The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  For a long time, historians thought that this was the earliest datable reference to the new construct of the satanic witch cult, because Nider said that ‘Peter’ had conducted his campaign sixty years before. Joseph Hansen identified him in 1900 as a Peter von Greyerz who had governed the upper Simmen Valley in the 1390s, and this became generally accepted. Recently, however, the ‘Lausanne cluster’ has found two other judges called Peter who ruled the district between 1407 and 1417, while those in office between 1418 and 1424, and 1429 and 1434, are unknown, and could also have included a Peter. Moreover, von Greyerz had a son of the same name, active between 1421 and 1448, who would have been known to Nider, and who may have been confused by the friar with his father, just as reports of the Valais witch-hunt could have contaminated memories of what had happened in the Simmen Valley. Legal records survive from that valley which cover the years 1389–1415, and show no trials for witchcraft.116 The Valais hunt is therefore now the earliest based on the new stereotype of a satanic witch cult to be dated in the western Alps.117 What is significant about the Formicarius is that Nider unhesitatingly integrated all forms of magic, including the complex ceremonial kind and simpler spells sold to benefit clients, into that stereotype.

  The next of the early texts from the region is the anonymous Errores gazariorum, ‘The Errors of the Cathars’, which was produced in the period 1435 to 1439 in two successive versions.118 Ponce Feugeyron has been suggested as a plausible candidate for its authorship, and another is George of Saluzzo, successively bishop of Aosta, to the south of the Valais, and of Lausanne: cases cited in the work were drawn from both dioceses. The name ‘Cathars’, coined for one of the most famous heresies of the high Middle Ages, was applied by this time to a range of outlawed sects, and was now given in the treatise to the imagined one of witches. This was defined as meeting in ‘synagogues’ (the word reflecting the contemporary suspicion and persecution of Jews as non-Christians) to worship the Devil, usually in animal form. The tract laid especial emphasis on the activities at these meetings, which included the eating of murdered babies (specifically under three years of age), dancing, and a sexual orgy without regard to the gender or kinship ties of partners. Initiates were given a box of ointment, consisting in part of baby fat, and a stick to anoint with it, on which they might ride easily to the ‘synagogue’. They also received powders manufactured of similar horrific materials in order to kill people – inflicting waves of lethal epidemics on communities – or to render them impotent or infertile, or blight their farmlands. The children were murdered in their beds at night, as alleged in the Valais trials, and then, as was also claimed there, dug from their graves and taken to the ‘synagogue’. Members of the sect pretended to be devout Catholics in daily life, and to offer comfort to the parents whose children they had killed.

  The final work of significance among these early texts is that by Claude Tholosan, a lay judge in the French district of Dauphiné, who between 1426 and 1448 conducted 258 trials in the Alpine areas of that province and neighbouring parts of Piedmont, a region lying to the south and south-west of Lake Leman.119 His book, like that by Nider, grouped together all kinds of magical practitioner as members of the new sect of satanic witches, called by him ‘magicians’ or ‘evil-doers’. His portrait of the sect matches that in Fründ, Nider and the Errores gazariorum, save that he did not believe in the reality of its members’ ability to fly by night and he incorporated a theme from the folk tradition of the ‘good ladies’: that demons led initiates into wealthy homes to feast and make merry there, magically restoring the food and drink that they consumed. Records of trials conducted by Tholosan survive, and match the evidence provided in his book. Other trial records are preserved from the districts north of Lake Leman between 1438 and 1464, and show the imposition by clerical inquisitors, most partnered with Bishop George of Saluzzo, of the portrait of the witches’ ‘synagogue’; especially that provided in the Errores gazariorum which had drawn in turn on the earliest surviving trials in that region for its second edition. Those accused by other local people were arrested and systematically threatened, cajoled and tortured until they confessed to engagement in the list of activities attributed to the sect and named other members of it. Most were then burned, men forming a slight majority of the victims.120

  The literary works and the trials therefore had an interdependent relationship, drawing on a compact set of territories in the western Alps, which was – as Hansen long ago pointed out – to play a decisive role in engendering the early modern witch trials as the literary works produced there developed between them the portrait of what became widely known in the next century as the witches’ sabbath. These Alpine sources bear out Grimm’s model of a mixture of orthodox Christian portraits of heresy and folklore: but the two are not evenly balanced. The basic framework of the new image of satanic witchcraft in the two kinds of Alpine source was taken from images of heresy: the nocturnal gathering to worship Satan or one of his lesser demons, often in animal form; the indiscriminate sexual orgy; and child-murder and cannibalism; all adding up to an incarnation of the anti-human, derived from ancient times, as well as the anti-Christian. What the new stereotype did was to combine the Church’s two prior stereotypes of demonic heretics and demonic magicians, in an atmosphere ultimately produced by the persecution of magical practitioners, which commenced in the 1370s. The true emotive power of the combination was that it produced an heretical sect in which Satan empowered its members with the ability to work harm against their neighbours on a grand scale, with the aid of devils; and above all to kill their small children. This provided the context in which local panics could occur which led immediately – as seen in the Valais – to trials and executions on a scale out of all proportion to those of medieval magicians hitherto. The western Alps matter because they generated the texts that were to propagate this new concept of heresy; but as seen, they were but one district in a much wider region over which it had been hunted in the 1420s.

  Carlo Ginzburg has argued (against Cohn) that older stereotypes of heresy were less important in the formulation of that of satanic witchcraft than specific persecutions of lepers and Jews in the mid-fourteenth century.121 It is true that the most serious accusation against Jews, of spreading plague, arose at a popular level in the western Alps, where the first texts concerning the witches’ sabbath were produced less than a century later. He is also correct that whereas the other constituent parts of older images of heresy continued in action during the fourteenth-century persecutions, child-murder and cannibalism did not. On the other hand, the lepers and Jews attacked in that century were not accused of most of the practices attributed to the new-style witches; but heretics such as the Waldensians were. The reintroduction of child-killing to the model, which it was suggested here was carried out by a campaign of preaching friars in the early fifteenth century, may have embodied ideas derived from older works of literature, or may have been a fresh start sparked by specific local anxieties. Ginzburg also, as has often been stated in the present book, emphasized the folkloric contributions to the new model, and especially those of night flight and shape-shifting to animals. However, the association between demons and animal forms was long established, as shall be discussed in a later chapter of this book. Michael Bailey has questioned Ginzburg’s stress on night flight, pointing out correctly that not all of the early texts mention it.122 It is not recorded in the Aneu Valley either; but it is at Todi, and is cited sufficiently in the early trials in western Switzerland to give it real importance. These citations, however, do not emphasize the spontaneous flight, or riding on animals, of the processions of the ‘good ladies’. Instead an ointment is portrayed as vital to the process, applied to the body at Todi or, in the Alps, to a chair or stick; which is not a motif found in the accounts of followers of the ‘ladies’. It is a much more ancient one, associated with the figure of the strix, and of the Roman witch. This had persisted through the Middle Ages, as proved by a Tyrolese poet of the mid-thirteenth centu
ry who mocked those who feared female cannibal witches who flew to attack people by night on a calf-skin, broom or distaff.123 It is tempting to relate the animated stick to the staff on which some magicians ride in the early medieval Norse literature, but the distance in time and space may be too large to make this tenable. It may therefore be proposed that Norman Cohn’s model of the origin of the early modern witch figure (which was itself an updating of Jacob Grimm’s) remains essentially correct, and may be restated now with better evidence and greater detail. Ideas derived from official notions of heresy were most important in the construction of the new belief system, and the most probable underlying ancient myth is that of the Mediterranean child-killing night-demoness, blending in the Alps into that of the Germanic cannibal witch. That belief system might, however, still have proved a short-lived phenomenon had not the Alpine hunts produced a body of texts to codify and promote it. As is well known to historians, fortune provided a perfect vehicle for this work, in that a major church council met at Basel, on the fringe of the western Alps, between 1431 and 1449 and represented for that time the major point for the development and exchange of ideas in Western Christendom. Nider, Feugeyron and George of Saluzzo were all present, and the Formicarius and Errores gazariorum seem to have been written there.124 Others who attended the council, from outside the Alpine region, subsequently wrote works of their own to propagate belief in the new satanic conspiracy of witches, and these formed part of an extensive body of publication by French, Italian, Spanish and German authors which debated the reality of the conspiracy, and, increasingly, supported the idea of it.125 Occasionally, it is possible to see in them once more the process by which existing local practices of magic were sucked up into the stereotype. One clear example of this is in the work of Pierre Marmoris, a professor at the University of Poitiers, who wrote in the early 1460s. He was as yet bereft of examples of the new satanic witch cult in his part of western France, and so he cobbled together cases of local magic which he had himself encountered, as examples of the menace from witches: people whom he had seen speaking incantations to heal animal bites or scare crows off crops; a man of whom he had heard at Chalons sur Marne who could make himself invisible; a Poitiers woman he had exorcized who claimed to be bound by an erotic spell; a Bourges man who offered to teach him how to refine wine at a distance; and legal prosecutions of which he heard for magic to cause impotence, and for the use of the hand of a corpse to put men to sleep.126 From such trivialities a portrait of a major new satanic cult could be fabricated. The spread of trials of people alleged to belong to it, across parts of France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands during the rest of the fifteenth century, showed the same ability to pick up pieces of local practice and lore. Likewise, although the basic stereotype of satanic witchcraft (secret assemblies to worship the Devil, followed by acts of destructive magic) remained constant, specific features of it – acts of homage to Satan, cannibalism, child-murder and orgiastic sex – were adopted selectively in these trials. Some had all these features, while others only a few, and not always the same selection, so that in practice a series of local variants was created, as they had been ever since the 1420s.127 None the less, just as had been the case at that first appearance, a single basic concept was the driving force for local persecutions, and this was to remain more or less unchanged to produce the much more extensive trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  7

  THE EARLY MODERN PATCHWORK

  THE EXECUTIONS INSPIRED by the new concept of the satanic witch lasted from those first known examples in the Pyrenees and at Rome in 1424 until the final one in Switzerland in 1782. Four decades of intensive work by experts drawn from virtually every European nation have resulted in a consensual picture with regard to most features of the trials that produced them.1 Between those two dates between forty and sixty thousand people were legally put to death for the alleged crime of witchcraft, with the true figure more probably in the lower half of that range. This figure is, however, deceptive in two ways, for the trials were concentrated both in space and in time. They were found mostly in a zone extending across Northern Europe from Britain and Iceland to Poland and Hungary, and from the extreme north of Scandinavia to the Alps and Pyrenees. Furthermore, even within the region across which trials were relatively common, the new concept of the demonic witch proved to be a slow-burning fuse. During the fifteenth century it was confined mainly to the western Alps, northern Italy and Spain, the Rhineland, the Netherlands and parts of France; and does not seem to have claimed more than a few thousand victims at most. Between 1500 and 1560 this range did not much expand, and the overall number of trials seems to have decreased, before an explosion in the second half of the century.

  Most of the victims claimed by the early modern witch-hunts in fact died in the course of a single long lifetime, between 1560 and 1640. Two factors may account for this. One is that it was the period in which the crisis in European religion ushered in by the Reformation came to a peak, and Catholic and Protestant engaged in a series of all-out contests. This sent the religious temperature to fever level in many places and individuals, and produced a greater willingness to perceive the world as a battleground between the forces of heaven and hell. The typical proponent of witch trials was a pious reformer, the age’s equivalent to the Observant friars of the early fifteenth century, who wanted to purge society of wickedness and ungodliness; to such people the destruction of witches was usually only a single item on a list of measures to achieve an ideal Christian polity. The period was, however, also marked by the nadir of a long climatic downturn producing colder and wetter weather and decreased crop yields. Although this only rarely acted as a direct provocation to witch trials, it probably produced a general atmosphere of heightened vulnerability and insecurity which encouraged them. After the 1640s they diminished in their heartland but spread out to the fringes of Europe instead, and were most numerous in Poland, Hungary, Croatia, the Austrian lands, Sweden, northern Norway, Finland and New England in this later period: in most of those areas, they were produced by the introduction of heightened religious reform and intolerance.