The Rise of the Christian Witch

I was going through some old history journals last term, looking for material for a seminar paper, when I was sidetracked by a really interesting piece in History Today, volume 50, no 11, November 2000. It’s The Emergence of the Christian Witch by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, an expert on the subject and the translator of my edition of the Malleus Maleficarum

Let me just highlight the main argument for future reference. Christianity, at the point that it began to acquire ever greater influence in the Roman world, faced two specific challenges: heretical deviations for orthodox teachings and the continuing belief in the power of magic among ordinary people. Indeed, converts were attracted into the church in part because of its own claim to magical practices. The early Christian fathers went that one step further, claiming a unique power. Indeed we have here, in essence, the cult of the saints, of the miraculous transformations achieved by preternatural intervention and the possession of ‘magical’ relics.

The problem remained how to convince a wavering pagan audience that the miracles of Christ and the Apostles were genuine, whereas those of people like Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyre were fraudulent. This was tied up with increasingly pejorative interpretations of the old religions. Daimones, the old spiritual intermediaries between this world and the next, were reinterpreted as demons, all under the command of Satan. There was an interesting process at work because Christianity itself came dangerously close to Manichaeism, a particular persistent heresy, in which the world is divided between the light and the dark, a constant battle-ground between good and evil.

In the end all magic, all magic that was not Christian that is, was condemned as potentially dangerous and heretical. The Theodosian Code of 428AD identified what was considered to be maleficium or harmful magic. The Church itself continued to work towards a solution to the perceived problem in a series of councils held between the fourth and the eighth centuries. Amongst other things women were forbidden to keep watch at cemeteries, presumably in case they invoked the spirits of the dead.

Even so, there was no systematic view of the dangers of witchcraft as a whole, as opposed to an activity carried on by isolated individuals. Bit by bit, though, a new preoccupation with the significance e of heresy began to emerge. Paganism and the practitioners of magic were, by this measure, viewed as an organised group, answerable to and inspired by Satan himself.

In 1437 Pope Eugenius IV issued a bull addressed to all inquisitors, deploring the fact that so many were practicing various forms of magic, worshipping evil spirits and making pacts with them. Witchcraft was now tied up with more general forms of apostasy, with the first known depiction of a witch on a broomstick appearing in Martin le Franc’s Champion des Dames in 1440, were she is described as Vaudoise, a Waldensian heretic.

The various elements now began to coalesce: the practice of magic, intercourse with evil spirits, the attendance at the sabbat, the pact with Satan himself. The fifteenth century theologian Pedro Ciruelo summed it up thus:

Anyone who maintains a treaty of friendship with the Devil commits a very grave sin because he is breaking the first commandment and sinning against God, committing the crime of treason and lese majestie. His action is also contrary to the religious vow he made when he was baptized. He has become an apostate to Christ, and an idolater who renders service to the enemy of God, the Devil.

The Christian Witch had been born.

In Memory of Agnes Sampson, the Wise Woman of Keith

As I have already indicated, Agnes Sampson was one of the women implicated in the North Berwick Witch Trials. Also known as the Wise Wife of Keith, Agnes was a healer and a mid-wife, well known in her local community, the Barony of Keith in East Lothian. The records of the day detail the agonies she was forced to endure prior to confession;

This aforeaside Agnis Sampson which was the elder Witch, was taken and brought to Haliruid house before the Kings Maiestie and sundry other of the nobility of Scotland, where she was straitly examined, but all the perswasions which the Kings maiestie vsed to her with ye rest of his counsell, might not prouoke or induce her to confesse any thing, but stood stiffely in the deniall of all that was laide to her charge: whervpon they caused her to be conueied awaye to prison, there to receiue such torture as hath been lately prouided for witches in that country: and forasmuch as by due examination of witchcraft and witches in Scotland, it hath latelye beene found that the Deuill dooth generallye marke them with a priuie marke, by reason the Witches haue confessed themselues, that the Diuell dooth lick them with his tung in some priuy part of their bodie, before hee dooth receiue them to be his seruants, which marke commonly is giuen them vnder the haire in some part of their bodye, wherby it may not easily be found out or seene, although they be searched: and generally so long as the marke is not seene to those which search them, so long the parties that hath the marke will neuer confesse any thing. Therfore by special commaundement this Agnis Sampson had all her haire shauen of, in each parte of her bodie, and her head thrawen with a rope according to the custome of that Countrye, beeing a paine most greeuous, which she continued almost an hower, during which time she would not confesse any thing vntill the Diuels marke was found vpon her priuities, then she immediatlye confessed whatsoeuer was demaunded of her, and iustifying those persons aforesaid to be notorious witches.

Agnes Sampson was garrotted and burned to ashes on 28 January 1591.

To Kill a King: the Story of the North Berwick Witches

Picture the scene. It’s September 1589; the wind is howling and the rain lashing. A ship tries to leave the port of Burntisland on the north side of the Firth of Forth in Scotland, making for Leith on the south; not a long journey, but the weather is fierce, and the wind blows in the wrong direction. On board is Jean Kennedy, destined to be a lady-in waiting to Anne of Denmark, soon to be Queen of Scotland. Also on board are the jewels that James VI, the young king, has bought for his prospective wife. The boat struggles on, but is caught on a wave, carried into the air, and crashes down on a nearby vessel. Jean is drowned, her companions are drowned; the jewels are lost. On the opposite bank of the estuary near Leith a dead cat is found, weighed down with the bones of a man.

Now the scene switches, all the way across the North Sea. That same month fifteen-year-old Anne, the daughter of King Frederick II, sets out for her new home. Her vessel is beaten back to the Norwegian coast, where it is forced to take refuge. In Scotland James anxiously awaits. Anne does not come; no news comes. The King decides to set out across the sea in person, carried forward by the winds that had beaten his Queen back. It’s not until early the next month that he finally receives news that Anne’s flotilla has been diverted to Oslo. The couple, now united, decide to winter in Copenhagen.

It’s while he is in Denmark that James becomes aware that the mishaps that have afflicted him and his bride are being blamed on witchcraft. The following summer, after James and Anne had crossed to Scotland, several women are executed in Copenhagen on a charge of having bewitched the princess’ fleet.

A few weeks beforehand a Scottish connection is discovered. A number of people are arrested, women mostly, many of then from the town of North Berwick at the mouth of the Forth. The arrested include Anne Koldings, who claimed to have long practiced magic. But the charge that emerges is not just witchcraft; it’s attempted regicide. It was Anne and her companions who had raised the storms that drowned Jean Kennedy and scattered the king’s fleet as it returned from Denmark. James and his wife arrive home safely, though their fleet has been scattered by fresh April storms.

More arrests follow, and the focus of interest switches to a coven held at St. Andrew’s Auld Kirk in North Berwick, where the Devil appeared to his devotees at night. There the conspiracy to murder the King takes shape. Those implicated include one Agnes Sampson, who convinced James of the truth of the allegations, so is said, by repeating the words he had used to Anne on their wedding night.

The trails that follow, which were conducted over a two year period, also touch on the high politics of the day, as Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, James’ mercurial cousin, is implicated in the attempted regicide. The king personally supervises the torture of some of the suspects, and in an act of personal vindictiveness succeeds in having Eupheme MacCalzen burned alive without the ‘mercy’ of strangulation beforehand. Agnes, too, is executed along with several others, after having confessed under the extremes of torture.

But these wretched women had served a clear political purpose: they had proved that the Devil had limited powers, that Bothwell had limited powers, that the witches had limited powers: the king was truly under protection of God.

Not News: the Pilgrim Fathers Practiced Witchcraft!

Well, no, not exactly, but I caught your attention, did I not?

It is true, though, that evidence has been uncovered suggesting that some of the colonial communities may have openly practiced witchcraft, swapping spells with African slaves. This comes from a small feature in the February issue of the BBC History Magazine, entitled The Colonists who Practiced Magic with African Slaves (p.12). It reports some conclusions reached by archaeologists and anthropologists who have uncovered a ‘spirit bundle’ below the streets of Annapolis, Maryland.

They were working on a log-road four feet below the present street level when the diggers found a clay and sand bundle, containing a stone axe, three hundred pieces of led shot, 25 common pins and a dozen nails. Discovery of such bundles is not new, but the remarkable thing about this one is that it was placed in plain view. Dr Mark Leone, director of the Archaeology in the Annapolis project, says that this find is quite different from anything else hitherto seen in North America, providing the earliest evidence so far that African religion was being practiced.

The bundle dates to 1700. Dr Leone continues: “We’re particularly intrigued by the placement of this bundle in so visible a spot, because it suggests an unexpected level of public tolerance. All the previous caches of African spirit practices we’ve found in Annapolis were at least 50 years younger. These had been used in secret. But in the earlier generation, the Annapolis newspapers was filled with references to English magic and witchcraft, so both European and African spirit practices may have been more acceptable then.”

Dr Frederick Lamp, curator of African Art at Yale, thinks that the bundle may represent the image of Eshu Elegba, the god of chance and confusion.

Commenting also on the frequent reports on pagan and non-Christian beliefs in The Maryland Gazette published before 1750 Dr Leone says, “English witchcraft in this period existed openly in public and was tolerated. It’s intriguing to speculate how English and African spirit beliefs may have interacted and borrowed from each other.”

Remembering the Little Witch Girl

I don’t suppose too may of you have ever heard of seven-year-old Brigitta Hörner, who once lived in Rothenburg ob der Tauber in seventeenth century Germany. So here is her story

In the summer of 1639 Brigitta began to make claims that she was a witch; that she had attended sabbats, flying to these occasions on a fire-iron. She further claimed that while there she had promised herself to the Devil, who was present dressed in black. The devil, so said Brigitta, told her to curse rather than pray. The little girl further said that she had no choice but to become a witch, because she had been baptised in the name of Satan rather than God by the pastor of Spielbach, the village where she was born.

In much the same fashion that was appear later that century during the Salem witch trials Brigitta began to identify the members of her 'coven', adults from both Rothenburg and Spielbach. This added to the social tensions in the area, with people asking her to identify those whom they suspected of witchcraft. It was concerns over public order that caused the city council of Rothenburg to have Brigitta arrested on 8 July. She was now widely known in the area as the 'Little Witch Girl.'

It's an altogether tragic story. We simply do not know why she began to tell these tales, though Alison Rowlands in her work on the subject suggests that it was simply attention seeking born of neglect. Brigitta's mother and father were both dead, and her remaining relatives, including an uncle by the name of Hans Hörner, did not want to take responsibility for her, leaving her to wander around Rothenburg, managing as best she could. Her stories gave her some degree of power over an uncaring adult world.

The city councillors treated her kindly. After a brief interrogation they decided that her stories were not plausible. She was released into the care of the local hospital, a charitable institution used in the support orphans and the elderly. In the official report on the matter, Georg Walther, lawyer to the council, wrote that Brigitta's stories were a fantasy, most likely caused by the influence of the devil on her imagination, which is quite remarkably when one considers that was a time when the witch-craze across central Europe was at its height; a time when children were used without hesitation-as they were at Salem-to implicate an ever widening circle of people; a time when even the youngest children could be executed on a charge of witchcraft. Brigitta was simply told not to repeat her stories and take religious instruction from the hospital's pastor.

Sadly, poor little Brigitta only remained in the custody of the authorities for three months, whereupon she was released into the care of her uncle, Hans. An unwanted responsibility, she was passed between him and other relatives for some time after. Hörner started to beat her to force her out of the city. She was later discovered dead in a barn near Rothenburg in October 1640.

I post this in memory of Brigitta, with the sincere wish that her little soul has found peace.

Bodin and the Witches, a Journey into the Demonic Mind

Jean Bodin, a sixteenth century French academic and professor of law, is sometimes known, if he is know at all, as one of the founders of modern political science. But Monsieur Bodin had another interest apart from his theories on sovereignty: you see, he was an ‘expert’ on witchcraft.

In 1580 he published a treatise entitled De la Demonomaine des sorciers, later used like the earlier Malleus Mallificarum as a witch-finding manual. The following extract gives some flavour of Bodin’s views on the subject;

Now, it is not within the power of princes to pardon a crime which the law of God punishes with the penalty of death-such as are the crimes of witches. Moreover, princes do gravely insult God in pardoning such horrible crimes committed directly against his majesty, seeing that the pettiest prince avenges with death insults against himself. Those too who let the witches escape, or who do not punish them with the utmost rigor, may rest assured that they will be abandoned by God to the mercy of the witches. And the country which shall tolerate this will be scourged with pestilences, famines, and wars; and those which shall take vengeance on the witches will be blessed by him and will make his anger to cease. Therefore it is that one accused of being a witch ought never to be fully acquitted and set free unless the calumny of the accuser is clearer than the sun, inasmuch as the proof of such crimes is so obscure and so difficult that not one witch in a million would be accused or punished if the procedure were governed by the ordinary rules. . . .

And so it proceeds in this same hysterical tone.

Bodin’s thesis rests ultimately on one core proposition: that a witch was, by definition, someone who had entered into a pact with the Devil. In seeking proof of this alleged link anything, literally anything, was permissible; accusations obtained in secret from people whose testimony was never examined in due legal process; the testimony of children; and, of course, confessions obtained under torture, even the torture of children.

As one can see from the above extract, authorities who failed to treat suspects with due harshness risked being abandoned by God and left at the mercy of the witches. He even went so far as to say that judges who failed to convict and execute alleged witches should themselves be executed. The point is that, for this man, accusation in itself was enough; there was no escape after that. There is, perhaps, an echo of things to come in the Demonomanie, given the almost sadistic delight Bodin takes in dwelling on the kind of tortures that should be applied in obtaining confessions.

The book still has an educative purpose, though in ways that Bodin can never have conceived. It gives a high degree of insight into the psychology of hysteria, a path into the mind of a bigot and a torturer; a path into the darker valleys of the modern age, as well as ages past.

Witchcraft and Superstition: Decline of a Tradition, Rise of a Cult

The first thing to note is that for centuries law and superstition walked hand-in-hand. That is to say, on the subject of witchcraft, there was little to distinguish offical perceptions from popular prejudice, though the well-springs of belief may have been different in both cases. The big change came in the eighteenth century, when concepts of witchcraft began to lose ground amongst the educated. The gap really begins to open up with the passing of the Witchcraft Act of 1736, which repealed earlier English and Scottish statutes on the subject. From this point forward the law dictated that;

No prosecution, suit or proceeding, shall be commenced or carried on against any person or persons for witchcraft, sorcery, inchantment or conjuration or for charging with any such offense, in any court whatsoever in Great Britain.

The Act further made it an offence to pretend to have supernatural powers. So, from this point forward, as far as the law was concerned, witchcraft was no more than a pretence. However, while the enlightened could scoff at the subject, beliefs in the literal truth of witchcraft continued to be well-entrenched among large segments of the population, especially in rural communities. People were slow to realise, moreover, that the law was no longer on their side on this subject. Right into the late nineteenth century magistrates continued to receive requests for the arrest of suspected witches.

So, no longer able to call on the law, people took to dispensing their own forms of 'popular justice', which gave rise to a new phenomenon in law: in place of the witch trail came to trial of those accused of assaulting those whom they believed to be witches. We now have one of history's acutest ironies: that the British in the course of Empire were attempting to reform the 'heathen' practices of subject people, while at home violence against suspected witches was on the increase. James Augustus St. John, author and traveller, was moved to write "...here in England, in the midst of our civilization, with the light of Christianity, ready to pour into the meanest hovels, violence against witches is still prevailing in our rural districts, while belief in witches is all but universal."

In 1895 a poor, elderly woman from Long Sutton in Lincolnshire was assaulted by a farming couple for supposedly bewitching their cows pigs hens and butter. Assaults of this kind even continued into the twentieth century. In 1935 a doctor from Poole in Dorset had to treat an old woman so badly scratched that she required stitches in twenty-two wounds. In essence there was often a two-way process at work: people claimed to possess traditional forms of 'folk wisdom' as a way of making money, which could very easily turn to accusations of black magic when things went wrong, or when tensions built up within communities that, despite social and industrial progress, were often claustrophobically self-contained.

Further social changes, and the continuing decline of the older rural ways of life, saw a steady decline in these traditional beliefs, as ordinary people caught up with educated opinion. But, once again, irony played its unique part: for while witchcraft was received in the public mind with increasing scepticism, it achieved a new life among sections of the middle class, inspired by the likes of Margaret Murray, author of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. This, and much of the Wiccan movement that followed on, was really quite bogus; for people were not persecuted in the past for following ancient cults, but for malice and spite, and with malice and spite, the small change of village life.

Goya's Black Art

I have a fascination for paintings and graphics depicting witches or the theme of witchcraft in general. Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer have both dealt with the subject, but the one who intrigues me most is Francisco Goya, who depicts witches and the Sabbath as part of his so-called Black Paintings series, completed in the latter part of his career, and intended for his eyes only. Spain was only just emerging from the trauma of the French invasion and the Wars of Napoleon, and Goya himself from a period of depression and mental illness. He had earlier in his career depicted the Devil and the Sabbath, but in an altogether lighter, almost comic fashion. There is nothing light about El aquelarre.

Night Witches

Flying witches have long been part of popular consciousness. In The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe Brian Levack points out two roots to this belief. The first, traceable to classical times, was that women could transform themselves at night into screech owls or strigae, who would devour infants. These night witches are to be found across time and across cultures, from Germany in pre-Roman times to modern Africa.

The second belief was that women went out on a night hunt with the Diana, goddess of the chase the moon and the night, often identified with Hecate, goddess of magic and the underworld. In Medieval Germany Diana often takes on the additional guise as Holda or Percheta, who could be both nurturing and terrifying. It was Holda who was held to lead a ‘furious horde’ of those who died prematurely through the night sky.

Belief in these night witches was so widespread that it even made its way into the Canon Episcopi, a set of instructions written in the tenth century by Regino of Prum that eventually became part of canon law. The Canon specifically singles out;

…some wicked women, perverted by the devil, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons…believe and profess themselves in the hours of night to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night to traverse great spaces of earth an to obey her commands as their mistress and to be summoned on her service on certain nights.

And so it went on. In the Second World War the Russian female pilots, who flew over the German defences in the dark, were so effective in unsettling the enemy that they were known as, yes, you guessed it, Night Witches!

The Baron and the Devil

I touched on the career of Gilles de Rais in my blog on The Damned but I thought I would say a little more about a man whose crimes are at least the equal of Erzebet Bathory, and in some ways much more demonic. Although it is not always recognised it is true, almost banally so, that each and everyone of us is capable of great good and just as capable of great evil. There are so many things, so many circumstances, which might open the one road or the other; the circumstances of our personal lives and the circumstances of history.

So, Gilles de Montmorency-Laval, Baron de Rais, to give him his full title, was a fifteenth century French nobleman, a soldier in the long wars with England and a companion of Joan of Arc, that most militant of saints. He was also one of the most prolific child murderers in the history of France and the world; the worst kind of pedophile before that term had ever been devised.

Like Erzebet Bathory, he was part of a world almost now beyond our comprehension; a world where people could and did exist as objects in the purest sense, objects that could be disposed of at will, if one had the right background and connections. Gilles’ world was one of privilege and wealth, the world of the great feudal nobility. His grandfather, Jean de Craon, was one of the richest men in the country. Gilles inherited his wealth, but he also inherited something else, the belief that he was above all law and moral restraint.

Gilles military career came to an end in the early 1430s, not long after the death of his grandfather. He now had a taste for two things the luxury that his wealth allowed…and blood.

What we know of the years that followed comes from the 1440 trial records, when Gilles was indicted on multiple charges, including murder, heresy and sodomy. It is important to remember that the Gilles confession and that of Henriet Griart and Etienne Corrillaut, also known as Poitou, his co-accused, was obtained under threat of torture, though torture was never actually applied. More tellingly, corroborative testimony was given by parents whose children had entered the nobleman’s castle never to be seen again.

The first abduction, rape and murder, that of an unnamed twelve-year-old boy, came sometime in the course of 1432. Thereafter the number of victims began to escalate. As with the example of Erzebet, it is difficult to establish a precise figure, though it is generally reckoned to be between 80 and 200, with some estimates taking the figure as high as 600 and above. Various methods were used to kill the victims, mostly young boys. Gilles was also in the habit of raping these boys as they died. He also enjoyed necrophilia.

The details are fairly grotesque, too grotesque to dwell on at any length. Suffice to say that organs and intestines were removed for the simple pleasure this gave. Those who died were cremated in the castle, the ashes being deposited in the moat or cesspit.

Reports of the vanishing children began to circulate around the neighbouring villages. Some of the stories handed down over time clearly have a fanciful quality. Gilles is said to have employed agents to entice the children into his domain, including an old woman known as Perrine Martin, better known as La Meffraye or The Terror.

It’s hardly surprising, though, that people began to attribute a supernatural quality to events seemingly beyond explanation or control. We know that Gilles himself had an interest in alchemy, becoming all the more urgent over time as his spendthrift ways steadily reduced his fortune to almost nothing. Anxious to obtain that ever elusive secret, the ability to turn base metal into gold, he descended into the deepest recesses of magical practice, not averse to employing the services of alchemists who claimed to have the ability to summon Satan himself, including one Jean de la Riviere, who pocketed the Baron’s payment for the service and then promptly disappeared!

Even so, Gilles was not discouraged by this setback. He wanted power as well as wealth. Having a demon to do his bidding would, in his estimation achieve both of these ends. He got a kind of demon, alright, just not the kind he expected. In May 1439 Francois Prelati arrived at his court, full of stories of the kind of benefits the Baron could enjoy once the necessary ceremony had been carried out.

On Midsummer’s Eve of that same year, when it was believed that spiritual forces were particularly strong, Prelati began his incantations in the castle of Tiffagues, observed by Gilles, warned that, whatever happened, he must not make the sign of the cross. Prelati, of course, was just another trickster, subtle enough to convince the credulous nobleman, continually calling for the presence of a demon he called ‘Barron’, who, even after two hours, remained obstinate in his absence.

Prelati suggested the use of stronger magic, including the sacrifice of a child’s eyes, heart and sex organs, a request that was granted. ‘Barron’, or some other demon, suitably impressed, appeared at subsequent rites, but only, alas, in the presence of Prelati himself, who insisted that Gilles and the rest of hi entourage remained outside the chamber where he performed his magic. These fraudulent spectacles went on intermittently for a year, up to the point of Gilles arrest, leaving him not one coin richer or one measure more powerful.

While this was going on the campaign of debauchery and murder continued on its independent course. As in Hungary, the fearful local peasants counted for nothing. But Gilles, running out of money and influence, was to take one step to far. The rape and murder of peasant children was one thing, an attack on the church quite another. In 1440 the Baron kidnapped a priest in a dispute over property. The Bishop of Nantes became involved in the subsequent investigation and Gilles lost the support of the Jean, Duke of Brittany, his one time protector. It was now that the details of his crimes became public.

In July 1440 the Bishop published an account of his preliminary investigations;

Milord Gilles de Rais, knight, lord, baron, our subject and under our jurisdiction, with certain accomplices, did cut the throats of, kill and heinously massacre many young and innocent boys, that he did practice with these children unnatural lust and the vice of sodomy, often calls up or causes others to practice the dreadful invocation of demons, did sacrifice to make pacts with the latter and did perpetrate other enormous crimes within the limits of our jurisdiction…

Gilles was arrested at Machecoul together with some of his accomplices and brought to Nantes. Now the full inquest began. In October he was finally indicted on thirty-four charges of murder, sodomy and heresy. At first hostile and abusive towards the court, Gilles finally admitted to the charges, except the summoning of demons, offering to swear on the Bible to prove his innocence. But the prosecutor was sufficiently convinced by the testimony of Prelati and others in the Baron’s entourage. Gilles and his co-accused were finally hanged on 26 October. Beforehand he had made a tearful plea for forgiveness.

Like Erzebet Bathory, Gilles de Rais has had modern defenders, notably Aleister Crowley and Margaret Murray, author of The Witch Cult in Modern Europe. Demonstrating a more than usual level of absurdity, Murray speculated that the Baron was a witch, celebrating the ancient fertility cults around the goddess Diana. It was suggested, moreover, that he was the victim of a conspiracy by the church, determined to lay claim to his lands, also without foundation as these reverted to the Duke of Brittany.

The fact is, despite the threat of torture, the process against Gilles is replete with detail, detail wholly unnecessary to secure a conviction, minute detail of most perverse forms of child abuse, mutilation and murder. Although the accusations of demonology seem doubtful, these were probably added in an attempt to make sense of the horror and carnage involved. It’s worth contrasting the details of the trial, of the accusations arising, with that of Jacques De Molay, Grand Master of the Templers, who was tried and convicted of heresy the previous century. The indictment against de Molay is artificial and unconvincing, almost formulaic, one might say. That against Gilles de Rais, again like that against Erzebet Bathory, convinces not in the grand sweep but in the weight of detail. He was a Catholic who descended into the deepest forms of perversity. It’s as simple and as direct as that.

Malleus Maleficarum-The Hammerer of the Witches

Another review, of sorts, this time of one of the most notorious books ever written!

The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammerer of the Witches)
Edited by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
Publisher: Manchester University Press (31 Mar 2007)
ISBN-10: 0719064430
ISBN-13: 978-0719064432

I’ve cobbled together some thoughts on the Malleus Maleficarum. What follows is entirely impressionistic rather than a detailed exposition; so please do bear that in mind. I’m assuming, though, that most of the people who glance at this have never actually read this notorious book. So, if there is anything that is not clear, or if you would like to know any more, I will do my best to tackle any questions that you might have.

The book, of course, was originally published in Latin, translated twice into English; first by Montague Summers in 1928, and more recently-and accurately- by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. The text that I am familiar with is the latter, published in paperback by Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, in 2007.

Anyway, the Malleus Maleficarum-literally the Hammerer of the Witches-first appeared in 1487 under the name of two Dominican inquisitors: Heinrich Kramer, usually known by his Latin name of Institoris, and Jacob Sprenger, though it is generally thought that Kramer was the sole author.

Those of you who know nothing of the nature of the great European Witch Hunts may be surprised to learn that that the Catholic Church was originally highly sceptical about the whole phenomenon of witchcraft, a position reflected in canon law. The Malleus was composed specifically because Kramer had been frustrated by the failure of the prosecution of a group of alleged witches in Innsbruck, a process in which he had been personally involved. The task of his manual-and that is how it is best conceived-was both to provide a scholarly defence of the heresy of witchcraft-and it is important to understand that is how Kramer conceived the practice-and to provide guidance for inquisitors in the pursuit and prosecution of witches.

I would like to say that the book stands in relation to the Witch Holocaust as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does to that of the Jews; but this would be a gross exaggeration; for it was only one of a number of similar texts, and by no means the most popular. It did, however, have a percolating effect, steadily influencing a large section of scholarly opinion on the matter, both before and after the Reformation.

As far as Kramer was concerned witchcraft was a huge diabolic conspiracy against Christendom, a terrorist threat, if you will, with Satan in the role of Osama Bin Laden and the witches as his agents. Witches were not ignorant of the faith, like Muslims. Rather they had chosen the deliberate path of apostasy and heresy, all the more dangerous for this. The diffuse nature of the practice-also like contemporary terrorism-made it a particular and pervasive threat.

The Malleus itself is by no means an original work, rather bringing together in one place a whole series of past opinions and judgements on the nature of malificiendum or harmful magic. Kramer’s unique contribution was to identify this principally with women, for the simple reason that witchcraft for him was a crime founded on carnal lust, and women were more susceptible to this than men. For Kramer the most powerful class of witches, whose crimes included the killing and eating of their own children, all practiced “copulation with devils.”

It would be wrong to assume, as often is, that the work is specifically misogynist; it does little more than reflect many of the prejudices of the day. Rather it was the carnal susceptibilities of women, their weakness in the face of temptation, which made them the Achilles Heel of the Faith. Kramer even argues, on the basis of a bogus etymology, that femina comes from the root fe and minus, meaning less of faith. It was this that made many females, those who chose the perverse path, to be liable to demonic seduction. In short it was the infidelity of women that could and did, in his mind, lead to perfidia, a betrayal of the Faith. This was not inevitable, but women needed all the help they could get to keep the dangers posed by their carnality under control.

The ideas presented in the Malleus gradually seeped downwards, linking witchcraft with diabolism in the popular mind, thus divorcing the practice from an older and less malign root. In this in made an important contribution to the forms of hysteria that formed such an important part of the psychology of the Burning Times.

So, this is what I would like you to hold in mind: that for Kramer and many of his contemporaries, witchcraft, linked with the Devil, was a malevolent form of supernatural terrorism. This was the essential fuel of the witch-hunt, then and in all subsequent times.

Now she rests!