by Colin Wilson
A century after the slaughter of the Cathars, witchcraft—or rather, black magic—was again used as an excuse to commit murder on a massive scale. The victims this time were an order of knights called the Knight Templars. They had been founded in the Holy Land after the First Crusade—in 1118—to protect Christian pilgrims trying to get to Jerusalem, and they became immensely rich. By 1303 they had been driven out of the Holy Land, and took refuge in Cyprus, but large numbers lived in France. King Philip IV of France—known as the Fair—often borrowed money from them, and dreamed of laying his hands on their wealth. The excuse he chose was to accuse them of Devil-worship and homosexuality. At daybreak on October 13, 1307, the authorities swooped on Templars all over France and arrested them. At their trial, the judges were told that in order to become a Templar, a man had to become a sodomite, and kiss the mouth, navel and anus of his sponsor; they also had to swear allegiance to the demon Baphomet. Under horrible tortures, many confessed. In 1310, 54 were burned to death—all refusing to confess. Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the order, was one who confessed, and was sentenced to life imprisonment; but when exposed in public to repeat his confession to the populace, he declared that he had been made to confess under torture, and that the order was innocent. He was burned alive on a slow fire. His last words were to summon the king and pope to meet him before God’s throne within a year; in fact, both died within that time.
The persecution of witches started off slowly. It was more than a century after the death of Angéle de la Barthe that a woman was first tried as a witch—that is, for black magic rather than heresy. Her name was Jehanne de Brigue, and the interesting thing about the case is that she probably was a witch. In 1390, she was accused in Paris by a man called Jehane de Ruilly, who had become convinced that he had been ‘hexed’ (or bewitched) by his ex-mistress Gilete, who had borne him two children. Her spells had brought him close to death, but Jehanne de Brigue had saved him by making a waxen figure of Gilete and suckling two toads, (i.e. placing their open mouths over her nipples.) It is not clear why Ruilly decided to accuse her of witchcraft when she had saved his life. Jehanne at first denied being a witch, but, after three months in prison, admitted that she had learned witchcraft from her aunt, and that she performed her sorceries with the aid of a demon named Haussibut.
She was sentenced to death, but given a temporary reprieve because she was pregnant. She decided to appeal to the Parlement of Paris, but this proved to be a mistake, for the Parlement suggested she should be put to the torture. Hereupon, Jehanne confessed that the whole affair had been inspired by Ruilly’s wife Macette, to get revenge on him for beating her; Jehanne had concocted a ‘philtre’ to poison him, and also made a waxen image.
Macette was arrested and tortured until she confessed; then both women were burned to death.
Our natural inclination is to believe that they were victims of mediaeval superstition. And indeed, there is no real evidence against Macette. But Jeanne had already been jailed in Meaux as a witch before her arrest in Paris. There seems little doubt that she believed she was a witch, and believed that she performed her magic with the aid of a demon.
The first ‘epidemic’ of witchcraft took place seventy years later in Arras, in northern France, and soon came to an end because common-sense prevailed—a weak-minded woman named Deniselle Grenoieres was burned alive, together with four accomplices she had named under torture; but the Archbishop of Rheims declared that the whole thing was a delusion, and the Parlement of Paris ordered the release of more suspects in 1460. But this tendency to regard witchcraft as a delusion worried Pope Innocent, and in 1484 he issued a papal bull denouncing witchcraft.
But the witchcraft persecutions that led to so much misery during the next two centuries were actually caused by an invention that would later cause the Church endless trouble: printing (invented by Gutenberg around 1440). For in 1486 there appeared a work that was directly inspired by the witch-obsessed pope, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, by Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. Its description of the sexual antics of witches undoubtedly explain its wide popularity—it described how witches have intercourse with demons (or incubi), and how male witches enjoy female demons, or succubi, but it was the invention of printing that turned it into a bestseller in many languages. As far as the Church was concerned, printing was a dubious blessing, since it enabled people to read the Bible for themselves—and so undermined the authority of the priests—and enabled Martin Luther’s denunciations of Rome (posted on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517) to be read all over Europe . . .
Even so, the persecutions got off to a slow start. In Toulouse (the old centre of the Cathar heresy) 40 witches were burned in 1557. Six years later, England passed a witchcraft bill under Queen Elizabeth. And in 1566, and again in 1582 and 1587, there were witchcraft trials at Chelmsford, in Essex, the first two of which resulted in two hangings, and the third in four.
But by that time in Germany, the great witchcraft craze was well under way. In Treves, five women were burned as witches in 1572, but this was only a prelude to the trials that began in 1582. By then, the harvest had been poor for several years, and witches were blamed. (Such troubles often seem to cause witch persecutions: a hundred years later, Massachusetts was having all kinds of political problems when the Salem ‘witch scare’ helped to release the sense of oppression and helplessness.) Between 1587 and 1594, 306 persons were accused of being witches, and they involved another 6,000 people in their confessions as accomplices. In his History of Treves Johan Linden, canon of the cathedral, notes: ‘Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment’. Dietrich Flade, Vice-Governor of Treves and Rector of the university, objected that many of the trials were illegal, and was himself accused as a witch and burned.
Franz Buirmann was a German equivalent of the English ‘witch-finder’ Matthew Hopkins; but there were many like him, and his career has survived only because Hermann Löher, a humanitarian court official who was forced to flee to Holland, wrote about his personal knowledge of Buirmann in a book published many years later. Löher lived at Rheinbach, near Bonn, a quiet village that had little crime. Buirmann, described as a ‘shrewd man of low birth’, had been appointed itinerant judge and witch-hunter by the Archbishop of Cologne; he was able to claim the property of those he condemned as witches, and, as a consequence, became affluent. In 1631 and 1636 he paid two visits to Rheinbach and two nearby villages, and burned 150 people out of 300 households. In further persecutions at Siegburg later the same year, Buirmann even had the executioner burned as a witch.
The German witch persecutions occurred mainly in towns that remained Catholic (like Treves). Other such areas were Strasbourg, Breslau, Fulda, Würzburg and Bamberg. Würzburg and Bamberg were ruled by cousins, one of whom burned 900 people, the other 600. In Bamberg, the witch burning began around 1609, under Bishop von Aschhausen, who in thirteen years burned 300 witches. In another series of trials between 1626 and 1630, 400 people were burned. When the Vice-Chancellor tried stopping the trials, he was accused as a witch and executed with his wife and daughter. (The Prince-Archbishop ignored an order from the Emperor ordering their release.) But the Bamberg trials stopped as abruptly as they had started, in 1630, partly because of the invasion of Leipzig by the Swedish King Gustavus, which gave the instigators of the trials other things to think about, partly because of the continued opposition of the Emperor.
In Würzburg in 1629, the Chancellor described in a letter how he had seen many children executed for intercourse with the devil—their ages ranging from three to fifteen. He adds that it is ‘beyond doubt that in a place called the Fraw Rengberg the Devil in person with 8,000 of his followers held an assembly and celebrated a black mass’. In 1629 there were 29 executions totalling 157 persons, many of them children. The Prince-Bishop even had his sole heir, a youth, beheaded as a witch. After this execution, the Prince-Bishop seems to have experienced a change of heart, and instituted commemorative services for th
e victims. Here, as in Bamberg, the Inquisitors and witch-finders were Jesuits. Prince-Bishop Philip Adolf, the man responsible for all these deaths, is described by one historian as ‘otherwise noble and pious’.
Yet there were waves of revulsion and resistance to all the torture and murder. In 1663, a magistrate and ‘witch-finder’ named Geiss, who had been torturing and burning the citizens of Lindheim for two years, turned his attention to a wealthy miller named Johann Schüler. (Here, as in so many other cases, the basic motive was undoubtedly financial.) Schüler’s wife had borne a stillborn child the previous year, and Geiss forced the midwife to ‘confess’ that they had murdered the child and used the body for witchcraft. The child’s body was exhumed and found to be intact (the midwife alleged it had been cut up), and the midwife and six people she had implicated were burned. Not long after, Geiss persuaded another suspected witch—through torture—to implicate Frau Schüler, who was arrested: an old scar was declared to be a ‘devil mark’. Schüler hastened to Würzburg to try to persuade the Dean of the Cathedral to help, but in his absence, Frau Schüler was tortured into confession. On his return, Schüler was thrown into the ‘witch’s tower’ and then tortured into confessing. However, as soon as the torture stopped, he recanted. He was tortured again; again he confessed and recanted. Geiss was preparing to torture him a third time when angry townspeople rioted, and Schüler and other suspected witches managed to escape. They succeeded in getting to Speyer, the seat of the Supreme Court, where the sight of their tortured and scarred bodies—particularly the women—aroused indignation. But in Schüler’s absence, and in spite of popular anger, Geiss burnt Frau Schüler alive. The townspeople rose up in force, and Geiss and his men had to flee. The Dean of Würzburg suggested to Baron Oynhausen—responsible for Geiss’s appointment—that he ought to assuage the popular fury by censuring Geiss, and Oynhausen dismissed him, to Geiss’s indignation—he insisted that he had only been doing his duty.
The Protestant states executed less witches, and ceased the witchcraft persecutions earlier than Catholic states; in Prussia, King Frederick William put a stop to witch trials in 1714. The last execution for witchcraft in Germany took place in 1775.
Why were the witch trials so widespread in Germany—more than in any other country? Rossell Hope Robbins, the highly sceptical author of An Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, comments: ‘Germany was the land of torture . . .’ and cites a case in Tettwang, near Constance, in 1608, when a father died in prison from torture, his wife was hoisted in the strappado 11 times (a device for dislocating the shoulders), and their 29-year-old daughter was also hoisted 11 times with a 50 pound weight attached to her legs. The torturer allowed her to recover for ten weeks before subjecting her to more torture—not out of mercy, but because he was afraid she would die under it.
The case of Buirmann and Geiss makes it obvious that many of the ‘witch-finders’ were sexual sadists, for whom the persecutions were an opportunity to give free rein to their impulses. (Criminologists have noted that Germany has a higher percentage of mass murders and sadistic murders than any other country—although in the past few decades America is beginning to catch up.) The rise of Protestantism in Germany also seems to explain a great deal (although some cities that persecuted witches—like Leipzig—were Protestant) as the Catholic Church struggled to regain its authority through a reign of terror.
Again, our horror at the appalling cruelty tends to blind us to the important question of whether any of the thousands of witches who were burned were genuine practitioners of magic—in the sense of the umbanda magicians described in the last chapter. But a case that occurred in North Berwick, in Scotland, in the 1590s raises that question all over again.
What happened was this. A young maidservant named Gilly Duncan was able to cure various ailments by some form of faith healing. In 1590 her master David Seaton, deputy bailiff of Tranent, near Edinburgh, tortured her with a rope around her neck to make her ‘confess’ to intercourse with the devil, which eventually she did. She was handed over to the authorities, and soon confessed that her accomplices—about 70 in number—included many highly respectable citizens of Edinburgh, amongst them one Agnes Sampson, an elderly gentlewoman of good education. Under prolonged torture, Agnes Sampson finally confessed—although not until her inquisitors found on her a ‘devil’s mark’ in the area of her vagina. John Fian, a schoolmaster from Saltpans, and two other women, Euphemia Maclean and Barbara Napier, ‘reputed for as civil, honest women as any that dwelled within the city of Edinburgh’, were also accused. Agnes Sampson now gave a full account of her attempts to bewitch the king—James VI of Scotland (later James I of England)—who, understandably, took an active interest in the proceedings. Fian confessed under torture, but later managed to escape; when recaptured, he recanted his confession, and the most appalling tortures failed to make him change his mind. He was strangled and burned. Euphemia Maclean was burned without being first strangled—probably because she was a Catholic—but Barbara Napier managed to get her sentence delayed on the grounds that she was pregnant, and finally escaped.
Certainly, this sounds like a case of horrifying injustice. James the First, who wrote a famous Dœmonologie, later decided that most witchcraft was superstition, and persecution of witches almost ceased towards the end of his reign.
Fuller examination of the case raises doubts about their innocence. John Fian had been secretary to the Earl of Bothwell, a man with a reputation for dabbling in black magic, and who had every reason for wanting to kill the king, since he himself was heir to the throne. James was himself sceptical about the confession of Agnes Sampson until—according to the chronicle Newes from Scotland—she took him aside and whispered in his ear certain words that had passed between him and his bride, Anne of Denmark, on their wedding night. No one but the king and his bride knew what they were. Naturally, James was convinced.
Agnes Sampson also confessed that she and the others had raised a storm to attempt to drown the King on his way back from Denmark—and indeed, the king had almost been drowned in a tremendous storm. She described how she had tied a toad by its back legs, collected the venom that dripped from it in an oyster-shell, and kept it until some occasion when she could get hold of some of the king’s soiled linen, which would enable her to bewitch him to death, making him feel ‘as if he had been lying upon sharp thorns and ends of needles . . .’ The method is reminiscent of the one still used by African witch-doctors.
Fian himself seems to have declared that the devil appeared to him in his cell on the night after his original confession. Since he had already confessed, he was not under the threat of torture, which again leads to the suspicion that he may not have been as innocent as Robbins assumes.
Montague Summers is, of course, convinced that the witches were guilty as charged. He writes: ‘The most celebrated occasion when witches raised a storm was that which played so important a part in the trial of Dr Fian and his coven, 1590–91, when the witches, in order to drown King James and Queen Anne on their voyage from Denmark, ‘took a cat and christened it,’ and after they had bound a dismembered corpse to the animal ‘in the night following the said cat was convayed into the middest of the sea by all these witches, sayling in their riddles or cives . . . this donne, then did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not bene seene’.’ It all sounds preposterous enough, particularly ‘sailing in sieves’; but if African witch-doctors can cause rain—or (see p. 304)—then Summers could well be basically correct. There is at least a fifty per cent possibility that Fian was involved in a real witchcraft plot to kill the king; and if witchcraft sometimes works, then we cannot rule out the possibility that Agnes Sampson and her associates really caused the storm which almost wrecked the king’s ship.
And what of this statement of Fian that the Devil appeared to him? This would seem to brand the confession an invention wrung from him by fear of further torture. Yet again, we should not assume that this is the only possible explanation. As w
e have seen, in his book about magic and witchcraft in Brazil The Flying Cow, Guy Playfair advances the theory that he himself has come to accept through the study of many cases that ‘black magic’ involves the conjuring of ‘low grade’ entities or spirits. And this is, of course, consistent with the view of magic held by witch-doctors and shamans. If we are willing to admit, as a possibility, that magic involves non-human entities, then Fian may have believed that he saw—or heard—the Devil on the night after his confession. We may reject Summers’ view that the Devil actually exists as the adversary of God—after all, most of what we call evil can be regarded as stupidity or the outcome of frustration—but there is a certain amount of evidence in psychical research for ‘mischievous’ entities (who, in many cases, seem to be half-witted). ‘Evil’ spirits may be exhibiting the same kind of stupidity and malevolence as evil human beings.