As in the case of Jim Jones, the witch craze revolved around control. It wasn’t necessarily about science itself, but rather the control of the cosmos that science was quickly changing. The elite, whose power was largely due to their religious and economic stature, spurred the witch craze. Scholarship, government, society, and law revolved almost completely around God’s law and theology. The usurpation of God was the usurpation of the basis for their control. Essentially, God’s control had been removed from the cosmos, leaving an entire people without direction, understanding, or a solid grasp of the world. Subsequently, the world reacted … violently.
As indicated before, no one explanation can completely analyze what happened in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the issue of control underlies nearly every facet of the major changes that occurred during these centuries and in the fears expressed by the witch-hunters at the height of the craze.
First, we shall look at the loss of religious control. Religious scholars did not miss the implications of the Copernican revolution; they had been debating the meaning of theological texts for centuries and were very adept at making logical arguments concerning God’s role in the world. Subsequently, it did not take a great leap of rational thought to tie Copernicus’s theories to the dismissal of God’s control over the heavens and the earth. Indeed, it was the church that had first access to Copernicus’s theories and to his writings, and it was the church that actually encouraged him to have the work published. “As Copernicus continued work on De Revolutionibus throughout the 1530s, interest in his work grew. In 1533, Pope Clement VII was told about Copernicus’s theory of the motion of Earth. Cardinal Nicholas Schonberg in Rome wrote to Copernicus in 1536 saying he admired his work, asking for a copy of his manuscript, and offering to pay all expenses. His friend, Bishop Tideman Giese, urged him to publish.”5 However, when Galileo expressed his support in 1610, he was warned by the church to stay quiet; and in 1632, when Galileo published his defense of Copernican theory, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he was convicted of heresy and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Why the sudden change of heart by the church?
The focus on the devil in the witch-hunts also merits inquiry because, as indicated before, many scholars and theologians had begun to dismiss the idea of a separate entity responsible for evil. However, the devil was the main focus of the witch-hunts as it was he who corrupted susceptible women and forced them to copulate with him at sabbats. The professed empowerment of the devil during these times may have been a means of protecting the weakest link in Christian theology. The existence of evil is one of the most difficult aspects of a religion that proposes an omnipotent, omniscient God who is both good and loving. Several different logical theories trying to justify the existence of evil or a devil have been debated for centuries with very little progress. While many scholars were beginning to shy away from the problem of the devil, denial of a personal, knowable evil entity was and is contrary to the base beliefs of Christianity. “The difficulty is that any unbiased, educated agnostic observing the phenomenon of Christianity will perceive that belief in the Devil has always been part and parcel of Christianity, firmly rooted in the New Testament, in tradition, and in virtually all Christian thinkers up into very modern times.”6 The devil, and evil itself, presented one of the more difficult theological problems. The implications of the Copernican revolution could (and eventually did) expose this weakest link in theology. Therefore, the exponential growth of the devil’s power and influence in the sermons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could have been a protective, defensive mechanism as the elite ruling party tried to maintain their control through a mythology based on fear. The greater the belief in the devil, the more difficulty the new empirical, scientific thinking would have in discrediting such beliefs … especially if the existence of the devil and witchcraft could be “proved” through trials and forced confessions of the accused witches. Belief in the devil gave the church and the ruling parties control over the masses and a powerful belief system against the empirical and scientific method.
The great reformation of the church also had its roots in power; firstly, by the Catholic Church trying to maintain their belief and power systems, and secondly, in the usurpation of control by the people themselves. The Protestant Reformation sought to connect the individual directly to God without having to use the church as a medium. As literacy increased and the Bible became more and more available to the people, the centuries of dogma built by the Catholic Church was called into question. Thus, the Reformation largely consisted of the control of peoples’ souls, and salvation being transferred from the Catholic Church to the individual. The Protestant Reformation, however, faced some difficulty with belief in the devil and the persecution of witchcraft as well. “The fierce religious differences revealed by the Reformation added another point of instability in this tumultuous century. Lutheran theologians and pastors stressed a demonology different from that of the Catholics. Regarding the devil’s power, they taught that misfortune was caused not by the devil but by God’s providence, and that the devil, and certainly his servants, did not have the enormous power with which popular belief, and especially Catholic belief, credited them.”7 However, the Protestants continued with witch-hunts, though less fervently than the Catholics. The Protestants, with their focus on scripture and scripture alone actually reacted more vehemently against the Copernican theories. “ ‘Mention has been made of some new astrologer, who wanted to prove that Earth moves and goes around, and not the firmament or heavens, the sun and the moon,’ commented an angry Martin Luther in 1539. ‘This fool wants to turn the entire art of astronomy upside down! But as the Holy Scriptures show, Joshua ordered the sun, and not Earth, to halt!’ Protestants proved initially more hostile to Copernicus.”8 Also, “Luther, who despised hermetic magic as a vain and prideful attempt to grasp divine knowledge through intellect, hastened to link all magic with witchcraft.”9 Hermetic magic was the search for an underlying connection throughout the natural world, probably more akin to physics than witchcraft. To Protestantism, the Copernican theories were more threatening and dangerous than any form of witchcraft. Witchcraft was ultimately the providence of God, but the budding scientific revolution was a direct threat to the belief in God. Thus, it was essential to the church that fervor, fear, and hunts were maintained, the devil continued to roam the European countryside, and witches continued to have their trials. Control of world perception had to be maintained in order to preserve the current balance of power, whether that power rested with the Catholic Church or the Reformation; both needed the existent, theological worldview in order to maintain their tenuous grasp of the cosmos and the people.
The witch craze also revolved around the establishment of centralized government and the assertion of control over the people. The elite, educated, and pious were taking their place at the head of government and extending their reach to small, country townships. “The ducal and Royal governments of Europe were becoming more efficient, centralized, and powerful; in other words, more capable of controlling many aspects of peoples lives.”10 Also, the trials were presided over by judges who acted on behalf of the state. “The judge became the initiator of charges, compiling evidence against suspects, interrogating the accused in secret, using torture when necessary to ascertain the truth, acting always in the name of the state.”11 The extended government control, along with new taxes and enforcement, tightened the noose around all of society and created new economic hardships for the peasantry. The witch-hunters and judges, on behalf of the state, also showed an expressed fear of a conspiracy of witches. Their torturous methods forced the witches to reveal other witches in the community. Under extreme duress, many of the women would openly confess to their deeds and begin to name other women who attended these blasphemous sabbats. This created in the townsfolk a dependency on the state and church based on fear of a vast satanic conspiracy of witches who kidnapped and devoured people’s chil
dren, cavorted with the devil, and cast spells which brought disease, famine, and death. The promotion of the belief in witchcraft allowed the townsfolk to blame all their difficulties on a common enemy, one which was being hunted down by the government and the church in the name of preserving life, safety, and souls. It also allowed the townspeople to feel a sense of control in the world. With an enemy responsible for the world’s evils, named and known and being hunted, it actually established a sense of purpose, reason, and control in the minds of the townsfolk; it felt as if order was being enacted in the world—God’s order.
Such order was not possible in the Copernican universe that was governed, not by God, but by strange, unseen forces. No longer was God the hand that ordered the universe. The witch-hunts, through their use of tortured confessions by the witches, proved the existence of the devil and the need for God’s hand in the natural world. The irony being, of course, that the chaos of this mass hysteria was anything but orderly, and certainly not godly.
And was it, perhaps, these strange forces of nature, such as physics, that everyone was so concerned about? Magic is essentially the manipulation of nature through unseen forces. In the case of witchcraft, it was manipulation of nature through the aid of evil spirits, even the devil himself. Suddenly, Renaissance scientists were proposing unseen forces that controlled the cosmos, similar to the way witches controlled the fates of people’s health, livestock, and lives. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, in her feminist examination of the witch trials, makes the important point that the victims, more than the perpetrators, should be examined closely when trying to find a cause of the witch craze. The majority of accused witches were poor, single or widowed women who lived on the outskirts of communities, often beggars who were largely involved in the healing arts and midwifery. With science barely existent in the times leading up to the witch craze, many of the healing arts dabbled in sorcery and mysticism, using herbs and medicinal practices that were not understood by either patient or healer; but nonetheless, these folk remedies worked and were readily accepted by the people. However, following the Malleus’s decree that all magic and sorcery was heretical, and the imposition from the elite that witchcraft had to be pursued and prosecuted, these women went from healers to witches. Again, it became an issue of control; through the elimination of those who were thought to have the ability to control these forces of nature and healing, control was returned to God, rather than leaving it in the hands of magicians who manipulated unseen forces.
But the real test as to what the elite truly feared and what actually drove the witch craze may lie in what was ultimately its undoing. The new understanding of the world through science was a contributing factor to both the birth of the witch craze and its death. In essence, the old belief system, which so ferociously reared its head during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now being defeated quickly and quietly by the age of science, reason, and empiricism. “From this combination of decreasing anxiety about the structure of the inhabited world and increasing assurance of people’s ability to understand that world in earthly terms, witchcraft, as a Western belief, was ultimately to founder.”12 And Russell writes, “Witchcraft took a steep downturn in the mid-seventeenth century, as people wearied of being terrified—terrified of the threatening presence of hostile spirits, and terrified of prosecution.”13 The confusion, anxiety, and fear that had spurred the witch craze had subsided and been replaced by a new era of thinking that did not allow for such beliefs. The foundations of the world in the sixteenth century had been rocked by several advancements in the sciences beginning with Copernicus’s theory of a heliocentric universe—a universe in which basic laws of unseen natural forces guided the planets around the sun, rather than God’s divine hand guiding the planets around the earth. The negation of God from the natural realm spurred a reaction beginning with the church and with the scholars who had direct access to Copernicus’s work. While he was at first encouraged by the church, within half a century Copernicus’s views were regarded as heretical, and Galileo paid a steep price for defending them. This sudden and dramatic change is indicative of the fear that Copernicus and Galileo wrought in those who adhered to the old traditions. Suddenly, the world as they knew it was being pulled out from under them. The witch craze was a violent reaction to this sudden and dramatic change.
However, I am not suggesting that the Catholic Church and the scholars got together and decided to systematically combat these new ideas by promoting witchcraft and the persecution thereof. Rather, I am offering yet another possible road into the cause of this dark time in human history. The Renaissance forever changed the course of human history, but a change so dramatic is going to have psychological effects. The world of spirit was quickly being replaced by a world of natural law and science, but the dramatic change would not come without some form of resistance. As the framework of the known godly universe began to crack and tumble, the people clung to their traditional beliefs in a violent and illogical way. One needs only look at the extent of absurdity to which these beliefs were carried to understand that this was much more than just an aberrance of human behavior. People were desperately trying to prove the spiritual universe. They needed some form of proof that the devil was out there and that his magic was being worked on the population; they found that proof, or rather coerced confession, in witches.
The accounts of orgies, cannibalism, and infanticide during the witches’ sabbats were nothing new to traditional beliefs. These were all offenses that had been laid at the feet of Jews, heretics, and even Christians in Rome during the early years of belief. Clinging to this great idea of evil “others” who had consorted with the devil fit perfectly into the spiritual understanding of the universe, and the townspeople were able to accept these accusations with ease. The establishment of folk magic and hermetic magic as heretical by the Malleus Maleficarum, as well as its decree that belief in witchcraft was essential to Christianity, set in place a thought pattern that would come to reject Copernicus’s theories as heretical and exposed many women who practiced the healing arts as witches. A battle of ideas was fought between the old traditions and the new science, and science ultimately and resoundingly won, but there were casualties. No universal worldview can be shifted without tremendous effect on the population, and that is essentially what science did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, beginning with Copernicus. “In opposition to scholastic modes of thought, the seventeenth century witnessed the rise of philosophies in which there was no place for spiritual or supernatural causes of the events of the natural world. Arising from Descartes’s categorical separation of the realms of matter and spirit, from experimental and empirical naturalism, mechanistic modes of explanation increasingly replaced accounts of spirit acting upon matter as satisfactory accounts of events in men’s minds.”14 If you want to see who fought a war, look at the dead and then look at the living. In this case, the old traditions were gone, and the modern age of science and reason had arrived.
EARLY AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM
In 1848, in a small farmhouse in Hydeville, New York, the Fox family began to hear strange knocks and rattles in their home. The family quickly came to believe that their house was infested with evil spirits. Two young adolescent sisters, Margaret and Katherine, discovered that they could ask the spirits questions and receive answers back in the form of knocks. Word got out in the surrounding towns, an area of New York known as the “burned-over district” because of the number of religious revivals that had run rampant throughout the countryside, and suddenly people were flocking to Hydeville from all over New York to see the Fox sisters communicate with these spirits. Thus began a movement known as Spiritualism that would capture the imagination of the public and the scrutiny of science for the next 80 years, eventually reaching its peak in the days just before the First World War.
However, before the Fox sisters were even born, a scientist was embarking on a round-the-world trip aboard the HMS Beagle. In 1831, Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle and b
egan a five-year journey that would take him to the Galápagos Islands and many other lands where he would study nature, flora and fauna, and eventually develop his theory of evolution through natural selection. While the Fox sisters were communicating with spirits, Darwin was communicating with fellow biologists, passing along his ideas and essays. Ten years after the Fox sisters began to hear raps in the attic, Darwin released his work, On the Origin of Species, and forever changed the way that science, nature, religion, and the origins of life were viewed. It marks one of the most dramatic scientific and cultural changes in modern history and sparked debates that still rage to this day. Amid this scientific revolution, the public became fascinated with Spiritualism and its practices, which included accounts of communication with dead relatives, levitation, manifestation, spirit hands, approbation, extrasensory perception, and spirit manifestos that focused on the nature of reality and the afterlife. Darwin, despite being a religious man himself, essentially removed God and the soul from the origins of life. His theories had almost immediate acceptance in scientific circles, but also social repercussions. The public reacted by turning toward the very thing that Darwin removed from the equation: the idea of the eternal human soul—that we were not merely animals but divinely created beings that lived on after death. Georgess McHargue states in her work, Facts, Frauds, and Phantasms, “Probably the most exact way to describe Spiritualism is to say it is the belief that the individual personality survives after death and can communicate with the living.”15
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