The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  To employ modern folklore in this cautious way is to follow a precedent established by other sorts of recent, highly regarded, research into early modern Scottish belief systems.28 This precedent has been continued in subsequent work on witch trials in Celtic-speaking areas, notably that of Andrew Sneddon, who, when considering Ireland, was careful to cite early modern (and where available, medieval) sources together with more recent folklore, to show that together they represented a continuum. My article in 2011, moreover, proposed a further control mechanism on the use of modern folklore to add depth to early modern material: the employment of medieval Irish literature, which together with modern folklore could allow the early modern data to be reflected both backwards and forwards in time, building up, if this strategy were successful, a very strong case for particular and persistent elements in Celtic societies which could explain the pattern of prosecution for witchcraft.29 There was no space in the article to offer more than a cursory summary of the Irish material concerned, but the present book provides an excellent opportunity to carry out just such an exercise, and extend it to other classes of medieval Irish record and to Welsh sources. Such an investigation of a possible ancient and medieval backdrop for an early modern phenomenon is wholly in keeping with the aims and methods of this book, and the results may either substantiate the argument for a cultural explanation for the apparent reluctance to hunt witches in Celtic societies, or force a major rethinking of it.

  The Medieval Context

  The written sources for medieval Gaelic Ireland are very rich, comprising for the present purpose devotional works, law codes, secular poetry and secular prose tales of the deeds of heroes. There is unhappily no similar body of evidence for medieval Man and Gaelic Scotland, although careful projection of the Irish material onto both is possible as place names and incidental references show both shared many cultural traits, and in the Scottish case some saints and heroes. Wales, on the other hand, possesses every class of medieval record that is found in Ireland, though in smaller quantity. To commence with the Irish sources, the secular laws, encoded between the sixth and ninth centuries, show little sign of a concern about magic. There are a few specific prohibitions which really reflect other priorities, such as a banning of love magic, as to coerce somebody else into falling in love with the magician could affect marriage alliances and inheritances; a prohibition on casting spells to cause impotence, which could have much the same consequences; and one on the taking of human bones from churches for use in magical recipes, which dishonoured the dead and desecrated the place.30 Similarly, a legal treatise declared that the fine for causing somebody’s death by a spell should be the same as that for murdering somebody and then concealing the corpse: the concern here was with killing by stealth, as dishonourable, instead of disposing of an enemy openly.31 There is no sign of the witch figure in these law codes, and the situation remains similar in the penitentials, composed between the late sixth and eighth centuries by churchmen concerned with imposing punishments to expiate specific sins. One forbids the use of magic in general, or perhaps destructive magic in general (the word used, malifica, could mean either when used by a cleric) in orthodox early medieval Christian fashion, and regards clerics and women as being especially prone to teach it. Another condemns the employment of magical practices for love potions and to induce abortions and (above all) to commit murder; and with that the concern of these documents for such matters seems to run out.32

  Moving to the saints’ Lives and heroic literature, it is clear that the medieval Irish had a considerable interest in magic as a literary motif, but the figure at the centre of it is not the witch, but the druid; and this is for the absolutely straightforward reason that druid (drui or drai) was simply the medieval Irish word for somebody who worked magic. This breadth of definition made the category extremely porous, as anybody could be called a druid at the time at which that person was working magic; conversely, full-time specialists in working magic could be considered to be full-time druids, and so members of a distinctive class or order of person.33 To blur boundaries (and perhaps to confuse matters) still further, certain occupations, notably that of high-grade poet, or blacksmith, were often regarded as inherently able to wield arcane powers, and those members of them who did so were credited with such powers because of their trades, and not automatically called druids. In the literature, people who are called druids often carry out acts of destructive or deluding magic of the sort associated with witches all over the world: they curse and blight people and their possessions, raise tempests and fogs, cause delusions, and transform human beings into animal shape or into stone, subdue and bind them to their will, and raise magical barriers to their activities. To increase the resemblance, the pagan druid features as the favourite foe of Christian saints, to be defeated and so converted, humiliated or destroyed by them. So are druids simply the medieval Irish equivalent to witches?

  The answer must be negative, for two different reasons. The first is that magic is treated in the heroic literature, at least, as a neutral force. There are therefore plenty of good druids in these tales, especially in the guise of counsellors to kings and defenders of their peoples, who function as admired, wise and benevolent figures. The main role of the druid in this class of literature, indeed, is not as a wielder of harmful magic but as a diviner or prophet. The second reason spins off from the first: that even the bad druids are not regarded as inherently evil in their activities, though some may be unpleasant as people. They are cast in the role of villains, for the most part, because they are opposed to the characters in the tales with whom the audience is expected to empathize. The partial exception to this rule only serves to confirm it: the druids who are pitted against saints in hagiographies, as the prime defenders of the old and wrong religion against the new and correct one. As pagans, they are defending a bad cause, but are still the misguided or self-seeking champions of their native societies, and not self-consciously the foes of humanity. At worst, they exemplify the evils of paganism as a false belief system, and the negative images of them draw heavily on those of magicians at ancient royal courts in the Bible, who are defeated by Hebrew prophets, or of false prophets exposed by Christian apostles.

  In both the heroic stories and the saints’ Lives, druids are usually male when their sex is indicated, while at times they are specifically identified as female. Given the hazy linguistic status of the role of ‘druid’ in Ireland, however, this may simply mean that both women and men were expected to work magic, and that in most of the contexts depicted in the literature that concerned magic, the protagonists were men. At times, however, there seem to be references to specifically female forms of magic, or to women as especially feared forms of magician. The reference to them in a penitential has already been cited, and the epic story of the second battle of Mag Tuired portrays an army about to engage in battle, supported by curses placed upon its enemies by druids, but also by four other specialist kinds of magic-workers, including ‘sorceresses’.34 A hymn credited to St Patrick asks for divine protection against the ‘spells of women, smiths and druids’, while a prayer credited to St Columcille claimed that the speaker heeded (at the end of a list of superstitions) neither ‘omens nor women’. 35 None of these sources, however, explains what, if anything, was distinctive about women’s magic. A saint’s Life, that of Berach, describes a group of malevolent female magicians in action, led by a pagan one who was determined to kill her young stepson, who was under the protection of the saint. She summoned her ‘band of women of power . . . to ply druidism, and craft, and paganism, and diabolical science’ to destroy the boy, but Berach’s prayers caused the earth to swallow them all up.36

  The Irish texts are replete with technical terms for curses, such as áer and glám dícenn, kinds of poetic malediction recited in verse; corrguinecht, (a particular mode of cursing uttered while standing on one leg with one eye closed and one arm outstretched); congain connail (magical wounding); and tuaithe (a spoken charm). One law text states that
such techniques were sometimes used while piercing an image of the person to be harmed.37 Jacqueline Borsje, perhaps the leading recent expert on the treatment of magic in medieval Irish sources, has commented that

  when we look at the Irish terms for supernatural verbal power, we are stunned by their variety. Many of these words are translated simply as ‘magic, incantation, charm, spell’, but the variety of terms seems to reflect a variety of meanings. The definitions of what they stood for have been lost.38

  Her words have to be heeded by anybody considering the place of destructive magic in the medieval Irish imagination. It is plain, however, that such magic is wielded in the tales in pursuit of private and specific ends, with practical benefits in mind, rather than for the general joy of working harm. When deployed on behalf of characters of whom the storyteller approved, it was regarded with proportionate approval; and indeed down to the early modern period, poets who allegedly possessed the ability to wound or kill adversaries with their verses (when provoked) were greatly admired for their prowess.39

  All this needs to be borne in mind when reading accounts of apparently bad magicians in the heroic stories (often called ‘witches’ in English translation). Perhaps the best known of these magicians are those responsible for the death of the greatest hero of the Ulster Cycle of stories, Cú Chulainn. Their identity developed as the Middle Ages progressed. In the earliest version, found in eleventh- or twelfth-century texts, the kin of two warriors killed by the hero decide to avenge them by hiring three old women, each blind in the left eye (often a sign of magical prowess in Irish tradition) to bring about Cú Chulainn’s doom. These do so by trapping him into breaking a prohibition laid upon him against the eating of dog flesh, so ensuring that death must come upon him.40 In later medieval versions, the same trap with the same result is sprung by the children of one of the dead warriors, Calatin. They learn magic of specific kinds, which are carefully itemized but can mostly be translated now only with the imprecision of which Jacqueline Borsje warned: the sons acquire druidecht (druid-craft), coimlecht (hostile spells), admilliud (blighting) and toshúgad (‘bringing forth’), and the daughters dúile (magic which could relate to books, elements or animals) and amaitecht (lethal magic). All sacrifice an eye as part of the process of education in magical abilities. Once proficient, they use enchantments to handicap Cú Chulainn’s people, the Ulaid, as well as to destroy him.41 They are clearly to be regarded as villainous, because they employ an underhand trick to get rid of somebody who is an honourable and admirable man as well as a great hero, and are the enemies of the people with whom the story identifies. Their action, however, has an entirely understandable and legitimate motivation in itself: to avenge a parent.

  The taking of a long chronological perspective enables a comparison between these elite sources from the Middle Ages with the folklore collected from Irish commoners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those commoners considered it a customary expression of enmity with somebody else in the same community to curse the land farmed by that person. It was done by depositing rotting matter on that land secretly with an imprecation, which would cause the luck of a farm to decay even as the materials concerned did. Such action was countered by discovering and burning the deposit, coupled with prayers for protection and blessing with holy water.42 The same moral economy therefore prevailed as that found among the elites in the medieval stories: that the use of magic as a weapon was a neutral force in itself, which was awarded virtue or vice according both to the manner in which it was wielded and where a person’s sympathies lay in the dispute. Another abiding link between these two bodies of evidence is belief in the evil eye, as a danger to both humans and livestock. In both cases, it was regarded as a force that could be used both intentionally and by accident, and the issue of intent was the vital one in determining whether its use was culpable.43

  There is, however, a different way in which the medieval Irish texts may connect with the witch figure, and that is through their inclusion of terrifying and dangerous women with superhuman powers. Whether or how these connect with the Graeco-Roman child-killing demons or the Germanic cannibal witch is a difficult issue to resolve. One penitential, from the late sixth or the seventh century, forbids Christians to believe in lamia or striga, as delusions.44 By these Latin terms it seems clearly to mean either the predatory Mediterranean night demons or else the women who were associated with those demons, but the ruling may simply echo those in contemporary European law codes, without specific reference to native Irish belief. A correspondence with that belief does, however, seem to be established by a glossary of names from heroic tales, composed at any point between 1050 and 1200.45 It tells of how certain women of Munster, the south-west Irish kingdom, had a habit of invading houses to kill new-born boys. Their powers, which seem at least partly magical, were too great to resist, but one hero was saved from them as an infant because one of the women had a fondness for him and hid him under a cauldron. The others detected him there and attacked him, but only blasted one ear, which remained permanently reddened. This sounds authentically Gaelic, but there seems to be no other appearance of such figures in the literature and there are no precise equivalents to them in the modern Irish folklore. Spectral child murderesses are recorded from various regions in that, but are the ghosts of specific evil women, haunting their former neighbourhoods because of their sins in life, and best fought with the exorcisms of Catholic priests.46

  None the less, medieval Irish literature is full of violent and scary women, who are usually described in English translations as ‘hags’ or ‘witches’. A typical appearance of these in a tale is represented by the seven who were defeated by the hero Art mac Cuinn when they attacked him at night in an oak forest.47 To describe them as witches in the sense of this book is, however, difficult for two reasons. The first is that there is no sign that they use magic, as such, as their weapons seem to be physical, with piercings and hackings. The second is that it is not absolutely clear that they are human. They are sent against Art by a superhuman queen, dwelling in a parallel otherworld, whose enmity he had incurred. Likewise, in one of the stories which make up the Fenian Cycle, that group of tales concerning the warriors led by Finn mac Cumaill, Finn himself and some of his men are trapped and bound by magic in a cave by three hideous hags, with coarse and dishevelled hair, red and bleary eyes, sharp and crooked teeth, very long arms, and fingernails like the tips of cows’ horns. They intend to kill the heroes with swords, but one of their comrades breaks in and slays two of them with his own sword, before forcing the last to release his friends. This time the hags concerned are definitely not human, but the daughters of a being from a parallel world who wants to punish Finn for having offended him.48

  More often the nature of the murderous hags of medieval Irish literature, whether they use magical or physical weapons, is left ambiguous. That literature abounds with images of divine females, apparently former pagan goddesses, who delight in battle, incite it and engage in it, and as such inspire terror among humans. The savage crones of the stories often look more like downsized versions of these than human beings who have learned magic. In another Fenian story, from the high to late medieval period, ‘demonic females of the glen’ join ‘the hounds and the whelps and the crows’ and ‘the powers of the air, and the wolves of the forests’ in ‘howls from every quarter’ to urge armies to destroy each other.49 Likewise, the twelfth-century historical saga entitled The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill portrays another list of bogey figures as eager for the bloodshed of the great battle which concludes the story, which may be translated as ‘battlefield spirits and goat-like battlefield spirits, and maniacs of the valleys, and destructive witches and shape-shifting supernatural beings and the ancient birds and the destroying demons of the air and the heavens, and the misfortune-giving demonic supernatural host’.50 Once more, however, the term rendered as ‘destructive witches’, amati adgaill, is a relatively rare one for ‘females with destructive supernatural powers�
�, who might be human or might not, and if human might be ghosts or might not: it might equally be rendered ‘frenzied women of destruction’.51 In appearance the medieval Irish hags bear a clear resemblance to some of the Roman portraits of witches (which passed in turn into early modern and modern European currency), but their nature seems essentially different. Moreover, they represent external enemies to the heroes and communities of which the Irish stories are told, and not a hidden and internal threat to them; and so, again, hardly qualify as witches under the definition adopted in this book.

  The same consideration applies to the much rarer appearances in the stories of beautiful and alluring human enchantresses, of whom the most obvious example is the one who seduces a king, Muircertach mac Erca, in order to bring about his death, in a twelfth-century story.52 He and his followers are inclined to regard her as superhuman, but she insists that she is not, but a Christian woman, and at the end she confesses that she was motivated to her deed by a desire to avenge her family and people, whom the king concerned had destroyed. None the less, she disposes of extraordinary powers of deception, such as appearing to turn water into wine and fern leaves into pigs, and stones, clods and stalks into warriors. Such abilities were associated with demons in Christian theology, and an alliance with such beings would explain why she insists that no churchmen be allowed to enter the royal household while she resides there. Despite all this, having secured her revenge she dies a penitent Christian, and the narrative does not entirely censure her for what is, after all, an understandable original reason for her behaviour. Once more in medieval Irish tradition, a witch-like figure is shown to have been propelled into using destructive magic by personal and specific grievances and not a general malevolence.