The Witch
Page 32
A rather different, but equally considerable, problem attends the diabolic elements of early modern witchcraft, and the whole mental assemblage of the satanic witch cult developed in the fifteenth century. Here in a sense there is no bridging an enormous conceptual gulf, because modern historians completely reject the literal reality of that cult, however much they may attempt to understand and explain belief in it. In this they are simply following the path laid out by early modern scholarly opinion itself, which came, first in practice and then in theory, to abandon that belief. After all, medieval Europeans did not have it either, until the fifteenth century, and in long historical perspective it was a relatively short-lived phenomenon. Its abandonment does, however, mean that there is a point at which every historian of it simply chooses to disbelieve the testimony of those who held it, as an arbitrary decision: there is, after all, ample apparent first-hand evidence on record that people worked witchcraft in partnership with demons whom they worshipped, and no objective means of proving conclusively that all of it is false. We simply decide to reject it as anything other than a fiction or a metaphor. This is an area of enquiry in which no academic investigator ever goes native, as there are no known cases of a professional scholar of the early modern witch-hunts coming to believe in the ideology that underpinned them.107 Nor are there any agnostics: no academic historian overtly gives the benefit of the doubt to the idea that Satan might have been active in early modern Europe in the ways described by so many alleged confessing witches. We all choose not to believe, because of the grim record of the results of believing.
That still leaves open the question whether there were any actual would-be satanic witches in early modern Europe. In other words, once the demons are out of the picture, except as fictional characters, were there people who assembled to worship them and committed the actions involved in that worship, as described in accounts of the sabbath? Here again, despite so much apparent testimony, all the professional research of the past half century seems to unite behind the conclusion that there were not, and that all the witches’ assemblies described in the records were illusory. Furthermore, as described earlier, there is an equal consensus that accounts of those assemblies were not mistaken or distorted portraits of some other religious tradition, such as a pagan one: they just never happened. It seems therefore that in the case of the attempted use of witchcraft by early modern people we have a strong presumption that something happened without quite being able to prove that it did, while in that of the satanic witch religion, we have ample evidence for the existence of something, which we disregard on the grounds that it is incredible. Using the logic that was applied to the attempted use of witchcraft itself, it is easy to believe that some individuals, in moments of despair and pain, prayed to the Devil, or devils, for aid against their enemies or persecutors, and some may have offered him a pact to gain it. In a post-Reformation era in which large numbers of people changed their allegiance from one form of Christianity to another, stigmatized by their former denomination as a satanic parody, this may not have been such a difficult step for them to take. Furthermore, there is solid evidence that during the period after the witch trials, in which the offence was less lethal, individuals did draw up pacts which they hoped to make with Satan in an effort to obtain their worldly desires: the evidence consists of the written pacts themselves, to which the writers (mostly urban men and soldiers) admitted.108 The problem is that when most demonic pacts are described in witch-trial records and demonological literature, they are attended by elements that the modern age regards as fantastic; and any attempt to reconstruct what actually happened must be both speculative and depend on an arbitrary and subjective reordering of the source material. All these factors converge on the final problem of how those fantastic elements arrived in the testimony in the first place. In very many cases they were clearly induced by torture, confinement in appalling physical and emotional conditions, browbeating and brainwashing.109 In others, however, they were not. When the sceptical inquisitor Salazar arrived in Navarre determined to get to the bottom of the panic over witchcraft there, his problem was not in discerning the untruths told by the accusers, but in discerning those told by the accused, who were providing detailed confessions in huge quantity. Only the most patient analysis succeeded in revealing their contradictions and inconsistencies, so that he could report back flatly to his superiors that ‘the witches are not to be believed’.110 Vivid dreaming, trance states, hallucinations, schizophrenia, false memory syndrome and Stockholm syndrome, and a prominence among those making voluntary and detailed confessions of children and young adolescents, may in sum account for this phenomenon; but ultimately they may not. Gustav Henningsen, studying the confessions of the Sicilian women who claimed to interact with ‘ladies from outside’, decided that dreaming could not account for the manner in which these people told of travelling in groups together three nights a week. In his opinion, such regular and purposeful imaginary activity could only be explained by some kind of technique that induced an entranced sleep that enabled collective mental experiences using telepathic communication. He wondered if experiences of the witches’ sabbath had been achieved by the same means.111 At that moment, he had stepped over the boundaries of current scientific knowledge; and this is the territory into which the study of early modern witchcraft may ultimately lead us. Such a step would depend, however, on certainty that the Sicilian women concerned were not exaggerating the regularity and coherence of dream experiences as part of defending their reputations as service magicians empowered by good spirits. It is hard to see how to achieve such certainty.
All this, moreover, still leaves a broader problem of whether any sort of group activity, involving any kind of magical rites, lay behind accusations and confessions of satanic witchcraft. Nobody has tried harder to find some in the Continental sources than Edward Bever, working on the records of trials in the German state of Württemberg. He has shown how the idea of diabolic witchcraft reached the elite there through printed works and the local university, and was then spread to the populace, mostly by the local Lutheran Church. He attributes the content of most accusations and confessions of it to dreams, delirium, psychoactive substances, out of body experiences, false memories, lies, self-hypnosis, errors of perception, personality disorders and other forms of cognitive dissociation. He also rules out the possibility that those accused formed anything like a religious or counter-religious sect, but leaves open one that a few people engaged in collective activity in which they shared ideas about magic, and even initiated others into means of working it. The problem with this, again, is one of proof. His prime witness is a would-be service magician tried for witchcraft, who claimed to have learned his magic in the realm of the goddess Venus, hidden in a mountain in the manner in which it is described in the famous late medieval romance of Tannhäuser, which has already made an appearance in the present book. Bever was impressed by the personal tone of the account, and the way in which it conformed to internationally reported experiences defined as shamanic by many scholars: but he wisely acknowledged that it could have been the result of dreams or an active imagination rather than of a local shamanic tradition, and indeed much of it sounds fantastic.112 What is certain is that magicians did sometimes band together for ad hoc operations in which numbers could count, most obviously the detection of buried treasure; but that is all the certainty that we possess.113
There is thus a curious paradox in the relationship between the early modern witch trials and ancient and folkloric tradition. On the one hand it has repeatedly been emphasized that the construct of the satanic witch that underlay the trials drew on very ancient images and ideas; indeed, to some extent it let loose the fears associated with these after about six centuries in which they had been damped down by the reluctance of Christian churchmen to take them very seriously. On the other hand, the new construct took a long time to develop and an even longer time to spread widely, and was a thoroughly late medieval one based on orthodox Christian i
deas and preoccupations. Moreover, the direct contribution of older motifs and traditions to the actual incidence and nature of the trials was minimal. It was most marked around the periphery of the main zone of the trials, in the far north and south-east of Europe and in a belt running along the southern watershed of the Pyrenees and Alps and in the lowland areas below that. In the heartland of the trials it was very small indeed, despite the existence of a flourishing and ample folklore concerning nocturnal spirit worlds, and even in the peripheral areas in which it featured more strongly, it appeared in only a minority, and usually a small minority, of trials. In a belt of territory running from Finnmark through Finland to the Baltic lands, it probably did affect the gendering of accusations, but in general the trial evidence serves incidentally to expose folk beliefs rather than folk beliefs serving to explain much about the trials. The latter were propelled and dominated, instead, by a new, almost pan-European concept of witchcraft propagated by elites and accepted into general culture. Such a conclusion is, however, based on a general survey of the evidence generated by local studies spanning the Continent. There is still a chance that an investigation of issues relating to the witch trials, focused on a particular region, may employ insights taken from ancient and medieval cultures to explain patterns which other perspectives do not. This sort of close reading may yet throw up new answers to existing problems within the subject, and the last part of this book will consist of a series of them focused on Britain: an island at once furnished with the right sort of records, a rich medley of cultures and an ample tradition of existing scholarship, all readily accessible to the author.
PART III
BRITISH PERSPECTIVES
8
WITCHES AND FAIRIES
EVER SINCE FOLKLORE studies became recognized as a discipline, towards the end of the nineteenth century, its practitioners have identified an early modern British belief in a connection between alleged witches and the terrestrial, human-like beings commonly called elves or fairies. This is especially apparent in the records of Scottish witch trials, and the latter have long been an important source for the study of British fairy tradition.1 This importance has been reinforced in recent years by Carlo Ginzburg, who made them a major prop of his argument that an ancient shamanistic sub-stratum of ideas underlay the concept of the witches’ sabbath. He drew attention to confessions by some of the accused that they had gone to visit the fairies, and especially their queen. These he deemed to be trance experiences and analogous to the claims of Continental Europeans to travel with the ‘Lady’ or ‘ladies’ by night. He concluded that, with the Scottish evidence added to that from the Alps, Italy and south-eastern Europe, ‘we can now recognize the distorted echo of an ecstatic cult of Celtic tradition’, dedicated to nocturnal goddesses.2
Ginzburg’s hypothesis has been ignored by most experts in the Scottish trials and Scottish fairy lore but has influenced two British authors who represent the main exceptions to the lack of impact made by his ideas concerning witchcraft on English-speaking scholars. The first was Emma Wilby, who has followed his approach, and that of associated scholars such as Éva Pócs and Gábor Klaniczay, in two books. One, published in 2005, considered the relationship between fairies and magic in early modern Britain, to argue that both witches and service magicians at least in many cases drew their ideas and practices from envisioned encounters with a spirit world.3 They did so, she suggested, in altered states of consciousness similar to those employed by shamans, and by drawing on a pre-Christian animist concept of the world from which most of the spirits with whom they dealt, and especially fairies, descended. She was careful not to refer to this concept as ‘pagan’ (any more than Ginzburg himself had done), emphasizing that early modern commoners generally had a cosmos populated by supernatural figures of both Christian and pre-Christian origin.4 She also avoided any attempt to prove continuity between ancient shamanism and early modern beliefs, preferring cross-cultural comparisons, mostly with shamans in modern Siberia and the Americas. These, she suggested, had much in common with British witches and service magicians, although she conceded that the evidence for trance states among those was very limited.
Her second book, in 2010, was an extended case study which applied her ideas to the most sensational individual witch trial in Scottish history, that of Isobel Gowdie at Auldearn on the Moray Firth in 1662: it is the one that has given the word ‘coven’ to the world as the most common term for a group of witches. Gowdie had made unusually detailed and lurid confessions of her activities as a witch, including a succession of malevolent misdeeds and night flights and a relationship both with the Devil and the fairy queen and king. She had usually been presumed mad by previous scholars but Wilby argued for an interpretation of her as a service magician and storyteller inspired by visionary encounters with spirits, real or not. In the process, Wilby made an excellent reconstruction of the local social and cultural context within which Gowdie operated, and incidentally a particularly good case that she and her friends might actually have been Satanists engaged in malefic magic.5 Wilby acknowledged the strong likelihood of the presence of false confession and false memory syndrome in her testimony, and she had also become aware of how controversial Carlo Ginzburg’s ideas were among experts, especially in Britain and America. None the less, she felt that the latter needed to acknowledge the possibility that some kind of visionary experience lay behind Gowdie’s claims, and that it was related to shamanistic practices, perhaps even as a member of a local ‘cult’.
Thus far the effect of Emma Wilby’s ideas on experts in early modern British history has been muted, and it is true that they are highly speculative readings of records which could be interpreted in other ways.6 There is, for example, no hard evidence that Isobel Gowdie was either a magical practitioner or a storyteller, or had visionary experiences of any sort. If she had the latter, it is still possible that she was a psychotic fantasist, whose delusions were strongly conditioned by prevailing cultural motifs. None the less, for most of the time, what Wilby has striven to do is to persuade scholars who have hitherto ignored the possibility that visionary experience may lie behind British witchcraft confessions and the work of magical practitioners to accept it as one feasible interpretation of the evidence.7 It is suggested here that she has succeeded in making this case.
The second British scholar to be influenced by Carlo Ginzburg’s ideas was Julian Goodare, who had already established himself as one of the leading experts on early modern Scotland. He distinguished his own arguments from those of both Ginzburg and Wilby, noting that nobody had adopted the former’s theories in full, and refusing to imitate Ginzburg’s ‘plunge into the archaic past’, while disagreeing with some of the latter’s suggestions, but thought that the ideas of both had value. He asserted that ‘deep folkloric beliefs or mythic structures mattered to the way in which the common folk conceptualized witchcraft’, and credited Ginzburg with drawing attention to that idea.8 His main personal illustration of it came in 2012 – to highlight a Scottish text of the mid-1530s, which spoke of fairies and stated that ‘some say they hold meetings with a countless multitude of simple women whom they call in our tongue seely wights’. The latter expression signified blessed or lucky beings, and recurred in Scotland until the nineteenth century. Goodare interpreted it as meaning a class of superhuman entity similar to but distinct from fairies. From this and other mentions of them in Scottish sources, and analogy with the Sicilian belief in the ‘ladies from outside’, he hypothesized the existence in early modern Scotland of a ‘cult’9 of ‘shamanistic magical practitioners’, mostly female, who claimed to commune with these beings and were sometimes called ‘seely wights’ themselves. He suggested that they claimed to make that communication by flying at night with the ‘wights’, in the manner of the followers of the Continental ‘Lady’, and that in reality they engaged in trance states and ecstatic visions. The influence of both Ginzburg and Wilby on this reconstruction must be plain, as must that of the work of Éva Pócs and
Gustav Henningsen, but its form was Goodare’s own.10 Not enough time has passed at the present point of writing for reactions to it to be registered among colleagues, but Goodare himself has subsequently followed it up with another essay in which he speculated how the ‘cult’ of the ‘wights’ might fit into the wider picture of early modern Scottish culture, especially with regard to fairy belief and visionary experience.11 The work of these scholars therefore cumulatively poses some important questions for the history of early modern Britain: what was the relationship between service magicians and accused witches, and fairies; was that relationship the same all over Britain; and can its development, and that of ideas concerning fairies in general, be traced over time? It remains to be seen how far the approaches taken in the current book can provide answers.
Fairies and Magicians
The book’s general technique of narrowing circles of perspective can be applied to the first question posed above. A global survey reveals that in every inhabited continent, service magicians were often (though apparently not necessarily) believed to derive at least some of their ability and knowledge from dealings with superhuman beings, the latter most commonly in spirit form. Likewise, witches were commonly thought to co-operate with evil spirits in their works of destruction.12 The ‘classic’ shamans of Siberia were therefore an extreme example of a widespread pattern, in their reliance on assistant spirits to carry out their service magic. It will be clear from preceding chapters, also, that European service magicians likewise often claimed to gain their powers and knowledge through communion with spirits. This was true of followers of the ‘Lady’ or ‘ladies’ from their first appearance in the ninth century, across their range. The man who said that he had learned his magical craft in the Venusberg, and the Scandinavians who confessed to doing so by communing with trolls or forest spirits, may also be remembered. On the other hand, in most parts of Europe there is an apparent absence of evidence that most service magicians identified themselves, or were identified, as coming by their reputed skills by this means. Indeed, there were some marked regional traditions that derived the powers of such figures from other sources. The ‘dream warriors’ of the south-east, including the benandanti, provide a striking example of one, in which special ability was attributed to being born with a caul. None the less, in the ‘dream warriors’ own region there was also a parallel kind of practitioner, to whom Éva Pócs has given the name of ‘fairy magicians’.13 These were found all over south-eastern Europe, from Greece through the Balkans to Slovenia, Croatia, Romania and (possibly) Hungary, and reputedly learned their skills, especially healing, from local beings who may be equated with the British fairies. Those beings, often taking the form of groups of beautiful women, were believed to cause many of the problems that their human pupils cured, but could also give good fortune and abundance. Some of the magicians who interacted with them were formed into societies, and most were female; many were believed to travel with these spirit patronesses at night, making them look like a south-eastern extension of the tradition first recorded in the canon Episcopi, and its longest recorded survival, perhaps together with Gustav Henningsen’s Sicilian donas. Much of the information on these people consists of folklore collected in modern times, but there are stray references to them in early modern records from Dalmatia and Croatia, functioning as healers and witch-finders.14 However, it is worth repeating that even within their region they represented only one variety of service magician, and that most of Europe seems to have lacked collective traditions of their kind. Moreover, fairy-like beings were only one sort of superhuman entity to whom magicians could reputedly turn for aid: in Spain and Portugal, the most common kind of person offering magical services was believed to be empowered by particular saints.15