The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Unlike the earliest proponents of the new stereotype of the demonic witch, those who warned against it in the most intense period of trials no longer claimed that it was a recently appeared menace. Instead, they portrayed it as one known since ancient times, but suddenly swollen to unprecedented proportions as Satan reacted to the opportunities created by religious division and the challenge presented by the extension of Christianity to large areas of the Americas and some of Asia. In their view the crisis represented by a novel superabundance of witches required a proportionately determined response to detect and destroy them.2 The results of such a response differed markedly from place to place. It seems likely that the majority of European villages, even in areas of relatively intense witch-hunting, never produced a single arrest for witchcraft, and trials were notably rare in large cities. Averaged out across the Continent, about three-quarters of those tried were women, but this figure conceals major local variations. Likewise, the majority of victims were drawn neither from the wealthier ranks of society nor from the very poor, being ordinary peasants and artisans like their accusers, but, again, local experience threw up exceptions to this rule. If they conformed to a particular human type it was that of the bad neighbour, quarrelsome and inclined to curse and insult; yet very many were generally normal personalities who happened to have the wrong friends or enemies at the wrong moment.

  On the whole, trials were most frequent, and execution rates highest, where the people in charge of the criminal justice system were most closely involved in the local fears and hatreds that produced the accusations. These could include very small states, such as many in Germany, which had over two thousand different jurisdictions, or the Swiss Federation, or where a relatively decentralized machinery of justice prevailed, as in Scotland or Norway.3 Where such areas were also characterized during this period by local elites or a local ruler determined to purify religion and morals, and economic, religious and social tensions, the preconditions for witch trials were in place. Religious identities were in general irrelevant to the matter, as the most intense regions of witch-hunting were Calvinist Scotland, Lutheran northern Norway, and some Catholic states in western and central Germany and in the Franco-German borderland. In most places the pressure to prosecute came from below in society, originating among the common people, but in a minority it was imposed by the rulers of the state concerned.4 Some of the worst rates and totals of execution were produced by ‘chain-reaction trials’, in which large numbers of people were arrested and forced to denounce yet more; but territories such as Lorraine, where one or two people were accused at a time, could still accumulate large overall death tolls. Ultimately, the incidence of witch-hunting in a particular area, even one with all the necessary preconditions of trials, could be a matter of caprice in which factors of fortune and personality were dominant: in the 1610s the lordship of L’Isle, in the Swiss Pays de Vaud, had all the preconditions identified above, and yet of the four villages in it, only one produced accusations (though those escalated into a particularly savage hunt there).5 It seems that across most of Central and Western Europe there were substantial numbers of suspected witches living among their neighbours but who were never denounced to a magistrate.

  It is abundantly clear that personal and factional enmities, and political ambitions, often formed a context for accusations. The latter never seem, however, to have been merely a pretext for the resolution of such other tensions: rather, they were generated by very real fears of bewitchment. In most places a legal proceeding was an expensive, difficult and inconvenient solution to those fears, with counter-magic, or the reconciliation or intimidation of the presumed witch, much easier options. Service magicians were sometimes denounced as witches, but seem to have made up a minority of the accused in any area studied. They were often more prominent in the process of accusation as providers of initial magical counter-measures against suspected witches or detectors of them. The period of witch trials may be regarded in many ways as a scientific experiment, fitted for an age of geographical and scientific discovery, and as such it failed. Witch trials did not seem to yield obvious and measurable benefits to communities that engaged in them, and the problem of providing clear evidence of guilt came to seem worse rather than better over time. Their context of religious conflict and intolerant confessional states faded away as European elites came to feel more prosperous and secure, and judicial machinery was subjected to greater central supervision and direction. Suspected witches, Christians from other denominations, and fornicators and adulterers, were all increasingly tolerated together, by central and local rulers inhabiting a more rational and less demonic universe, ordered by a less demanding and more remote God. By the end of the twentieth century it had become common for experts to reject single-cause explanations for the witch trials, and to adopt an approach to accounting for them summed up in the phrase ‘many reasons why’.6 As a means of finding the reasons for why trials occurred in particular places at particular times, which was the main business of those who propounded it, this was certainly the best theoretical perspective: the mesh of preconditions and triggers differed significantly between locations. As a means of accounting for the trials as a whole, however, it suffers from a flaw: that the single obvious reason for them was the appearance of the stereotype of the demonic witch in the fifteenth century, and its eventual application to a wide swathe of Europe. As one of the best-known witch-hunters, the French judge Pierre de Lancre, put it, the description of witches’ assemblies ‘which occurs in various lands, seems to be somewhat diverse . . . But, taking everything into consideration, the most important ceremonies are all consistent.’7 It is the manner in which local people emphasized certain aspects of the stereotype rather than others, and infused it with their own traditions and preoccupations, that gives regional studies of their trials their especial importance: but the centrality of the stereotype remains, even if it was not in itself a sufficient cause of witch trials. What is proposed in this chapter is to survey the findings of those regional studies, made across Continental Europe mostly during the past five decades. This exercise is undertaken with the particular intention of enquiring into what effect, if any, ancient and folkloric beliefs had in determining the incidence of witch-hunting, the images expressed in it, and the identity of the victims of it.

  Such an undertaking has to reckon with two problems of evidence which beset anyone with an interest in the popular component in witchcraft beliefs and witch-prosecution. The first is that evidence for the ideas that propelled trials is found in only a minority of the surviving records of them. The second is that by definition, virtually all those records were made by members of the social and political elite. They were almost always concerned to prove what they were hearing to be either illusory or demonic, rather than asking the kind of questions about belief and identity in which historians would now be most interested. Moreover, both accusers and accused in court cases were operating under conditions of restraint, by which their statements were expected to conform to certain predetermined models to enable a trial. These problems have, however, been obvious to most of the scholars who have carried out the studies on which the synthesis here is based, and they have developed strategies to cope with them. It remains apparent that ordinary people sometimes made statements which the investigating authorities found surprising, disturbing or irrelevant, and which were still incorporated into the record; and that there were distinct differences between early modern images of witchcraft and patterns of prosecution in particular regions, which can be accounted for in terms of local tradition. It is that relationship, between tradition, action and written record, which is at the heart of this chapter.

  The Dream Warriors

  The proposed survey might well begin with Carlo Ginzburg’s benandanti, the most spectacular example of a magical folk tradition yet uncovered in early modern trial records. In general, they were simply service magicians in the extreme north-eastern Italian province of Friuli, healing, divining and breaking bewi
tchments like all of their kind. As said before, however, they also sent out their spirits at night (in the ‘Ember’ fast days which fell in each of the four seasons) to fight witches for the fertility of local farmlands. Like those of the witches, their spirits rode horses, cats, hares or other animals to the battlefield, formed into battalions with flags and captains and duelled with plant stalks. If they won, a good harvest resulted, and in any event they returned at the end to their sleeping or entranced bodies. They were not invested with this power but gained it naturally by being born with a membrane, the caul, over their heads at birth, and were called to fight when they grew to adulthood. A few claimed to visit the dead on their spirit-journeys and learn their fate. They battled in the name of God and Christ against witches as servants of the Devil – representing in Ginzburg’s words ‘a Christian peasant army’ – but their identity as magicians drew the attention of local inquisitors from the late sixteenth century. Benandanti began to denounce people to the inquisition as witches, and to be denounced themselves, and their night flights were assimilated into the image of demonic witchcraft. In the mid-eighteenth century they disappear from history.8

  Immediately to the east of Friuli, in Slovenia and the Istrian Peninsula, the south Slavonic cultural zone began, and in Istria an Italian commentator recorded in the seventeenth century a belief in people called cresnichi or vucodlachi. These were born with a caul, and their souls were believed to go by night, especially in the Ember Days, to fight in bands for the fertility of the coming season. Unlike the benandanti these retained a presence in folklore collected in later centuries, as kresniks or kudlaks. The former were almost identical to the benandanti, save that their spirits went forth at night in animal form rather than riding animals. The latter were malicious magicians, who took the place of witches in some places in the role of fighting the kresniks (like them, taking animal shape), who protected sleeping humans and the farmlands.9 In the huge south Slav region to the south-east, comprising Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro, the equivalent figure was the zduhač, also born with a caul and able to wage spirit-combats in the clouds to protect their clan territory, although these were fought against the zduhačs of rival clans. They are recorded in relatively modern folklore, as are similar personalities under other names in parts of the same region and of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Croatia. Some of these went in animal form, some waged battle against the spirit-champions of rival communities, and some opposed witches or evil spirits. All, however, were distinguished by a caul or other unusual features at birth, and all fought in spirit form at night, usually at special seasons, to protect their villages, and especially the crops of those. Most of this area was under Muslim rule in the early modern period, of the Ottoman Turks, and so bereft of the sort of records that could throw up references to them in Christian areas: but an inquisitor in Dalmatia, the Croatian coastal region, in 1661, reported a belief in good spirits who chased away bad weather.10

  In other parts of the same huge region, and further east and south-east, bands of young women or men acted out the spirit-battles in physical form, by touring their neighbourhoods in the Whitsun season, when fairies and devils were supposed to be especially menacing, to perform dances, plays or blessings to protect homes and farmlands. This custom was recorded in southern Macedonia as early as 1230, and in modern folklore collections in Croatia, Slavonia, Serbia and Romania, where it persists to the present day. In the Romanian districts, the modern dancers also acted as healers, of people thought to be afflicted by fairies or demons, and their patron, who was also in places the queen of the fairies, was ‘Irodeasa’. This was probably the Herodias of the medieval night rides, and shows how far the tradition of her as a nocturnal spirit had travelled from its apparent Western European source.11 To the north of the south Slav region lies Hungary, and its figure of the táltos, which has been discussed above. It was argued there that neither this figure nor the benandanti could be confidently assigned to a pan-Eurasian shamanic province, and it may be considered here whether the táltos makes a better fit with the Balkan one of spirit-battles. It seems that it makes a remarkably good one. Like the other figures in the Balkan tradition, the táltos was marked out by special signs at birth, and sometimes operated through dream or trance, and fought for the good of local people in spirit form and animal shape or on animal steeds as well as carrying out all the usual functions of a service magician. Táltosok tended to portray themselves as Christian saints fighting satanic opponents, witches and demons. Their battles were also sometimes against each other and against foreign magicians.12 They are mentioned in medieval Hungarian records, and quite good early modern accounts of their beliefs and claims were provided by witch trials, and indeed other elements of those Hungarian trials seem to derive from the same folk tradition. Early modern Hungarian witches were often thought to send out their souls to work evil, through their mouths, in the form of a small animal such as an insect. They were said to ride on animals or take their form, and fight over the fertility of land, occasionally on behalf of their own villages, although they generally worked harm instead.13 One Hungarian scholar has noted from the trial records that a characteristic of Hungary was the ‘duel of magicians: healer, táltos, midwives and witches all fight each other’.14 People tried as witches in Croatia in the same period spoke of forming into military companies at their gatherings.15 In modern Romania it was believed that witches were born with a caul, transformed into animals, and went out in spirit guise at night to form bands that fought each other.16 Modern Serbs thought that witches worked evil by letting their spirits leave their bodies in the shape of insects or birds.17

  There seems to be good evidence here of a compact expanse of territory, with its centre in the south Slav cultural province, characterized by a belief that both service magicians and witches sent out their spirits on special nights, in dreaming or entranced states, to do battle with opponents. Whether this had existed from pre-Christian times, or was a popular tradition that had developed in the Middle Ages, is impossible to tell. In this perspective the benandanti become Italians who learned the idea from Slavonic neighbours, and the táltosok are Magyars who did the same, whatever remote and unproven connection they may have had with Siberian shamans which may have predisposed them towards the idea. The idea that to be born with a caul conferred abilities to communicate with spirits, or send out one’s own spirit, is found across Europe, but only in this area was it associated with the dream or trance battles.18 Here, therefore, the early modern trials of witches and other magicians did uncover a distinctive regional belief system, and so provide historical records of it; but the system itself neither provoked nor transformed the trials. Those were introduced into the region as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation movement of spiritual purgation and renewal, and in much of it as part of German (or Austrian) cultural imperialism. The benandanti were not the main business of the inquisition in Friuli, and only twenty-six of 2,275 witch trials recorded in Hungary mention a táltos.19 Rather, the Balkan ‘dream warriors’ only served to tinge the trials slightly with aspects of their belief system, at the extreme northern and western limits of their range.

  The Northern Shamanic Region

  Earlier in this book, it was suggested both that the Sámi of northern Scandinavia represented a people who had a ‘classic’ shamanism of the sort found in Siberia, definitely descending from a pagan past, and that Sámi influence created a ‘sub-shamanic’ zone among the Norse, including their settlements in Iceland. Another such zone existed among the Finns, either because of their own ancestral connection with western Siberian peoples or because of Sámi influence. As the Sámi retained a formidable reputation as magicians all through the early modern period – which has also been discussed earlier – it is an obvious question how far they attracted charges of witchcraft when the Scandinavian kingdoms to which they belonged became notable centres of witch-hunting in the seventeenth century. The answer is that they certainly featured in witch trials, a total of 113 b
eing prosecuted, and over thirty of them executed, in both the Norwegian and Swedish provinces of Lapland: the Norwegians tried about half the number that the Swedes did, but put to death three-quarters of them while the Swedes spared the lives of all but a few of those tried. Two other features of these statistics are significant. The first is that they reversed the typical European gender balance, for seventy-three of the seventy-six Sámi tried for magic by the Swedes were male, and so were nineteen of the twenty-seven burned by the Norwegians. This simply reflected the balance within Sámi culture itself, in which the practice of magic, with its shamanic rites, was associated mainly with men. The other feature is that despite their reputation, the Sámi magicians were not the main target of the witch-hunts in the far north. Finnmark, the extreme north-east province of Norway, was the scene of one of the most intense witch-hunts in Europe. It took place, however, principally among the Norse settlers in the fishing villages, and – in conformity with the Norwegian as well as the European norm – its victims were overwhelmingly female. The same is true of the main Swedish witch trials, which claimed hundreds of lives in the heartland of the kingdom. One reason why the Sámi tried by the Swedes normally escaped execution was that they were regarded as savages practising tribal superstitions rather than as recruits to the satanic witch conspiracy. Even the more severe Norwegians tended not to accuse Sámi of consciously worshipping the Devil, which is why about a third of those tried for magic escaped execution; and several of those who did not were found guilty of more routine crimes as well. Though they made up almost half the population of Finnmark, they represented 18 per cent of those accused of magical offences. Nor were the spectacular shamanic rites recorded among the Sámi apparent among those actually put on trial: they feature, if at all, in muted form.20 So, the existence of what has been described before as a genuine shamanic province in northernmost Europe definitely left its distinctive mark on the pattern of witch trials there; but even within this region, it did this as a side-show.