Witches wishing to inflict harm on someone could fill the Bellarmine Jug with the nail parings, the hair, and the urine of their intended victim. (In the days of chamberpots, it wasn’t actually that difficult to get the urine sample.) Sometimes a scrap of red cloth was cut in the shape of a heart, then pierced with pins, and put inside, too. Once the jug was sealed again, it was buried in some secret spot or hurled into a river. Then it was considered just a matter of time before the victim began to sicken and fail.
The Bellarmine Jug was also often used as a defensive measure. If someone thought he had been cursed, he could procure the same personal items from his presumed nemesis and make his own witch bottle. Then, at midnight, while reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, he could put the witch bottle in the fire to boil. The witch, it was thought, would feel her blood boil in the same way, and knowing that her curse had been thrown back at her she would quickly move to lift it. If the bottle exploded (which must have been particularly unpleasant) it was assumed that the witch had died.
The custom of the witch bottle has been around for many years. As late as the 1850s, a famous English herbalist and astrologer known as James (“Cunning”) Murrell was using them in his country practice. Murrell lived in a little weatherboard cottage across a narrow lane from the Hadleigh Church. One day a girl showed up there in uncontrollable hysterics, scrambling on all fours, barking furiously like a dog. Her family suspected it was a gypsy’s curse at work because earlier in the day, the girl had found a gypsy woman in the barn, and ordered her out. The woman had gone, but not before muttering, “You’ll be sorry for this, my girl.” That’s when the fits had begun.
Murrell concurred with the family’s diagnosis. He immediately prepared a witch bottle, filling it with herbs, pins, and samples of the girl’s own urine and blood. (Although using the girl’s own fluids was unusual, it was not unheard of.) Then he put the bottle on the fire to boil. The room was darkened, the doors locked, and everyone present was enjoined to keep perfect silence or the counterspell would not work.
A short while later, as they sat silently around the fire, they heard footsteps approaching the door, then loud and persistent knocking. An old woman cried out, “For God’s sake, stop! You’re killing me!” A second later the bottle burst, and the woman’s voice died away. The girl’s fits abated.
The next day, on a roadside three miles away, the half-burnt body of the gypsy woman was discovered by a passing traveler.
THE WITCH HUNT
Though the words “witch” and “witchcraft” had already been in use for well over a thousand years, and its practices employed in countries all over the world, it was chiefly in western Europe, between 1450 and 1750, that the witch mania — and such it was — reached its terrible peak. It was then that the churches, Catholic and Protestant both, declared war on witches and raised them to a previously unheard-of prominence. It was then, too, that the churches led their adherents in what might be described as a massive pogrom, a roundup of these witches that resulted in unimaginable horrors and grisly executions. By some accounts, up to 200,000 people — mostly women — were tried, found guilty, and either hanged from the gallows or burned at the stake. (As a special mercy, those scheduled for burning were sometimes strangled first.) It was a mass hysteria and persecution seldom rivaled in human history.
Who were its victims? Chiefly, they were the women who had always concocted charms and folk remedies and herbal brews — many of which had genuine medicinal properties — and who had passed such secrets along. They were women who had the added misfortunes of living alone, of having a pet, of being old, poor, unattractive, and possibly a bit addled. These women ran the greatest risk of being charged with witchcraft, and could call on the fewest resources in their own defense.
But even youth and beauty were no protection: in 1629, a nineteen-year-old girl, Barbara Gobel, was burned at the stake; the executioner’s list describes her as “the fairest maid in Wurzburg.” Not far off, another young woman who went to the stake was called the “fairest and the purest maiden in all Cologne.” Sometimes it was their very youth, beauty, and even piety which attracted the attention of the eager demonologists; these virtues, it was assumed, were just a clever disguise, Satan’s way of concealing his followers among the innocent flock. But the witch-finders were not to be so easily fooled.
Clearly, there was no guarantee of safety for anyone.
Consequently, the persecutions went on and on and on . . .
THE LEGAL ARMORY
Witchcraft being a difficult charge to verify in court, judges and prosecutors were always happy to have any authoritative help they could get. For many years two books, weighty with erudition and freewheeling with their suggestions, provided them with all the ammunition they needed.
One was De La Demonomanie des Sorciers (or, Of the Demonomania of Witches). Written by a French lawyer and demonologist named Jean Bodin, the book was first published in Paris in 1580, though it appeared in numerous editions and translations thereafter. Bodin had served as a judge in many witchcraft trials, and in the Demonomanie he gathered together all that he had learned. Among other things, Bodin offered one of the first legal definitions of a witch: “One who knowing God’s laws tries to bring about some act through an agreement with the Devil.”
A particularly callous work, the Demonomanie provided plenty of tips for eager prosecutors. “One must not adhere to the ordinary rules of prosecution,” Bodin advised, for “proof of such evil is so obscure and difficult that not one out of a million witches would be accused or punished, if regular legal procedure were followed.” Consequently, Bodin recommended a number of questionable courtroom measures: the names of informers were never to be told, children were to be forced to indict their parents, suspicion of witchcraft was enough to warrant torture (“for popular rumor is almost never misinformed”), and “a person once accused should never be acquitted, unless the falsity of the accuser is clearer than the sun.”
Bodin came down equally hard on the sentencing issue. All in favor of gruesome executions, he worried nonetheless that witches were often getting off too lightly: “Whatever punishment one can order against witches by roasting and cooking them over a slow fire is not really very much, and not as bad as the torment which Satan has made for them in this world, to say nothing of the eternal agonies which are prepared for them in hell, for the fire here cannot last more than an hour or so until the witches have died.”
Any judge who failed to dispatch a convicted witch should, in Bodin’s view, be executed himself.
The other book much loved by witch-hunters, and once described as “a perfect armory of judicial murder,” was known as the Malleus Maleficarum (or The Witches’ Hammer), first published in 1486. Bodin took much of his own information and zeal from its pages. Written in Latin by two Dominican friars, Jakob Sprenger, the Dean of Cologne University, and Prior Heinrich Kramer, the book was a virtual bible of witchcraft practice and lore. It was also one of the first international bestsellers, going into no less than thirteen editions before 1520, and sixteen more between 1574 and 1669. There were translations in German, French, English, and Italian.
The book was divided into three parts. The first part exhorted civil and ecclesiastical authorities to recognize the enormous scope of witchcraft — the number of its adherents, and the abominations they performed. It described in rambling, lurid detail how they renounced the Catholic faith, paid homage to Satan, cavorted with incubi and succubi. It also pointed out that to have any doubts about the existence of witches was in itself heretical: in Exodus 22:18, the Bible said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” What more instruction could you ask than that?
The second part was an intensive study of the various kinds of maleficia witches could do. Maleficia covered all the injuries and misfortunes that could befall mankind — from crop failures to heart attacks — and for which no other obvious cause was apparent; such trouble was assumed to be the malice of witches at work in the world.
In the final portion, the book got down to cases — literally. It explained how to start a legal action against a witch, how to gather evidence, and how to extract that all-important confession: technically speaking, a witch could not be condemned without one. But as the text (a quarter million words, all told) also offered lots of tips on interrogation, imprisonment and torture, the confession was never that difficult to come by.
This last part of the Malleus Maleficarum has one other distinction; it appears to be chiefly the work of only one of the authors, Heinrich Kramer, who had had plenty of experience in the pursuit and prosecution of witches. He had spearheaded the effort in the Tyrol, and he’d done it with such ferocity that even the Tyroleans had rebelled against him. At one point, to bolster his case, he’d hired a local woman (of easy virtue and meager means) to hide in an oven and pretend to be the Devil; from inside, she denounced many of the local townspeople. Kramer had then rounded them up and put them through the most extreme forms of torture. The Bishop of Blixen, after much struggle, eventually succeeded in expelling him from the region. But Kramer was a busy man; in 1484, he procured from Innocent VIII a papal bull silencing opposition to witch hunts. And with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, he restored himself to pride of place as witch expert extraordinaire.
INTERROGATION
When witch trials were at their height, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the interrogation of suspected witches became so routine that in many regions a set list of questions was developed that could be used quickly and uniformly. The judges of Colmar in Alsace, for instance, arrived at twenty-nine in all, which they labeled: Questions to Be Asked of a Witch:
How long have you been a witch?
Why did you become a witch?
How did you become a witch, and what happened on that occasion?
Who is the one you chose to be your incubus? What was his name?
What was the name of your master among the evil demons?
What was the oath you were forced to render him?
How did you make this oath, and what were its conditions?
What finger were you forced to raise? Where did you consummate your union with your incubus?
What demons and what other humans participated at the sabbat?
What food did you eat there?
How was the sabbat banquet arranged?
Were you seated at the banquet?
What music was played there, and what dances did you dance?
What did your incubus give you for your intercourse?
What devil’s mark did your incubus make on your body?
What injury have you done to such and such a person, and how did you do it?
Why did you inflict this injury?
How can you relieve this injury?
What herbs or what other methods can you use to cure these injuries?
Who are the children on whom you have cast a spell? And why have you done it?
What animals have you bewitched to sickness or death, and why did you commit such acts?
Who are your accomplices in evil?
Why does the devil give you blows in the night?
What is the ointment with which you rub your broomstick made of?
How are you able to fly through the air? What magic words do you utter then?
What tempests have you raised, and who helped you to produce them?
What [plagues of] vermin and caterpillars have you created?
What do you make these pernicious creatures out of and how do you do it?
Has the devil assigned a limit to the duration of your evildoing?
Considering that witches were questioned under torture, and that failing to reply just increased the punishment, it’s not surprising that there were many confessions. The victim’s replies were sometimes entered in court records with a simple “affirmat” (admitted); at other times, a scribe prepared what was called a relatio, a kind of public summary of what happened in court, including, most notably, the witch’s full confession. Written in the first person, as if the witch were simply telling her story of her own volition, these confessions had to be signed by the witch herself, and were generally read aloud to the crowd that assembled later on for the execution.
TESTING, TESTING
In trials for witchcraft, a thousand different stratagems were used to ferret out the guilt of the accused and elicit that all-important confession. If the usual methods of torture didn’t work — and they seldom failed — there were other tests that the prosecutors could employ.
One of the oldest, revived in the twelfth century from a far earlier time, was the bier right.
The ritual itself was fairly simple: the body of a murder victim was laid out, and the accused was brought toward it. If the body bled anew, then that was all the proof needed. In the view of many noted demonologists, the hatred that the murder victim felt for the murderer remained in the body somehow, and the approach of the murderer made the victim’s blood surge once more.
In the Dalkeith witch trial of 1661, a woman named Christine Wilson was accused of murder but claimed she was innocent. The bier right was invoked by the court. Wilson, according to a manuscript in Scotland’s National Museum of Antiquities, “refused to come nigh the corpse or to touch it, saying that she never touched a dead corpse in her life. But being earnestly desired by the minister and bailiffs . . . that she would but touch the corpse softly, she granted to do it . . . she touching the wound of the dead man very softly, it being white and clean without any spot of blood or the like, yet immediately, while her finger was upon it, the blood rushed out of it to the great admiration of all the beholders, who took it as a discovery of the murderer.”
Swimming the witch was another method of ascertaining guilt, though this one could prove fatal regardless of the outcome. The reputed witch was first elaborately tied, her right thumb to her left big toe, and vice versa, so that she was “cross bound”: then, while loosely roped to men on shore, she was thrown into deep water to see if she would sink. If she did (and sometimes drowned in the process), she was declared innocent. But if she managed to stay afloat, she was determined to be a witch. The rationale? It was the considered opinion of no less a figure than King James I of England, as expressed in his Daemonologie (1597), that witches, having “shaken off them the sacred water of baptism and willfully refused the benefit thereof,” would be rejected — that is, made to float on the surface — of any body of water they were ducked in.
Witches were also presumed to be preternaturally light (allowing one more reason for why they might float). By this same reasoning, they were occasionally weighed against the big Bible in the parish church. But this test was not used as often as others, perhaps because too many suspected witches managed to pass it.
THE WITCH-FINDER GENERAL
Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witch-Finder General, had methods of his own for the discovery of witchcraft, including what he claimed to be a secret list containing the names of all those who had made such a pact with the Devil. This list, of course, was never seen by anyone but himself.
Armed with it, Hopkins launched in 1645 a bloody purge of witches throughout the eastern counties of England; before he was stopped, he had sent hundreds of people to the stake and the gallows, making himself, not incidentally, a wealthy man along the way.
The son of a minister, Hopkins took up the law. Despite being ruthless and utterly unscrupulous by nature, his practice in Ipswich mysteriously failed to thrive. He knew he had to find some other line of work, and it was while he was casting around for the right opportunity that the witch craze began to seize the Puritan areas of England. Recognizing his chance, Hopkins quickly read a few books on the subject— including Daemonologie by James I, Potts’s account of the Lancashire witches, and Richard Bernard’s Guide to Grand Jurymen — and then hung out his shingle as Witch-Finder General. For a price (at first a pound per head) he claimed to be able to root out and exterminate the witches in any cit
y or village. And in only a few months’ time, he had more business than he knew what to do with.
His first big chance came when the wife of a tailor in the town of Manningtree fell ill, and the tailor became convinced that it was the work of a witch, a one-legged old woman named Elisabeth Clarke. Hopkins got wind of the charge and flew into town to lead the prosecution. He convinced the local magistrates that he should be allowed to keep the prisoner awake for several days and nights in a row, ostensibly to catch her familiars, or imps, when they came for their regular feeding. In fact, he simply wanted to torture Clarke through sleep deprivation. After a few days, during which Hopkins and his cronies claimed to have witnessed the visitations of a whole range of familiars, including a kitten, two dogs, a hare, a toad, and a polecat, the old woman, exhausted and confused, made a full confession. When questioned about her accomplices, she gave the name of another old woman, Anne West.
Now Hopkins was on a roll. He arrested Anne West, and remarkably, the woman’s own daughter, Rebecca, confirmed that her mother was a witch. Rebecca went on to tell stories about other local women, too, who she said read from a book of incantations, prayed to the Devil, and sent their imps — two dogs and two kittens — to do harm to both cattle and humans all over the district. Hopkins rounded up the others, and before leaving town he had succeeded in having six of the women, including Clarke and Anne West, hanged. The daughter, who admitted that she too had had carnal relations with the Devil, was for unknown reasons spared.
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