The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  34.The word is ban-tua: the text, Cath MaigeTuired, was most notably edited by Whitley Stokes in Revue Celtique, 12 (1891), with this passage on p. 91.

  35.Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (eds), Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, Cambridge, 1901, vol. 2, 357; R. I. Best, ‘Prognostications from the Raven and the Wren’, Eriu, 8 (1916), 120.

  36.Edited by Charles Plummer, in Lives of Irish Saints, Oxford, 1922, vol. 2, 29.

  37.Liam Breatnach (ed.), Uraicecht na Riár, Dublin, 1987, 114–15.

  38.Jacqueline Borsje, ‘Celtic Spells and Counterspells’, in Katja Ritari (ed.), Understanding Celtic Religion, Cardiff, 2015, 18. I am very grateful to her for sending me copies of most of her publications over the years. See also, in particular, her essay ‘Witchcraft and Magic’, in Séan Duffy (ed.), Medieval Ireland, London, 2005, 518–20.

  39.Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, Dublin, 1988, 46.

  40.This is the story known and edited as Aided Con Culainn.

  41.This is the story known and edited as Brislech Mór Maige Muirtheimne.

  42.On this see particularly Richard Breen, ‘The Ritual Expression of Inter-Household Relations In Ireland’, Cambridge Anthropology, 6 (1980), 33–59.

  43.The classic study of the phenomenon in the medieval texts is Jacqueline Borsje, ‘The Evil Eye in Early Irish Literature and Law’, Celtica, 24 (2003), 1–39. One that uses both bodies of evidence, drawing direct comparisons between those texts and modern Gaelic (in this case Scottish) folklore, is R. C. MacLagan, The Evil Eye in the Western Highlands, London, 1902.

  44.Bieler (ed.), The Irish Penitentials, 56.

  45.Cóir Anmann, c. 54. There are editions by Whitley Stokes, Leipzig, 1897, and Sharon Arbuthnot, for the Irish Texts Society, 2005.

  46.Anne O’Connor, ‘Images of the Evil Woman in Irish Folklore’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (1988), 281–5.

  47.This is in the story known as Echtra Airt meic Cuinn, trans. R. I. Best in Eriu, 3 (1906), 149–73.

  48.This is the story called Bruidhean Chéise Corainn.

  49.The story is entitled Cath Finntrágha.

  50.The traditional translation of the saga by J. H. Todd in the Rolls Series, London, 1867, 174–5 has the term ‘destructive witches’ rendered simply as ‘witches’, but Mark Williams assures me that Todd’s version is misleading, and has suggested the alternative one employed here.

  51.I am very grateful to Mark Williams for discussing the term with me, and greatly extending my knowledge of it. He also recommended William Sayers, ‘Airdreach, Sirite and Other Early Irish Battlefield Spirits’, Éigse, 25 (1991), 45–55, which discusses ‘spirits of the glen’ as featuring as spectres in other stories, and notes that ammait could mean either a woman or a spirit with supernatural power.

  52.This is in the story called Aided Muirchertach Mac Erca. I am very grateful to Mark Williams, again, for bringing it to my attention. Mark’s own close reading of the tale, and especially of the character of the enchantress, can be found as ‘Lady Vengeance’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 62 (2011), 1–33.

  53.See especially Alfred Nutt, The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, London, 1900; Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, New York, 1903; and Roger Sherman Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, New York, 1927.

  54.For recent studies of the fays, see inter alia Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time, Oxford, 2004; Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge, 2007; Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, Cambridge, 2010; and James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance, London, 2011.

  55.She appears in lines 1205–29, and is known as the Gwidon Ordu, the ‘Very Dark Hag’. More of these beings (in groups of nine as in Peredur) are overcome by heroes in the poem ‘Pa gur yv y porthaur’ and the hagiographical Life of Samson: see Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Early Welsh Arthurian Poems’, in Rachel Bromwich at al. (eds), The Arthur of the Welsh, Cardiff, 1991, 44–5.

  56.Suggett, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, 42–3.

  57.Ibid., passim; Tallis, ‘The Conjuror, the Fairy, the Devil and the Preacher’, passim.

  10 Witches and Animals

  1.For example, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971 (references to 1997 edition), 569; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, London, 1996, 71–4; and ‘The Witch’s Familiar in Elizabethan England’, in G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (eds), Authority and Consent in Tudor England, Aldershot, 219–20; Philip C. Almond, The Witches of Warboys, London, 2008, 51–5.

  2.By Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 569.

  3.Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 71–4; Andrew Sneddon, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, London, 2015, 7.

  4.Sharpe, ‘The Witch’s Familiar’, 228; Almond, The Witches of Warboys, 51–5; and his The Lancashire Witches, London, 2012, 26; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories, London, 2000, 153; and ‘Fairies’, in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, 346–7

  5.Emma Wilby, ‘The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland’, Folklore, 111 (2000), 283–305; Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, Brighton, 2005.

  6.Boria Sax, ‘The Magic of Animals’, Anthrozoos, 22 (2009), 317–32. I am very grateful to the author for sending me a copy of this article.

  7.Charlotte-Rose Millar, ‘The Witch’s Familiar in Sixteenth-century England’, Melbourne Historical Journal, 38 (2010), 113–30; Victoria Carr, ‘The Witch’s Animal Familiar in England, 1300–1700’, Bristol University PhD thesis, 2017. I am very grateful to Victoria Carr for giving me a copy of this article, which was itself presented to her by the author, and to Dr Millar herself for subsequently showing me the relevant chapter of her forthcoming book with Routledge, The Devil in the Pamphlets, in draft. Both she and Victoria also commented on this chapter of mine.

  8.James A. Serpell, ‘Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets’, in Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (eds), The Animal / Human Boundary, Rochester, NY, 2002, 157–92. This essay is remarkable for the way in which it incorporates many hypotheses and invalidates none: thus, it states that a survival of pre-Christian beliefs is difficult to demonstrate convincingly in the case of the English witch’s familiar but then goes on to say that the role of animals in European conceptions of witchcraft suggests ‘at least vestigial traces’ of shamanism (p. 184). In doing so it follows Ginzburg in assuming that shape-shifting is automatically a sign of shamanism.

  9.For example, from George Lyman Kitteredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England, New York, 1929, 174–5; to Serpell, ‘Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets’; and Sax, ‘The Magic of Animals’.

  10.Elsie Clews Parsons, ‘Witchcraft among the Pueblos’, in Max Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, Harmondsworth, 1970, 204–9; Benson Saler, ‘Nagual, Witch and Sorcerer in a Quiché Village’, Ethnology, 3 (1964), 305–28; J. Robin Fox, ‘Witchcraft and Clanship in Conchiti Therapy’, in Ari Kiev (ed.), Magic, Faith and Healing, Glencoe, 1964, 174–200; William and Claudia Madson, ‘Witchcraft in Tecopsa and Tepepan’; Benson Sales, ‘Sorcery in Santiago El Palmar’; and Annemarie Shimony, ‘Iroquois Witchcraft at Six Nations’, in Dewar E. Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, Moscow, ID, 1970, 73–94, 124–46, 239–65; Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatan, Chicago, 1941, 303–37; Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Spiritual Power in Central America’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, London, 1970, 183–206; Florence H. Ellis, ‘Pueblo Witchcraft and Medicine’; and Louise Spindler, ‘Menomini Witchcraft’, in Walker (ed.), Systems of North American Witchcraft and Sorcery, 37–72, 183–220.

  11.John Middleton, ‘The Concept of “Bewitching” in Lugbara’, Africa, 25 (1955), 252–60; Daryll Forde, ‘Spirits, Witches and Sorcerers in the Supernatural Economy of the Yakö’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88 (1958), 165–78; Robert Brain, ‘Child-witches’; Esther Goo
dy, ‘Legitimate and Illegitimate Aggression in a West African State’; and Malcolm Ruel, ‘Were-animals and the Introverted Witch’, in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 161–79, 207–44, 333–50; Alan Harwood, Witchcraft, Sorcery and Social Categories among the Safwa, Oxford, 1970, ch. 3; Charles-Henry Pradelles de Latour, ‘Witchcraft and the Avoidance of Physical Violence in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, N.S. 1 (1995), 599–609; Fiona Bowie, ‘Witchcraft and Healing among the Bangwa of Cameroon’, in Graham Harvey (ed.), Indigenous Religions, London, 2000, 72; John Parker, ‘Northern Gothic’, Africa, 76 (2006), 352–79; C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, Oxford, 1937, 79–80; E. C. Rapp, ‘Akan’, 8, Africa (1935), 553–4; Michael Jackson, ‘The Man Who Could Turn into an Elephant’, in Michael Jackson and Ivan Karp (eds), Personhood and Agency, Uppsala, 1990, 59–78; Harry G. West, Ethnographic Sorcery, Chicago, 2007, passim.

  12.Ajay Skaria, ‘Women, Witchcraft and Gratuitous Violence in Colonial Western India’, Past and Present, 155 (1997), 109–41; David N. Gellner, ‘Priests, Healers, Mediums and Witches’, Man, N.S. 29 (1994), 33–7; Knut Rio, ‘The Sorcerer as an Absented Third Person’, in Bruce Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Rationalism, New York, 2002, 129–54; Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism, Philadelphia, PA, 1974, 21–32; Nicola Tannenbaum, ‘Witches, Fortune and Misfortune among the Dhan of Northwestern Thailand’; Roy Ellen, ‘Anger, Society and Sorcery’; and Gregory Forth, ‘Social and Symbolic Aspects of the Witch among the Nage of Eastern Indonesia’, in C. W. Watson and Roy Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, Honolulu, 1993, 67–80 and 81–97.

  13.Jackson, ‘The Man Who Could Turn into an Elephant’.

  14.Gary H. Gosan, ‘Animal Souls, Co-Essences, and Human Destiny in Mesoamerica’, in A. James Arnold (ed.), Monsters, Tricksters and Sacred Cows, Charlottesville, NC, 1996, 80–107.

  15.Manning Nash, ‘Witchcraft as Social Process in a Tzeltal Community’, American Indigena, 20 (1961), 121–6.

  16.Hugo G. Nutini and John M. Roberts (eds), Bloodsucking Witchcraft, Tucson, AZ, 1993, passim.

  17.Isaac Schapera, ‘Sorcery and Witchcraft in Bechuanaland’, in Marwick (ed.), Witchcraft and Sorcery, 108–20; Robert F. Gray, ‘Some Structural Aspects of Mbugwe Witchcraft’, in John Middleton and E. H. Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, London, 1963, 143–73; Harriet Ngubane, ‘Aspects of Zulu Treatment’, in J. B. Loudon (ed.), Social Anthroplogy and Medicine, London, 1976, 328–37; Brigit Meyer, ‘If You are a Devil, You are a Witch, and if you are a Witch, you are a Devil’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 22 (1992), 98–132; W. Crooke, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, Allahabad, 1894, 353–6.

  18.M. G. Marwick, ‘The Sociology of Sorcery in a Central African Tribe’, African Studies, 22 (1963), 1–21; Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, Neuchatel, 1912, vol. 2, 461–71; Hugh A. Stayt, The Bavenda, Oxford, 1931, 273–6; Isak A. Niehaus, ‘Witch-hunting and Political Legitimacy’, Africa, 63 (1993), 498–530; Suzette Heald, ‘Witches and Thieves’, Man, N.S. 21 (1986), 65–78; Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft, Charlottesville, VA, 1997), 61–8; George Clement Bond, ‘Ancestors and Witches’, in George Clement Bond and Diane M. Ciekawy (eds), Witchcraft Dialogues, Athens, OH, 2001, 131–57; Simeon Mesaki, ‘Witch-killing in Sukumaland’, in Ray Abrahams (ed.), Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania, Cambridge, 1994, 47–60; Roy Ellen, ‘Introduction’, in Watson and Ellen (eds), Understanding Witchcraft and Sorcery in Southeast Asia, 1–25; Gerald W. Hartwig, ‘Long-Distance Trade and the Evolution of Sorcery among the Kerebe’, African Historical Studies, 4 (1971), 505–24; and see nn. 30 and 33 below.

  19.E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford, 1937, 1.3; Godfrey Lienhardt, ‘Some Notions of Witchcraft amongst the Dinka’, Africa, 21 (1951), 303–18; Jean Buxton, ‘Mandari Witchcraft’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 99–121.

  20.John Middleton, Lugbara Religion, Oxford, 1960, 238–50.

  21.A. W. Howitt, ‘On Australian Medicine Men’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 16 (1887), 34.

  22.A.J.N. Tremearne, The Ban of the Bori, London, 1914, 151.

  23.C. G. Seligmann, The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge, 1910, 282–4.

  24.Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, Oxford, 1961, ch. 6; J. T. Munday, ‘Witchcraft in England and in Central Africa’, in J. T. Munday et al. (eds), Witchcraft, London, 1951, 8–13; Isak Niehaus, Witchcraft, Power and Politics, London, 2001, 25–6; T. O. Beidelman, ‘Witchcraft in Ukaguru’; and Mary Douglas, ‘Techniques of Sorcery Control in Central Africa’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 57–98, 123–41; Barrie Reynolds, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia, London, 1963, ch. 1; C.M.N. White, ‘Witchcraft, Divination and Magic among the Balovale Tribes’, Africa, 18 (1948), 81–104; Jensen Krige and J. D. Krige, The Realm of a Rain Queen, Oxford, 1943, 250–70; Greta Bloomhill, Witchcraft in Africa, London, 1962, 67–76; Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa, Oxford, 1961, 253–9.

  25.Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, Berkeley, 1985, 112; Richard W. Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery, Berkeley, 1967, 65–79.

  26.Deward E. Walker, ‘Nez Perce Sorcery’, Ethnology, 6 (1967), 66–96.

  27.W. D. Hammond-Tooke, ‘The Cape Nguni Witch Familiar as a Mediatory Construct’, Man, N.S. 9 (1974), 128–36; Monica Hunter Wilson, ‘Witch Beliefs and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 56 (1951), 307–12.

  28.J. R. Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, Oxford, 1967, 115–22.

  29.E. H. Winter, ‘The Enemy Within’, in Middleton and Winter (eds), Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa, 277–99.

  30.Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft, New Haven, 1944, chs 1.4, 2.3.

  31.Crawford, Witchcraft and Sorcery in Rhodesia, 1–30, 115–22; Margaret Field, Religion and Medicine of the Gă People, Oxford, 1937, 145–9.

  32.Eytan Bercovitch, ‘Moral Insights’, in Gilbert Herot and Michele Stephen (eds), The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, New Brunswick, 1989, 122–59; Marc Simmons, Witchcraft in the Southwest, Lincoln, NE, 1974, 54–95; Elizabeth Colson, ‘The Father as Witch’, Africa, 70 (2000), 333–58.

  33.Rodney Needham, Primordial Characters, Charlottesville, VA, 1978, 26, 42.

  34.Wanda Wyporska, ‘Witchcraft, Arson and Murder’, Central Europe, 1 (2003), 41–54.

  35.Liv Helene Willumsen, Witches of the North, Leiden, 2013, 274–89.

  36.Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jasmin’s Witch, trans. Brian Pearce, London, 1990, 56–63; Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine, Oxford, 2007, 123–35; Petrus Valderama, Histoire generale du monde, Paris, 1617, vol. 2, 257–61; and sources at n. 37.

  37.Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 109–12, 195–200, 204, 216–17; Henry Charles Lea, Materials Towards a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, Philadelphia, PA, 1939, 372, 394, 403–4.

  38.Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, Reno, NV, 1980, 78; T. P. Vukanovič, ‘Witchcraft in the Central Balkans 1’, Folklore, 100 (1989), 9–24.

  39.For example, Martín del Rio, Disquisitiones magicae, Leuven, 1608, 2.6.17; Henri Boguet, Discours des sorciers, Lyon, 1610, c. 47; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons, Paris, 1612, 4.1.1, 4.1.5, 4.36; Nicholas Remy, Daemonolatriae libri tres, Lyon, 1595, 2.5; Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers, Paris, 1580, 2.6.

  40.See Ernest W. Baughman (ed.), Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America, The Hague, 1966, motif G275, for a large range of examples from historic sources and modern folklore collections. The Irish equivalents often took the form of the ‘milk-sucking hare’, mentioned in Chapter Nine. For early modern English and Scottish instances of the belief, see Richard Galis, A brief treatis
e containing the strange and most horrible cruelty of Elizabeth Stile, London, 1579; A Most Wicked worke of a Wretched Witch, London, 1592; The divels delusions, London, 1649; Doctor Lambs Darling, London, 1653, 7; Joseph Anderson (ed.), ‘The Confessions of the Forfar Witches 1661’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 22 (1887–8), 254–5; Joseph Glanvill, A Philosophical Endeavour towards a Defence of the Being of Witches, London, 1666, 16–17; A True and Impartial Relation of the Informations Against Three Wretches, London, 1682, 21; A tryal of witches at the assizes held at Bury St Edmunds, London, 1682, 7; Francis Bragge, A Full and Impartial Account of the Discovery of Sorcery and Witchcraft, Practis’d by Jane Wenham, London, 1712, preface; John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1834, 563; J. A. Sharpe, Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Yorkshire, Borthwick Paper 81, 1991, 7; and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, webdb.ucs.ed.ac.uk/witches.

  41.De Lancre, Tableau de ‘inconstance des mauvais anges’, 2.4.6; Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 75–8.

  42.Athanasius of Alexandria, Vita Antonii, c. 9.

  43.Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edition, London, 1993, 39–41. For visual representations of demons in animal or part-animal form, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton, 2003.

  44.This is recorded in the ‘Narrative’ printed in L. S. Davidson and J. O Ward (eds), The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler, Ashville, NC, 2005, 26–70.

  45.Edited in Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), L’imaginaire du sabbat, Lausanne, 1999, 30–45.

  46.Edited in ibid., 289–99.

  47.Dommenico Mammoli, The Record of the Trial and Condemnation of a Witch, Matteuccia di Francesco, at Todi, 20 March 1428, Rome, 1972.

  48.Ostorero et al. (eds) L’imaginaire du sabbat, 339–53.

  49.Ibid., 451–82.

  50.Georg Modestin, Le diable chez l’évêque, Lausanne, 1999, 186–275; Martine Ostorero et al. (eds), Inquisition et sorcellerie en Suisse Romande, Lausanne, 2007, 40–65; Martine Ostorero, Folâtrer avec les démons, Lausanne, 1995, 237–75.