The Witch-Craze:
A Survey

WITCH-CRAFT DURING THE MIDDLE AGES

The witch-mania arose mostly during the Renaissance and Reformation period in what can be called the "Janus-face" of these movements, i.e. the dark side or counter to what would appear to be a resolute march in progress. The witch-mania was not a lingering ancient superstition, only waiting to dissolve but was a new explosive force, constantly and fearfully expanded with the passage of time.

The people of the Early and High Middle Ages certainly believed in magic and witch-craft. Yet there was no systematic demonology (theology of witch-craft). Indeed the Catholic Church did its best to disperse what it saw as a superstition which was nothing more than a relic of paganism and which had no place in the theology of the Christian Church.

St Boniface declared in the 8th century that belief in witches and werewolves was unchristian. Charlemagne decreed the death penalty for anyone who burnt someone to death as a witch because, he said, it was pagan to do so.

In the 9th century it was declared that belief in night-flying or metamorphosis was an hallucination. Such a believer was both a pagan and a heretic, a statement which became the official view of the Catholic Church, codified into Canon Law (the Capitulum Episcopi). In later centuries European statesmen would declare that witches did not exist and that the witches' sabbat was simply a dream.

By the end of the 15th century, however, all that was to have changed. The existence of witches would become accepted by Papal decree. Later even the preaching of the various Protestant reformers would attest to the danger of witches and witchcraft.

THE RESURGENCE OF WITCHCRAFT

Somehow the Renaissance period ushered in a new belief in witches, not in the old modified forms of the Dark Ages, but in modern mass production. Witches appeared to multiply, so that the more they were killed off, the more there seemed to be.

They were all somehow spawned by the devil and participated in bizarre supernatural activities. They anointed themselves with "devil's grease" made from the fat of murdered babies. This enabled them to slip through cracks and key-holes and down chimneys. It gave them the ability to fly at night on broomsticks and so participate in the witches' sabbat or meeting with the devil, at first weekly but later almost on a nightly basis.

These sabbats became so crowded that they took on the appearance of a country fair. Witches were able to recognise their neighbours and friends who were also participating, as well as all the other demons which accompanied the devil. At the sabbat, all danced in honour of their Dark Lord and played on macabre instruments like skulls and human bones.

They kissed the devil in his many forms (under the tail if he had taken the form of a goat and on the lips if he was a frog). Then they would partake of various promiscuous exercises, having sex with the devil (proved for the Catholics at the time by the existence of Martin Luther who could have been born in no other way) and feast on grisly meals.

Around the new belief in witchcraft there grew a codified demonology or theology of witchcraft. Various academics and monks pondered such difficult aspects as to how the devil could actually impregnate a witch. Did he first have to take the form of a women, be impregnated by a man (succubus) and then pass the impregnation on to the woman (incubus)? A difficult question indeed!

And just as the scholars defined the finer points of the demonology, so did the laity accept the general concept of witchcraft. For two centuries preachers preached against witches and lawyers acted against them.

Yet, despite such preaching and such condemnations, the numbers of witches steadily grew. The kingdom of Satan was brought firmly on earth until it reached its peak of hysteria during the mid-17th century. It thereupon began to die out and has scarcely been heard of since except in some of the more way-out born-again cults of today, and of course in forms of psychology!

The witch-craze arose in the mountain areas of Catholic Europe. It was especially notable in the the Pyrenees of Spain and in the Alps. It was in these areas the Church fought persistently against early heresies, especially the Albigensian and Vaudois heresies of the High Middle Ages. (It had been to combat these heresies that the Dominicans especially was founded and the Spanish Inquisition established.)

While attempting to eradicate these heresies, the inquisitors found the existence of a new one, namely witchcraft. This heresy was indissolubly tied to the first and scarcely recognizable from it. Yet it needed papal approval to extirpate.

The papacy initially refused such permission because, according to Canon Law, witchcraft was a superstition and could not exist. While the High Middle Age papacy was strong, it could refuse to take action against witchcraft, and instructed that action could only be taken if it was proved that heresy existed.

Circumstances, however, changed during the 14th century crises, with the outbreak of the Black Death and the creation of the Avignon papacy. The popes began to lose their resolve and many feared that they themselves were indeed being bewitched.

The Avignon pope, John XXII, therefore became the first to instruct the inquisitors to proceed against witches as well because he personally lived in continual terror of them. For the next 1« centuries, then, action was taken against the so-called witches of the Pyrenees and the Alps.

Because there was now papal approval, action quickly evolved into theory. By 1450 the first books on the theology of witchcraft began to appear in Spain, declaring that witchcraft was itself a new heresy.

This was an important evolution because it overcame the problems of the Canon Law Capitulum Episcopi by making witchcraft no longer a superstition which could not be acted against but a heresy which could. From there the belief spread down the mountain sides and began to establish itself in Spain proper and in the Rhinelands of Germany. New authority was therefore needed o eradicate the spreading heresy.

For that purpose the inquisitors again turned to the papacy. In 1484 they managed to wring out of Pope Innocent VIII a Papal Bull, Summis Desiderantes which deplored the spread of witchcraft into Germany and gave permission to the Dominicans to eradicate it there as well. The Papal Bull was a crucial document because it officially recognised the existence of witchcraft as a heresy and gave virtual authority for action to be taken against it anywhere in Europe.

The witch-syndrome had therefore broken its bounds of being a local phenomenon and was now recognised as an international situation. Witches from all parts of Europe would now be brought to trial, both in ecclesiastical courts and in secular ones.

People would be sentenced to burning by their hundreds each year. Nevertheless, the witch-craze would always remain associated with the highlands and the great witch-hunts would centre on the Alps and its foothills in Germany, and the Pyrenees and its extensions into Spain and France.

ORIGINS OF THE WITCH-CRAZE

Hugh Trevor-Roper argues that the reason for the witch-craze centring in the mountain areas was not merely poverty of the inhabitants and a possible accompanying belief in magic. It was more probable, he says, that it evolved out of racial and social distinctions. The mountain people were socially different from the people of the plains, in customs, organisation and belief. They were, he says, different civilizations.

Medieval civilization, he argues, was a civilization of the plains for it was there that the wars took place. The mountain people had therefore no need for feudalism and feudal society did not take root. At the same time, although missionaries took the Christian gospel to the mountain people, it also failed to take root and became a veneer of orthodoxy which could easily erupt into heresy.

The mountains were therefore the home of sorcery and witchcraft. They were also the home of primitive religious forms and resistance to new orthodoxies in the evolving Church. The persecution of these people as heretics and witches was therefore merely a form of social intolerance which does not stop at intellectual frontiers.

Another point about heresy is that it is a crime of Christians. Jews and Moslems were simply unbelievers and therefore could not be accused of being heretics. Yet in Spain both Jews and Moors were forcibly converted to Christianity during the time of the Inquisition.

Once Christian, therefore, they could now be discriminated against simply because they were socially different and their conversion was always rather suspect. They could therefore be accused of heresy, or better still, as witches, because it was still believed that they poisoned drinking water, killed infants, etc.

Persecution of Jews and of witches reached a climax at precisely the same time. This, Trevor- Roper argues, suggests that the attack of both was social because both Jew and witch represented social non-conformity.

In Germany Jews were fearfully persecuted during the 14th and early 15th centuries at a time when there was little persecution of witches. After the Papal Bull against witches appeared, the persecution switched. Suddenly there was wholesale slaughter of witches but little persecution of the Jews. The Jew had merely changed into a witch.

There was a fundamental reason for the change. When the Black Death broke out in the mid-14th century, a scapegoat was needed to explain the plague. The existence of Jews was the simplest and most convenient way.

By the mid-16th century, however, circumstances changed. The Reformation had now taken place and the Wars of Religion were being fought between Christian and Christian. One could not blame the Jews. The intolerance had therefore to take a new form by accusing not only Jews but any other religious and social deviant. Any perceived social deviant, therefore, be they Jew, Lutheran, Calvinist or whatever, would be accused of being a witch.

In that Catholics and Protestants had much in common. Catholics hated Jews as well as Lutherans and Calvinists. Lutherans hated Jews as well as Catholics and Calvinists. Calvinists hated Jews as well as Catholics and Lutherans. Rather than single them out, it was easier to bundle them all up into one parcel of hatred. Call them all witches and burn them all at the stake.

THE CONFESSIONS OF WITCHES

Trevor-Roper argues that the existence of witchcraft as a heresy existed purely in the minds of the inquisitors. It was not, he said, the existence of some old superstitions of Dark Age religion. The basic concepts of 15th and 16th century witchcraft were completely new, concepts such as the sabbat, the pact with Satan, sexual intercourse with the devil, etc. They were then codified in much the same way as St Thomas Aquinas had codified the Summa Theologiae.

At the same time, however, there is a major problem: The confessions of the witches are bounteous. They all proclaim the same bizarre incidents of the Sabbat, etc., and many are testified to by reliable sources. Was there therefore an element of truth behind the confessions?

The confessions were obtained from two sources, namely through torture and by voluntary profession of guilt. Torture had been allowed in Roman law, went out of fashion during the Dark Ages but was rediscovered in the 11th Century. It was allowed in ecclesiastical tribunals especially when heretics were on trial. By the 14th century it had come into general use particularly when witches were on trial.

The witches therefore faced a barrage of questions and torture was used to exact the answers and the forms of torture were grizzly in the extreme. The fingertips and toes could be crushed in a vice. The body could be stretched on a wrack. The tender parts of the body could be pinched. There was the pulley which threw the body into the air and jerked it violently.

The Spanish boot crushed the calf until the shinbone shattered. The "Lift" raised the arms violently behind and up. The "ram" was a chair of red-hot needles and there was the bed of nails. Then there was the less complicated device of pulling out the finger nails with pliers or pushing needles beneath them.

Such forms of torture were guaranteed to get any answer from the victim. Since the questions were prepared and they were all the same, the answers also all agree. The bizarre tales of the Sabbat were therefore not the creation of the witches' imaginations but rather the creation of the inquisitors warped minds.

The so-called witches then merely had to answer yes or no, according to the answer that the torturer wished them to elicit. Furthermore, they were only too eager to accuse their neighbours of attending the Sabbats if it would relieve them of more torture. And so the system escalated and it became evident that there was an ever widening circle of witchcraft, stretching beyond even the wildest dreams of the inquisitors.

If all the witches gave their confessions under torture, then witchcraft could be instantly dismissed. There were others, however, who did give their confessions freely. It was these people who gave validity to the whole cult, for they freely admitted to all the perverse activities which the other witches had tortured out of them.

The answer, says Trevor-Roper, is simple. These are the psychopaths who today have weird visions, and believe they have been called to do strange acts. In the 16th and 17th centuries their psychopathic imaginations revolved around visions of the devil or visions of Christ.

In the latter case we have several cases of the great saints, eg. St Theresa of Avilla, who had visions of sexual fulfilment from Christ (Agnes of God) but because their profanations of faith were impeccable, they were declared saints.

Others had visions of sexual fulfilment with the devil and for that they would be declared heretics and witches. If rounded up, their guilt would overflow in free admissions of their so-called activities, much of it based on stories they had heard and which therefore substantiate the basis of the inquisitors picture.

The first phase of witchcraft as social discrimination quickly spread to the second phase where witchcraft was used to suppress political or religious rivals. St Joan of Arc, captured by the British during the 100 Years War, would normally be ransomed as a prisoner of war but her oddity allowed her to be burnt as a witch.

It was also the finest way of getting rid of unwanted fellow Christians. It was noted, for instance, that after the Reformation, most of the witches burnt in Protestant Germany were Catholic. Most of those burnt in Catholic Europe were Protestants.

Most of those burnt in Catholic France were Huguenots (Calvinists). It is also noted that in those countries where most people believed in one faith or where torture was not used in trials, there were also few witch burnings, e.g. England.

Furthermore, there were more witches burnt during periods of catastrophe and upheaval than at any other time. The witch-craze rose to new heights during the Wars of Religion of the late 16th century and against during the 30 Years War of the early 17th century. Whenever countries were reconquered by the Catholic Counter-Reformation, it was noticeable too that witch trials increased dramatically.

COLLAPSE OF THE WITCH-MANIA

The witch-mania began to collapse during the late-17th century. Once the 30 Years War was over in 1648, Europe settled back into less troubled times. Although there were continual wars, they took on the nature of national wars and not religious ones. A period of religious toleration therefore took root and, at the same time, stability returned to the growing powers of France, England, Austria and Prussia.

A new spirit of religious toleration began to form. The Edict of Nantes was signed in France, granting freedom of religion to the Huguenots. Jews were tolerated in Prussia and Austria. Witch-mania became a spent force. By the 18th century (Age of the Enlightenment) writers such as Voltaire could rail against superstition and witchcraft and make believers in such superstition appear as fools.

CONCLUSION

It seems then that the witch-craze arose out of social intolerance, fuelled by superstition. The last legal execution of a witch occurred in Switzerland in 1782. Is it possible for there to be another eruption?

If the witch-craze had been fuelled solely by superstition, then possibly the answer would be NO. The fact, however, that it had its roots in social intolerance, then there is every possibility that it could happen again and that it does happen, and often.

Superstition is still alive and well in both Christian and non-Christian circles. Add to that superstition a healthy dose of social intolerance as well as political expediency and we have witchcraft in all its ugliness.

The prime example is Hitler's Germany which accused the Jews of sabotaging the economy. He exterminated 6 million Jews for crimes which they often confessed under torture. Idi Amin's Uganda saw the persecution of the Asians. Stalin accused the Kulak's of various crimes and some 5 million were executed, many of whom admitted their so-called crimes.

The necessary ingredients exist in today's violence-racked villages of Kwa-Zulu Natal. It is noticeable that there is a steady rise in the number of executions of women in Kwa-Zulu Natal accused of being witches.