Ziarnko was a Polish printmaker who lived and worked in Paris. This image was made to accompany a book by Pierre de Lancre, one of the most notorious witch hunters of the early seventeenth century. De Lancre was credited with six hundred executions in just three years, although current scholarship suggests the actual number is less than one hundred.
The image was printed as an oversized fold-out sheet in de Lancre’s book. It can be read as a parody or grotesque inversion of a court masque. Letter keys helpfully identify the main elements for curious readers: Satan, depicted as a five-horned goat, oversees the sabbat from his throne at the upper right. A naked witch and a demon are presenting him with a young child. For the banquet at lower right, body parts of children are served up. As flying witches arrive with more children, riotous dances take place at either side of swirling smoke rising from a diabolical brew being prepared at the center foreground.
The number of people accused, convicted, and executed as witches is difficult to determine. Some witch hunters claimed extraordinary results — one, Nicolas Remy, boasted of having convicted nine hundred witches over about a decade. This number seems vastly inflated, but at the height of the witch trials, between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century, somewhere between fifty and one hundred thousand trials may have been held. There is a tendency among contemporary historians to question the vast numbers sometimes given, but whatever the tally the fact remains that a lot more supposed witches were killed during this period than in others, and more in Europe than elsewhere.
Not that the trials were distributed in all parts of Europe equally. About two-thirds of the cases occurred in German-speaking areas. There were few trials in Spain — the Inquisition there generally scoffed at suggestions of witchcraft and declined to prosecute them. (Still, on a visit of the inquisitor to Navarre in 1611, 1,802 people came forward to admit involvement in witchcraft; 1,384 of them were children.) In England, there were few trials, despite King James’s interest in witchcraft, and torture was relatively uncommon. His Daemonologie was his best-selling title, and one of his acts during his first year after assuming the crown of England was to make witchcraft punishable by death. His interest probably arose from his conviction that the rough seas he experienced during his one trip outside Britain, when he had traveled to Norway to meet his bride, Anne, were the result of sorcery. On its way to Scotland Anne’s royal fleet had been forced to wait out a storm for several weeks in Norway. James determined to meet her there, but his ships too were beset by storms (similar storms had saved England from the Spanish armada). On his return to Scotland — in 1590, when this occurred, he had not yet become king of England — James launched a large-scale investigation, which rounded up several dozen suspected witches, many of whom confessed under torture to having been involved in causing the storm. Particular attention was given to an unfortunate woman named Agnes Sampson, a midwife and herbalist. Examined by James himself, she confessed to having attended a witches’ coven that caused the storms. Prior to this confession she had been fastened to the wall of her cell by four iron prongs forced into her mouth, kept without sleep, and held by a rope around her head, so the garrotting and burning that followed her confession at least put an end to her ordeal.
One of those accused of conspiring with witches to cause rough seas during James’s voyage was Francis Stewart, the Fifth Earl of Bothwell. Stewart’s father had been the chief suspect in the murder of James’s father, and he had subsequently married James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots. James and Stewart were political rivals. While most victims of accusations of witchcraft were among the poor and the vulnerable, at the highest levels of society witchcraft became politicized, as happened with Louise Bourgeois’s patron, Leonora Galigai. Even Cardinal Richelieu resorted to charges of witchcraft against political rivals.
The combination of witchcraft and palace intrigue in Scotland was juicy material for a play that might please the new king. James assumed the throne of England in 1603, and not long afterward William Shakespeare produced just such a play. The dating of many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays is uncertain but current scholarship suggests that Shakespeare’s original Macbeth was written in 1606. In the play the witches prophesize that Banquo will father a line of kings: these are the Stuarts who were James’s ancestors, his claim to the throne.
But Shakespeare’s witches were not the weird sisters familiar from modern texts of the play, nor was the play the one we now know. A theatergoer who attended a performance of the play describes them, rather, as “women feiries or Nimphes.” Those were parts that would have been played by boy actors. The current text of the play, however, takes pains to mention their beards. “You should be women,” Banquo tells them, “And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.” This change would have allowed the parts to be played by men (perhaps even by the original boy actors, now grown up).
A Portrait of the Artist as a She-Owl, woodcut from The Owles Almanac, 1618, by Thomas Middleton. Printed by Edward Griffin, sold by Lawrence Lisle.
The artist of this woodcut, no doubt executed to Middleton’s instruction, is unknown. It parodies traditional images that presented authors surrounded by various symbols of arcane knowledge. Here, in front of a bookshelf and a clocklike device, the owl inscribes esoteric symbols with a quill pen.
That is far from the only change in the text. The task of adapting Shakespeare’s play for a “modern” audience was given to Thomas Middleton, who had recently had a success with his play The Witch; both the existing version of Macbeth — which includes enough Middleton that it is included in the recent collected edition of his works edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino for Oxford University Press — and Middleton’s own The Witch were probably produced in 1616. The Witch was probably performed in the spring and followed by the revival of Macbeth in the fall.
Another play from 1616 also concerned satanic doings. A satiric comedy by Ben Jonson called The Devil Is an Ass, it most likely opened at Blackfriars in October or November, after the new adaptation of Macbeth. It concerns a visit by one of the lesser demons of hell to London, where he inhabits a human body but finds himself outdone in devilment by the ordinary citizens of the city and winds up in Newgate Prison. “The hurt th’ hast done, to let Men know their strength,” Satan upbraids the miserable imp, “And that the’are able to out-do a Devil / Put in a body, will for ever be / A scar upon our Name!”
“Come Away, Hecate, O Come Away,” ca. 1616, from Thomas Middleton’s The Witch. Musical manuscript, hand copied by Anne Twice. New York Public Library, MS Drexel 4175, no. liiii.
This text of this song, which was performed not only in Middleton’s own The Witch but also in his adapatation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was handwritten by a woman named Anne Twice, who must have wanted to perform it. According to Gary Taylor and Andrew J. Sobel, “It is hard to resist the assumption that the female owner/creator/user of this manuscript identified in some way with the song’s ‘I’ and its triumphant evocation of female power, pleasure, and flight.”
In The Witch the song was sung by Hecate, witches, and a cat. For the lyrics of the song see the Source Notes, p. 366.
When The Tragedy of Macbeth was included in the folio edition of Shakespeare’s works the editors did not have the words to its songs, which had been reprised wholesale from Middleton’s Witch, and so the text simply reads “Music and a song. Sing within: ‘Come away, come away, etc.’” But the full text and music were included in a printing of The Witch, and a handwritten copy exists in the New York Public Library.
Macbeth is among the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays (less than two-thirds the average length of his tragedies), in large part because Middleton abridged substantial parts of it. Shakespeare’s original version apparently began with a battle scene, but the audience’s taste for such scenes had faded by 1616. Ben Jonson satirized such scenes in Every Man in His Humour as “three rusty swords, and help of some few foot-and-half-foot words.” Instead, the action of the ba
ttle is quickly summed up in dialogue.
In the decade between the original version and Middleton’s adaptation, the King’s Men had moved from the Globe to Blackfriars Theatre — in other words, from a semi-outdoors setting to an indoor one. This enabled new special effects, which the scenes of witches and ghosts made use of, but it also required the elimination of such elements as the horses that Banquo and Macbeth apparently rode in on. In all, Middleton probably cut somewhere around a quarter of the original text.
He also moved elements around and added new ones. In general, Middleton pumped up the spectacular and fantastic elements of the play, no doubt to capitalize on the popular reception to his Witch. The witch Hecate, subject of the song “Come Away, Hecate, Come Away,” was one of his additions; she had been the title character of The Witch. That play, a comedy set in Italy, has an extraordinarily convoluted (and preposterous) plot, which involves a lover who had been thought dead returning on his fiance’s wedding night and his efforts to prevent the wedding from being consummated; a duchess’s attempts to kill her husband out of resentment at his having made a drinking vessel from the skull of her father; a young woman’s secret pregnancy and delivery of the child; the comeuppances of a glutton and a courtesan; and much more. All of these plot twists are facilitated by charms and potions prepared by the 117-year-old witch, Hecate.
Witches Roasting a Child, from Compendium Maleficarum (Compendium of Witches), 1626, by Francesco Maria Guazzo. Milan. Woodcut.
Guazzo, a priest, described ceremonies preliminary to taking a vow of allegiance to Satan and detailed varieties of demons. Here, while witches roast a child in the foreground, two others place another child in a boiling broth. Eating children to obtain supernatural powers was commonly believed to be an activity of witches, whose powers were associated with an inversion of traditional symbols of fertility.
Hecate embodies the European notion of the witch in the early seventeenth century. We meet her as an outsider, living in a cave. She has made a pact with the devil, who has granted her 120 years of life. She is heating up a pot in which she will boil a dead child. Serpents also go into the potion. It will enable the witches to fly in the moonlight. She discusses a charm that will curse a farmer’s livestock. Besides her fellow witches, cats and spirits are her companions. She rhapsodises about transforming into a guise that will enable her to have sex with young men:
Here, take this unbaptised brat.
Boil it well, preserve the fat:
You know ’tis precious to transfer
Our ’nointed flesh into the air
In moonlight nights o’er steeple tops,
Mountains and pine trees, that like pricks or stops
Seem to our height; high towers and roofs of princes
Like wrinkles in the earth: whole provinces
Appear to our sight then ev’n leek
A russet mole upon some lady’s cheek.
When hundred leagues in air, we feast, and sing.
Dance, kiss, and coll, use everything.
What young man can we wish to pleasure us
But we enjoy him in an incubus?
All of these elements — old age, night flight, destruction of livestock, killing and eating children, preparation of potions, companionship of cats, pacts with the devil, sex with young men — are standard attributes of the European witch. With the spread of literature and literacy following Gutenberg, and the beginnings of political consolidation of disparate villages into large states governed by literate bureaucracies, two distinct lineages of knowledge increasingly began to diverge. Knowledge from written texts, despite exceptions, was a largely male domain, and men had positions of power from which to oppress the oral, largely female tradition of folk knowledge. As a result, witches came increasingly to represent unorthodox and illicit wisdom. Where once conjurers were regarded as dangerous but potentially helpful, increasingly they were associated with evil and with the devil himself.
Witchcraft had long been a part of village-centered life. So much about the world was mysterious. Why does the object of my affections not reciprocate my feelings? Why has my cow stopped giving milk? What is causing my wheat to be covered with black mold? Faced with these kinds of questions, it only made sense to give the neighbor’s potion, amulet, or spell a try. Prayers were known to produce beneficial results, so why not spells? Such white magic was distinguished from black magic. There was good reason to believe in that too, for the church insisted that the devil was real, and that he was active among us. But now, with religious leaders more concerned than ever with standardizing belief, people more and more were hearing that all magic, both white and black, was evil — if it didn’t involve the intervention of some demon, how else could it be effective?
Witches’ Sabbat, 1606, by Frans Francken II (1581–1642). Antwerp. Oil on oak panel, 36 × 48 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, bequeathed by Rev. Alexander Dyce, Dyce.3.
Frans Francken II was known for his “monkey kitchen” paintings, in which monkeys represent human vices and follies. But Francken also did a series of paintings devoted to witches and witchcraft, including this witches’ sabbat taking place in a domestic interior at night. The foreground is dominated by finely dressed ladies, whose youth and beauty are juxtaposed with the grotesque appearance of older, naked or seminaked women behind them. The hectic scene is filled with winged demons, flying witches, and other creatures. There may be a suggestion that evil lurks behind female sensuality.
A variety of types of magic is represented: incantations, burning of herbs, rituals involving skulls, magic runes, the preparation of a potion in a cauldron. A burning house seen through a doorway may represent the object of the destructive power of all these magic arts.
Francken’s detailed representation of witchcraft “gave the impression that he knew more about it than the popular culture allowed,” a V&A curator has written, “although the reason for this remains unclear.” The European witch hunts reached their height between about 1580 and 1640, just when this painting was made. Who at such a time would have been the audience for an image of this kind?
Emerging science left much unexplained. What caused the storms that buffeted King James’s wedding ships? What caused the plagues and famines that struck at seemingly random intervals? Old women, often widows, took much of the blame. Not only were they frequently burdens on families struggling for subsistence, but they also symbolized infertility, represented by the deaths of children and livestock and the failure of crops. The union of women above child-bearing ages with young men was considered unnatural and unproductive, and consequently a likely indication of witchcraft. However old and haggard, such witches were often depicted as highly sexualized. They gathered in witches’ sabbats together with younger women recruited by them into the service of evil. In these sabbats they would have sex (anal sex, it was sometimes said) with the devil, but this would result in their being infertile, or else giving birth to monsters. During such liasons the devil would leave his mark, and women with moles and birthmarks were wise to keep them concealed if they could. Of course, the mark was not always easy to find. James I advised that “the Deuill dooth lick them with his tung in some privy part of their bodie, before he dooth receiue them to be his seruants, which marke commonly is given them vnder the haire in some part of their bodye, whereby it may not easily be found out.”
Female sexuality in the person of witches was frightening to many men. A 1603 manual warned that “through their dances, their obscene kisses” female witches “contrive to send demons and evil spirits into a man’s body.” Those evil spirits could deprive a man of his vitality, turn him impotent, or worse. The grandfather of all witch scare books, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), which was reprinted at least thirty times between 1487 and 1669, explained that witches
collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members altogether, and put them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been
seen by many and is a matter of common report.
Deceitful Sorcerers and Witches, drawing 109 from El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno (“The First New Chronicle and Good Government”), 1616, by Guaman Poma.
Poma’s drawing of Inca witches clearly shows the influence of European images of the devil. With new and more frequent encounters among peoples during the age of maritime globalism, cross-cultural influences were frequent and complex.
Among the evidence the Malleus provides about this practice is the case of an unfortunate man who “had lost his member” as a result of witchcraft. This man
approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to the parish priest.
A saying in Burma has it that “out of seven houses there must be one witch.” Belief in witchcraft was hardly unique to Europe but was found throughout the world. (And it has been remarkably persistent. In 1977, as old women confessed on the radio to changing shape into owls and devouring babies, the postal service of the People’s Republic of Benin responded with a postage stamp bearing the legend La Lutte Contre la Sorcellerie — The Battle against Sorcery.) What was unusual about the European witchhunts was the scale on which they were conducted and the number of victims they produced. Whereas witchcraft had traditionally been managed on the village level, in the German-speaking Empire, where the largest number of witchcraft executions occurred, some of the highest-ranking state figures took it upon themselves to oversee hunts. Village-centered religion had been based around ritual and symbol, only loosely surrounded by nebulous constellations of beliefs that had varied considerably among communities and individuals. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation had represented an attempt to codify belief on a scale beyond anything previously attempted. In this context witch trials were part of a trend toward intolerance of customs and beliefs that diverged from institutionalized standards.
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