The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  35.Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 55–61.

  36.Aesop, Fables, no. 26.

  37.Both inscriptions are translated in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 275–7.

  38.Termed agurtai and manteis.

  39.Many are translated in John Gager (ed.), Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, Oxford, 1992; and there is a catalogue in Eidinow, Oracles, Curses and Risk, 352–454. They are discussed by those historians, and by Christopher A. Faraone, ‘The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells’, in Faraone and Dirk Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, Oxford, 1991, 3–32; Daniel Ogden, ‘Binding Spells’, in Ankarloo and Clark (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume Two, 38–86; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 48–50; Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World, 64–103. Plato’s reference is in his Republic, 364B-C.

  40.The main primary texts are Homer, Odyssey, c. 10; Euripides, Medea; Hesiod, Theogony; Eumelus, fragments of Corinthiaca; fragments of Naupactica and Nostoi; Pindar, Fourth Pythian Ode; and Sophocles, Rhizotomoi. Most are printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 82–95, 312–13. Ogden himself, in Night’s Black Agents, London, 2008, 7–35, makes a spirited defence of the idea that both Circe and Medea could be regarded as witches, against a current apparent majority view that they cannot. I hold here (for reasons given) to the majority, summed up by Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 5, 15, 34, 128, 135. A lot, however, hinges on the definition made of a witch, which varies between the different commentators, and within his own one, Ogden is correct.

  41.On this see Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 79–95; and ‘Who Practised Love-Magic in Classical Antiquity and the Ancient World’, Classical Quarterly, N.S. 50 (2000), 563–83; Ogden, ‘Binding Spells’, 62–5; and Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece, 211–39.

  42.This is a point especially made by Stratton, Naming the Witch, 49–71.

  43.It first appears in Aristophanes, The Clouds, lines 749–57. This and other sources are reproduced in D. E. Hill, ‘The Thessalian Trick’, Rheisches Museum für Philologie, 116 (1973), 221–38; and (of course) Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 226–40. For academic considerations of the trope, see the list compiled by Jan Bremmer in Boschung and Bremmer (eds), The Materiality of Magic, 252, to which can be added P. J. Bicknell, ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, in Ann Moffatt (ed.), Maistor: Classical, Byzantine and Renaissance Studies for Robert Browning, Canberra, 1984, 67–75.

  44.Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 97–123.

  45.Fritz Graf, ‘Magic and Divination: Two Apolline Oracles on Magic’, in Gideon Bohak at al. (eds), Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition, Leiden, 2011, 119–33.

  46.Pliny, Natural History, 30.1–20; Seneca, Oedipus, lines 561–3.

  47.Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, 8.7.9–10.

  48.Apuleius, Apologia, 26.6.

  49.Plotinus, Enneads, 2.9.14.1–8.

  50.For what follows, see Mary Beard et al., Religions of Rome, Cambridge, 1998, vol. 1, 154–6; Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World, 135–9; Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World, London, 2001, 1–16; Stratton, Naming the Witch, 79–99; James B. Rives, ‘“Magus” and its Cognates in Classical Latin’, in Richard L. Gordon and Francisco Marco Simon (eds), Magical Practice in the Latin West, Leiden, 2010, 53–77; J. A. North, ‘Novelty and Choice in Roman Religion’, Journal of Roman Studies, 70 (1980), 86–91; and Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, 36–60.

  51.Reference at n. 46.

  52.What follows is based on the sources at n. 50, plus James Rives, ‘Magic in the XII Tables Revisited’, Classical Quarterly, 52 (2002), 270–90; and ‘Magic in Roman Law’, Classical Antiquity, 22 (2003), 313–39; and Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World, 141–62. For the pivotal third-century ruling, see Julius Paulus, Sententiae, 5.23.14–19.

  53.Livy, History, 8.18, 39.41 and 40.43.

  54.Gordon, ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, 254–5, is an example of a distinguished historian who believes that the word signified magic.

  55.Printed by Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 284.

  56.Printed in ibid., 333.

  57.For example, Virgil, Eclogue 8.2.

  58.Horace, Epodes, 3.6–8; 5, passim; and 17; and Satires, 1.8; 2.1.48; and 2.8.95–6.

  59.Lucan, Pharsalia, 6.415–830.

  60.Virgil, Aeneid, 4.478–508.

  61.Ovid, Amores, 1.8.

  62.Propertius, Poems, 4.5.5–18.

  63.Tibullus, Poems, 1.2.41–58.

  64.Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 1.3–8; 2.22–8; 9.29.

  65.Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.159–351; and Heroides, 6.83–94; Seneca, Medea, passim; Orphic Argonautica, lines 887–1021; Hyginus, Fabulae, 26.

  66.Petronius, Satyricon, cc. 133–4.

  67.Stratton, Naming the Witch, 79–96.

  68.The references are collected in Valerie M. Warrior, Roman Religion, Cambridge, 2006, 96; and printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 222–6. I think those to Catullus and Horace ambiguous, but accept and cite the rest.

  69.The main sources are printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 281–4.

  70.Tacitus, Annals, 2.27; 2.55; 2.69; 3.22–3; 4.52. These texts are well collated and discussed by Stratton, Naming the Witch, 100–105.

  71.Sources at n. 39; plus Beard et al., Religions of Rome, vol. 1, 220. I accept the argument of Henk Versnel, that many of the tablets from the imperial period often grouped together with curse tablets are found in temples and shrines, and should be regarded instead as prayers to deities to avenge misdoings, and so not part of the traditional category of magic at all: his latest salvo in this, summing up the evidence and the debate to date, is in his essay ‘Prayers for Justice, East and West’, in Gordon and Simon (eds), Magical Practice in the Latin West, 275–354.

  72.Published in Wolfgang Meid, Gaulish Inscriptions, Budapest, 1992, 40–46.

  73.Andrew T. Wilburn, Materia Magica, Ann Arbor, 2012.

  74.Pliny, Natural History, 28.19.

  75.Printed in Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 48.

  76.Fritz Graf, ‘Victimology’, in Kimberly B. Stratton with Dayna S. Kalleres (eds), Daughters of Hecate, Oxford, 2014, 386–417.

  77.David Frankfurter, ‘Fetus Magic and Sorcery Fears in Roman Egypt’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 46 (2006), 37–62.

  78.Isaac Shapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, African Affairs, 51 (1952), 41–52.

  79.Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London, 1922, 73–7, 239–42, 393.

  80.Alex Scobie, ‘Strigiform Witches in Roman and Other Cultures’, Fabula, 19 (1978), 74–101.

  81.For original texts, see O. R. Gurney, ‘Babylonian Prophylactic Figures and their Rituals’; and Langdon, Babylonian Liturgies, 12–15. For commentaries, Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, Detroit, 3rd edition, 1990, 221–2; Thompson, Semitic Magic, 65–8; Schwemer, ‘Magic Rituals’, 427–8; Markham J. Geller, ‘Tablets and Magical Bowls’, in Shaul Shaked (ed.), Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity, Leiden, 2005, 53–72; Kathrin Trattner, ‘From Lamashtu to Lilith’, Disputatio Philosophica, 15 (2014), 109–18.

  82.Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 222. A much more famous terracotta figure of a nude winged female figure with clawed feet in the British Museum, known as the Burney Relief, or more romantically as the Queen of the Night, has often been used uncritically as a depiction of a lilitu, or simply of ‘Lilith’. From her iconography, however, she is certainly not a demoness but a goddess: Dominique Collon, The Queen of the Night, London, 2005.

  83.This has been strongly argued by Judit M. Blair, De-Demonising the Old Testament, Tübingen, 2009, 63–95.

  84.Original texts can be found in Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked (eds), Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity, Jerusalem, 3rd edition, 1998. Commentaries on them and on Lilith(s) in the Ta
lmud and after are in Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 223–40; Lesses, ‘Exe(o)rcizing Power’; Geller, ‘Tablets and Magical Bowls’; and Blair, De-Demonising the Old Testament, 24–30.

  85.The main texts for the lamia are printed in Daniel Ogden, Dragons, Serpents and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook, Oxford, 2013, 68–107. Discussions are in Johnston, Restless Dead, 119–23, 165–79; and ‘Defining the Dreadful: Remarks on the Greek Child-Killing Demon’, in Meyer and Mirecki (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, 361–87; Daniel Ogden, Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, Oxford, 2013, 86–92; and Stamatios Zochios, ‘Lamia’, Trictrac, 4 (2011), 96–112 (I am grateful to the author for the gift of this article).

  86.For discussion, see Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution, Cambridge MA, 1992, 82–7; Ogden, Drakōn, 95; Johnston, ‘Defining the Dreadful’, 380.

  87.All the more important primary texts are printed in Samuel Grant Oliphant, ‘The Story of the Strix’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 44 (1913), 133–49; and 45 (1914), 49–63, to which material can be added from Ovid, Fasti, 6.131–68. Discussions are found in Oliphant’s article and in David Walter Leinweber, ‘Witchcraft and Lamiae in “The Golden Ass”’, Folklore, 105 (1994), 77–82; Johnston, Restless Dead, 165–9; and Laura Cherubini, ‘The Virgin, the Bear and the Upside-Down Strix’, Arethusa, 42 (2009), 77–97. The following observations are based on these sources.

  88.Ovid, Amores, 1.8.2; and Fasti, 6.131–68.

  89.Sextus Pompeius Festus, De verborum significatione, 314.33, printed in Patrologia Latina, vol. 95, col. 1668. Festus probably wrote in the second century, but was summarizing a work of Verrius Flaccus from the first.

  90.(?Pseudo-) Lucian, Lucius or the Ass, c. 12; Apuleius, Metamorphoses, c. 16.

  91.Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 1.17, 5.11.

  92.It was Norman Cohn who first noticed and exploited the full potential of this, in Europe’s Inner Demons, London, 2nd edition, 1993, 162–6. Some of the primary texts were published in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (ed.), The Occult in Medieval Europe, Basingstoke, 2005, 135–6.

  93.Pactus legis Salicae, texts 19 and 64, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section One. Volume Four. Part One, Hanover, 1962, 81–2, 230–31.

  94.Leges Alamannorum, Fragmentum II, paragraph 31, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section One. Volume Five, Hanover, 1962, 23.

  95.Edictus Rothari, nos 197–8, 376, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section One. Volume Four, Witzenhausen, 1962, 53, 91.

  96.Capitularia Regum Francorum, Capitulatio de partibus Saxonicae, paragraph 6, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Leges. Section Two. Volume One, Hanover, 1973, pp. 68–9.

  97.Again, it was Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 164–6, who drew attention to the trail of texts leading into the medieval period.

  98.Paul Piper (ed.), Notkers und seiner Schule Schriften, Freiburg, 1883, vol. 1, 787. The term used for witches is the standard medieval German one.

  99.Burchard, Decretum, Book 19, c. 170.

  100.Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, Book 3, cc. 85–8.

  101.Julius Caesar, Gallic War, 1.50.

  102.Tacitus, Germania, c. 8.

  103.Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass, London, 1883, vol. 1, 95–7, 396; Grimm quotes the other relevant primary sources, Strabo, Dio Cassius, Gregory of Tours and Saxo Grammaticus.

  3 The Shamanic Context

  1.Graham Harvey, ‘Introduction’, in Harvey (ed.), Shamanism: A Reader, London, 2003, 18.

  2.For accounts of its development, see Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, Princeton, 1992; Jane Monnig Atkinson, ‘Shamanisms Today’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1992), 307–30; Peter N. Jones, ‘Shamanism’, Anthropology of Consciousness, 17 (2006), 4–32; Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination, Oxford, 2007; and Jeroen W. Boekhoven, Genealogies of Shamanism, Groningen, 2011.

  3.Examples of all these employments of the term are found in works cited in the sources above. For a range of discussions and characterizations since the century began, see Alice Beck Kehoe, Shamans and Religion, Prospect Heights, 2000; Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley (eds), Shamans Through Time, London, 2001; Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon (eds), The Concept of Shamanism, Budapest, 2001; Alby Stone, Explore Shamanism, Loughborough, 2003; Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion, 2nd edition, Oxford, 2006, 174–96; Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis, Historical Dictionary of Shamanism, Lanham MD, 2007, 2; Aldo Colleoni, ‘Shamanism’, in Colleoni (ed.), Mongolian Shamanism, Ulan Bator, 2007, 25–35; Angela Sumegi, Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism, New York, 2008, 1–25; Thomas A. Dubois, An Introduction to Shamanism, Cambridge, 2009; Christine S. Van Pool, ‘The Signs of the Sacred’, Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology, 28 (2009), 177–90; H. Sidky, ‘Ethnographic Perspectives on Differentiating Shamans from other Ritual Intercessors’, Asian Ethnology, 69 (2010), 213–40; Adam J. Rock and Stanley Krippner, Demystifying Shamans and their World, Exeter, 2011, x–xi, 1–40; Diana Riboli and Davide Torri (eds), Shamanism and Violence, Farnham, 2013, 1; Marcel de Lima, The Ethnopoetics of Shamanism, Basingstoke, 2014, 1–5.

  4.Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, London, 1983; and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, London, 1992; quotation on p. 300. His argument, based on older theories, was that shamanic practices had been brought to Europe by prehistoric migrations across the steppes: for the subsequent fate of these theories see Jan N. Bremmer, ‘Shamanism in Classical Scholarship: Where Are We Now?’, in Peter Jackson (ed) Horizons of Shamanism, Stockholm, 2016, 52–78, which also reflects on Ginzburg’s use of them.

  5.Boekhoven, Genealogies of Shamanism, 129.

  6.His great book was Shamanism, the English edition of which was first published in London in 1964. For my own critique of his definition, see Ronald Hutton, Shamans, London, 2001, especially at pp. 120–31; others may be found in works cited at nn.1, 2 and 4 above.

  7.Mircea Eliade, ‘Some Observations on European Witchcraft’, History of Religions, 14 (1975), 149–72. For the apparent influence of Eliade on Ginzburg see also Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, Oxford, 2007, 170–86: Znamenski also emphasizes the importance to Ginzburg’s thought of his appointment to a chair at the University of California Los Angeles, a particular centre of enthusiasm for Eliade’s concept of shamanism.

  8.This connection was especially made in the publications of Vilmos Dioszegi, the great mid-twentieth-century Magyar scholar of Siberian shamanism.

  9.From a long list of their publications, some edited in partnership, the most relevant here are probably Gábor Klaniczay, ‘Shamanistic Elements in Central European Witchcraft’, in Mihály Hoppál (ed.), Shamanism in Eurasia, Göttingen, 1984, 404–22; and Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, Budapest, 1999.

  10.Klaniczay, ‘Shamanistic Elements’; Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 14–15.

  11.Gábor Klaniczay, Éva Pócs and Carlo Ginzburg, contributions to the Round Table Discussion, in Klaniczay and Pócs (eds), Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, Budapest, 2008, 37–42, 45–9. See also Klaniczay, ‘Shamanism and Witchcraft’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 214–21.

  12.At least in the English translation of his microhistory, bearing that title, made by Erik Midelfort and published at Charlottesville in 1998.

  13.Eleven years of articulation of this opinion are summed up neatly in Henningsen’s contribution to the Round Table Discussion at n. 11, on pp. 35–7. For its first expression see Henningsen, ‘The White Sabbath and Other Archaic Patterns of Witchcraft’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds), Witch Beliefs and Witch Hunting in Central and Southern Europe, Budapest, 1992, 293–304.

  14.The critiques of Ginzburg’s ideas by Anglophone historians are summed up with references by Yme Kuiper, ‘Witchcraft, Fertility Cults and Shamanism’, in Brigitte Luchesi and
Kocku von Stuckrad (eds), Religion in Cultural Discourse, Berlin, 2006, 35–59. Since 2005 two British scholars, Emma Wilby and Julian Goodare, have applied them to material from their island, with results that will be considered later in this book.

  15.I have made exploratory attempts at this exercise in ‘Shamanism: Mapping the Boundaries’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 209–13; and before expert audiences at Åbo University, Finland, in 2007 and Harvard University in 2009. I am very grateful to members of those for their helpful and supportive comments, and above all to Carlo Ginzburg himself, at Harvard, for his generosity.

  16.In Between the Living and the Dead, 7.

  17.Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum, Book 3, c. 34.

  18.Gerald of Wales, Itinerary Through Wales, c. 16.

  19.Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, Exeter, 2000, 226.

  20.Matt Goldish, ‘Vision and Possession: Nathan of Gaza’s Earliest Prophecies in Historical Context’, in Goldish (ed.), Spirit Possession in Judaism, Detroit, 2003, 217–36.

  21.Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 188.

  22.The classic work of this kind is Miranda and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, The Quest for the Shaman, London, 2005.

  23.For other considerations of this problem, see Neil Price (ed.), The Archaeology of Shamanism, London, 2001; Michael Winkelman, ‘Archaeology and Shamanism’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 12 (2002), 268–70; Christine S. Van Pool, ‘The Signs of the Sacred’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 28 (2009), 177–90; and Homayun Sidky, ‘On the Antiquity of Shamanism and its Role in Human Religiosity’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 22 (2010), 68–92.

  24.The term ‘rite technique’ is adopted from Anna-Leena Siikala’s The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman, Helsinki, 1987. The summary of Siberian shamanism that follows is based on my own Shamans, a book which was designed specifically as one of the foundations of the present one. It was based on a survey of the texts that recorded Siberian shamanism, in all languages, up to the early twentieth century.