The Night-demoness
Some societies in different parts of the world have held two concurrent concepts of the witch, one taking the form of a theoretical being, which operates by night and performs effectively superhuman feats, and one representing genuine human beings who are suspected and accused of witchcraft in day-to-day life. The Tswana of Botswana, for example, distinguished ‘night witches’ from ‘day sorcerers’. The former were supposed to be evil old women, who gathered at night in small groups and went, naked and smeared with white ash or human blood, around homesteads to harm the inhabitants. They were said to get through locked doors, having thrown the inmates into a deep sleep. In practice, these beings were treated as more or less fictional, few claiming to have seen them and many openly refusing to believe in them. The ‘day sorcerers’ were ordinary members of the tribe who were supposed to try to harm personal enemies with combinations of spells and material substances. Everybody believed in them.78 On the far side of the Old World, in the Trobriand Islands, the inhabitants spoke of women who flew around at night naked, but invisible to victims, met on reefs in the sea to plot evil, and removed organs from living humans for cannibal feasts, thus blighting their victims with weakness and illness. They also believed that certain male members of the community learned how to use a combination of magic, natural materials and animal helpers to inflict illness and death on chosen victims. It was the latter who were feared in everyday life, while the former were held responsible for occasional major catastrophes such as epidemics.79 Such dual belief systems have been fairly common, though not ubiquitous, among societies that have believed in witchcraft.
The ancient Romans were one people who possessed such a thought system, and in doing so tapped into another well-scattered aspect of human belief, the tendency to associate witches with owls. This family of birds has, after all, five features that people often find sinister: nocturnal habits, silent movements, predation, a direct stare and an ability to turn the head completely round. In the Native American languages of the Cherokee and the Menominee the word for the owl and the witch is the same, and the belief that witches could take the form of owls was found from Peru to Alaska. Even more widespread is the idea that owls, or humans in their shape, were responsible for the ubiquitous human tragedy of the sudden, unexpected and mysterious sickening and deaths of babies and small children. It was found among many North American peoples, but also in Central and West Africa and Malaya.80 This was also a feature of Roman culture, but as one corner of a complex of ideas spanning the Near East and Mediterranean, which also allows us some opportunity to penetrate the thought world of pagan Germany.
This complex is first revealed in Mesopotamia, where by the early second millennium BC the lists of demons or ghosts compiled in the rites of purification and exorcism include a closely related group with seven different names that share the component lil. The first four were female, the last three male. They seem to have been erotic spirits who coupled with humans in their dreams, wearing them out and tormenting them. By the first millennium they also appear to have been regarded as dangers to women in childbirth, though the Mesopotamian demoness who was the special enemy of infants, pregnant women and new mothers was a lioness-headed one called Lamashtu.81 A Phoenician exorcism text of the seventh century BC calls a lili ‘flyer in a dark chamber’, which would suit these roles, and portrays her as a winged sphinx.82 In the Hebrew Bible there is a famous reference to a lilith (at Isaiah 34:14), in a list of beings that haunt a land devastated by divine anger; but it has been suggested that as the others in the list are genuine wild animals, the lilith may here signify a night bird, probably, indeed, the ‘screech owl’ of the King James translation.83 If so, the linguistic connection between nocturnal demons or malevolent ghosts, and a nocturnal bird, is suggestive for what is to follow.
These demons or ghosts represent the strongest and most convincing continuity between the belief system of ancient Mesopotamia and that of the incantation bowls fashioned in the same region between (probably) AD 400 and 800. It has been mentioned that 90 per cent of the protective spells upon them were aimed at demons, rather than humans, and about half of these were ‘liliths’ and lilin. The former were female, and preserved the dual character of the older lil- spirits, of coming to men in erotic dreams and endangering women, as virgins, during menstruation, and at conception, pregnancy and childbirth, along with their infants: this was because a ‘lilith’ regarded herself as the true paramour of the man on whom she preyed sexually, and so treated his human wife and their children with murderous jealousy. The male lilin brought erotic dreams to women. A drawing and a few inscriptions indicate the appearance of a lilith, as a young naked woman with long dishevelled hair and prominent breasts and genitals: in her aggressive and immodest sexuality and unkempt, wild state, the antithesis of the well-behaved Jewish wife or daughter of the age. Sometimes the same figure is mentioned on the bowls as a single being, Lilith, who also features in texts of the Talmud, which agree upon her long hair, and one of which also credits her with wings. In an eighth-century Jewish text, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Lilith suddenly took a quantum leap in her mythological persona, being given a back story as the first wife of Adam and integrated into the Hebrew Bible. She was on her way to becoming the most feared demon of Judaism and one of the great imagined figures of the Western world.84
The Greeks spoke of various child-killing demons abroad at night, called (in the singular) mormō, mormoluke, gellō and lamia, who were, as in Mesopotamia, also dangerous to young women, on the eve of marriage or while or after giving birth. The lamiai were furthermore credited with being predators on young men, whom they tempted sexually before devouring. Most – in the Greek style – were made into personalities with their own myths, in which they generally featured as human women who had died prematurely or lost their own children tragically.85 Their similarity to the spirits of Mesopotamia may be the result of direct transference, as Lamashtu may be the original of lamia, and a type of Mesopotamian demon called a galla may stand behind gellō, though this is not conclusively proved.86 It is the Romans, however, who are most significant for the present enquiry, for the most commonly mentioned of their child-murdering horrors was the strix (plural form striges or strigae), a figure which they had given to the Greeks by the last centuries BC. What was distinctive about the strix was that, whereas the Greek monsters were like ugly humans or serpents, it strongly resembled an owl, or (to a lesser extent) a bat, being a winged, clawed creature, which flew by night and had a hideous screeching cry. The resemblance was the stronger in that the Romans sometimes seemed to use the same name for a species of actual screeching owl.87 The actions and role of the strix varied from teller to teller, but everybody agreed that it was bad news. To some it was a creature of ill omen, a harbinger of foreign and civil war, which hung upside down. Its main function, however, was to prey on young children at night, weakening or killing them by feeding on their blood, life force or internal organs. When a victim was dead, it could eat the corpse. Unlike the child-killing monsters from further east, it seems to have had no inherent connection with sexuality. The would-be scientist Pliny was not sure whether striges were genuine or fictional creatures, while the poet Horace mocked the belief in them; and indeed they feature almost wholly in works of imaginative literature, and not in law codes or histories. On the other hand, in the seventh century AD John Damascenus could still note that the common people of his time, despite the teachings of Christianity, still believed in ghosts and striges, which slipped into locked houses and strangled sleeping infants.
One thing that was distinctively Roman about the strix was its connection with witchcraft, which was based on a quality of Roman witches, mentioned earlier, that was not shared by their Near and Middle Eastern counterparts: they were shape-shifters, able to change into animal forms in order to go abroad. This opened the possibility that striges were in fact temporarily transformed witches. Ovid’s Dipsas possessed, in addition to all her other powers
, that of flying at night clad in feathers. In another work, Ovid left open the question of whether striges were actual birds, or crones who had been turned into bird form by spells.88 By the first century AD, the grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus could define strigae simply as ‘the name given to women who practise magic, and are also called flying women’.89 Novelists subsequently took advantage of the idea, as both Lucian (or somebody writing like him) and Apuleius produced accounts of a woman undressing, rubbing her body with ointment while carrying out particular rites, and then turning into an owl and flying out through a window into the night.90 As in each case she is going in quest of a lover, and is a highly sexed woman in her prime, fond of young men and inclined to destroy those who reject her, this image supplies the link between striges and predatory sexuality which was missing earlier; and so fits them more neatly into the wider pattern of belief in such figures stretching as far as Mesopotamia. Apuleius, indeed, collapsed distinctions further, by twice referring to one of his human witches as a lamia.91
This evolving complex of beliefs may also supply a key to unlock the attitudes to witchcraft of the pagan Germanic tribes that lived to the north of the Roman Empire, and broke into it from the late fourth century onwards to conquer its western half and substitute successor kingdoms of their own.92 To do so involves stepping far across the conventional boundary between ancient and medieval, to consider some later texts which cast light on earlier belief. One of the steps taken in the formation of those successor kingdoms was usually the proclamation of a law code, in the Roman manner and in the Roman language, of Latin. The oldest of these to survive, and possibly the first to be issued, is that of King Clovis of the Franks, for the northern part of his kingdom, later France, in 507–11. It is accordingly the least Romanized and, as it was created only a couple of decades after the Franks accepted Christianity, retains many echoes of pagan culture. Two of its clauses apparently concern bad magic. One prescribes a huge fine for anybody who commits maleficia against another person, or kills with a potion: both acts were probably regarded here as magical, as they are in the Roman codes being copied. The other imposes the same heavy penalty on a stria who ‘eats’ a person. This is a version of the word strix and suggests a native belief in a night-roaming female who consumes a person’s life magically. Two more clauses provide further information. One fines anybody who falsely accuses anyone of being a herburgius, and glosses the term as meaning ‘one who carries a cauldron to where striae do their cooking’. This suggests that the nocturnal women concerned were believed to meet to cook and eat the fat or organs they subtracted from their victims: a tradition also found in parts of Africa. A larger fine was directed for anybody who falsely called a freeborn woman a stria, which was clearly a very serious insult.93 Other Germanic tribes had the same fear of the same figure. The law code of the Alamanni, from the early seventh century, ordered fining for a woman who called another a stria.94 In the same period the Lombard king Rothari fined anybody who called a young woman over whom they stood as guardian a striga or masca, presumably at times to lay hands on her inheritance: the second term, ‘masked one’, could be another word for the same being, or for a different magician who harms by stealth. Another fine was inflicted on anybody who killed another person’s female servant or slave for being a striga or masca, ‘because in no way should Christian minds believe that a woman can eat up a living human being from within’.95 In 789 the first Holy Roman Emperor to emerge from the Germanic peoples, Charlemagne, informed the recently conquered Saxons, who were undergoing a forcible conversion to Christianity, that, ‘If anyone, deceived by the Devil, believes, as is customary among pagans, that any man or woman is a striga, and eats men, and shall on that account burn that person to death or eat his or her flesh, he shall be executed.’96
It may be noted that the successor kingdoms had adopted the attitude of learned Romans: that beings such as the strix probably did not exist. The codes are themselves, however, testimony that in pagan times all classes of German society had believed in them. This was a significant difference from the Roman situation, and, moreover, while the Roman strix was primarily a danger to children, the Germanic equivalent allegedly attacked people of all ages. That belief continued as a tenacious popular tradition far into the Middle Ages.97 Around the year 1000 the Swiss monk Notker Labeo commented that whereas savage foreign tribes were said to practise cannibalism, ‘here at home’ witches were said to do the same.98 Soon afterwards, Burchard of Worms prescribed a penance for the belief among women that while their bodies lay in their beds at night they could go out as spirits through closed doors to join other women of the same kind. They would then band together to kill people and cook and eat their organs, restoring them to a brief and weakened life by substituting straw or wooden replicas for the parts that had been taken. He thought this a devilish delusion.99 In the early thirteenth century Gervase of Tilbury dismissed as the product of hallucinations a tradition found in Germany and France that women known as lamiae, mascae or striae flew by night across great distances to enter the homes of chosen victims, dissolve their bones inside their bodies, suck their blood, and steal their babies.100
Older sources may help to reconstruct more of the cultural context in which such ideas played a part. A succession of Roman authors noted that the Germans credited women with especial powers as diviners and prophetesses. Julius Caesar heard that a German army had not attacked him as expected because the ‘matrons’ in it had pronounced that battle would be unfortunate if joined before the next full moon: Caesar added that it was customary for such women to make such decisions by ‘lots and divination’.101 In the next century the Roman historian Tacitus reported that Germans regarded women as ‘endowed with something celestial’, which gave them the power to see the future, and that several of their most famous prophetesses had been venerated almost as goddesses.102 A succession of such figures is recorded among the Germanic tribes and kingdoms by other ancient and early medieval historians, causing the nineteenth-century folklorist Jacob Grimm to suggest that ancient German culture had invested females with greater inherent powers than males, both for divination and for magic in general – which would certainly make a fit with the fear of night-roaming, flesh-eating women.103
What is missing from this picture is any sense of how good and bad magic in general were conceived and gendered among the pagan Germanic peoples. Likewise, there is far too little information on how magic and its practitioners were characterized, deployed and averted among ordinary people in the pagan Roman Empire. We have some striking images of certain kinds of it, and them, which are significant and allow some conclusions to be drawn, but large areas of relevant knowledge are absent.
Summary
It may be argued from all the data above that when magic is the subject under scrutiny, the ancient European world can indeed be divided into different regions, with contrasting attitudes and traditions. The Egyptians made no distinction between religion and magic, did not distinguish demons as a class of supernatural being, and had no concept of the witch figure. The Mesopotamians feared both demons and witches, and the Persians combined this fear with a division of the cosmos into opposed good and evil powers, the Hittites introduced it into high political life, and the Hebrews blended it with a belief in a single, good, deity with a single permissible cult. The Greeks (or at least some of them) made a distinction between religion and magic, to the detriment of the latter and some of its practitioners, but do not seem to have had an idea of witchcraft. The Romans made the same distinction, and accompanied it with a vivid concept of both witchcraft and witches, which extended to a criminalization of many forms of magic. The Germans feared a mythical sect of night-flying cannibal witches, which projected into real life, and criminal prosecution, a much more widespread mythology – found as far as Mesopotamia – about nocturnal demonesses.
It is possible to draw a simple and crude conclusion from all this: that the early modern witch trials derived ultimately from the fact that We
stern Christianity managed to blend the Mesopotamian belief in demons and witches, the Persian one in a stark cosmic dualism, the Hebrew one in a single true, jealous and ultimately all-powerful deity, the Greek one in a difference between religion and magic, the Roman one in witches and (perhaps) the need for witch-hunts in times of especial need, and the German one in night-flying, murderous human cannibals who were mostly or wholly female. There would be some truth in such an idea, but it would ignore a whole range of complications and subtleties which are needed to explain why the early modern trials took so long to occur after the triumph of Christianity across most of Europe, why they were relatively short-lived and why they happened when and where they did. Instead, ancient traditions played an important role in the formation of European witchcraft beliefs in more complicated and subtle ways, and over a long period of time: and this process will be the subject matter of most of the rest of this book.
3
THE SHAMANIC CONTEXT
THE TERM ‘SHAMANISM’ is one entirely created by Western scholarship, and dependent in all its current public usages on the definitions that this scholarship has made of it. Its utility in everyday language, academic and popular, has largely been due to the fact that those definitions are so diverse that they no longer represent a classification: in the words of one expert, Graham Harvey, they are more of a ‘semantic field’.1 The term itself was coined by German authors in the eighteenth century, and has continued to develop, and expand its meanings, ever since. Although anthropologists have supplied much of the material for the study of it, they have often been wary of it since the mid twentieth century, because of its imprecision, and it has been applied more freely in the disciplines of comparative religion, the history of religion, and religious studies, and by some historians, archaeologists, experts in literature, and psychologists, as well as having a large non-academic currency.2 At its widest application, it is used to describe the practice of anybody who is believed, or claims, to communicate regularly with spirits, as defined at the opening of this book. More often the term is applied to the techniques of a person who regularly communicates with spirits in a traditional non-Western society, and does so for the benefit of other members of it. It is accorded even more frequently to such a person who apparently makes the communication with spirits in an altered state of consciousness, most commonly described as a trance. Quite often, some further refinement is required to meet the definition of shamanism, such as the ability always to control spirits, rather than being controlled by them; or to send out the person’s own spirit into other worlds, leaving the body temporarily; or the use of a dramatic performance to make the necessary contact with spirits. At the most restricted extreme of the semantic field are those who would confine the term to the specific techniques of such figures in native Siberia and neighbouring parts of Eurasia, as it is derived from the word ‘shaman’, used of these people in one of the linguistic groups of Siberia, the Tungus. Some authors indeed employ it to mean the whole religious system of the inhabitants of this region.3 There is no means by which any of these usages of the expression can be objectively judged to be more legitimate than the others: in practice, academic and non-academic authors choose one or another according to the convenience of it for their particular argument. In this respect the ivory tower of professional scholarship has become a Tower of Babel.
The Witch Page 12
