Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  As Briggs and others have pointed out, our primary sources for these events are fragmentary, skewed, and unreliable, since they consist almost entirely of trial records and confessions obtained as a result of threats and torture. Nevertheless historians have come up with a variety of definitive, sometimes contradictory, explanations for the phenomena: economic, political, social, and religious.

  Robin Briggs’s approach is far more modest. He politely remarks that few of the theories of other historians “are wholly worthless,” though it is clear that he considers many of them extremely limited. Again and again he apologizes for his inability to come to definite conclusions, since the evidence is so patchy, compromised, and contradictory. Yet in spite of these continual disclaimers, his book on the subject, Witches and Neighbors, contains several interesting observations. Its title, for instance, is descriptive rather than exclusive. According to Briggs, most accused witches were neighbors and/or close acquaintances of their accusers. Also, as a rule, episodes of witchcraft persecution were not “essentially directed and managed from above” by the authorities, as some historians have claimed. Instead, they were the end result of long-term, small-scale social and economic conflict and superstitious belief. Today, Briggs remarks, “many people deal with social conflict as the African nomads did; they move on or find new groups to associate with.” Meanwhile, in static communities all over the world, belief in witches flourishes.

  Witches and Neighbors is based on an extensive investigation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century data from Western, Northern, and Central Europe and New England, and also “a close study of nearly 400 trials from Lorraine” in eastern France. Anyone who has ever sat in a provincial library or courthouse, trying to read a very old document in a foreign language, written in crabbed handwriting and ink faded to burnt brown on crumbling paper, must feel awe and admiration for Professor Briggs and the use he has been able to make of this obscure and recalcitrant material.

  The villages of late sixteenth-century Lorraine, as Briggs reveals them, seem to have been full to the brim of petty disputes and sudden ludicrous events:

  Claudon Colas Colin warned Jennon Etienne to keep her geese out of his meadow—She passed before his horses and held out her arms, whereupon one of them fell down, dying a few hours later.

  Even representatives of the Church were not immune from these occurrences.

  The curé of Bisping had helped arrange a marriage and was roused early from his bed to join the party which fetched the bride. As they went on their way Senelle Fetter, whose own son had been an unsuccessful suitor for the girl’s hand, was seen looking over her door at them. The curé started to feel unwell—He took to his bed with fever and a swollen leg, to die maintaining that she had given him the illness.

  As Briggs points out, most societies studied by anthropologists or historians believe in witches. The only exceptions are a few nomadic African tribes, who developed witches as soon as they settled down. Witchcraft, his book suggests, is the outward manifestation of inescapable social conflict. If you live in the same place for several years, sooner or later one of your neighbors will do something that irritates you very much. This is even more likely if you are in direct economic competition with him or her, as early modern villagers were. If you, like almost everyone else in your village, believe in the power of spells and the evil eye, it is a short step to blaming your most unpleasant neighbors for whatever goes wrong.

  If times are hard, Briggs remarks, fears and accusations of witchcraft seem to be even more common. This happened during the sixteenth century, when most people in Europe suffered a continuing drop in their living standards. Overpopulation reduced stocks of food and depressed wages; there was increased competition for scant resources such as wood for fuel: “Wages declined in real terms, work became harder to find, pauperization spread.” Briggs compares the condition of the peasantry to that of “people trying to cling to a sharply inclined sandhill.” Local misfortunes also played a part: “Devastating weather, plagues of insects, epidemics of animal disease and similar misfortunes might arouse villages or larger regions to peaks of anxiety.”

  When things went wrong in these communities, a common reaction was to look around for someone to blame. Usually the suspected witch already had a reputation for being difficult and easily offended, or unreasonably demanding. In a subsistence village economy it was taken for granted that you would help your neighbors out when things went badly for them, and that they would return the favor. Gossip and suspicion focused on people who openly envied and resented others’ good fortune, and on those who frequently asked to borrow food or small sums of money but seldom returned the favor. Social slights were also apt to end in suspicions of witchcraft. The neighbor who was not invited to a wedding or a christening feast was frequently blamed for subsequent problems, especially if he or she showed resentment. As Briggs points out, this theme passed into folklore as the familiar motif of the excluded witch or fairy godmother taking her revenge.

  Unusually persistent or ungrateful beggars were also very apt to be accused. In a world without organized public assistance, charity was a religious duty. Besides, the local beggars were often also longtime neighbors: people who in the past had been self-supporting, but were now too old, ill, or crippled to work, and had no relatives to support them. When times were hard, charity could become onerous. More and more often, the demands of aggressive beggars for money or food were met with refusal. And, as any big-city resident today can testify, beggars who are turned down often become unpleasant; they may even curse those who have refused to give. In sixteenth-century rural Europe, such reactions were taken seriously, and might be blamed for any subsequent misfortune, even if there had been no overt threat:

  Margueritte Liegey, known as la Geline (“the hen”), had allegedly been a much feared beggar … for twenty years. After Claude George refused her alms one day she fell ill with her mouth twisted—

  Most accused witches, according to Professor Briggs and many other modern historians, were very far from the skilled and powerful figures of folk belief, though in their confessions they—and their examiners—drew heavily on these beliefs. At first they usually denied being witches, or claimed that they only used their knowledge for good. It was only later, after long-drawn-out examinations which often included torture, that they confessed to having cast evil spells, signed a compact with the Devil, or attended witches’ Sabbaths.

  Public accusations of witchcraft, however, were in fact extremely rare. When people believed themselves bewitched, the most common reaction was to ask or force the suspected person to remove the spell by means of a gift, a touch, or a prayer. If he or she refused, or denied responsibility, one might try some do-it-yourself charms and prayers. The next line of defense was to consult an expert: either the local priest, or a “cunning man” or “cunning woman” who would confirm the identity of the culprit and cast a counterspell. (Cunning men and women, of course, had considerable prestige in local society, but since they were known to have special powers, they were also in danger of being accused as witches.)

  As Robin Briggs points out, it usually took at least fifteen or twenty years of gossip and suspicion before there was a formal accusation, and the majority of cases never reached the courts. There were several reasons for this. First, whether or not you won your case, the accused witch and his or her friends and relatives were very likely to take revenge on you—either magically or materially. The accused person might also decide to declare that you, too, were a witch; you might then soon find yourself in the same prison.

  Second, the economic consequences of a witchcraft trial could be devastating for the accuser. Traditionally the property of a condemned witch went to the state or local government to defray the costs of the trial, which might be very heavy. But if, as often happened, the witch was too poor to pay, the entire village (including the accuser) was liable for costs. If the witch was acquitted, the accuser might hav
e to pay all costs, and could also be sued for slander. In some European jurisdictions, moreover, “it was still normal practice to imprison plaintiff as well as accused” until the initial depositions had been taken.

  As a result, when there was a formal accusation it was common for several families or individuals to pool their grievances and suspicions, assuming probably that there was safety in numbers. Occasionally, Briggs relates, wholesale accusations were employed by the local political authorities to get rid of unwanted persons, usually vagrants and beggars—an early and drastic parallel to current denunciations of homeless and unemployed people, who (like witches) may be blamed for a wide variety of social ills.

  Today, the popular stereotype of the witch is invariably a poor old woman. Historically, this is only partially correct. It is true that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many witches were at the bottom of village society, or at least less well off than their accusers. Sometimes, however, the rich and powerful were accused—though usually by the even more rich and powerful, or their dependents. In such cases, the details tended to be extravagant. In 1588 the vice-governor of Trier was accused of having gone to the witches’ Sabbath “in a golden wagon to urge the destruction of all the crops.” “On other occasions he and his followers … brought on a terrible hailstorm that killed forty-six cows, by standing in a brook and pouring water over their heads in the name of a thousand devils.”

  The accused witches tended to be older than the average villager; but as Briggs points out, in most cases suspicion against them had been building for at least fifteen or twenty years, it must often have started when they were fairly young. The idea that all witches were female is also an error. In many parts of Europe, Briggs says, “men comprised 20 or 25 percent of those charged; in some, including large areas of France, they actually formed a majority.” (According to Briggs, in a study of modern rural France, where belief in witchcraft is still prevalent, one out of four suspected witches was male.)

  Briggs’s explanation for this gender imbalance is that women were and are apt to be poorer and more dependent, and that they were and are more apt to be associated with the family and the household: thus, domestic disasters such as the illness of a cow or a child are more likely to be blamed on them. He also points out that contrary to the belief of some contemporary feminists, midwives were less likely than the average woman to be accused, though they were often consulted when witchcraft was suspected.

  Briggs takes pains to disprove other popular misconceptions about the persecutions of suspected witches. For example, he tells us that most estimates now put the number of people executed in Europe between 1450 and 1750 at forty to fifty thousand—not, as some modern writers claim, nine million. The persecutions were also far from general. Though most of the common people believed in the existence of witches, “a substantial majority of towns and villages did not experience a single trial, successful or otherwise, over the whole period.”

  Though many accused witches denied the charge, or confessed only under torture, Briggs thinks that some of them came to believe in their own powers. After all, if you already believe in witches, and the curses you utter in a moment of rage or resentment come true, maybe you’re one of them. And if you have good reason to be angry, envious, or resentful—if you’re poorer and less lucky than your neighbors—the idea that you have special powers can be attractive. As Briggs points out, though, the power of witches “was essentially negative, to drag others down with them.” It is clear from the trial records that though the Devil might promise a witch wealth and prosperity, or the ability to heal others, he almost never came through on these promises. His only sure gift was the power to harm.

  In England and Scotland, interestingly, the pact with the Devil was usually replaced by a compact with an animal familiar who was his representative. Frequently the animal was a cat, but dogs, chickens, ferrets, hares, toads, and hedgehogs were also reported. Usually the witch was believed to suckle the familiar with her own blood—a striking instance of the traditional British devotion to pets.

  Though most of Robin Briggs’s tentative explanations of the witchcraft persecutions seem reasonable, he does occasionally propose psychological explanations that will strike some readers as limited. He suggests, for instance, that some people projected their own hostile wishes toward their relatives onto outsiders, and then called them witches. Parents, he says, sometimes feel but repress hostility toward their children; and children often wish that their younger siblings would die. If these people did in fact die, “fear and repressed guilt would then combine to direct suspicion at surrogate figures.” This seems plausible, if impossible to prove; on the other hand, it is unlikely that most people would have felt repressed hostility toward a cow or a pig or a field of hay, and projected such wishes onto their neighbors.

  Diane Purkiss avoids the problem of the confusing, fragmentary, and probably biased records of the witchcraft trials by putting aside any attempt to find out what “really happened” and concentrating on what people thought happened, both then and now. In The Witch in History, Ms. Purkiss, who is a Lecturer in English at Reading University, has interesting things to say about contemporary witchcraft, and some striking if idiosyncratic comments about earlier (mainly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century) material.

  Some readers will be turned off:—and others, no doubt, turned on—by Purkiss’s vocabulary. This is full of words like “problematics,” “gender theory,” “reify,” “recuperation,” and “valorize”—words that are like red petticoats to prestructuralists. When some people see these words, they become maddened and charge. I felt a little restive myself at first, and began to paw the ground, but gradually I calmed down.

  In Part I of The Witch in History, Purkiss examines the beliefs of the contemporary witchcraft movement. Today most educated Americans and Europeans who identify themselves as witches or pagans, and many who are merely sympathetic to the movement, believe what Purkiss calls “a religious myth— The religion it defines is radical feminism.” According to this myth, she says, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe millions of women who lived alone and worked as herbalists and midwives were accused of witchcraft and burned alive because their independence, sexual freedom, and medical knowledge threatened established religion and medicine. This myth, Purkiss points out, is also “often linked with another lapsarian myth, the myth of an originary matriarchy.” Radical feminist historians, Purkiss says, treat the witchcraft myth as relevant not only to the past but to the present. They believe (with some justification) that male authority is still trying to suppress strong women— though evidently with more success in some parts of the world than others.

  Though Diane Purkiss sees—and presents—the attractions of the witchcraft myth, she is also aware of its drawbacks. Her relation to contemporary witchcraft on the whole is ambiguous—as seems natural for a writer who confesses in her introduction that as a child her favorite book was The Wizard of Oz, and that she identified strongly with both Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West. At four, her favorite game involved pouring a bucket of imaginary water over her mother, who “gamely went through the motions of melting many times a day.” (Robin Briggs, writing in a very different tradition, that of the very private British academic, only informs us by implication that he gets on well with his colleagues and likes his wife.)

  Purkiss begins by describing the creation of the witchcraft myth in modern times. For example, she describes the transformation of the “action wing” of New York Radical Women, WITCH, from the potentially dangerous Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell of 1968 to “a mild-mannered bunch of consumer-rights groups” with names like Women Intent on Toppling Consumer Holidays and Women Inspired to Commit Her-story. As she says, “committing her-story is significantly less threatening than committing terrorist acts.” The problem, in her view, is that far too often “herstory” becomes what she calls “hystery”—a false and melodramatic
version of the past.

  Purkiss also analyzes, rather critically, several modern literary versions of the witchcraft myth, such as those that occur in the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, where death by fire is embraced and sexualized—in spite of the fact that English and American witches were hanged and not burned. She appears to think better of Fay Weldon’s rather frightening novel Puffball, in which the witch is wicked and spiteful, pointing out that this is the kind of story “early modern women themselves told about witches.”

  One distortion of the feminist witchcraft myth that Diane Purkiss particularly deplores is the attempt to compare the witchcraft persecutions with the Holocaust, in part by inflating the number of women who died. The most frequently cited figure in feminist literature, she says, is nine million. “Worryingly, this goes two million better than the Holocaust, as if a competition is afoot, and at times there does seem to be a race on to prove that women have suffered more than victims of racism and genocide (as though women have not been among the victims of racism and genocide).” Feminists like Mary Daly, Purkiss thinks, “seem unaware that the Holocaust itself bore more heavily upon women, who were much less likely to be selected for work and hence survival than young men, and who were gassed automatically if pregnant or nursing an infant.” Such writers, Purkiss suggests, can sometimes become potential persecutors of women themselves, as when Mary Daly identifies nonliberated females as “fem-bots” (female robots).