trials, their ideology of misogyny surely corroborated and reinforced already held beliefs. If the average peasant had already come to the conclusion that a witch was more likely to be female than male, he did so concurrently with authorities. It is unclear the degree to which class informed ideas about gender primarily because both upper and lower classes seem to have held similar ideas in the first place.

Perhaps we should rephrase our original question. Undoubtedly, gender is a contributing factor in understanding witchcraft, so we might instead ask how gender affected witchcraft and whether other forces overwhelmed it. Christina Larner judiciously answers the question of feminine causality in both affirming and dissenting terms. She claims that gender was a causal factor as evidenced by the fact that women made up the vast preponderance of witches but that it was not a direct or even the most important factor because they were persecuted for being witches, not women. In Larner’s own terminology, determining who was a witch was “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” though she reminds us that early modern peasants and elites usually had women in mind. Larner explicitly states, in “Who Were the Witches?” that witch-hunting was woman-hunting or at least the hunting “of women who [did] not fulfill the male view of how women ought to conduct themselves.” However, she seems to answer the titular question of her essay “Was Witch-Hunting Woman-Hunting?” in the negative or at least renders the question moot, since the former incorporated the latter. All roses are flowers but not all flowers are roses. For Larner, women-hunting was always conducted under the auspices of witch-hunting.

Just as witch-hunting subsumes women-hunting, so too can class act as categorical architecture within which to position gender as a causal factor. Diane Purkiss asserts that the theory that witch-hunting was entirely the result of patriarchal dominance over women has been overblown by radical feminists of the twentieth century in their efforts to imbue their contemporary ideological struggles with historical antecedents. Purkiss maintains that most witches were executed not because they were women but because they were among the weakest of the lower classes. True, early in the witch hunts, upper class women such as Dame Alice Kytler had been accused and when witch hunts became particularly pervasive in one locale, persecutions tended to stride higher up the social ladder, but by and large, these were exceptions. Most women accused of witchcraft were very poor. It is no coincidence that in his encounter with witches, the devil often promised women monetary rewards and financial gain. And, in regards to the relationship between class and gender, it is telling that women accused of witchcraft were often not poor of their own accord but simply because they were married to poor men . Their poverty was a result of their class not their gender.


Class, it must be noted, was more than merely the separation between the elite authorities and the peasants. Social distinction existed within peasant communities and the relative lack of midwife accusations is another piece of evidence to support the notion that witch-hunting was women-hunting only within the confines of the lowest stratum of the peasant class. Jane Davidson has proffered ample evidence that women who were involved in healing practices were not culled from their communities as witches based on gender or occupation but, as upstanding citizens, they were largely immune from persecutions and even participated in the legal prosecution of witches. Cohn believed—perhaps understandably given the earliness of his contributions to modern witchcraft historiography—that midwives figured into the category of the accused, but Purkiss, Briggs, and Davidson, among others, have dismantled the myth that midwives were ever regularly accused of witchcraft. They have also attacked the idea that the witchcraze was an attempt by masculine medical authorities to keep women out of the profession of healing. Davidson denounces this theory by providing the example of Johann Weyer, an educated elite physician, who actually chided less educated (lower class?) physicians for resorting to witchcraft as an explanation for their medical mysteries. Nevertheless, to be fair, Weyer was a noted skeptic of witchcraft to begin with. This relationship in itself can be taken as evidence that class distinction, even among the elites, was important in regards to witchcraft accusation. Larner subscribes to the theory of masculine medical dominance in part, observing that in Scotland, laws were passed limiting the authority of midwives in medical matters, but she is careful to note that the major change in the status of midwives did not take place until well after the major witch hunts were over.

During the height of the witch hunts, midwives actually colluded with the authorities and aided in the search for the witch’s mark on the body of the accused at the behest of the male prosecutors whose Christian sensibilities prohibited them from doing so. By their very participation, midwives seem to contravene the idea that with-hunting was women-hunting, although, as Clive Holmes has argued, these women may have been purposefully reinforcing their conformity to the legal process by participating as witnesses. In either case, their social standing saved them and their gender did not condemn them.

The difference between gender and class may best be examined through the lens of the legal system. Larner claims that legal responsibility shifted from men to women during the early modern era. Whereas women were once the legal responsibility of their fathers and husbands, the new Protestant ethic of personal accountability made women more susceptible to direct attacks in court. E.J. Kent contends that the legal system worked better for males, and they tended to utilize the courts more often to resolve their disagreements. The male sphere of influence, even among lower classes, was much broader than females because their economic sphere extended beyond the household. For example, as Holmes documents, witnesses in witchcraft cases dealing with property were more likely to be men whereas those dealing with personal illness or death were more likely to be women. He also argues that, in spite of the fact that women participated in the process of identifying a witch, witch-hunting can certainly still be construed as woman-hunting because males were in control of this process the entire time. Arguably, it was mostly elite, wealthy men in charge of this process; lower class males simply used the system to their advantage.

Without a doubt, gender played a substantial role in the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, it may have played the most important role, but gender seems to have exerted itself as a direct causal factor primarily within the environs of the peasant class from which most witches were to be found. Elite and peasant conceptions of a witch may have been poles apart in most ways, but both tended to agree that a witch was more likely to be female. Historians have often remarked that elite prosecutors of witches developed their own feedback loop of expectation from witch confessions that reinforced already held beliefs. Some modern historians seem to have developed a feedback loop of their own, claiming that witch- hunting was woman-hunting because so many witches were women while simultaneously asserting that so many witches were women because women conformed to the feminine stereotype of a witch. Misogyny was a reality in early modern Europe, as was poverty. If gender were the sole or even most important causal factor, we would expect to see far more elite women being persecuted as witches. As a “sex-related” but not “sex-specific” crime, witchcraft corresponded to culturally inculcated archetypes of the non-virtuous woman, but encompassed a broad enough subset of crimes to include males as well. The fact that the vast majority of these men and women emerged from the peasant class goes a long way towards explaining the incorporation of ideas about gender within ideas about class.

Integrating the Process of Inversion into the Process of Othering in the Context of the Early Modern Witch Hunts*

*This essay is something of a synthesis of the previous two papers (and posts) on the degree to which witchcraft can be viewed (in terms of social anthropology) as inversion or othering. By inversion I mean, in the context of the witch hunts, that witches were "inverted" and regarded as exactly the opposite of whatever the accusers considered the prime example of perfection in their society. In early modern Europe, this tended to be some version of the "virtuous Christian, made more complicated by the fact that Protestantism and all its variations complicated that view after 1517. By "othering", I mean that accusers were defining witches against oneself and highlighting those aspects of an individual that most differentiated them from their accusers. The idea of the "other" has been a concept in psychology and philosophy for several centuries but was given its most modern (or postmodern) meaning by Edward Said, who applied it to peoples of the periphery - geographical, cultural, religious, etc. I have attempted to retain some of his definition. This essay is very postmodernist, even though I don't particularly consider myself a postmodern historian. Still, the terminology gives me a vocabulary to elucidate ideas that I otherwise would not have.

The issue of how to situate a person accused of witchcraft within the larger political, religious, and social structures of the early modern period constitutes one of the most important questions in witchcraft historiography. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these social structures were in the continuous process of defining and redefining themselves. Even the concept of “witch” was ambiguous and carried different connotations for people depending on their social distinction, religious affiliation, or national identity. What embodied a witch for an elite ecclesiastical authority was not always the same for a local peasant, but two elites of different religious persuasions or from disparate geographic locales did not always agree on definitions either.


Amidst these chaotic social conditions that so characterized the early modern period, many scholars have sought to understand the meaning of a witch in terms of the degree to which she either conformed to or diverged from social norms as recognized by both her socio-economic peers and superiors. Scholars have viewed the witch’s relationship with society in varying gradations of complexity as an inversion of social norms or as a convenient way for marginalized peoples to be “othered” by elites or commoners in their attempts to affirm a specific social, religious, or political identity. However, inversion corresponds to schemas far too binary and simplistic to yield knowledge about the diverse ways in which these marginalized peoples were regarded. The less dualistic notion of “the other” represents a more fruitful theoretical account of this multifaceted relationship. Rather than viewing the relationship of the witch to society as one of pure opposition, the concept of the other allows historians to determine how social groups distinguished witches by identifying the feature or features that set them apart from the in-group. It is my intent to recast inversion not as separate from othering but as an extreme version of the process and situate inversion within the greater dynamic process of defining the ideal Christian against the other.

How does one define the idiom of inversion? In the terminology of Stuart Clark, inversion is a reversal of the most exalted ideals of a given social structure or the construction of an oppositional model to the prevailing institutions. Clark has attempted to understand the relationship between the witch and society as an inverted one, in which the witch personified precisely the opposite of what was understood to comprise the ideal Christian. This binary relationship denoted the witch as a particularly odious and dangerous enemy of society. While this can be a useful conceptual framework in which to situate the idea of witchcraft, it does not take into account the convoluted manner in which early modern peoples defined a witch. The idea of a “good” and “bad” witch amounts to a value judgment that simply did not accord with the worldview. Certainly, as Christians, they subscribed to the notions of absolute good and evil, represented by Christ and Satan, but the functional nature of a witch, who had the power to both to cause and prevent harm, was also acknowledged by early modern commoners. All magic derived from Satan; therefore, even practically beneficial magic was evil because the process, not the result, determined its morality. This idea would later prove highly influential among witch hunters who, unlike the commoners they were persecuting, believed that all acts of magic emanated from Satan.

As several scholars have illustrated, most peasants did not equate witchcraft with Satan until the intervention of authorities, and these authorities only gradually came to accept this as an integral part of witchcraft theory. According to H.C. Erik Midelfort, seventy-five to one hundred years passed from the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum until the concept of the devil’s sabbat was integrated into the elite accusation of witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, and even after this time, some secular officials maintained the original distinctions of harmless magic and maleficia. For example, Alison Rowlands has described that officials in Rothenburg ob der Tauber may never have fully conflated witchcraft with other forms of magic and regarded the general problem with superstition as a greater threat than the specific problem of witchcraft. Lutheran skepticism of the active power of the devil, in this instance, may have significantly diminished the reality of the witch as other elites understood it, and condemned the more credulous commoners whose utilitarian exploitation of magic savored of heresy. Similarly, Joyce Miller argues that as late as the seventeenth century, Scottish courts tried “charmers” differently than they tried witches and the principal disparity was the lack of the demonic element in the former. However, the variation between Scotland and Rothenburg was that in Scotland, witches were punished more severely than charmers, whereas in Rothenburg, their persecution was less harsh. Christina Larner has pointed to the fact that the pact with the devil did not figure prominently in English witchcraft trials or laws in the mid-sixteenth century and that the Witchcraft Acts of 1542 and 1563 actually curbed its spread. These discrepancies can be attributed to religious and political idiosyncrasies of their respective regions and countries. The inclusion of Satan—who represents the most obvious inverted symbol of the Christian ideal—seems particularly important if we are to regard the relationship between the witch and society as an inversion. His absence, at least in these instances, makes othering a more viable option.

Gender also plays an important role in understanding the relationship between inversion and the other. The sexual dichotomy of male and female obviously provides the perfect context for inversion, and medically speaking, male elites often defined women as inverted men. Appropriate early modern gender roles were often confirmed by the process of accusation and confession itself. Some women seem to have intentionally asserted their identity as ideal Christian women by adopting submissive positions during interrogations and reinforcing their roles in society. However, as both Diane Purkiss and Christina Larner have explicated, this inversion did not extend to the social realm since it was extremely common for women to accuse other women of witchcraft. If othering requires degrees of similarity between accuser and accused, this type of witchcraft allegation epitomizes that process. For Purkiss, class and gender conflicts converge in these examples, and marginal women faced double jeopardy: inversion of the male perception of an ideal woman by authorities and othering in the context of the typical housewife or mother by her female peers. Given that women sometimes made accusations independently to settle personal scores and sometimes colluded with authorities, inversion and othering are further appended. Purkiss, however, is often imprecise with her terminology and seems to use “other” and “inversion” almost interchangeably. For example, while describing the typical responsibilities of a housewife, Purkiss uses language very similar to Stuart Clark when she depicts the inverted housewife as causing “utter disorder,” but then portrays the anti-housewife, a dual concept, as “her own dark Other who causes pollution where there should be order”. While she begins with inversion, her ideational structure reconciles with othering more effectively. Purkiss can certainly be forgiven for this muddled apprehension since the foremost problem in situating the witch within this tortuous cultural landscape is the relationship between the witch and her political, social, and religious positions. And perhaps, by combining the idea of othering with inversion, Purkiss is allowing the other to subsume the more simplistic nature of inversion.

In the inversion thesis, witches represent people who counter the ideal of the model Christian. In fact, they signify the exact opposite. How do we, perhaps imitating Purkiss, situate this within the concept of the other? The difference between inversion and otherness can be understood as degrees of complexity, but far from being separate representations, inversion seems to be a simplified subset of otherness. If inversion is a binary reflection of oppositional models of the perfect society or the perfect individual, we must take care to define not only the “inverted side” of the spectrum but the “ideal side” as well. The notion of witches as inverted Christians is confounded by the kinetic nature of political and religious social structures of the early modern period. What do we place opposite the inverted witch? The Reformation created various versions of the “ideal” Christian, and within both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, the “perfect Christian” would come to encompass different things. Protestants recognized the direct relationship between a Christian and God as an important component of faith, and they deemphasized the need for an intermediary between an individual and God, seeking to demonstrate that faith alone (sola fide) was necessary for salvation. Catholics, regarding the institution of the Church as that intermediary, denounced Protestants for this assertion. The relationship between the Christian and the Church can be interpreted as “inverted” in that Protestants and Catholics came to opposite conclusions concerning the power of the Church but, despite their differences, these Christian traditions still retained enough similarities to require more than simple inversion. According to Jean Delumeau, Protestants were not simply rebelling against Catholics or the institution of the Church, but both Catholics and Protestants were attempting, in their own ways, to reverse the trend of spiritual crises and decadence perceived in early modern spiritual life. A rededication to Christianity, by definition, included a repudiation of all non-Christian elements, perhaps witchcraft foremost among them.

Protestant and Catholics, amidst the backdrop of this Reformation and Counter-Reformation religious strife, could highlight their differences as evidence of “the other” more readily due to their general congruity. Since othering seeks to accentuate seemingly minor differences, the majority sameness between these distinct groups provides a context within which the ideal Christian can be situated. Clearly, the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Counter-Reformation, and proliferation of diverse sects within the Protestant world complicates the idea of the witch as an inverted Christian, since the definition of the ideal Christian loses all meaning when applied across religious and social groups.

There is historical precedent for this type of in-group/out-group fracturing, and the importance for early modern witchcraft persecutions may lie in an examination of the evolution of divergent sects within in-groups. Briefly, an in-group may be defined as a cohesive community with similar values and loyal members subscribing to them. An out-group conforms to different values that do not correspond to one’s in-group. Note that this does not necessarily presage an inverse relationship, as many in-groups differ from perceived out-groups only slightly, leading to a greater capacity for othering instead of inverting. To use a biological analogy, as in-groups drift and differentiate, speciation occurs and two out-groups with a common ancestor appear. Both Norman Cohn and Elaine Pagels have examined how this process transpires, and both have demonstrated that events in antiquity and the Middle Ages, at least in part, provided a template for later witch hunters to use in their persecution of witches.

It is perhaps ironic that Cohn, writing in the 1960s-70s, argued for continuity between the ancient world and the early modern witch hunts since his writings have been interpreted as a reaction to and a critique of Margaret Murray’s own theories of continuity. Cohn himself has undergone criticism for the fact that he has relied too heavily on elite sources at the expense of the peasants on which these sources comment. However, Cohn does not argue for a direct, continuous link between ancient persecutions of Christians and later medieval and early modern persecutions of witches. What he has stressed is that the pattern of these persecutions is similar enough to suggest common motives of social and political control. According to Cohn, long before these elite authorities were condemning commoners as practitioners of witchcraft, Romans were using virtually the same tactics. Specifically, Cohn has maintained that the early modern harassment of witches mirrors the ancient Roman condemnation of Christians, and just as the Romans accused Christians of crimes they surely did not commit, early modern elites were in turn charging witches with crimes that had no bearing on their actual behavior. This extreme singling out of one portion of society implies the existence of a cohesive and powerful in-group banding together against a weaker out-group. Cohn also detects a precedent for the persecution of witches not only in the ancient Roman persecution of Christians but in the treatment of more recently emerged sects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the Waldensians and Cathars.


The Waldensians were a sect of Christians originating in Germany and known for their piety and asceticism. Cohn writes that they remained unadulterated by non-Christian influences and that they were eventually charged with heresy because of their sympathetic view that Satan and his demons, which were expelled unjustly from heaven, would eventually be granted eternal salvation. Since the central authorities rejected the charge of devil-worship and instead emphasized their refusal to follow papal authority, the Waldensians clearly fit the model of an othering. What is even more interesting is the fact that Conrad of Marburg, who first circulated the accusation of devil-worship, seems to have had the intention of inverting them by ascribing to them a reversal of Christian in-group values. But what resulted was an othering since the Waldensians never deviated entirely from the Christian norm—they simply had the misfortune of being denied papal approval to preach. The rise in mendicant groups throughout the twelfth century prompted the papacy to limit their power at the Lateran Council of Rome in 1179 and forbade any new ones from forming at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Here again, inversion is situated within the wider process of othering.

The Cathars provide perhaps a greater challenge to incorporating inversion into othering, since their views were admittedly dualistic. And unlike the Waldensians, the Cathars were influenced by non-Chrisitian ideas, most notably from the Gnostic and Manichaean traditions. The Cathars believed in two deities: a creator of the spiritual realm (whom they identified with God) and a separate creator of the material realm (whom they identified with the God of the Old Testament and equated with Satan). Christian orthodoxy had assimilated dualism of good and evil into its doctrine, but since God had created Satan, evil was always subservient to good. In the radical dualism of the Cathars, good and evil were equalized and locked in eternal combat.


The nature of the Cathars’ beliefs provides a great template for Clark’s inversion thesis, but again we see a greater degree of othering than inverting. Whether people in the twelfth century believed the tales that the Waldensians or Cathars were engaged in devil worship is not the issue, and certainly Cohn believes the best evidence against this is that it is not mentioned in contemporary sources. What is at issue is the method of Cathar persecution, and the underlying motives behind it relate more to the expansion of French royal authority into the Languedoc region of southern France and the territorial expansion of northern French noblemen than to their supposed inversion of Christian traditions. Indeed, their disdain for the material world marked them as paragons of the Christian ideals of poverty, purity, and chastity—the very ideals they criticized the Church for not upholding. As we shall see, the contentious issue of state-control informs a great deal of modern historians’ understanding of the nature of persecutions. In short, Waldensians and Cathars began as internal threats which authorities attempted to stigmatize with inversion and evolved into out-groups distinct enough from Christianity, as far as the authorities were concerned, that they were othered.

There are earlier templates for this pattern as well. Elaine Pagels delves even further into ancient history in order to discover the nature of the other, and in her quest for the origins of Satan, she attempts to understand the development of a singular adversary, as opposed to multiple satans, within the milieu of the culturally diverse eastern Mediterranean. The Jews, who originally defined themselves as one cohesive group, witnessed a great deal of fracturing in the few centuries before Christ. Traditionally, Jews identified themselves in ethnic, political, and religious terms and clearly demarcated themselves from all “others” or the ha goyim. Among in-groups, Jews developed very distinct rituals to foster collective cohesion and distinguished themselves from non-Jews through practices such as circumcision and keeping kosher dietary laws. Greater contact with non-Jewish peoples following the inauguration of the Hellenistic era contributed on the one hand to greater solidarity among Jews in order to separate them from non-Jews but paradoxically more sectarianism as various Jewish groups assimilated ideas of other peoples.

Where “us” and “them” were once clearly defined, the propagation of these sects within Judaism—Essenes, Pharisees, Sadducees—did not go so far as to create new out-groups, but rather produced in-groups within the greater in-group. At first glance, the Jews seem to have had a well-grounded conceptual framework to deal with exactly this. Rather than one singular evil embodied in Satan, they employed multiple satans or “adversaries” not consigned to one particular figure, and in the role of adversary, satans could actually be beneficial if they stood in opposition of one embarking on the wrong path or if they were employed through the will of God. The latter is exemplified by the story of Job, and here, the satan is clearly obedient to God. Why did the Jews not assign satans directly to those they wished to other? Undoubtedly, Jews clashed with one another over their sectarian differences, but identification with Israel took precedent over these squabbles in a way that Christians would not later emulate during their struggles with heterodoxy. Pagels may be insinuating that one of the most significant breaks between Jews and Christians in the first century was that for Jews the ethnic in-group still surpassed the ideological differences of its sects, whereas for Christians, ascription to the teachings of Christ, especially after the Gospel spread to the Gentiles, broke all ethnic barriers. Christians, following the Essenes, possessed a dichotomized mental architecture incorporating a singular Satan to whom enemies could be consigned. And as Christianity came to consist of more and more Gentiles after around 100 CE, what may once have been regarded as another Jewish sect, or in-group, soon developed an identity of its own, and came to view Jews as a new out-group ripe for othering.

Following the functional anthropological approach to witchcraft, Stuart Clark specifies that on a sociological level, the hunting of witches bonded a community against a common internal threat. This certainly seems to be applicable to the Waldensians and Cathars as internal threats to Christianity and the Essenes, Sadducees, and Pharisees as, at least originally, internal threats to Judaism. The Waldensians and Cathars may be regarded as internal threats to Christianity who differentiated themselves enough to be considered out-groups. Inversion breaks down when these internal threats become external out-groups, as these aforementioned sects appear to have done as they had more and more contact with authorities. Since othering appears when in-groups must accentuate minor differences, and charges of devil-worship did not succeed in convincing the authorities, the elites were required to rely on the heretical deviance of both sects. Inversion works better when employed to describe the social dynamics within an entire in-group, such as a peasant community, versus an out-group, such as another religious sect, ethnic group, or nationality. Clark’s inversion thesis is accompanied by the concept of misrule, a sort of “disorderly behavior” that exists to strengthen a social structure by subtly making a mockery of it. In the case of a peasant community, Clark implies that since witchcraft took on such horrific dimensions, the social structure of early modern Europe must have been especially entrenched and rigid. This implication is supported by Wolfgang Behringer who avers that the ruling elites solidified their power during the social and economic tensions resulting from the climatic changes wrought by the Little Ice Age. These elites were largely insulated from food shortages and inflation rampant in the lower classes and were even able to profit from this disorder. On the other hand, as many historians have vociferously argued, the degree to which authority was centralized in early modern Europe is open to question and certainly some places were more centralized than others. For example, the Holy Roman Empire, made up of an amalgamation of principalities—some Protestant, some Catholic—was not centralized politically or religiously during the height of the witch hunts. Behringer and Clark both suggest, however, that the lack of state-control over territory pales in comparison to the socio-economic control these elites exerted over the lower classes.

Finally, perhaps the most befitting area of study for a direct comparison and synthesis of otherness and inversion lies in the nascent nation-state and the emergent identity of people as belonging to particular cultural/ethnic groups. The imprecision of national borders and the fact that numerous populations resided in geographic locations that did not correspond to their own ethnic, cultural, or religious identities exacerbated the problem of witchcraft and contributed to the othering of people who lived, quite literally, on the physical margins of society. And it is surely no coincidence that borderlands between nations and regions where separate cultures, ethnic groups, and religions cohabitated often witnessed the most widespread persecutions. Particularly, the borders between Scotland and England; between France and the Holy Roman Empire in Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Lorraine; and the Basque region of the Pyrenees between France and Spain provide excellent case studies for the process of othering and the further subtending of inversion. It is also no coincidence that these were regions that either spawned the most celebrated and revered demonologists or allowed them to flourish: James VI hailed from Scotland, Heinrich Kramer was from Alsace, Nicolas Rémy from Lorraine, and Pierre de Lancre prospered in the town of Labourd in the Basque country.

We have already noted the marked lack of obvious inversion in the Scottish witch trials: there was no devil-worship, no pact with the devil, no eating of babies, and very few sexual orgies or other prototypical Continental witch ideals. Larner advocates the importance of the centralization of political control in Scotland as both a reason for heightened persecution of witches as criminals of the state and for the lack of demonological elements as a necessity. The capital offense of witchcraft in Scotland had become a crimen exceptum, or a crime that suspended the traditional procedural protection of the plaintiff in the interest of protecting the state from its enemies. Witchcraft, which had once been a solitary offense, came to be a crime against the state, and the “godly kingdom” of Scotland affirmed its national character by ferreting out those that did not fit this mold. Larner considers Scotland a prime example of early modern state-building, and Scotland’s self-identification with devout Christian principles, coupled with its adoption of some aspects of Roman law, allowed for especially efficient judicial prosecution of witches. Conversely, Brian Levack, though he acknowledges the importance of the growth of the Scottish state, alleges that it was precisely that legal and administrative infrastructure that allowed Scottish officials to rein in some of the more zealous local officials. In either case, as far as the average Scottish commoner was concerned, it likely did not matter where the persecutions originated and the records certainly indicate that, even though torture may have been less prominent in Scotland, the existence of witches was not.

In a very real sense, the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire were all borderlands. Local princes exerted almost complete control over their principalities independent of the authority of the emperor. Protestants and Catholics lived side-by-side in a much more integrated way than in many other places in Europe, and as we have seen, between Protestants and Catholics, othering was supremely important. William Monter has theorized, like Levack, that decentralized authority led to the most atrocious witch hunts. However, unlike Scotland, which had a central authority to control these outbreaks, the Holy Roman Empire’s lack of centralization contributed to one of the most brutal witch hunts in all of Europe. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Catholicism and Protestantism become more ensconced in the areas where they were proscribed, and the purposeful creation of a more religiously homogeneous society generated conditions that made it more difficult to point out witches since the state had supposedly succeeded in forcing religious conformity, thus negating much of the power of othering. Perhaps it is no coincidence that major witch hunts in the Holy Roman Empire, and across Europe, began to decline in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

It has not been my intention to argue that inversion did not exist in the conceptualization of the crime of witchcraft in the early modern era—merely that it provides only a starting point from which to understand the more intricate relationships between the witch and the social, religious and political arrangements of the day. Inversion is obviously a useful construct, but its definitive categories do not easily accommodate non-binary modes of discourse or take into account the evolutionary nature of early modern mentalités. What may start out as inversion within an in-group can morph into a more variegated othering as in-groups transform into new out-groups. Because of these labyrinthine correlations, it is incumbent upon the historian to restructure his frame of reference to incorporate inversion into the broader system of othering.