Dictionary:

witchcraft

  (wĭch'krăft')

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1. Magic; sorcery.
2. Wicca.
3. A magical or irresistible influence, attraction, or charm.

Witchcraft can be roughly defined as the power of a person to do harm or influence nature through occult means. It has been believed in by most known cultures. Indeed, the fact that belief in witchcraft and magic has largely been rejected in post Enlightenment Europe and North America could be seen as one of the distinguishing features of the cultures of those continents in modern times.

In its historical dimension, witchcraft is most familiar in the light of the period of the witch persecutions in western and central Europe, between 1450 and 1750. Gaps in records preclude precision, but the best current estimates suggest that some 40 000 people, perhaps 80% of them women, were executed for witchcraft between these dates. (The claim that there were nine million witch executions is now rejected as a wild over-estimate.) Witchcraft as a historical phenomenon continues to attract wide interest, and has also attracted a high degree of serious scholarly attention.

This interest and attention has created a plethora of approaches to and interpretations of witchcraft, but it is only very recently that these have overtly addressed issues related to the history of the body. Certainly, there has been a degree of interest in the medical aspects of witchcraft. Physicians were frequently called in to attend the suspected victims of bewitchment, and a number of them wrote tracts on the subject. Perhaps the most famous was Johann Weyer, court physician to the Duke of Cleves, who in 1563 published De Praestigiis Daemonum, a tract which, while not denying the existence of witchcraft, argued that most cases of supposed witchcraft were, in fact, the outcome of natural causes or of trickery. More recently, writers within the women's movement of the 1970s argued that the witch-persecutions of the late medieval and early modern periods were the outcome of an emergent male-dominated medical profession attacking female healers in general or, more particularly, midwives. This interpretation has been discredited, but the broader issue of the interface between medical practice and witchcraft remains largely unexplored.

Perhaps the key to placing witchcraft within the history of the body will be provided by the investigation of two sets of problems. The first of these is the question of the source of the power of the witch and where it was thought to reside; the second is the rather better documented phenomenon of the physical sufferings supposedly undergone by victims of witchcraft and, more particularly, of witchcraft-induced demonic possession.

Certainly, the research carried out by anthropologists on witchcraft has provided ample evidence of beliefs which locate the power to bewitch in the physical body of the witch. Perhaps the fullest description of this phenomenon came with a famous early study, E. E. Evans-Pritchard's analysis, based on three periods of fieldwork carried out between 1926 and 1930, on witchcraft, magic, and oracles among the Azande, a people living in the Sudan. The Azande thought, as did many other peoples in western and central Africa, that witchcraft existed physically as a substance in the bodies of witches. The exact details of this substance and its location varied, but it was most commonly held that it took the form of an oval brackish swelling or ‘bad’ that was joined to the edge of the liver of the witch. Thus proof that a person was a witch might take the form of a public autopsy of the suspect's body after death, performed in the presence of the deceased's relatives and, blood-brothers, and important members of the local community.

This type of evidence is less overt in historical materials, and at present much of the thinking on this range of issues remains speculative. It is clear that witchcraft was in some ways conceived of as a form of power which ran between the body of the witch and her victim, and thus notions about witchcraft in this period were connected with ideas about the body, and especially the female body. The medical theory of the day, with its attachment to the importance of humours, made it easy to see the body as a type of vessel in which there might be forces which could get out of hand, were the humoural balance to be upset.

Perhaps these forces were at their most unruly when the witch changed her shape, as many cultures believed was possible. Many early accounts of witchcraft touch on this (and there is the connected issue of lycanthropy, the form of witchcraft in which humans were supposed to assume the form and nature of wolves). It was a recurrent theme when, in the nineteenth century, folklorists collected tales of witchcraft. In England, in particular, it was still held at that time that witches were able to change themselves into hares. Other witchcraft beliefs demonstrate the importance of the body of the witch. The counter measures aimed at combating witchcraft often involved sympathetic magic that was aimed at hurting the witch physically. Perhaps the most striking example of this was the witch cake. This was typically made of some sort of flour (and sometimes other substances) mixed with the urine of the person supposedly suffering from witchcraft, and thrown onto a fire. The idea was that the process would cause unbearable pain in the urinary system of the witch, who would reveal her identity by coming to destroy the source of her discomfort. It was also widely held that the witch's victim would gain relief by scratching the witch on the face and drawing blood.

The body of the witch was meant to carry the witch's mark. This normally took the form of an excrescence or area of skin that was insensible to pain, or a supernumerary teat from which the witch's familiar spirit, which normally took an animal form, was thought to suck blood. Thus the body of the witch might be subjected to penetration by bodkins or needles as the insensible spot was sought, or to searches for the teat, which was generally expected to be located on the suspected woman's genitals or anus.

If the body of the witch showed peculiar manifestations, so too, on the evidence of some of the better documented cases, did the body of the witch's supposed victim. We have numerous descriptions of the sufferings allegedly caused by bewitchment, descriptions that, for the most part, await analysis by modern doctors or psychiatrists. These descriptions are especially rich, and the symptoms they record especially puzzling for the modern reader, when contemporaries thought the problem involved the possession of the body of the sufferer by demons sent into them by the witch. Many modern readers will be familiar with such celebrated incidents as the possession of a whole convent of young nuns at Loudun in France in the 1630s, or the crucial role played by a group of supposedly possessed young girls in the witch-scare at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. But these are merely two well-known examples of a phenomenon which was widespread in Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In England, for example, the possession of several children at Warboys in Huntingdonshire, which resulted in the execution of three witches in 1592, created a model of possession through witchcraft that survived for at least another century. The possessed demonstrated clear symptoms: convulsions, contortions, trances, vomiting of foreign bodies (notably pins), speaking with the voice of the possessing demons, and becoming unnaturally strong or unnaturally heavy.

Perhaps the deepest analysis of such possessions has been carried out by the historian Lyndal Roper, on sixteenth-century materials relating to the German city of Augsburg. Here the crucial issue was the changes in attitudes which the Reformation had created towards the relationship between the flesh and the spirit, with both Catholics and Protestants developing rival theologies of the body. Protestantism weakened the links between the physical and the divine, and therefore forced a revision of the theological understanding of the body. The exorcism of people thought to be possessed by demons, frequently at the instigation of the witch, therefore became an area of dispute between the two sides in the local religious struggle. The fact that most of the supposedly possessed were women added another dimension: the possessed women, as they contorted in their beds as a result of the attentions of male demons, bore strong resemblance to women lost in lust. Analysis of such cases, therefore, introduces medical, theological, and wider cultural attitudes towards the body through the inherently dramatic (and usually public) phenomena of possession and exorcism.

— J. A. Sharpe

Bibliography

• Roper, L. (1994). Oedipus and the Devil: witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe. Routledge, London and New York

See also possession; witch doctor; witch's tit.

noun

The use of supernatural powers to influence or predict events: conjuration, magic, sorcery, sortilege, thaumaturgy, theurgy, witchery, witching, wizardry. See supernatural.

No topic in folklore has caused more argument than witchcraft.. However, the work of historians over the past 30 years has disentangled various levels of meaning within the word itself, and analysed the social context for accusations. The phenomenon is seen as essentially one of belief-systems, stereotyping, rumour, and social pressures; debate now centres on the interaction of upper-class and popular attitudes, and of prejudice against women. There is no longer any scholarly support for theories that witches formed a secret society, whether political, as the French historian Michelet proposed, or pagan, as claimed by Margaret Murray; the equally simplistic idea that witch-hunts were a cynical establishment plot has also been abandoned.

The Old English word ‘witch’ meant ‘one who casts a spell’. Intrinsically neutral, it could be applied to those using magic helpfully (see white witch); in most contexts, however, ‘witchcraft’ means using magic to harm humans, farm animals, or property. Fear of it permeates folklore of all periods, but it was not until the late 15th century that it was perceived in Europe as a threat grave enough to require systematic prosecution, on the assumption that it implied a pact between the witch and Satan. It was first declared a crime in English law in 1542; the number of English trials peaked in the 1580s and again in the 1640s, but fell off sharply after 1660. The last, in 1717, ended in acquittal, and in 1736 the Witchcraft Act was repealed and the crime officially ceased to exist (though people claiming magic powers could still be prosecuted for fraud). Thereafter, fear and hatred of witches, though still common, was frowned on by the élite as mere ‘superstition’.

Witch-trials in England differed from those in Scotland in highlighting charges of material harm, not devil-worship, though religious writers and preachers were naturally preoccupied with the latter issue. The first two Witchcraft Acts (1542, 1563) made hanging the penalty for murder through witchcraft, and the pillory, imprisonment, or loss of goods the punishments for lesser injuries. The Act of James I (1604) added another capital offence, to ‘consult, covenant with, employ, feed or reward any evil or wicked spirit’, and a handbook for judges published in 1618 stressed the importance of familiars as evidence; yet in practice trials still centred on the harm allegedly done.

Witchcraft accusations arose occasionally among the ruling classes, but more frequently among minor gentry and lower orders; almost 90 per cent of those charged were women, often elderly ones. The accusations were sparked off by some previous quarrel or vendetta; frequently, conflict arose when the alleged witch and her victim were neighbours, but not equals, the victim being relatively well off, the witch poor, and sometimes having a bad reputation. The latter requested some small gift or friendly service, and showed anger when this was refused. The better-off neighbour, aware of having failed in charity, would later interpret any sickness or misfortune as magical revenge; he or she often consulted a cunning man, who identified the cause by divination, confirming the diagnosis. The eventual court-case might involve charges brought by several families, the fruit of years of accumulating suspicions.

Almost all English witch-trials arose in this spontaneous way. There was no pressure from central Church or State to prosecute witches, though locally some justices of the peace were more vigorous than others in rounding up suspects; Matthew Hopkins is the only individual known to have initiated a systematic campaign. Moreover, since witches were thought to operate singly or in very small family groups (covens and sabbaths being rarely mentioned), interrogations were not aimed at forcing the accused to incriminate others. Hence English ‘witch-hunts’ were small scale, by European standards, with marked variations between one region and another. Full statistics are lacking because court records in many areas are missing or incomplete; those of the Home Assize Circuit between 1559 and 1736 show 513 persons charged, of whom 200 were convicted, 109 of them being hanged. Estimates of the total number executed have recently been revised from ‘under 1,000’ to ‘probably less than 500’ (Thomas, 1971: 450; Sharpe, 1996: 125).

Contemporary pamphlets describing the trials occupied a borderline between reportage and fictive narrative; they sought to convince, but also to ‘entertain’ readers by shocking them. They drew upon traditional stereotypes and anecdotes, reinforced them, and spread them. The beliefs they reveal are more elaborate and dramatic than the actual charges. They include accounts of witches feeding their familiars with their blood; meeting Satan in the form of a black man (or black dog), making a covenant with him, or having sexual intercourse with him; changing themselves into hares; changing others into horses and riding them to a sabbath, to feast there with the Devil. These beliefs seem to have grown steadily more common and more complex over the two centuries of the trials; all except the sabbath continue to appear frequently in later folklore, plus the motif of magic flying.

Fear of witchcraft was still widespread in the 19th century. Folklore of this period is rich in anecdotes about local witches and stresses the importance of defending oneself against them. There were charms to guard the home and farm against potential witchcraft (e.g. hagstones, horseshoes, rowan), and counterspells to use if it had already occurred. As law no longer offered redress to people believing themselves bewitched, the help of cunning men was still in demand; mob violence, including swimming witches, still occurred.

As late as the 1970s, in Hertfordshire:

Many now living, even in market towns, can remember being told by parents not to cross or trouble certain dangerous men or women and thus invite their displeasure and revenge. Nor can the name of the last witch in many villages be discovered, the truthful reply from those who will talk about this forbidden subject being that ‘the time has not yet come’. (Jones-Baker, 1977: 114)

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• Macfarlane, 1970/1999
• Thomas, 1971: 435-585
• Sharpe, 1996
• Hester, 1992
• Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn, A Trial of Witches (1997).
• Parallel Scottish material will be found in Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (1981).
• Briggs, 1962, discusses witchcraft in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.
• For witchcraft in later English belief, see Davies, 1998 and 1999a and b
• Maple, 1960, 1962, 1965.
• Relevant material occurs in most regional collections and in Briggs, 1970-1: B. ii. 609-761.
• Introductory surveys to the European background include Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft (1980)
• and Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987).
• A brief outline of recent scholarship is Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore 107 (1996), 5-18.
• Two important collections of essays are Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (1990)
• and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (1996)

No general agreement seems to have been reached in the United States on what witchcraft is, or was, or might be.

When the Puritans arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century, they soon saw evidence of witchcraft. Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop discerned it in the behavior of Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s. Hutchinson was deeply spiritual, highly intellectual, and openly critical of some clergymen's interpretations of religious doctrine. Her outspokenness and her charismatic appeal to other early New England settlers so disconcerted Winthrop and some of the colony's most influential ministers that they tried her as a heretic and banished her from the colony. At the time neither Winthrop nor his clerical allies explicitly said that her crime was witchcraft, though they called one of her female followers, Jane Hawkins, a witch and insinuated that Hutchinson and another of her allies, Mary Dyer, gave birth to demons. Only later, when he wrote his history of New England in the 1640s, did Winthrop speak openly about Hutchinson's witchcraft. Some people thought her a witch, he said, because she was so successful in drawing support from her neighbors for her heretical religious beliefs.

When Winthrop talked further about Hawkins, he linked her heresies to her medical knowledge and also denounced Margaret Jones for her medical practice and divination skills. Not all healers or prescient women or challengers of official theology were labeled witches, nor were these the only recurrent themes in the suspicions voiced. Still, when we consider the hundreds of accusations lodged over the course of the seventeenth century, especially in light of ministerial writings on the topic, the meanings of witchcraft for New England's early colonists begin to emerge.

New Englanders defined witchcraft as the use of supernatural power, usually but not always to harm. They believed that some human beings possessed extraordinary abilities that were darkly unnatural. Ann Hibbens drew suspicion in 1656 because she possessed knowledge that ordinary people lacked, in her case an awareness that two neighbors some distance away were speaking of her. George Burroughs, one of the few men and the only minister to be executed as a witch in New England, was accused of unusual strength—he could carry a full barrel of molasses with just two fingers of one hand. More commonly, accused witches were said to abuse their power, to kill rather than heal an ailing child, to obstruct ordinary domestic processes such as the making of butter or beer, or to invisibly attack the cattle or crops upon which their neighbors' prosperity rested. Katherine Harrison was known to spin more yarn than any other woman, and that was used against her in court in the 1660s, but a man's tale of how she hindered him from completing a garment he was weaving probably carried more weight with the jury that declared her a witch. Indeed, the motive that underlay the supposed act of witchcraft was part of how the crime was defined. If the deployment of superhuman power itself was understood as witchcraft, more often accusers emphasized its angry, malicious, and vengeful use. Thus Eunice Cole stood accused of many acts, from unseemly speeches to consulting evil spirits, but the records that survive of her court appearances from 1656 to 1680 stress the viciousness of her character, motives, and personal attacks.

If witchcraft gained its everyday meanings through accusations and trials in local contexts, Puritans also understood witchcraft as a relationship between a human being and the devil. Because they insisted on finding clear evidence of a witch's alliance with Satan, ministers fleshed out this meaning in discussions of the nature, physical evidence, and purported benefits of the pact between the two, the danger of such a relationship to New England's spiritual mission, and the effects on those who resisted Satan's insatiable desire for more witches to serve him. Many young women lent invaluable support to Puritan definitions of witchcraft when they acknowledged the excruciating pain they felt (which the ministers told them they would feel) when they held out against Satan's attempts to lure them into witches' ranks.

To these two definitions of witchcraft must be added a third, New Englanders' implicit understanding of what kinds of people were likely to align themselves with Satan and do their neighbors harm. If historians of witchcraft at the turn of the twenty-first century generally accept that popular and elite conceptions of witchcraft coexisted in the seventeenth century and frequently overlapped, consensus falls apart over the more subtle meanings conveyed in the patterns visible in the lives of accusers and accused. For some, accused witches were the angry, malicious, and vengeful people their neighbors said they were, and they attempted to harm their neighbors through image magic, curses, and spells. For these scholars, witchcraft was a social reality, a set of practices that identified genuine witches. For other historians, the lack of evidence for such practices in most witchcraft records and widespread economic, religious, and social patterns linking accusers and the accused suggest that New England witch-craft is best understood as an expression of social and cultural anxieties among accusers rather than the malice of the accused. From this perspective, religion, psychology, and gender provide better analytical tools for deciphering the meanings of witchcraft than the biases of accusers.

However varied their interpretations, for the most part historians reject definitions of witchcraft as superstition, mental illness, and lies. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Salem outbreak of 1692 is recognized as merely one—if by far the most deadly—witchcraft event in the American colonies. Studies of New England are heavily influenced by recent attempts to understand Western witchcraft traditions in the contexts of early modern belief systems and world religions more generally. As scholars turn to anthropology, women's studies, and most recently, literary and visual culture studies for analytical tools and interdisciplinary frameworks, witchcraft history looks less like a narrative of the exceptional and more like a window into comparative social and cultural transformation.

American witchcraft history has also begun to incorporate the past three centuries. Although the trials came to an end in New England soon after the Salem outbreak and witchcraft was declared a superstition, belief persisted through the eighteenth century and, for a few, even longer. Mainstream Protestant ministers debated the existence of witches and witchcraft among themselves long after such discussion was no longer acceptable in public discourse; Christian fundamentalist churches continue to keep the fear of witchcraft alive in sermons and boycotts. Artists, poets, and writers of fiction picked up the threads where ministers and magistrates left off, creating children's stories and entertainment for adults that kept as much as it changed the image of the witch. Advertisers, too, found her useful in selling their wares, from lingerie to liqueurs to Halloween costumes. Witches drew followers as well as exploiters in the nineteenth century and, by the late twentieth century, in particular with the emergence of feminist neo-pagan movements, witches and witchcraft had been reclaimed as multifaceted symbols of resistance, emancipation, and social and spiritual rebirth.

Bibliography

Butler, Jon. "Magic, Astrology and the Early American Religious Heritage." American Historical Review 84 (1979): 317–346.

Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Russian witchcraft is best seen as a remnant of East Slavic, pre-Christian, pagan practices, elements of which survived into modern times. The earliest written record that mentions witchcraft dates to 1024 and appears in a chronicle describing the execution of sorcerers in Suzdal. Literary sources continued to speak of sorcery in later centuries and, in most cases, were connected to allegations of witchcraft causing inclement weather, droughts, crop failure, and other phenomena that resulted in famine and pestilence.

During the Kievan era (roughly 900 to 1240) the most common form of popular (extralegal) witch trial appears to have been ordeal by cold water and execution by burning at the stake. As early as the second half of the eleventh century, however, Rus princes granted the Church official authority over witchcraft trials. Contrary to the Byzantine canonical practice of executing suspected witches, the Rus princes established relatively nominal monetary penalties for practicing sorcery. Despite this, unofficial persecutions of sorcerers continued to take place on occasion.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muscovy saw a marked increase in the preoccupation with witchcraft. With the 1551 Stoglav Council headed by Ivan IV (1533 - 1584), the Muscovite government and church took an active interest in battling witchcraft. The council recommended that the state impose the death penalty for sorcerers, and that the church excommunicate such offenders. Ivan IV's Decree of 1552, while disregarding the recommendation of imposing the death penalty, transferred witch trials to state jurisdiction, thereby transforming witchcraft into a civil offence. This formed the background for the use of allegations of criminal witchcraft for political purposes. During the reign of Ivan IV, and more so through the subsequent Time of Troubles, the Muscovite ruling elite invoked charges of witchcraft to persecute their political enemies, both at court and outside of Moscow.

Witchcraft trials saw their heyday during the seventeenth century, when the death penalty came to be systematically applied to the guilty. However, the Muscovite witch hunts were much smaller in scale than those that were occurring in contemporary communities of Western Europe. Although the tsars sent directives to the provinces to fight sorcery until 1682, the orders were not systematic and organized, nor were the persecutions. This, in large part, is because of the deep-rooted dvoeverie (dualfaith, the holding of conflicting belief systems) among most Russians, including the ruling elite, who had ambivalent views toward remnants of pagan practices. Also, unlike in the West, where much of the "witch craze" was directed against women, the Muscovite "witch scare" charged a proportional number of men (warlocks) with sorcery. This was probably connected to the occupation of the accused - unlike in the West, Muscovy men often acted as herbalists and village healers, which were professions commonly associated with witchcraft.

During the reign of Catherine II (1762 - 1796), the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished and the crime lowered to the level of fraud. In 1775 she transferred cases dealing with witchcraft to courts handling such affairs as popular superstition, juvenile crimes, and the criminally insane. Sorcery, however, persisted among the East Slavic peasants into the nineteenth century, in large part because of their continued use of charms, spells, potions, and herbs in folk medicine.

Bibliography

Zguta, Russell. (1977). "Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia." The American Historical Review 82 (5):1187 - 1207.

Zguta, Russell. (1978). "Witchcraft and Medicine in Pre-Petrine Russia." The Russian Review 37 (4):438 - 448.

—ROMAN K. KOVALEV

Despite a generation of excellent research, the history of witchcraft remains bedeviled by a host of misperceptions. Ordinary readers often assume that the major witch-hunts occurred in the Middle Ages, that they were conducted by the Catholic Church, and that they reflected the prescientific notions and sexual fantasies of fanatics and neurotics. Elsewhere one can read that huge chain reaction witch trials constituted a "women's holocaust" accounting for millions of deaths, and that the witch-hunters especially targeted midwives and female healers. All of these conclusions are both wrong and misleading. The great age of witchcraft trials came after 1430, and primarily after 1570. The prosecuting magistrates were almost always secular officials, imbued with the best thinking of prominent theologians, philosophers, and even scientists. The numbers of those executed have often been exaggerated by a factor of one or two hundred. Men made up perhaps a quarter of those executed, and there is little evidence that midwives or healers were singled out for suspicion anywhere. But historical prejudices are hard to uproot.

Understandings of Witchcraft

Depending on one's definition, various histories of witchcraft are defensible. It was once common, for example, to understand the crime of witchcraft as consisting essentially of having a pact with the devil, an agreement in which one exchanged one's eternal soul for monstrous powers. Such a crime of diabolism had not existed in the ancient world and only slowly emerged from the medieval campaign against magic and heresy, especially against medieval heretics such as the Cathars and Waldensians, groups who challenged both Catholic doctrines and papal jurisdiction. By the late fourteenth century, however, canon lawyers, prominent inquisitors, learned academics, and several popes came to agree that by means of a contract with the devil, whether explicit or only implicit, a magician might work genuine harm in this world. These theorists also gradually worked out a composite view of all the different sorts of crimes and activities their heresy involved. It was increasingly believed that witch-heretics flew off to a "sabbath" where they renounced their Christian faith and baptism, worshipped the devil, danced together, and enjoyed a cannibalistic feast, devouring children whom they had killed while using their fat or other body parts to make loathsome potions. They were also thought to receive instruction in working harmful magic by which they might destroy their neighbors' crops, interfere with the fertility of their cattle, and with the sex lives of those around them. Most luridly, witches were thought to have sexual relations with the devil or with lesser demons. During the fifteenth century large numbers of heretical "witches" or sorcerers began to be discovered, and increasingly they were women.

Another definition of witchcraft emphasizes the continuity of magical practices that witches had used in the West ever since classical times and the similarities between such practices and those found all around the world. On such an understanding, witchcraft is the belief in and use of unusual, secret, or even supernatural forces in order to force or promote specific desired ends. The ancient Greeks had believed in such magic but had not seen it as much of a daily threat. They originally thought that "magic" (mageia) was the strange, foreign religious practice of Persian priests (the magi) and of beggars or other dishonorable Greeks. Magic seemed both alien and disreputable. In Greek literature, the figure of the witch included characters such as Circe and Medea, women who used destructive magic to express their anger, lust, and frustration, but magic does not seem to have been a prominent fear among the Greeks. With the ancient Romans, however, harmful magic (maleficium) was forbidden in the earliest set of laws (the Twelve Tables, 451 B. C.E.) and was punished with increasing severity. The Roman historian Livy (History 39.41.5 and 40.43.2f) recounts episodes when apparently thousands of persons were executed by jittery judicial officials, and, in the late first century C.E., the Romans began to crack down on fraudulent magicae vanitates ('worthless magic'), practices that included healing, divination, and astrology. Thus, this understanding of witchcraft did not require a devil or a pact but insisted on the dangers lurking in the hidden practices of lustful and vengeful witches.

A third notion of witchcraft may be found in the injunctions of the Old Testament, in which the authors of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Kings, for example, forbade necromancy and divination, practices that competed with the rituals of the Levites and sacrificial priests while also challenging God's sovereignty over the dead and the future. From this point of view, witchcraft represented not diabolism or a physical danger but an abomination, not a conspiracy in league with the devil but impiety, a denial of God's omnipotent control over blessings, punishments, and history (and hence the future as well); such witchcraft constituted an attempt to gain knowledge or advantages that were for God alone. Over time the Israelites intensified their prohibitions against magic, sorcery, divination, and consulting the dead (necromancy), which all hinted at popular polytheism during the exilic and post-exilic period.

All of these notions of witchcraft blended together in various proportions during the late Middle Ages and early modern periods. Some jurists and demonologists were more concerned about a supposed Satanic conspiracy, whose goal seemed to be the destruction of humankind and Christianity. Others remained convinced that witches were primarily a physical danger to their neighbors. Still others were inspired by the image of idolatrous or irreligious magicians who did not constitute a physical danger to anyone and were not members of some hideous conspiracy, but were committed to "heathenish practices" and to foretelling the future by means of astrology, numerology, or other illicit means. In the seventeenth century some writers began to think that the basic crime of witchcraft consisted in being antisocial, regardless of any actual harm done or religious error.

The Growth of Fears of Witchcraft

In the early Middle Ages, these components had not yet blended to any extent, and so one finds approaches to the crime of witchcraft concentrating on the old Roman or Germanic fear of harmful magic, while churchmen felt free to express deep skepticism about other elements of witchcraft. In perhaps the most important early medieval text, the Canon Episcopi (c. 910; "Bishops," a title taken from the first word of this admonition), Regino of Prüm condemned maleficium ('wrongdoing') and sortilegium (harmful magic and 'fortune-telling') harshly in his first paragraph, but also went on to express deep doubts about the stories told of women who supposedly went out at night to ride on the backs of beasts with the goddess Diana. Such persons were dreaming or hallucinating, he thought, and any Christian who believed these tales was guilty of conceding too much power to a pagan goddess. This canon found a prominent place in Gratian's Decretum (1140; Resolution), the most important medieval codification of canon law. From then on, all commentators had to concede that anyone who thought he or she flew might well be deluded.

Following the notion of witchcraft as diabolical heresy, one can trace the rise to prominence of an ecclesiastically flavored fear of a new and growing sect of witches. In the early fourteenth century, Pope John XXII (reigned 1316–1334), for example, repeatedly condemned his enemies for using charms, wax figures, and incantations in their efforts to kill him. In a couple of papal bulls aimed at combating these threats, Pope John widened the understanding of heresy to claim that sorcery involved heresy and a pact with the devil. It was once thought that his reign also witnessed the beginnings of large-scale witchcraft trials with hundreds of executions in southern France, but research in the mid-1970s established that the sources purportedly describing these trials are in fact nineteenth-century forgeries. Consequently, historians over the past twenty-five years have relocated the beginnings of major witch-hunts to the fifteenth century, and especially to the 1430s.

The Earliest Witchcraft Trials

The earliest trials seem to have sprung up around Lake Geneva, to the east in the Valais and Vaud, to the north in Fribourg, Neuchâtel, and Basel, and to the southeast in Leventina (Ticino) and Valle d'Aosta (Italy). During that decade, several authors elaborated the notion of the witches' sabbath and expressed a sharpened sense of the dangers of a witches' conspiracy. For example, the Dominican Johannes Nider (c. 1380–1438) wrote extensively in favor of church reform and against witchcraft. Although he maintained a skeptical attitude toward the flight of witches, he helped propagate the view that witches assembled for dancing, feasting, and sexual orgies and for murdering babies and eating their flesh. Gradually the notion took hold that witches gathered regularly at meetings called sabbaths or synagogues, terms that make the parallel with Jewish assemblies obvious. Frequently, however, these newly detected witches were seen as analogous to medieval heretics, especially to the Cathars and Waldensians. One treatise (c. 1450) described the "heresies" of the witches under the title Errores Gazariorum (The errors of the Cathars, referring to the dualist heretics), while many texts referred to fifteenth-century witches as Vaudois (Waldensians, another prominent medieval heresy). Although the concept of witchcraft drew on ideas of how medieval Jews and heretics were organized, there is no credible evidence that the European witchcraft trials were actually directed at Jews or surviving pockets of heresy or paganism.

The Malleus Maleficarum

By the late fifteenth century many ecclesiastical writers had concluded that witchcraft was a fairly new heresy with its origins in the 1380s. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII (reigned 1484–1492) issued a papal bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, reporting the wide extent of the threat and authorizing two Dominicans, Jacob Sprenger (c. 1436–1495) and Heinrich Kramer (for centuries called Institoris [Latin for 'merchant']; c. 1430–1505) as inquisitors to root out the heretics, especially in southern Germany and in the alpine regions of Tyrol. Secular magistrates were to cease obstructing their efforts and offer their assistance. Despite the bull, Kramer continued to have trouble prosecuting witches, partly because of continued secular and ecclesiastical resistance to his haughty and brutal methods. In the diocese of Constance, Kramer seems to have over-seen the conviction and execution of at least forty-eight women, but at Ravensburg he secured the conviction of only two, while many other suspects were released. In 1485, Bishop Georg II Golser of Bressanone quashed Kramer's investigations at Innsbruck and exiled Kramer, noting that he seemed credulous, unethical, and perhaps crazy in his use of torture and in his wild imaginings of what witches did.

While licking his wounds, Kramer composed what is perhaps the most famous treatise on witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum (late 1486 or early 1487; The hammer of witches), in an effort to justify his fear that witchcraft was gaining ground against Christendom and that lustful women were naturally attracted or seduced into a life of devil worship, demonic sex, and harmful magic. Historians have often thought that the more distinguished Cologne theologian and coinquisitor, Jacob Sprenger, was the coauthor of this book, but the evidence for this collaboration is thin. It is worth noting that Kramer's Malleus never embodied accepted Catholic doctrine and that Kramer himself, after being banned from Innsbruck, was rusticated to the mission fields of Bohemia, where he died in obscurity in 1505.

In the Malleus Kramer laid out both the new theological understanding of witchcraft and the harsh inquisitorial methods by which one could force suspects to confess and to implicate others in their heresy-crime. Kramer also pleaded successfully for the intervention of secular officials in the prosecution of witchcraft, and, indeed, after 1500 most of the trials north of the Mediterranean were run by secular magistrates and according to secular laws. The vast majority of witchcraft executions came at the hands of ordinary secular magistrates who enforced secular laws and did not follow the prescriptions or share the peculiar phobias of the Malleus.

Heresy or Harm?

Those who define witchcraft as a sort of heresy have often argued that by the end of the Middle Ages the construction of the crime was complete and that the great witch-hunts that followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were only the automatic result of this late medieval construction. On this view, common among certain medievalists, the "great witch craze" merely combined this fantastic crime with the supposedly relentless procedures of the Inquisition. Those who have emphasized the nature of witchcraft as harmful magic, however, have thought that the emphasis on heresy and inquisition seriously underestimates the fear of witchcraft among humble villagers, who were always more concerned about their crops, herds, and families than any supposed deviations in belief, and point to the slow adoption of witchcraft statutes by the civil authorities of northern Europe. Emperor Charles V's (ruled 1519–1556) imperial penal code (Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, 1532; The criminal code of the Emperor Charles), valid for the whole Holy Roman Empire, described the crime in these words: "When someone harms people or brings them trouble by witchcraft, one should punish them with death, and one should use the punishment of death by fire. When, however, someone uses witchcraft and yet does no one any harm with it, that person should be punished otherwise, according to the custom of the case" (Article 109). There was no mention of pacts with the devil, no sabbath, cannibalism, flight, or heresy. This secular code was obviously most concerned with maleficium, 'harmful magic'.

A similar emphasis is visible in the English statute of 1563, which threatened the death penalty for any witchcraft, enchantment, charming, or sorcery if it resulted in the death of a human being; but if these dark arts were less successful (if the victim was maimed or if animals were killed), the witch was to be punished with only a year's imprisonment. Reduced penalties were introduced for the lesser crimes of using magic to find lost or stolen goods, or to incite someone to illicit love. Other secular states also continued to consider witchcraft as first and foremost an attack on others by magical, supernatural means; it was only in the seventeenth century that some of these northern European states finally adopted a fully diabolized understanding of witchcraft, one that made it a capital crime to "consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose," as the English statute of 1604 put it. Just as most secular states in northern Europe continued to place maleficium at the heart of witchcraft accusations, so too most jurisdictions under an ecclesiastical law (for example, the Mediterranean regions of Italy, Spain, and Portugal) persisted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in seeing witchcraft mainly as a spiritual offense. But that did not mean that the inquisitorial regimes were fiercer. Rather, it meant that throughout southern Europe the scrutiny of witchcraft rumors, accusations, and confessions was more intense, and executions for the crime of witchcraft correspondingly scarce.

Variations in Time and Space

The wave of recent research into witchcraft trials across Europe has underscored dramatic variations from time to time and from place to place. No region was ever subject to a hundred years of terror; the worst witch-hunts came in waves or spasms, starting in the 1560s and 1570s in southern Germany and in Lorraine, rising again in the 1590s, again in the 1610s and late 1620s, and coming to an end in the 1660s. Across the Holy Roman Empire, the largest persecutions occurred in smaller territories, especially those under the secular jurisdiction of a prelate, an imperial abbot, or some other ecclesiastical administrator. The bishoprics and archbishoprics of Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Augsburg, Würzburg, Bamberg, and Eichstätt were among the fiercest in all of Europe, while the Duchy of Lorraine was perhaps the worst secular territory. Together they accounted for about 10,000 executions.

It was not only Catholic territories that proved to be zealous prosecutors of witchcraft. The Swiss territory of Vaud (under the general control of Bern) conducted perhaps the most extensive witchcraft trials in any Protestant land (perhaps 2,000 executed in all), but the reformed courts of Scotland probably executed 1,000 witches as well. Lutheran Mecklenburg, a land of splintered jurisdictions and widespread noble autonomy, may well have executed 2,000 of the approximately 3,700 persons tried there for witchcraft. In these large persecutions, village accusations of witchcraft usually proliferated in the wake of some climatic disaster, a late frost or a cold, rainy summer that ruined crops, as was common in Germany in 1626, "the year with no summer."

Magistrates responded to local pressures demanding punishment for the witches thought responsible for these disasters; by the seventeenth century some magistrates were ready to interpret such crop failures and the resulting famine as the consequence of a satanic conspiracy. Thus, village suspicions were reinforced by elite fears. In general, however, it appears that larger secular territories with better-developed appeals courts were able to contain the panic of witchcraft more effectively. The Electoral Palatinate, for example, never carried out witch-hunts of any magnitude, and Bavaria after the 1590s also displayed an increasing skepticism. The Parlement of Paris, the appeals court responsible for a huge jurisdiction that took in most of northern France, became increasingly skeptical from the 1580s onward and, after 1624, made the prosecution of witchcraft almost impossible. After a high point in much of Central Europe in the 1620s, another wave of witchcraft trials erupted in the 1660s from Germany north to Sweden, but then became rare except in Poland, where trials continued until about 1725. By then, witchcraft trials were long over elsewhere. It was long supposed that the last German execution for witchcraft occurred in 1775 in Kempten, but it is now known that the suspect there, though condemned, was not actually executed. In 1782 the Protestant canton of Uri executed a woman as a witch, and a few Polish trials resulted in executions even after that.

Witchcraft remained a crime mainly prosecuted in Catholic and Protestant Europe. The thoroughly developed notion of the pact with the devil was never introduced into the lands of Eastern Orthodoxy, so there were basically few trials (and no massive chain-reaction trials) in Russia. Even in Catholic Poland it appears that earlier accounts of huge witchcraft trials are seriously exaggerated. Suspicions of magic and a variety of other popular spiritual beliefs remained common among the Russian peasantry, however, right down to the twentieth century. Altogether, for all of Europe and over a period of about 300 years, scholars now estimate that perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 people were executed for the crime of witchcraft, a large number to be sure, but small compared to estimates that suggest nine million executions, a number for which there is no basis.

Variations in the severity of witch-hunts and punishments imposed on those accused of the crime-heresy of witchcraft seem to have depended on whether local convictions could be appealed to a distant (and usually more skeptical) court. Where local courts could act autonomously, local excesses were difficult to moderate. It may even be that the term witch-hunt is misleading because, in many of the worst cases, magistrates were not actively hunting anyone but were, instead, responding to accusations that bubbled up from neighborhood suspicions. In a surprising number of cases, the original accusations were launched by village women against one or more other women suspected, sometimes for decades, of causing local harm.

"Witchcraft As Superstition"

The third definition of witchcraft as impiety surfaced in early modern Europe among magistrates who reacted in horror at the "superstition" of common villagers whose impious attitudes, magical practices, illicit charms, and devotion to local magical healers or shamanlike prophets seemed to prove their adherence to irreligion and witchcraft. Such "superstitious" peasants seemed to deny God's omnipotence, omniscience, and sovereignty over the future and over all blessings and troubles. From this point of view, witchcraft accusations seem connected to efforts of churchmen and magistrates to enforce severe reforms of parish and devotional life. This pattern has been found in Friuli, north of Venice, among villagers who confessed that some of their neighbors regularly went forth "in the spirit" at night to combat the witches who threatened their fields.

Another study has examined the similar case of an alpine horse wrangler who confessed that he traveled with the "phantoms of the night" to learn the secrets of life and death and to gain healing powers. Pastors and priests, however, complained that their parishioners were too quick to blame their pains on witchcraft instead of recognizing the ways that God tested and punished them for their deviation from the devotion expected of them. So the common notion that ordinary people were "superstitious" did not automatically lead to charges of witchcraft among them. Instead, it often happened that elite judges sitting in provincial or national capitals disdained to take seriously accusations or convictions at the village level.

Sociology of Witchcraft Trials

Much recent research has concentrated on the sociology of the victims of witchcraft trials. The old notion that midwives and popular healers were singled out for repression has faded in the light of evidence that most of those convicted were more often women and men who failed in their neighborly obligations. The fantasies and tensions that led some women to accuse other women of witchcraft, for example, have been examined. In the German lands and in Britain about three-quarters of the executed were women, but elsewhere the proportion of men could be higher. In northern France men and women seem to have been executed in about equal numbers, while in Iceland and Finland men made up the majority of convictions. It was once held that women were the targets of misogynistic (and supposedly celibate) inquisitors, but it has become clear that most magistrates responded to pressures for witch trials from below and that the Mediterranean lands of the Inquisition (together with Ireland) were among the safest places to suffer local suspicions. There is also little evidence that those suspected of witchcraft were mentally ill or "hysterical." Many of those convicted may, however, have seemed like "bad neighbors," quarrelsome or dangerous, isolated and suspected of harboring vengeful feelings toward fellow villagers.

The Rise of Skepticism

There was never a time when "everyone believed in witchcraft." Even at the height of witchcraft trials, some people expressed doubts about the crime itself, about details (for example, whether witches could really fly to the sabbath), or about judicial procedures (whether torture could reliably force suspects to confess the truth). Johann Weyer (Wier; 1515–1588), personal physician to the Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, reacted to the renewal of witchcraft trials by publishing De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563; On the deceits of demons), which questioned whether the crime of witchcraft was even possible. Although Weyer conceded large powers to the devil, in his view magic could never be effective (and therefore maleficium could never harm anyone); no one could really have a binding pact with the devil, and so confessions of guilt suggested that the suspected witch (usually an old woman) was actually melancholy (mad). In 1584 Reginald Scot (1538?–1599), a Kentish gentleman, published his Discoverie of Witchcraft, an even more radical rejection of witchcraft that questioned even the power of demons to produce wonders or harm of any sort. During the seventeenth century these sorts of skepticism were reinforced by a growing procedural skepticism of the sort expressed anonymously by Frederick Spee, S.J. (1591–1635), in his Cautio Criminalis (1631; A warning concerning criminal cases). Spee movingly criticized the brutal employment of torture, the reliance on perjured testimony, and twisted interpretations of the law, so that in his view no one once accused could expect to escape conviction. Doubts like these finally made an impression all across northern Europe, so that the secular courts there became as skeptical as the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions had been ever since the mid-sixteenth century. Only after witchcraft trials had almost died away did a more fundamental skepticism spread, a philosophical or theological doubt that spirits of any sort could have any physical effects in this world. Here we may point to the example of Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698), the Dutch reformed theologian, whose Betoverde Weereld (1691; The world bewitched) did not challenge the existence of demons but tried to show that they could not affect human affairs or the natural world. In his view the doctrine of demons had crept into Catholic Christianity from the pagans and needed to be thoroughly reformed. Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), a celebrated jurist of the University of Halle, took a similar position in De Crimine Magiae (1701; Regarding the crime of magic).

It is noteworthy that witchcraft remained controversial, at least among theologians, well after the crime of witchcraft was essentially no longer pursued. The Netherlands had ceased prosecuting this crime around 1600 and the Parlement of Paris had made witchcraft hard to prove by the early seventeenth century, but it was not until 1682 that King Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) prohibited witchcraft trials in France, while England did not abolish the crime until 1736, and Austria and Hungary waited until 1755 and 1768, respectively, for this step. Even after these legal reforms were imposed, certain theologians and many villagers continued to believe in magic and to fear the powers of witchcraft.

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—H. C. ERIK MIDELFORT

The word "witchcraft" derives from the Saxon wicca, some-times translated as "wise person" but more accurately derived from an Indo-European root, "weik," that produced words in various Western languages related to magic, religion, and divination. Currently, the word is used to designate a variety of very different but vaguely related phenomena including, but not limited to, (1) the magical/religious practitioners in a variety of third world pre-industrial societies; (2) the Satanism described in the anti-witchcraft books beginning in the late fifteenth century in Europe; (3) the Neopagan followers of Wicca, the religion started by Gerald B. Gardner in the 1940s; and (4) individuals (primarily female) who are reputed to have psychic abilities.

Interpretations of Historic Witchcraft

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the figure of the European witch was interpreted and reinterpreted in numerous ways, depending on the orientations of the scholars involved. They described her (typically) as variously an antisocial practitioner of malevolent magic; as a pro-social healer, midwife, and magician condemned by churches and universities; as a victim of mental illness or of accidental poisoning by mind-altering plants; or as a deliberate user of mind-altering plants who sought a shamanic "soul flight." She was either the follower of a Satanic religion developed in opposition to Christianity, or she was the inheritor of pre-Christian Paganism. She was supported by her neighbors, or she was the unfortunate scapegoat for social tensions, a lonely victim with no family to protect her. These different pictures of the typical witch of the Burning Times or the Great Hunt (both terms for the persecutions that peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in turn reflect the sympathies of the writers, whether pro or anti-Catholic, socially rebellious, socially conservative, feminist, or Neopagan. These different perspectives on historical European witchcraft have also influenced what is today called Neo-pagan Witchcraft, a new religious movement.

Since the mid-1970s, historians have more closely examined the court records of witch trials in various European countries (and in North American colonies). They have studied the verdicts, punishments, social status of accused witches, lists of goods confiscated from the accused, and other evidence. In one notable case, scholarly re-examination of older work revealed a major forgery, a portion of Etienne Leon de Lamothe-Langon's Histoire de l'Inquisition en France (History of the French Inquisition), written in 1829. Lamothe-Langon's description of huge 14th-century witch trials with hundreds of executions in the South of France turned out to be complete inventions by the writer—who had also written a profitable series of "gothic" horror novels with titles like The Monastery of the Black Friars.

Today, informed estimates of the total deaths in central and western Europe range from 40,000 to 50,000, much lower than the millions once claimed. Contrary to the picture created by writers such as Lamothe-Langon, the Inquisition (an arm of the Roman Catholic Church created in 1246 to combat heresy) did not execute many witches; secular courts were more likely to condemn accused witches than were church courts. As many or more accused witches were executed in Protestant lands as in Catholic countries, and the witch trials did not peak until 1550-1650, a period that historians describe as "early modern" rather than "medieval."

During the early Middle Ages, Church writers were more likely to insist that witchcraft was a delusion and that priests should discourage their congregations from believing that anyone could cast spells or fly through the air in the entourage of a Pagan deity. The famous Canon Episcopi, publicized in the tenth century but possibly of earlier date, stated that it was heretical to believe in witchcraft, not to practice it. This ecclesiastical legal document, like others of its kind, urged bishops and priests to combat the practice of sorcery, but also suggested that people who believed that they were witches were deluded by the Devil. Another set of church ordinances from the late eighth century demanded the death penalty not for the witch, but for the person who murdered an alleged witch—again, because believing in witches was a Pagan superstition.

After the Black Death swept Europe in the 1340s, mysteriously killing thousands of people, Europeans were more likely to accept conspiracy theories involving enemies of Christianity, defined variously as heretics, Muslims, Jews or possibly witches. Officers of the Inquisition now began to expand their scope from Christian dissenters and heretics, such as Cathars and Waldensians, to people who supposedly had chosen to follow a diabolical anti-Christian religion (rather than a lingering Paganism). New manuals for witch-hunters appeared, such as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, or "Hammer of Witches," a book that although authored by Dominican monks was used and reprinted equally by Protestant witch-hunters in Germany and England. By the sixteenth century, the witches' sabbat was regarded by authorities as a parody of the Christian Sabbath, the worshipful aspect of a religion which was a distorted image of true religion, i.e., Christianity. According to the records, the sabbat was generally held in some wild and solitary spot, often in the midst of forests or on the heights of mountains, at a great distance from the residence of most of the visitors. (The use of the word "sabbat," clearly derived from the Jewish Sabbath, indicates the way in which medieval and early modern Christians tended to blur distinctions between all perceived enemies of Christianity, whether Jews, Muslims, Pagans, or perceived sorcerers and witches.)

The witches themselves told a story—usually after torture— of taking off their clothes and anointing their bodies with a special unguent or ointment. They then strode across a stick, or any similar article, and, muttering a charm, were carried through the air to the place of meeting in an incredible short space of time. Sometimes the stick was to be anointed as well as the witch. They generally left the house by the window or by the chimney, which perhaps suggests survival of the custom of an earth-dwelling people. Sometimes the witch went out by the door, and there found a demon in the shape of a goat, or at times of some other animal, who carried her away on his back, and brought her home again after the meeting was dissolved.

In the confessions extorted from them, the witches bore testimony to the truth of all these details, but those who judged them, and who wrote upon the subject, asserted that they had many other independent proofs in corroboration.

Powers of Witches

In the eyes of the populace, the powers of witches were numerous. The most peculiar of these were: The ability to blight by means of the evil eye, the sale of winds to sailors, power over animals, and the power of witches to transform themselves into animal shapes.

Witches were also believed to possess the power of making themselves invisible, by means of a magic ointment supplied to them by the Devil, and of harming others by thrusting nails into a waxen image representing them.

New research has shown that witch trials were more likely to occur in areas of political instability and religious conflict. Hence both Germany and Switzerland, each a patchwork of small political entities and divided between Catholics and Protestants, witnessed more witch trials than did France or Spain. In late seventeenth-century Spain, after an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in the Basque region (shared with France), a lawyer for the Spanish Inquisition convinced its supreme council not to prosecute. Instead, the council ordered an "Edict of Silence" forbidding further discussion of witchcraft. In that Spanish case and others, local secular authorities went around the Catholic Church and appealed to the king for the right to try witches. The king agreed with their request and accused witches began to be sentenced until the Inquisition stopped the process on the grounds that this was church business only.

By the eighteenth century, however, fewer educated Europeans believed in spell-casting, witches flying through the sky, or other typical accusations of the Great Hunt. Thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire (1694-1778) had denounced the witch trials as the product of religious bigotry, whether Catholic or Protestant, supported by superstitious monarchs across Europe. They hoped that new, more rational attitudes would produce societies where such events could not occur.

In America, the Salem witch trials of the 1690s were similarly seen as the product of a repressive Puritan church struggling to hold onto power. Nineteenth-century American historian George Bancroft's History of the United States used the Salem trials to condemn Puritan "superstition," as did the poet and editor James Russell Lowell. As part of the nineteenth-century struggle for authority between science and religion, the witchcraft trials were entered into evidence as examples of the excesses of religion. This view tended to overlook the fact that secular courts were as likely or more likely to execute accused witches than were religious courts, producing the slightly skewed stereotype of "medieval" witches being hauled before the "Inquisition."

The Witch as Romantic Rebel

This anti-clerical view of the medieval and early modern witch as the victim of superstitious churchmen was strengthened by a new nineteenth-century view of the witch as a Romantic rebel or outlaw—an idea which partly underlies the new religion of Neopagan Witchcraft. It connects with the romanticization of medieval life (and of rural nineteenth-century life) by writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy, both of whom described fictional "cunning women" or solitary rural witches in their novels. A leading proponent of this new Romantic view of witches was the French writer Jules Michelet, a fervent anti-Catholic and anti-monarchist, who produced numerous books of history, natural history, and social reform. Advocating a turn from Christianity to worship of a Great Mother Goddess such as Isis, Michelet held that women were morally superior to men, and that their persecution as witches in former centuries was an attack by the elites on both the rights of women and the working classes. Michelet took the position of the Malleus Maleficarum that women were innately drawn to witchcraft and made a positive good of it. Medieval witchcraft, he declared in his 1862 book La Sorcière, had been an egalitarian rural religion led by female priestesses—a view which was to resonate with later maverick writers on witchcraft such as Charles Leland and Margaret Murray. Had the witches worshipped Satan, as their accusers claimed? Indeed they had, Michelet wrote, for "Satan" was merely the god of fertility and the patron deity of those persons condemned by kings and bishops and their henchmen. Although he did little actual research for La Sorcière, Michelet succeed in introducing ideas that would be taken up by later generations of non-academic writers and by unconventional academics. One was the idea that witches were healers and midwives persecuted by a male-dominated medical establishment; another was that the persecuted witches represented traces of a secret Pagan religion.

Michelet's advocacy of a Mother Goddess religion helped reinforce a new current in nineteenth-century scholarship: that there had once been a universal matriarchal period of goddess-worship, later buried by a patriarchal Paganism typified by the well-known Greco-Roman pantheon: Jupiter/Zeus, Hera/Juno, and so on. The notion of a universal ancient matriarchy appealed to thinkers as different as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, both of whom incorporated parts of it in their theories of communism and psychoanalysis respectively. It also influenced the first wave of women's rights advocates, such as the American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who published her own version of the anti-clerical witch trials in 1893, Women, Church, and State. Basing her research largely on Michelet, Gage produced a figure of nine million victims of the Burning Times, a figure which although wildly inflated continues to be repeated by some persons today.

Witches, Drugs, and Shamans

As the nineteenth century closed, two interpretations of the medieval and early modern witchcraft period were gaining adherents. One interpretation, suggested above, held that the persecuted witches were leaders and followers of an underground pre-Christian religion. The second, somewhat related to the first, was that at least some of the accused practiced an underground form of European shamanism, utilizing an ancient tradition of entheogenic plants such as Amanita mush-rooms and members of the solanaceous plant genus such as henbane, mandrake, belladonna, and datura.

During the height of the Great Hunt, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some lawyers and physicians had made their own tests of the unguents or "flying ointments" seized from accused witches, attempting to learn their compositions and effects. At the time, these men were advancing a counterargument to the witch-hunters' position that the witches worshiped Satan. No, said such men as Andrés Laguna, physician to Pope Julius III, the witches were merely "wretched ones," deluded by drugs, who "firmly believe that they have done in a waking state all of that which they dreamt while sleeping."

Theologian Nicholas Remy, writing at the height of the trials, in the late 1500s, made numerous references to witches smearing their bodies with oils and ointments, noting, "Now if witches, after being aroused from an 'iron' sleep, tell of things they have seen in places so far distant as compared with the short period of their sleep, the only conclusion is that has been some unsubstantial journal like that of the soul."

In an account published in 1555, Laguna described one of his experiments, using "a jar half-filled with a certain green unguent" confiscated from some accused witches, which he believed was prepared with "cold" herbs such as henbane or man-drake. He took the mixture to another city, where he gave it to the wife of the public