Topic- History of Medieval Witchcraft (part 2) Teacher- Weavre Weavre-- You can see the topic of tonight's 101 by typing /topic, if you don't already know it. Actually, I'll focus on the political background and written history of the affair, rather than the philosophy, for now. Just. to emphasize the point, Salem, MA, is not in Europe ... that's a topic for a whole 'nother class!) Last week, I started off with some material from a 1948 text', *The History of Magic*, by Kurt Seligmann. That passage was chosen rather purposefully, and I was a bit ... er..."frustrated" when I split without having a chance to explain it well, so I'll do that here, first. It was a vivid passage describing the pressures of peasant life under feudalism, and how the Christian author of the book believed these pagan people came to be accused of diabolism. The simple facts in it were not entirely accurate, but I think it does provide an important perspective, 1948 is long before most social scientists considered blaming the ,system, rather than the victim, for social injustice, but Seligmann did exactly that. And, fie gave a good, memorable image of the political system in which the witchcraft scares began. But, most importantly, he illustrated that Christian authors did, indisputably, find it necessary to assure that the pagan peoples their religious forbears had oppressed were Satanic. (By "Satanic", I am referring to Christian diabolism, not Ben's pagan tradition!) (note from Ilana, see Sadogoat's Wicca 101s) 1948 was before the repeal of Britain's Witchcraft Act, which we'll look at shortly. And, Seligmann was writing from a Christian viewpoint. Still, he was a good enough scholar to realize that Christian diabolism cannot exist in a non-Christian society ... which I left him stuck with a moral dilemma. Which he resolved by rationalizing the means by which pagans might become satanists in the kind of society that existed. In fact, I do not have any grounds to dispute that his theory might be accurate for some few individuals, but we do know that such diabolism was never popular enough to account either for all the pagans that existed before the 15th century, or for all the accusations of witchcraft that flamed during the next 300 or so years. Anyway, you now have the quickie version of the explanation for why I chose to present material that contained some factual inaccuracies...basically, it also contained some important truths. That said, onward to the "new" material. Actually, I'll backtrack just a little bit, for the sake of those who weren't here and haven't read the log. The following, except where noted, is taken mostly verbatim from an article by Jeffrey Burton Russell, entitled "Witchcraft" and first published in The Encyclopedia of Religion. (Full reference available if anyone wants it). His article actually covers three forms of witchcraft: "Sorcery," his word for what we would call "natural" magic, practiced by preliterate cultures around the world, European witchcraft, and modem (our) witchcraft. The second one is what we're looking at tonight. I'll give you a little background first, which is already contained in the first log for those who were here (about 5 minutes worth): The sorcery (remember, that's simple, traditional magic) of most cultures involved incantations supposed to summon spirits to aid the sorcerer. In many societies the connection between sorcery and the spirits was not explicitly formulated. (Much Wiccan magic falls in this category...no explicit connection) But, in both Greco-Roman and Hebrew thought the connection was defined or elaborated. The Greeks believed that all sorcerers drew upon the aid of spirits called daimones or daimonia. A Greek "demon" could be either malevolent or benevolent. It could be almost a god (theos), or it could be a petty spirit, In the thought of Plotinus (205-270 CE)and other Neoplatonists, the demons occupied an ontological rank between the gods and humanity. The Hebrews gradually developed the idea of the mal'akh, originally a manifestation of God's power, later an independent spirit sent down as a messenger by God. In Greek translations Christians eventually identified "angels" with the Greek "demons" and defined them as beings ontologically between God and humanity. But a different element gained influence through the apocalyptic writings of the Hellenistic period (200 BCE-150 CE): the belief in evil spirits led by Satan, lord of all evil. The idea had limited precedents in earlier Jewish thought but gained prominence in the Hellenistic period under the influence of Iranian Mazdaism, or Zoroastrianism. Under such influence the Christians came to divide the Greek daimones into 2 groups, the good angels and the evil demons. The demons were supposed to be angels who, under Satan's leadership, had turned against God and thereby become evil spirits. Sorcerers sought to compel spirits to carry out their will, but angels under God's command could not be compelled; thus it was supposed that one practicing sorcery might well be drawing upon the aid of evil demons. This was the central idea of the variety of witchcraft we are to discuss, the alleged diabolism of the late medieval and Renaissance periods in Europe. Although simple sorcery had always existed, a new kind of diabolical witchcraft evolved in medieval and early modern Europe. The Christian concept of the devil transformed the idea of the sorcerer into that of the witch (here the word does *not* mean Wiccan!) are consorters with demons and subjects of Satan. Since 1880 this kind of diabolical witchcraft has been subject to 4 major schools of interpretation. The first, rooted in classical nineteenth-century liberalism, perceived witchcraft as an invention of superstitious and greedy ecclesiastics eager to prosecute witches in order to augment their own power and wealth. The second school, that of Margaret Murray, argued that witchcraft represented the survival of the old pagan religion of pre-Christian Europe. This religion, which never existed *in the coherent form she believed*) (NOTE: This does not say it didn't exist. at all. Murray believed that the pagan religion of Western Europe was a united, continent-wide, organized, entity ... that's the part that is no longer believed to have existed!) BTW ... that's where I split before, so the logs tack together there too. continuing ... ) she supposed to be the religion of the majority of the people down into the 17th century, although subject to constant persecution by the Christian authorities. Murray's theory had great influence from the 1920's through the 1950's; unsupported by any credible evidence, it is now rejected by almost all scholars. The third school emphasizes the social history of witchcraft, seeking to analyze the patterns of witch accusations in Europe much as the anthropologists have done for other societies. The fourth school emphasizes the evolution of the idea of witchcraft from elements gradually assembled over the centuries. Most scholars currently belong to one or the other of the last two schools. The Historical Development *note again: here, I am using witchcraft to refer to a Medieval phenomenon, not to modem Wicca, in case you've recently joined us or forgotten... The first element in diabolical. witchcraft was simple sorcery, which existed in Europe as it did elsewhere. It persisted through the period of the witch craze and indeed has persisted to the present. Without this fundamental element, witchcraft would not have existed. The second, related aspect was the survival of pagan religion and folklore in Christian Europe, or rather the demonstrable survival. and transmutation of certain elements *from* paganism. The Canon Episcopi, a legal document of the Frankish kingdom issued about AD 900, condemns "wicked women ... who believe that they ride out at night on beasts with Diana, the pagan Goddess .... Such fantasies are thrust into the minds of faithless people not by God but by the Devil." The wild ride with Diana (the classical name applied to the Teutonic goddess Hilda, Holda, or Bertha) was a form of the "wild hunt," a troop of spirits following a male or female Teutonic deity. Such spirits were believed to ride out at night blowing their horns and striking down any human that had. the temerity or ill fortune to encounter them. Another element in the development of diabolical witchcraft in Europe was Christian heresy. The classical formulation of witchcraft had been established by the 15th century. Its elements were: pact with the Devil formal repudiation of Christ the secret nocturnal meeting the ride by night the desecration of the Eucharist and the crucifix, orgy sacrificial infanticide cannibalism Each of these elements derived from one or another charge made against medieval heretics. Heresy became the medium through which sorcery was linked with the Devil. At the first formal trial of heretics in the Middle Ages, at Orleans in 1022, the accused were said to hold orgies underground at night, to call. up evil spirits, to kill and cremate children conceived at previous orgies and use their ashes in blasphemous parody of the Eucharist, and to pay homage to the Devil. The history of such charges goes at least as far back as the court of Antiochus I V Epiphanes of Syria (176-165 BCE), who made similar accusations against the Jews; the pagan Romans used them against the Christians, and the early Christians used them against the gnostics. An early 11th century pedant must have resurrected the charges from patristic accounts of gnostic heresy and applied them to the Orleans group, applying the archetypal thinking common in the Middle Ages: a heretic is a heretic, and whatever one heretic does another must also do. Thus the *idea* of heresy, more than any actual heresy itself, became the basis for the connection of heresy with witchcraft. Some later heretical groups, such as the sect of the Free Spirit, also were accused of similar diabolical crimes. Not all heretics were so charged, however. On the whole the accusations were limited to those who had some connection with dualism, the doctrine that not one but two eternal principles struggled for control of the cosmos. Dualist influence on most medieval heresies was indirect, but upon Catharism it was both direct and pronounced. Catharism was a dualist heresy imported into western Europe from the Balkans in the 1140's. Strong in southern France and northern Italy for well over a century, it dominated the culture of Languedoc and the Midi in the years around 1200; it was suppressed by the Albigensian crusade and eradicated by the Inquisition. The Cathari believed that matter, and the human body in particular, were creations of the evil god, whose intent was to hold the spirit imprisoned in the "filthy tomb of the flesh", 'The evil god is Satan, lord of this world, ruler of all material things and manipulator of the human desires for them. Money, sex, and worldly success were the domain of the devil. These doctrines brought the devil closer to the center of attention than he had been since the time of the Deert Fathers a thousand years earlier. If only to refute Catharist theories, scholastic theologians had to give the Devil his due. The Catharist designation of Satan as the lord of things of this world. may also have led some who desired those things in the direction of Satan worship. Scholastic theology was the next major element in the formation of the witch concept. In the 12th through the l4th centuries, the Scholastics developed the tradition of Satan, refined its details, and supplied it with a rational substructure. They extended the Devil's kingdom explicitly to include sorcerers, whom they considered a variety of heretic. Simple sorcerers had become, in the dominant scholastic thought of the later Middle Ages, servants of Satan. (The basic argument was that the Christian community formed the mystical body of Christ, and therefore everybody else formed part of a mystical body of Satan ... pagans, Jews, heretics, everybody. That made it every Christian's duty to struggle against that opposing body) The link between sorcerers, heretics, and Satan was the idea of pact. The notion of pact had been popularized in the 8th century by translations of the 6th century legend of Theophilus. In this story, Theo. was a clergyman who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for ecclesiastical preferment. He met the Devil through a Jewish magician and signed a formal pact with "the evil one" in order to fulfill his desires. The Scholastics derived a number of sinister ideas from the legend of Theo. Their theory transformed the person making the pact from a relatively equal contracting pail to an abject slave of Satan who abjured Christ, did feudal homage to "the dark lord," and kissed his master's genitals or backside in token of his submission. (They didn't even have to explicitly sign a contract ... anyone who knowingly opposed the Christian community--heretic, sorcerer, Jew, Moslem--was deemed to have made an implicit pact with the Devil & to number among his servants.) The shift from Platonic to Aristotelian philosophy in the 13th and 14th centuries encouraged the process of demonizing witches. Platonic thought allowed for the existence of a natural, morally neutral magic between divine miracle and demonic delusion; but Aristotlianism. dismissed. natural magic and denied the existence of occult natural forces. If no natural magic existed, it followed that wonders were worked either through divine -miracle or demonic imposture. Theology, then, made a logical connection between witchcraft and heresy. Heresy is any persistently held belief counter to orthodox doctrine. One who used demons served the Devil rather than God, and if one serves the devil, one acknowledges that correct theology involves serving the Devil rather than God: this was the worst imaginable heresy. The final element in the transformation of sorcery into diabolical witchcraft was the Inquisition. The connection of sorcery with *.heresy meant that sorcery could be prosecuted with much greater severity than. before.. Late Roman laws against sorcery were extremely severe., but during the early Middle Ages simple sorcery, or natural magic, was treated with relative leniency. Often is was ignored; when detected, it might bring no more than a fairly stiff penance (fine). Elements of simple sorcery were incorporated into Christian practice, as seen in the combination of Christian prayer and pagan spells commonly said by parish priests in England during the 10th and 11th centuries. (I've got a book of Celtic Invocations recalled from that time. BTW. if anyone's interested in that aspect.) Penalties for heresy, on the other hand, were severe.. Suppression of heresy in the earlier Middle Ages was inconsistent, but in 1198 Innocent III ordered the execution of those who persisted in heresy after having been convicted and excommunicated. Between 1227 and 1235 a series of decrees established the papal Inquisition. In 1233 Gregory IX accused the Waldensian heretics, who were, in fact evangelical moralists, of Satan worship. In 1252 Innocent IV authorized the use of torture by the Inquisition, and Alexander IV (1254-1261) gave it jurisdiction over all cases of sorcery involving heresy. Gradually almost all sorcery came to be included under the rubric of heresy. The Inquisition was never well organized or particularly effective (at what it was supposed to do); in fact most cases of witchcraft were tried before the secular courts. Nonetheless the Inquisition provided one essential ingredient of the witch craze: the inquisitors' manuals. These manuals told inquisitors what signs of Satanism to look for, what questions to ask, and what answers to expect. Having obtained the answers they expected by using torture or threat of torture, the inquisitors duly entered the answers in formal reports, which then added to the body of "evidence" that witches flew through the air, worshipped the Devil, or sacrificed babies. It is unlikely that no one in the period ever practiced Satanism, but it is even more unlikely that any widespread Satanism existed. The great majority of the accused were innocent, at least of diabolism.. (Note ... on www, there is a copy of a condemned witch's letter to his daughter, secreted out of his prison and preserved. I haven't verified the source, but it's very moving.) The Witch Craze The number of executions for witchcraft was measured in the hundreds until the end of the mid-15th century, but from 1450 to 1700--the period of the Renaissance and the origins of modern science--a hundred thousand may have perished in what has been called the great witch craze. The witch craze can be explained by the dissemination, during a period of intense social unrest, of the intellectual elements summarized above by the Inquisition, the secular courts, and above all the medium of the sermon. The popularity of the sermon in the later Middle Ages and in the Reformation explains how beliefs about witches spread in a period when the leading intellectual movements, such as nominalism and humanism, downplayed or even ignored witchcraft. For example, the mystic Johannes Tauler, who was capable of great theological sophistication, was also capable of exploiting lurid demonology in his sermons in order to impress his didactic message upon his congregations. The invention of the printing press did its pail in spreading the evil. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull confirming papal support for inquisitorial proceedings against the witches, and this bull was included as a preface to the Malleus Malleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a book by two Dominican inquisitors. (Available on www, and something I consider a must-read for any knowledgeable person, Wiccan or not! Published in 1486, the Malleus went into many editions in many languages, selling more copies in Protestant and Catholic regions combined than any other book except the Bible. The Malleus colorfully detailed the diabolical, orgiastic activities of the witches and helped persuade public opinion that a cosmic plot directed by Satan threatened all Christian society. Fears of cosmic plots increased in periods of high social tension. The 5th and 16th centuries witnessed a growth of eschatological anxiety (a widespread belief that the Antichrist, the return of the Savior, and the transformation of the world were at hand) As the religious split between Catholicism and Protestantism widened during the 160 century and flared up into religious warfare, esch. fears deepened. Cath. saw the Prot. as soldiers of Satan sent to destroy the Christian community. Prot. viewed the Pope as the Antichrist. Terror of witchcraft and prosecution of witches grew in both Cath. and Prot. regions, reaching heights between 1560 and 1660, when religious wars were at their worst. (worst, in context) No significant differences distinguished Cath. from Prot. views of witchcraft. The Prot., who rejected so many of the accretions of doctrine in the Middle Ages, accepted the beliefs about witches almost without modification. Luther declared that all witches should be burned as heretics in league with Satan; persecutions in the regions ruled by the Calvinists were comparable to those in Cath. and Lutheran areas. Millions were persecuted and tens of millions terrified and intimidated during on e of the longest and strangest delusions in history. The craze was restricted almost exclusively to western Europe and its colonies. Since diabolism is virtually meaningless outside a Christian conceptual frameworks, it could not spread to non-Christian areas. Although the Eastern Christian church shared the same beliefs in the powers of Satan as the Western church, it experienced no witch craze. The absence of the witch craze in the Eastern church illustrates the hypothesis that for a craze to break out, three elements are required : the appropriate intellectual structure the mediation of that structure from the elite to the people at large; and marked. social tension arid fear. (All illustrated in the Seligmann passage) Skeptics such as Johann Weyer (fl. 1563) and Reginald Scot (fl. 1584), who wrote against belief in witchcraft, were rare and were often rewarded for their efforts by persecution; Weyer, for example, was accused of witchcraft himself. More. typical of the period were. the works of the learned King James I of England and VI of Scotland (d. 1625). Personally terrified of witches, James encouraged their prosecution, wrote a book against them, encouraged the statute of 1604 against pact and devil worship, and commissioned a translation of scripture (the Authorized Version of King James Bible) that deliberately rendered certain Hebrew words (such as kashshaf) as "witch" in order to produce such texts as ... Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," which supported the kings design of suppressing witchcraft legally. In 1681 Joseph Glanvill was still able to publish a popular 2nd edition of a work supporting belief in diabolical witchcraft. But by that time, the craze was beginning to fade. Cartesian and scientific thought had no room for witchcraft; ecclesiastical and civil authorities agreed that witch prosecutions had got out of hand.; and European society was settling down to 2 centuries (1700-1900) of relative peace and prosperity. The greatest outburst in those centuries was the French Revolution; it occurred in an intellectual. context (the Enlightenment) in which revival of witch beliefs was impossible. European society found other rationales by which to demonize aristocrats, Jews, communists, capitalists, imperialists, or whoever was selected as an object of hatred. The date of the last execution for witchcraft in England was 1684, in America 1692, in Scotland 1727, in France 1745, and in Germany 17755. Witchcraft and Society The most important social function of the belief in diabolical witchcraft was scapegoating. Sometimes this process was conscious and cynical, as when Henry VIII added witchcraft to the list of charges trumped up against Anne Boleyn. Much more often it was unconscious ... blaming a witch for your troubles gives an impotent person the illusion of the ability to solve them. Another function of the belief in the existence of witchcraft was to promote the cohesion of Christian communities by the postulation of a powerful external foe. Witches thus served a purpose similar to that of external enemies in modern warfare, for they united the people against a common threat. Historians have noted the correlation between witch accusations and social position. Persons between the ages of 40 and 60 were most commonly accused; the accused had fewer children than normal, children were seldom accused of witchcraft but often believed to be its victims, ppl accused of witchcraft had been previously accused of other crimes more frequently than normal, especially offensive language, lying, theft, and sexual offenses. Chronic grumbling, abrasive personality, and cursing also increased one's chances of being accused. Witches usually were of low or lower middle social status, although sometimes magistrates, merchants, and other wealthy persons were involved. Anyone connected with medicine, especially midwives, was prone to suspicion, because illness and death could so easily be blamed on witchcraft. The most striking social correlation is between witchcraft and women. Although not always the majority, over the entire history of the witch craze, women outnumbered men by at least 3 to I in accusations. In New England, 80% of the accused were women. At that time, many more women were living alone than men, and in the patriarchal structure, she had little legal or social recourse to right wrongs... Such women sometimes struck back clandestinely, through arson, sorcery, etc .... they also tended to grumble more! The misogyny underlying the association sprang from deep and ancient psychological roots. CG Jung, Mircea Eliade, Wolfgang Lederer, and others have commented on the powerful ambivalence of the feminine in religions, mythologies, and literatures dominated by males. The male view of the archetypal feminine is tripartite: she is the sweet ,pure virgin, she is the kindly mother, she is the vicious, carnal hag. (In this framework) From the 12th century, Christian society ... had a compelling image for the Virgin, and for the Mother. As the power of the symbol of the Virgin Mother grew, the shadow side, the hag symbol, had, to find outlet for its corresponding power. In ancient polytheistic religions the dark side of the female archetype bad been integrated with the light side in the images of-such goddesses as Artemis. Split off from the positive archetype, the image of the hag became totally evil ... became the witch. God was male, as was his opponent. Satan's followers submitted to him sexually, so they must be female.