This perception can pose one part of a double dilemma for a modern Western liberal rationalist. If a belief in witchcraft means that witchcraft can, in effect, kill, then are not societies with that belief justified in having criminal penalties for it? This challenge is compounded by the other aspect of the dilemma, the question of whether Western societies, in a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic world, should show respect for the differing traditions of others, and accept that witch-hunting is intrinsic to their identity and world view, and so none of the business of outsiders. Indeed, it could be argued that they should recognize that it may in fact be appropriate to their needs. This dilemma was thrown sharply into relief in the late 1990s by a debate in South Africa kindled by the report of the Ralushai Commission, a panel appointed by the government of the Northern Province to consider solutions to the burgeoning amount of witchcraft-related violence in the province following the end of white rule.230 The members, academics and magistrates, were almost wholly drawn from native peoples. Their report, issued in 1996, argued for a new approach that judged Africans according to African understandings of reality, embodying the ideas that witchcraft was objectively real and that a belief in it was a hallmark of traditional African identity. One member of the commission, Professor Gordon Chavunduka, spoke for the literal reality of most of the characteristics of witches as portrayed in native tradition, including membership of initiatory societies dedicated to evil; he only expressed a lack of certainty that witches rode hyenas.
The report called for cases to be tried henceforth in customary courts, by chiefs acting with the advice of service magicians, who could impose prison sentences or fines on those convicted, and lesser penalties for those who brought false or unreasonable accusations. Such suggestions, and those of the report itself, foundered on concerns about whether the courts would be regarded as bewitched if they failed to convict, how guilt could be empirically established, and whether such legal action would tone down or worsen fear of witchcraft. The greatest stumbling block was the problem of agreeing on a set of professional criteria that would regulate and evaluate traditional benevolent magic, and so make its practitioners appear competent as expert witnesses. Moreover, there seemed to be no easy way of extending such a law to cover white South Africans, who do not believe in witchcraft, or of exempting them from it without establishing a new kind of apartheid. In the end, the central government of South Africa decided to ignore the report, encouraging instead local reconciliation procedures to deal with suspicions of witchcraft, procedures reputed to have reduced violence since the 1990s.231 The present book is openly and wholeheartedly in favour of this policy, and of the concomitant and longer-term one, however expensive and onerous it may be, of worldwide state-sponsored educational programmes to persuade people out of a belief that destructive magic is effective irrespective of the credulity of the victim.232 If it is true, as it seems to be, that people who are utterly convinced that they have been genuinely cursed or bewitched can suffer physically, and even die, as a result, then the only really sure way of rendering them safe is to remove that conviction and halt the effect. This same process of re-education would also provide a long-term absolute remedy to the desire itself to curse, and with it to the murders designed to acquire human body parts for use in destructive magic. It would not, on the other hand, necessarily call into question the use of magical operations intended for benevolent purposes, as the same effect, of belief in magic often rendering it potent, could still apply among those involved in the processes; but for good, and with the understanding that the voluntary complicity of the human subject of the operation would be needed for its success. By such a process, however difficult, laborious and protracted, the world may eventually be delivered from an ancient horror, which has caused much division and misery through the millennia for peoples who have conceived and nurtured it. That should be an ambition as important and meritorious as the eradication of smallpox and polio.
Conclusions
It should be plain enough by now that the five basic characteristics of the early modern European stereotype of a witch can all be found around the globe, although not among all of its inhabitants. It may therefore be worthwhile to emphasize the two respects in which Europe stands out as anomalous. The first is that it was the only continent in which natives developed the common equation between witchcraft and essential evil into the idea that it represented an organized heretical anti-religion, dedicated to the worship of an embodied principle of evil in the cosmos. This was because the dominant religion of medieval and early modern Europe was Christianity, which during this period placed an unusually heavy emphasis on a polarized opposition between utterly good and utterly bad powers in the universe, of which its own god represented the former, and ultimately the more potent. The European development of witchcraft beliefs thus represented a natural concomitant of this unusual theology, though not a necessary one. It was to have knock-on effects upon the rest of the globe, as the European Christian idea of the satanic witch was communicated to peoples who were conquered by Europeans or received them as missionaries, as described.
The other extraordinary feature of Europe was that it became the only area in the world to contain societies which had traditionally believed firmly in the reality of witchcraft and yet which came spontaneously to reject that belief, at least in official ideology. This again had profound effects on the remainder of the globe, as European colonial administrators enforced that formal disbelief on traditional peoples to whom it came as a shocking, unwelcome and alien concept, with consequences that have been discussed. There are, it is true, qualifications and limitations inherent in this modern European scepticism. One of these is that a very long and arduous campaign of education and enforcement was needed, all over the Continent, to persuade most ordinary people of the truth and utility of the official change of attitude. It extended in most countries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and is even now not wholly complete.233 Another qualification is that an active fear of witchcraft has recently been reintroduced to the West among communities of immigrants from ethnic groups, especially African, who have traditionally harboured, and retained, it. In the first twelve years of the twenty-first century, this became a concern of the British police, who investigated eighty-three child abuse cases provoked by suspicion of witchcraft, including four murders, and still thought the problem significantly under-reported. The Metropolitan division set up a special task force, Project Violet, to tackle it.234
The early modern European image of the satanic witch lives on in its homeland, moreover, in a secularized form. The panic over satanic ritual abuse of children that erupted in North America during the 1980s and crossed the Atlantic to Britain at the end of the decade, was, as Jean La Fontaine has demonstrated in detail, based firmly on the early modern construct of an international, devil-worshipping sect concealed within Western societies. It was, however, repackaged in a form suitable for rationalists, such as many of the social workers (and in America, teachers and police as well) who became persuaded of its truth. This required no literal belief in the existence of Satan or of magic, merely a continued credence in that of well-organized groups of practising Satanists who were dedicated to the committal of antisocial and criminal acts, and so deserved to be exposed, supressed and punished. This credence was enough to produce some dreadful miscarriages of justice, on both sides of the Atlantic, before careful investigation revealed a complete lack of evidence for such a Satanist conspiracy.235 However, some of those who propagated the panic over alleged satanic ritual abuse, and most of those who did so at its formative stage, were fervent evangelical Christians of a traditional kind, with a very literal belief in a Devil. The same belief is a hallmark of another relatively recent development, the Christian ‘deliverance ministry’ in Canada and the United States, which has depended on a straightforward credulity in demonic possession, sometimes accompanied by one in satanic witches.236 The fact that members of this have not so far extended their activities int
o calls for renewed witch-hunts may be attributed to their ability to draw a line between private conviction and public policy; but it may also depend to some extent on the lack of any willingness on the part of governments to pay them heed. Furthermore, these alterations in Western culture have, in turn, effects on other parts of the world. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European missionaries to extra-European peoples tended to discourage traditional beliefs in witchcraft, as an aspect of backwardness and barbarism; although, as said, this could be undermined by the fact that traditional translations of the book which they distributed as the word of their deity encouraged such beliefs. In recent years, some American missionaries visiting African peoples have, however, begun to encourage a literal acceptance of the existence of demons and of witches, and to reinforce the resurgence of witch-hunting.237
For the purposes of the present book, the most significant outcome of a survey of extra-European beliefs with regard to witchcraft is the value that it may have for an understanding of early modern mindsets and the witch trials that these generated. From the worldwide patterns that it has revealed, one would expect early modern Europe to manifest distinct fluctuations over time in the intensity of witch-hunting, linked to economic, social and political change. It would also be reasonable to expect distinctive regional variations in the nature of trials, both in their number and intensity and in the nature of the persons accused, with regard to status, age and gender. Another natural expectation would be for Europeans to distinguish between different kinds of magical practitioner, not merely with regard to the benevolence or malevolence of their operations but also the nature of those. It is hardly going to be news to anybody at all aware of the results of research into the subject to confirm immediately that all of those expectations are in fact correct. What may be novel, and is another outcome of a global perspective on the subject, is to enquire whether such differences in European belief and practice may be rooted in ancient ethnic and cultural differences, corresponding to those between particular tribes, polities and language-groups; and also what difference historical change made to those ancient traditions. That enterprise will be the purpose of the rest of this book.
2
THE ANCIENT CONTEXT
IT WAS OBVIOUS to many early modern Europeans that their ideas and images of witchcraft were at least partly inherited from antiquity. The text that was most fundamental to their culture, the Bible, was itself ancient, and the authors of the demonological texts which supported witch prosecution quoted lavishly from it, and also from the Church Fathers. They also, however, included passages from pagan Greek and Roman authors: one of the most famous of such witch-hunters’ guides, the Malleus maleficarum, cited five of those; Henri Boguet’s Discours des sorciers also had references to five; and Martin del Rio’s Disquisitiones magicae drew on a grand total of twenty-nine.1 Creative writers were just as disposed to use such sources. Sometimes this process was implicit: the most famous witches in the whole of early modern literature, those who deal with Macbeth in William Shakespeare’s play, were derived originally from the ancient mistresses of prediction, the Fates or Norns, and in parts the chant they use seems similar to one composed by the pagan Roman poet Horace.2 At other times it is explicit, so that when Shakespeare’s only slightly less famous contemporary, Ben Jonson, added an antimasque featuring witches to his Masque of Queenes, he stuffed the footnotes to his published text with references to Greek and Roman authors.3 Recent historians of early modern attitudes to witchcraft have, understandably, been generally disinclined to follow up these links: after all, their concern is with the later period. Those who have done so have tended to be authors of general surveys of the subject and to devote a few pages to suggesting that the ancient Mediterranean world had either a similar fear of witches to the early modern European one or a different one from it.4 Parallel to the tremendous expansion of research into early modern beliefs concerning witchcraft and magic in the past few decades, there has been an equivalent development in the study of the same subject in ancient times; by 1995 one of the most distinguished of those involved in it, Fritz Graf, could already speak of a ‘boom’ in the field, and this has intensified further since.5 These two developments have occurred almost without dialogue between them, and historians of ancient civilizations have tended to confine themselves to the particular one that is their individual specialism, without cross-comparison even between them. In recent years this pattern has begun to provoke some concern among them, with calls for a greater recognition of the differences between concepts of magic in ancient cultures, and an end to ‘universalizing generalizations and reductionist approaches’.6 This chapter is a response to these calls, and will attempt a broad comparative survey of attitudes to witchcraft and other forms of magic across the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, drawing on the mass of recent research and some of the primary sources upon which it has been based. It will build on the approach employed to anthropological data in the first chapter, by emphasizing the distinctive nature of the attitudes adopted by different cultures, and attempting to determine what is constant in them and what is not. One of the lessons provided by a worldwide survey of witchcraft beliefs has been the critical importance of local variation, and it is equally important now to see if these ancient peoples exhibited the same phenomenon.
Egypt
The ancient Egyptian attitude to the supernatural and the divine was centred on the concept of what was called heka, signifying the animating and controlling force of the universe.7 It was employed by divine beings to maintain the natural order of things. They had no monopoly on it, however, because individual deities could teach it to humans, who could then deploy it not just against their own kind, but against other deities, to achieve their own desires and increase their might. This was part of a world picture in which the boundary between human and divine was porous, so that goddesses and gods often needed the aid of human beings and the greatest of the latter could become deified when they died and sometimes even before then. It was accordingly entirely permissible, and even admirable, for people to try to coerce deities, and texts in royal tombs which addressed the latter mingled praise with threats, and prayers with demands. Heka was especially expressed in words, spoken or written, but also by ritual, often linked to particular stones, plants and incenses. It could also be triggered by the making and treatment of statues and figurines, so that from the dawn of Egyptian history, at the opening of the third millennium BC, kings were portrayed as striking bound effigies of enemy prisoners to favour their fortunes in war. By the middle of the second millennium, models of people were being placed in tombs to work for the deceased in the next life. This was a system of thought which completely collapsed into a single whole the categories of religion and magic, as defined at the opening of this book, and with them those of priest and magician, and prayer and spell. The same spell, indeed, could implore, cajole, flatter, threaten and lie, in its attempt to gain the compliance of a deity or spirit.
Ancient Egyptians had no concept of witchcraft, and therefore represented another of the examples of peoples scattered across the globe, as described earlier, who lacked one. One reason for this may have been that they were also one of the societies which believed in the ‘evil eye’ and feared foreigners as hostile magicians; traits associated worldwide with a reduced or absent fear of witches. Only once is the use of magic mentioned in a criminal trial, and that was of a group of conspirators at the royal court who had tried to kill King Rameses III in about 1200 BC. One of them had attempted to do so by using magic, making wax images and potions with allegedly deadly spells learned from a book in the royal library; but this was treated as the employment of just another weapon, and the culprit was convicted of treason and not of witchcraft.8 Heka was itself entirely morally neutral and could be legitimately employed against both public and private foes, as long as the quarrel was generally considered to be a just one. Ordinary people who wished to exercise it often obtained the services of
a special kind of temple priest, the ‘lector’, who was expert in its use and drew partly for such knowledge on the books in temple libraries. Lectors functioned as service magicians, most commonly by conferring protection against misfortune or attack, or treating medical problems. Tomb inscriptions, however, suggest that they could also use lethal curses, and state officials and private persons alike were expected formally to pronounce those upon the kingdom’s foreign foes. Literature and art both support the idea that the laity, including commoners, also had specialized magical knowledge deployed for specific purposes. Some of this is summed up in references to specialists in certain kinds of spell, such as ‘scorpion-charmer’ and ‘amulet-maker’; so well integrated was magic into the whole social and religious system that there was no general word for a magician in the Egyptian language.
Egyptians believed in frightening and dangerous spiritual entities, some inherent in the cosmos and others the ghosts of dead humans or the agents of angry deities.9 They were especially associated with the realms beyond the normal haunts of humanity: night, the desert and the underworld. Magical protection was invoked against them, but they were not considered to be intrinsically evil, but as having a mixture of positive and negative qualities, the former or latter predominating according to context. If they could be turned against enemies, then they became powerful helpers, and texts existed to do just that. Likewise, at least from the early first millennium BC onwards, it was considered possible, and even admirable, for a proficient magician to make a supernatural being into a personal servant. Especial significance was attached to knowing the true names of such beings, which could confer power over them upon those who possessed such knowledge. This belief system underwent no substantial alteration during the three thousand years between the appearance of the Egyptian kingdom and its conquest by the Romans, only an increase in associated objects and actions. Oddly enough, for a culture as enduring, formalized and apparently as static as the Egyptian, it quite early displayed a capacity for absorbing ideas from other cultures, especially those to the east: from the mid second millennium BC, spirits with Semitic names start to abound in Egyptian texts. Conversely, by the early part of the last millennium BC at the latest, Egyptians had acquired a reputation among neighbouring peoples for excellence in knowledge of most kinds, which included that of magic. In the oldest surviving European literature, the poetry of Homer (probably from the eighth century BC), Helen of Troy, restored to her native Greece, puts a herbal potion into the drinks of her husband and his guests which has the power to remove all painful memories and banish all grief for a day. It has been given to her by an Egyptian, and Homer comments that this race is the most skilled of all in the use of herbs, as in all kinds of medicine. Greeks such as Homer did not distinguish between the chemical and arcane properties of herbs (and indeed often could not), and the properties of this drug clearly surpass those of straightforward chemistry.10 Eight hundred years later, the Jewish historian Josephus could declare that everybody regarded the Egyptians as representing the summit of all knowledge, including the arts of incantation and exorcism.11 It is probable that this reputation was simply a natural consequence of the age, stability, wealth and sophistication of Egypt’s civilization, but Sir Wallis Budge, writing in the nineteenth century at the start of the systematic study of Egyptian magic, commented that the ancient reputation of the latter also derived from its remarkable degree of acceptance by, and integration into, its native society. He may well have been right.12
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