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.

Satanic Ritual Abuse: a New Form of an Old Fear

Knowing quite a bit about the history of witchcraft, of the links made between witches and Satanic rituals in the late Middle Ages, I'm acutely aware hysteria behind the persecutions that followed can appear in a modern guise, does appear in a modern guise, time and again. I’m sure you’ve heard of cases of supposed ritual abuse where children are involved; the McMartin pre-school trial in California in the early 1980s is probably among the most famous.

The belief in these Satanic rituals, involving the most loathsome crime of all-the deliberate harm and exploitation of children-conjures up some of the features of the great European witch-hunt: the fear that the world was being turned upside down and Christianity subverted.

It is difficult to know how some of the hysterical views put forward could be accepted in the modern age, the age of reason, well, of comparative reason. Did you know, for instance, that in a series of police workshops held in Utah in 1992 it was claimed that adults involved in Satanic cults were sacrificing 50 to 60 thousand children a year in the United States alone? Yes, that’s thousands. The fact that no remains had been found on such a scale was attributed to the fact that they had been eaten! This is something that Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican Inquisitor, and author of the Hammerer of the Witches, would have understood.

Overall the parallels between the witch-hunt and the modern Satanic abuse trials are remarkably similar. As in the early modern witch hunts the clergy played an important part in cultivating both a fear of Satanism and in obtaining confessions. As in the past testimony has been elicited from children, most often without any form of corroboration. In the modern age so-called ‘recovered memory’ has played an important part in the whole process. We see in this the shadows of the Great Basque Witch Hunt in the early seventeenth century, where children-with all of their imaginative faculties-were the principal accusers, as they were at Salem later that same century.

Most of the modern trials for Satanic abuse have failed for one reason or another, usually because the testimony is suspect and corrupted. It’s a pity that the legal authorities involved were not more mindful of the warnings of Alonso de Salazar Frias, a member of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, who wrote of the Basque witch children that their confessions were nothing but fantasies, demanding that all subsequent trials of this kind should be subject to the test of ‘external and objective truth,.’