The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  One striking feature of a global survey of witchcraft beliefs is the great variation in local forms which they take, usually corresponding to different peoples and cultures, and forming at times large regional traditions but more often a patchwork of ideological systems, not one of which is exactly like another. The same pattern is found across the ancient European and Near Eastern worlds wherever the cultures concerned can be reconstructed from surviving records. The consequences of these ancient variants for later European belief systems were considerable, and this was overwhelmingly because the dominant religion of the Continent became Christianity, a Western Asiatic faith first given established status by the Roman Empire. As a result it absorbed a mixture of cultural traits of crucial importance to its attitudes, which derived from sources spanning the whole extent of the world between the Atlantic and the Indus Valley. From the Persians it derived a view of the cosmos as divided between opposed utterly good and utterly evil divine personalities, with witches serving the evil one. From Mesopotamia came a fear of demons, as constantly active and malevolent spirits abroad in the world seeking human allies and victims. The Hebrews contributed a belief in a single true God, all-powerful and all-knowing. The Greeks stigmatized magic, defining it in opposition to religion as an illegitimate manipulation by shady human beings of normally superhuman power and knowledge, for their own ends and those of those who paid them. The Romans supplied a highly coloured image of the witch as a person of total evil, in league with evil forces, and dedicated to unnatural, antisocial and murderous activities. They also provided apparent precedents for the large-scale trial and execution of people for engaging in magic. Finally, two different kinds of ancient nocturnal bogey were bequeathed to the medieval Christian folk memory, both associated with witchcraft. The Roman one was a bird-like demoness, sometimes confused with a human witch, which attacked small children. The Germanic one was a woman who used magic, sometimes in co-operation with others, to drain the life force, or remove internal organs, from adult people and feast upon the proceeds.

  Although the Hebrews, Mesopotamians and Romans, at the least, all feared witchcraft and prosecuted people for it, only the Romans engaged in large-scale, chain-reaction, trials for magic, and then only apparently at two widely separated points in their history. In a global context, the peoples of ancient Europe and the Near East were not, on present evidence, keen witch-hunters, and the Greeks do not appear to have had a belief in the witch figure until the Roman period, and may not have prosecuted people for magic much at all; although they publicly disapproved of magicians and contributed elements of the later image of witchcraft to Europeans. Nor did Christianity initially result in any intensification of accusations for witchcraft. Early medieval Christian states retained a belief in magic, now much of it firmly linked to demons in mainstream theology, and a readiness to punish people convicted of using it to harm others. There is not much evidence for most of the medieval period, on the other hand, that this produced more than a trickle of individual prosecutions in most regions. Indeed, early medieval Christian churchmen seem to have discouraged witch-hunting across much of the Continent, in three different ways. They cast doubt on the existence of both of the nocturnal bogey figures described above, and this doubt was embodied in laws designed to prevent the persecution of people for association with such figures. They placed a heavy emphasis on the power of their Church to defeat and banish demons, rather than on the necessity of action against the human allies and dupes of those evil spirits. Finally, individual churchmen sometimes wrote and acted to challenge and prevent the persecution of individuals for alleged acts of destructive magic.

  There was, however, one major state and culture in the Mediterranean ancient world that neither feared witchcraft nor disapproved of magic, and that was Egypt. A category of its temple priesthood, indeed, supplied magical services to ordinary people, on request, often using written texts resting on beliefs and methods developed over millennia. When it came under Roman rule, and so eventually encountered a hardening Roman social and legal attitude to magic and an atrophying of resources to support the temples and their priesthood, this tradition became privatized. The result was an unprecedentedly sophisticated form of highly literate ceremonial magic, spread by texts and training and devoted to the needs of clients and the magicians themselves. Aspects of it soon leaked into Greek philosophy and Jewish and Christian culture, and can be found reflected in magical objects discovered across the pagan Roman Empire, as well as helping to make the Egyptian magician a stock character in Greek and Roman fiction. One major aspect of it was the manner in which many of its rites sought to harness superhuman power on behalf of selfish human needs, and (in a wholly traditional Egyptian manner) to compel deities as well as lesser spirits to act in response to the magician’s wishes. This not only directly flouted the Graeco-Roman disapproval of magic as an affront to the majesty of divine beings and a menace to religion, but ran against the hardening of official attitudes and legal sanctions with respect to magicians across the Roman Empire. One consequence of this clash was the hostility with which the Egyptian magician is treated in the Graeco-Roman literature of the imperial period, and another was the savage and widespread waves of persecution launched against practitioners of ceremonial magic, across much of the empire, in the mid-fourth century.

  Despite continued official disapproval, in varying degrees, learned ceremonial magic remained a clandestine tradition, based on direct textual transmission, in Jewish, Greek and Arabic culture throughout the early Middle Ages, and was indeed perpetuated and augmented there by transfusion into forms adapted to Judaic, Byzantine and Muslim religious thought. Despite repeated attempts to reconcile it with religious orthodoxy in each case, it retained much of its late antique character as a strongly marked and cosmopolitan learned counter-culture, offering human beings empowerment and direct self-improvement in a way which mainstream religious teaching did not. A strong if not conclusive case can be made that Egypt, both in terms of philosophical and religious attitude, and textual transmission, was the origin point of this whole tradition. It is certain that it was one of the most important of the likely sources for that tradition, and almost certainly the most important. Latin Christianity came late to the adoption of ceremonial magic of this sort, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the importation and translation of texts, mostly from Greek and Arabic, introduced it. However, some Latin Christians then took at least to aspects of it with great excitement, rapidly developing their own distinctive version of it, based on the quartered circle as the standard location for rites and the pentagram as the most powerful geometrical figure for use in them. An effort was made to secure for astral magic, in particular, the status of a respectable branch of learning. This failed, and in the thirteenth century a growing orthodox backlash developed against ceremonial magic which resulted in its effective demonization by the end of that century. During the fourteenth century ecclesiastical machinery, which had been developed in the course of the thirteenth to hunt adherents of Christian heresies, began, fitfully but cumulatively, to add ceremonial magic to its targets, and define it as a form of heresy in itself. This redefinition contaminated service magic in turn, for the simple reason that the two forms blended indistinguishably into each other at their boundaries, relatively unlearned popular magicians sometimes adopting ideas and motifs from ceremonial magic and learned ceremonial magicians sometimes working for clients. As a result, the two were targeted together in a very widespread official drive against magic, which began among local communities in Western Europe in the mid-1370s and continued unabated into the early fifteenth century.

  This campaign provided the background for the development of the stereotype of the satanic witch conspiracy that appeared in the 1420s, across an arc of territory from Catalonia through the western Alps to Rome, and was spread by preaching campaigns associated with the observant reform movement among friars. It immediately produced serious public panics, as local people were encouraged to blame
the members of this conspiracy for all their apparently unusual misfortunes, and especially for the deaths of young children. The use of torture, in at least some areas, ensured confessions, which in turn reinforced the stereotype; and this also immediately produced a scale of execution unknown in trials for magic at least since the late Roman period. The stereotype concerned was created by fusing an enhanced fear of murderous witchcraft with by then standard images of the horrific rites committed at devil-worshipping assemblies which orthodox Latin Christianity alleged against Christian heretics; and mixing in by then ancient folkloric figures. Two of those seem to have been especially influential in this case: the child-killing nocturnal demoness of the Mediterranean world and the cannibal witch of the South German one.

  The technique adopted here in telling this story, of apportioning ancient Europe and the Near East between distinctive belief systems, associated with particular cultures and treating magic in contrasting ways, throws up different insights and produces different perspectives from one employed by some other historians: of deriving many of the ideas and motifs that came to make up the stereotypical early modern European witch figure from a prehistoric pan-Eurasian ‘shamanistic’ tradition. To suggest this is not in itself to invalidate broader cross-cultural comparisons based on the concept of shamanism, which may yet have importance in inducing broad thinking about the nature of ecstatic visionary states across Europe, Eurasia or humanity. When considering the nature of the early modern European witch trials, however, the emphasis on regional tradition does have the value of enabling the identification of a specific shamanic and sub-shamanic province in northern and north-eastern Europe, with its own characteristic magical practices and figures, and its own experience of the early modern witch-hunts. Other zones can be mapped out around the Continent in which the trials were tinged by distinctive regional traditions of belief, especially a succession of those occupying the northern edge of the Mediterranean basin, and the Alpine areas above it, with a projection into the Balkans and lower Danube basin. Another consists of the British Isles, and another is Iceland. These represent, however, peripheral areas bordering the core regions of the trials in which most cases and executions occurred, and in those core regions the direct contribution of local popular motifs and traditions was minimal despite the existence of a flourishing and ample folklore concerning nocturnal spirit worlds. Even in the peripheral areas in which it featured more strongly, it usually appeared in only a minority, and often a small minority, of trials. In general the legal records serve at times and in particular places 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. On the other hand, in two important senses an awareness of a deeper time scale does reveal significant new things about early modern European beliefs concerning witches. If the microcosm of local folkloric traditions is only peripherally important in explaining the nature and incidence of witch trials, then the macrocosm of fundamental and general ideas does rest firmly on ancient foundations. These include the figures of the witch and service magician themselves; a willingness to credit the power of magic, especially as expressed in words and images; a balancing faith in the efficacy of measures to counter hostile magic, sometimes by using magical remedies and sometimes by propitiating or attacking the hostile magician; a sense of an animate universe teeming with spirits, some inherently malevolent and some willing to approach and assist humans; and one of the night as an unfriendly place haunted by especially dangerous non-human entities. If the construction of the satanic witch conspiracy was generated by the particular circumstances of the later Middle Ages, all of the component parts of it were in existence by the end of the ancient world, and existed within Latin Christianity long before they were put into that particular, and for a short period lethally potent, combination.

  The other sense in which a deeper time scale and cross-global comparisons may provide interesting insights into early modern witch trials consists of the application of that time scale and those comparisons to the nature and incidence of trials in particular regions. That argument has been illustrated by the three case studies from Britain. In each, an individual aspect of the early modern British evidence – the appearance of fairies as figures in certain trials, especially in Scotland; the apparent rarity of trials in areas with Celtic languages and cultures; and the demonic animal familiar which features prominently in English accounts of witchcraft – was submitted to this approach. In each it may be suggested that new understandings resulted. A global context revealed that both witches and service magicians were often thought to work with the assistance, and sometimes the tuition, of terrestrial spirits equivalent to the British fairies, and that this was indeed true of early modern Britain as a whole. The appearance of fairies in Scottish witch trials was to some extent a spin-off from their association with service magicians, and so with magic in general, and the British belief in such beings was derived ultimately from ancient tradition. However, the particular concept of fairies that featured in the trials was a late medieval creation. Likewise, a global context proved that across the world a minority of societies had not believed in witchcraft or not feared it very much in practice, because uncanny misfortune was blamed on other sources. It was suggested that the Celtic societies of the British Isles manifested an unusually low level of early modern witch-hunting, and an exploration of medieval Irish and Welsh literature, compared with early modern and modern folk beliefs in Welsh and Gaelic cultures, seemed to support a conclusion that this disinclination was indeed rooted in native belief systems. The animal familiar was related to a belief in terrestrial spirits which took animal form, and one in the ability of witches to do so, found in many parts of the world and in ancient and medieval Europe. It was also, however, related to the specific Christian manifestation of that, the demon in animal shape, and the linkage of that to the late medieval satanic anti-religion of witches, to suggest that the early modern English witch’s familiar appeared only at the end of the Middle Ages.

  If the reconstruction of the background to the early modern witch trials provided here is correct, it suggests that a shift in approach is made to the study of medieval popular cultures, meaning collections of beliefs and customs held by the mass of the population of a given society, as distinguished from those developed and propagated by intellectual and social elites. Hitherto, and especially when dealing with traditions of popular lore which may have contributed to the development of the early modern stereotype of the satanic witch, scholars have often tended to follow the nineteenth-century convention of assuming that they were survivals from a hazily defined pagan past. It remains true that important elements of them, listed above, indisputably were rooted in pre-Christian antiquity. None the less, all of those were significantly reworked in the course of the Middle Ages. It has long been accepted by scholars that the construct of the devil-worshipping conspiratorial sect of witches, which underlay the early modern hunts, was a fifteenth-century creation. It has now been suggested here that the construct of a medieval tradition of nocturnal spirit processions, made by Jacob Grimm and characterized by him as the remnant of a widespread pagan cult of the dead, needs to be unpicked. Within his materials may be found images of penitential processions of the dead, which seem fairly clearly to have an origin in eleventh- and twelfth-century concerns for the fate of the soul and in clerical exemplars. Another major strand of those materials consists of stories about night-roving bands of spirits, especially female, which living humans could join, and which often visited and blessed houses and which were often led by a superhuman woman. These are more likely to derive from a pagan source, but there seems to be no such source in the surviving evidence that matches them. Even if they drew on ancient elements, therefore – and this remains unproved – these were worked up into a distinctively medieval form, which spread out alongside the accounts of the wande
ring dead, across much of Europe, before increasingly blending with them in some folk tales to produce a set of composite legends on which Grimm drew. Likewise, although the early modern British images of fairies were ultimately based on an ancient tradition of land spirits, known to the English and Lowland Scots as elves, they were transformed during the later Middle Ages into a new model of a fairy kingdom, which became central to ideas concerning such beings.

  Similarly, a worldwide tendency to believe in spirits in animal form must have underlaid the early modern English concept of the witch’s animal familiar, but the lack of any sign of that concept in the Middle Ages and the lack of an enduring widespread imprint of it in modern folklore both suggest that it was a development of the early Tudor period and drew heavily on late medieval Christian demonology. What emerges from this is the remarkable dynamism, creativity and mutability of medieval and early modern popular cultures, which were at least the equal in those respects of literate and elite cultures. In none of those three cases does the belief concerned feature as part of a self-contained world of commoners. That in night-roaming superhuman ladies or a lady comes closest to that, but the very names first credited to the lady concerned, Diana and Herodias, seem to be derived ultimately from classical and scriptural learning. The development of a popular British concept of a fairy kingdom seems to have drawn heavily on literary romance, while that of the English animal familiar depended on a common stock of images of demons in animal shapes, known throughout society.