What of the wider ‘sub-shamanic’ zone suggested earlier as embracing much of medieval Fenno-Scandinavia? In Finland its influence on the early modern trials again seems apparent, because there they also bucked the European trend. Overall, about half of those accused of magic-related offences were male, and men formed a clear majority until the late seventeenth century, and male defendants were especially numerous among the native population. The association of witchcraft both with devil-worship and with women was stronger in areas of Swedish influence and settlement, and took a long time to gain purchase on the Finns. This matches the native association of magic mainly with a male practitioner, the tietäjä, even though, as across most of Europe, service magicians themselves were rarely accused of destructive acts.21 As among the Sámi, shamanism itself has a muted presence in the Finnish court records. One expert has concluded that ‘the shamanistic witch culture appears not to have played any major role in witch trials during the early modern era’; another, that ‘my sources do not point towards shamanistic remnants, let alone practicing shamans. These materials mention no trance or describe no magical travel to this or another world in any detail.’22 None the less, the impact of native tradition on the patterning and gendering of trials seems clear.
The same may be true of Estonia, to the south in the Baltic ethnic zone, where a similar situation is recorded: the concept of satanic witchcraft was mostly imposed following the conquest of the area by Sweden, and 60 per cent of those accused of harmful magic were male, though slightly more women were executed.23 One study has emphasized the rooting of local beliefs in a persisting popular paganism, comprising worship at sacred groves and stones, especially on Midsummer Eve, in almost every south Estonian parish.24 It would not, on the face of things, be strange to find such a survival here, on the eastern edge of the European world, where the last state on the Continent to convert formally to Christianity had been neighbouring Lithuania, in the late Middle Ages. On closer inspection, however, the single example provided of such practices is less convincing. It portrays a continuing devotion to St John the Baptist, whose feast was on Midsummer Day, and the stone at the centre of this was an altar to him. The rite was a curing of the sick, with prayers to the saint, and the ‘sacrifices’ were the bandages of those who thought themselves healed, and offerings of wax, of the sort familiar at medieval shrines. Other such rites were also conducted on saints’ days. There are also records of peasants counselling their fellows not to attend church, and to blame their misfortunes on doing so. The author presents this as pagan resistance to Christianity, but the context is that of the first attempt by the Swedish authorities to survey the results of imposing Lutheran Protestantism as the new official religion on a native Baltic populace that had been accustomed to medieval Catholicism. It is therefore not clear that what was going on was a clash between Christianity and paganism, rather than between different kinds of Christianity.25 The early modern Estonian records do, however, connect with a very convincing and well-recorded folk belief system among the Baltic peoples, which may well have pagan roots: twenty-one people (out of a total of 205 in surviving witch trials records) were accused of killing livestock while in the shape of wolves.26 To early modern European demonologists, Livonia, the territory of the Liv people, which extended across much of modern Estonia and Latvia, was the land of werewolves par excellence.27 They tended to tell two stories about them: that once a year at midwinter all Livonian werewolves held a great assembly, or series of them, and that they were locally supposed to be the great foes of witches, and protect communities from them. One included a report of an encounter with a man at Riga who claimed to be one and to send out his spirit in wolf form to fight a witch disguised as a butterfly, while lying entranced. In a now famous trial held in what has become Latvia in 1692, an old service magician also asserted that he was a werewolf, and battled with witches and demons in hell three times a year alongside his fellows, in wolf form, for the fertility of the farmlands and in the name of the Christian God.28 This account caused Carlo Ginzburg to make an understandable connection with the benandanti, and join the two together as survivals in different places of an ancient shamanistic cult extending across Central Europe. His hypothesis remains, as said before, possible but unprovable: it may well be that the Livonian tradition had a completely independent point of origin from the Balkan one.29 What is interesting in the present context is the proven existence of a belief among the Balts that special people possessed a magic that could transform their spirits into wolves, to fight those of witches for the common good. This left its imprint upon local witch trials (though again in a minority of cases). It may help explain the high proportion of men among the accused in general, if men were prominent among such magicians – although most of those actually denounced for being destructive werewolves were female – and may also (perhaps) extend the ‘sub-shamanic’ province of Northern Europe from the northern to the eastern side of the Baltic Sea.30
In a previous chapter, the argument was made that the effects of shamanism could be found in the magical beliefs of medieval Scandinavians in general, but none of those seems to be present in the witch trials of the bulk of the peninsula. Elements of older belief systems not necessarily related to shamanism do feature at times. The idea of the witches’ sabbath was probably digested more easily because of the pre-existing concept of women, human or supernatural, who flew by night.31 As said before, magical knowledge, including witchcraft, had been associated with trolls. By the early modern period, educated Scandinavians no longer believed in trolls, or cared much about people who tried to commune with them, but in popular testimony in Norwegian witch trials, demons sometimes took troll form. Furthermore, two service magicians prosecuted in 1689 claimed to have gained their powers from ‘earth trolls’.32 Nature spirits make slightly more frequent appearances in Swedish cases, such as that of the service magician at Söderkoping in 1640 who confessed that he had enjoyed years of sex with a being shaped like a beautiful woman with a foal’s tail who came to him in his boat or in the woods and gave him good luck in fishing and hunting. In a neighbouring district another man claimed to get his own luck in hunting from a forest nymph, who opposed an old, ugly and black being which tried to prevent him from killing the animals. Three other men testified in later decades to having had similar relationships with wood or mountain spirits in the form of lovely women (though two of these had shaggy legs). Vivid and important though these examples are, they represent just five out of many hundreds of trials for witchcraft and magic in early modern Sweden.33 More often pagan elements in early modern Scandinavian magic seem to exist in the eye of the modern beholder. One historian has described Danish love spells as ‘a mix of pagan and Christian symbols and rituals’; but while her Christian example is an invocation of St Thomas Aquinas, her pagan one is the use of chickens’ eggs.34 In such contexts, ‘pagan’ seems to be shorthand for ‘natural’ or ‘secular’.
There is, however, one very striking form in which a definite element of Norse paganism survived into the early modern period, and that was in ceremonial magic. Just as elsewhere that magic had preserved the names of Egyptian deities as powerful spirits, so the most famed of Scandinavian gods continued to be associated with magical workings, although as devils. It seemed that in the north the Christian tactic of demonizing the divinities of older religions had worked with particular effect. Those divinities certainly remained known to educated Scandinavians throughout the Christian period, as characters in myth (much as Greek and Roman deities were throughout Europe and former Irish deities in Gaelic lands). As demons, however, they, and especially their leader, Oðinn, retained a supposedly ‘real’ presence. A late fourteenth-century Norse rune stick invokes Oðinn as ‘greatest among devils’, as well as calling on Christian powers. In 1484 a man tried for theft in Stockholm confessed to having ‘served Oðinn’ for seven years. Nine years later another thief was executed, for having dedicated himself in a cemetery to ‘the devil Oðinn’ to get rich, an
d a text from the late 1530s stated that people who suddenly became mysteriously wealthy were suspected of having made a pact with Oðinn. Another Swedish case, from 1632, involved advice to find wealth by going to a crossroads at night to make exactly such a pact, with Oðinn as a devil. A trial in 1693 said that he came to those who invited him with black servants, dogs and coach horses, the latter having flaming eyes.35 From Iceland comes a seventeenth-century book of magic which contains a curse in the names of Lord God the Creator (repeatedly addressed), Christ (‘Saviour’), Oðinn, Thor, Frey, Freya, Satan, Beelzebub and spirits with unknown names: the powers of heaven and hell are thus indiscriminately enlisted.36 All this provides a spectacular example of how ancient gods could be fully assimilated into Christian mythology, though they do not seem to feature in the witch trials themselves.
The crossing has now been made to Iceland, the medieval literature of which provided some of the best material for the argument, made earlier, for a hybrid Norse magical culture that incorporated elements of shamanism. It may readily be expected that this would influence the nature of early modern Icelandic trials; and indeed this has been claimed. Of the 120 people tried for witchcraft in Iceland, only ten were female, and only one woman was among the twenty-two individuals who were burned. One of the first scholars to write of this in English related it directly to medieval tradition, and through that (vaguely) to paganism and shamanism.37 Things are, however, not quite that simple: in the medieval Icelandic literature, destructive magic is as much a female as a male practice, and the most apparently shamanic aspects of magical technique, such as seidr, are much more female. The key to explaining the Icelandic anomaly lies instead in a broader European phenomenon: that ceremonial magic was, throughout the medieval and early modern periods, essentially the preserve of men. In seventeenth-century Danish law, which was enforced in Norway and Iceland, the possession of books of magic was a criminal offence, and the Icelanders took that very seriously. The people charged with magic in their island tended to be possessors of such books, and therefore male, and those executed were the men who were proved to own them and believed to have used them to harm others.38 The concept of a diabolic witch conspiracy, with assemblies and rites, was almost wholly missing. There may however still be an informing link with the ancient past, and that lies in the heavy stress placed in medieval Icelandic texts on the importance of written words and characters – runes – in working magic. It seems to have been the combination of that with the importation of book-centred ceremonial magic that produced the peculiar nature, and gendering, of the Icelandic trials.
Another loose end that could usefully be tied up in this context concerns Russia, and the neighbouring territory of the Ukraine which became part of the Russian state in the seventeenth century. That state bordered on Siberia itself, homeland of classical shamanism, contained large numbers of Sámi in its northernmost parts and linked the ‘dream warrior’ zone of the Balkans and Hungary to the ‘northern shamanic zone’ of the Baltic and Fenno-Scandinavian regions. It should therefore logically play a pivotal role in the mapping of ancient and medieval traditions onto early modern belief systems, as expressed in the witch trials. At first sight the trial evidence supports such an expectation, because in the mainstream European context Russia was anomalous as so much of the Fenno-Baltic and Sámi areas were: it had relatively few witch trials and even fewer executions for a state of its size – around five hundred trials in the seventeenth century with a 15 per cent death rate – and three-quarters of those accused were male.39 On closer inspection, however, a relationship between these results and ancient tradition seems to be missing. In the words of a prominent Western expert, ‘Neither shamanism nor paganism makes the least detectable appearance in Muscovite [early modern Russian] magical practices.’40 Once again, the eye of the beholder may be partly at work here, as the same historian summed up the spells which feature in Russian witch trials as mostly poetic nature imagery glossed with Christianity.41 An older generation of scholars might well have characterized that imagery as pagan, but this would also be an arbitrary and subjective judgement, and it certainly seems as if nothing that can be called shamanism by any definition is present, and as if ancient and folk tradition cannot explain the particular nature of Russian witch trials. Russian folklore collected in the modern period abounds with spirits, of the household and the wild, but they make no more than two appearances in the trials, and few in spell books.42
The reasons for that lie elsewhere, in the peculiar cultural isolation of seventeenth-century Russia, which meant that the new concept of the satanic witch had not got in. The raw materials for it were there, for Russians already had a strong belief in the Devil and lesser demons and thought that humans could make pacts with them; feared witchcraft; and embedded a strong distrust of women within male culture. None the less, these traits were never brought together into the mainstream European idea of a demonic conspiracy, because neither Protestantism nor Catholicism made any inroads into Russia’s Orthodox Christianity, which itself never generated that idea. Russian elites had virtually no contact with foreign cultures. As a result, attitudes to magic simply continued the medieval European norm, individual people being prosecuted for using or attempting to use magical operations to harm others; and indeed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this remained a weapon in the factional politics of the imperial court, as it had in those of medieval Europe. The spells alleged to have been used were relatively simple and employed mundane objects and ingredients. As most of the accusations arose from local and personal tensions over power (such as those between social superiors and inferiors), and men were most commonly involved in these, it was natural that men should bear the brunt of them more often. The medieval Russian propensity to turn on presumed witches at times of natural disaster seems to have vanished. Ironically, the early modern European construct of satanic witchcraft was eventually introduced to Russia, in the reforms of Peter the Great, which were intended to bring his nation into conformity with general European norms and are often taken as commencing its ‘modernization’. This was in the early eighteenth century, when witch-hunting had died out in most of the Continent (though not in neighbouring Poland and Hungary). Fortunately, its late introduction was not accompanied by a rise in the religious temperature, which would have ensured large numbers of trials, and so the effect was limited and short-lived.
It may be useful, at this point, to look quickly at the other areas of Europe in which men were usually prominent as victims in the witch trials and see what cultural factors may have underpinned such an outcome there. One of these was western and central France, which remains relatively understudied in this regard.43 An immediately identifiable reason for the high proportion of men among the accused (about half) was the significant presence among them of two groups: churchmen and shepherds. The former may have been vulnerable because of their continued association with learned ceremonial magic, which had been linked to them in the region in trials since the fourteenth century. The latter appear to have been regarded as practising an especially magical occupation in these parts of France, and there is a good study of the prosecution of them as witches in Normandy, where local belief held that shepherds could work harm with toad venom and stolen consecrated hosts.44 There seems to be no evidence of the origins and age of this folk tradition. The final area in which men were prominent was most of what is now Austria, and there is even less information as yet available to account for this.45 A study of Carinthia, where two-thirds of the accused were male, suggests that this was because witches there were especially associated with bringing bad weather, and weather magic was locally thought of as more of a male interest. This could well reflect a distinctive local tradition with long roots.46
On the other hand, the same study also notes that persecution of witches was also linked strongly to a legal drive against begging, and this occurred elsewhere in Austria, and especially in the territories of the archbishop of Salzburg. There, in the same pe
riod of the late seventeenth century, a savage hunt was launched against young male beggars in what became one of the last major series of witch trials in German-speaking lands. This was the end product of a sharp reversal of the local tradition of charity, made in response to changing economic circumstances, and the charge that beggars cursed the more fortunate members of society, in jealousy and as vengeance, justified the change.47 The hunt for beggar-witches in parts of Austria, which may do much to explain the high profile of men in the trials there, cannot therefore be ascribed to any traditional stereotypes. It seems, rather, a late development propelled by a specific crisis in economic and social relations. All in all, therefore, the witch trials sustain the concept of a ‘shamanic’ and ‘sub-shamanic’ province confined to the far north-east of Europe, which had some impact on the gendering of accusations there, even while archaic elements were rare in the trials themselves.
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