The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  THE WITCH

  Copyright © 2017 Ronald Hutton

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hutton, Ronald, author.

  Title: The witch : a history of fear from ancient times to the present / Ronald Hutton.

  Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2017. | Includes

  bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017001239 | ISBN 9780300229042 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Witchcraft--History. | Witch hunting--History. |

  Witches--History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Folklore & Mythology. |

  HISTORY / Europe / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural.

  Classification: LCC BF1566 .H88 2017 | DDC 133.4/309--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001239

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  PART I: DEEP PERSPECTIVES

  1The Global Context

  2The Ancient Context

  3The Shamanic Context

  PART II: CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVES

  4Ceremonial Magic – The Egyptian Legacy?

  5The Hosts of the Night

  6What the Middle Ages Made of the Witch

  7The Early Modern Patchwork

  PART III: BRITISH PERSPECTIVES

  8Witches and Fairies

  9Witches and Celticity

  10Witches and Animals

  Conclusion

  Appendix

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THIS BOOK HAS been over a quarter of a century in the making, and many debts of gratitude have been accumulated in that time. The ideas behind it first began to germinate in the 1980s, as a result partly of my interest in British folklore, intensified by my researches into the history of the ritual year, and partly of my travels abroad, especially among the Polynesian islands and in the then USSR, which enhanced my interest in indigenous religion and magic and in shamanism. In the 1990s I began to test them in the form of guest lectures and seminar papers, at the universities of Oxford, Leicester, Edinburgh and (as it was then) Wales, a process continued in the new century at Edinburgh and Oxford again, Durham, Exeter, Åbo, Harvard, Ohio State, Jerusalem and Manchester. From 1999 onwards I also started to publish them, in a series of works which feature as building blocks in the construction of the arguments of this book, and are referenced as such. Accordingly I owe heartfelt thanks to my hosts at those academic institutions; to the editors of the journals, collected essays and publishing houses that accepted those early writings and the peer reviewers who commented on them; and to the many librarians and archivists who assisted my research with a greater than expected enthusiasm and kindness. To all these there is only space to express a generalized and generic, but still fervent, sense of enduring obligation.

  It is otherwise with the final stage of the work, the sustained and concentrated task of completing the research and writing up this book, which was undertaken between 2013 and 2017. That was made possible by the Leverhulme Trust, which funded a three-year project on ‘The Figure of the Witch’, with Louise Wilson as my assistant and Debora Moretti as my student. We then attracted other students, supported from other sources, onto the team: Victoria Carr, Sheriden Morgan and Tabitha Stanmore, and Beth Collier joined us as an artist. My experienced colleague from Classics and Ancient History, Genevieve Liveley, provided invaluable work in organizing symposia. The dynamism, harmony and camaraderie of the group were wonderful, and made for a perfect environment in which to work. Louise was an ideal assistant, and checked through the whole manuscript of this book. Individual chapters were read by Jan Bremmer, Mark Williams, Charlotte-Rose Millar and Victoria Carr, and their criticisms were very valuable. It was also read through by Ana Adnan, who has in addition demonstrated yet again her remarkable talent for the notoriously difficult task of providing companionship to a writer.

  There are many other kindnesses on the part of professional colleagues which have contributed considerably towards the work and are recorded in the endnotes to it: indeed, a perusal of those is a testimony to the extent to which the writing of history is now a communal and collaborative process. Both personal feuds and struggles between ideological camps have declined notably among academic historians over the past few decades, and both have always been especially lacking in the now large and geographically far-flung field of the professional study of European beliefs in witchcraft and magic. I have certainly never witnessed any myself, let alone engaged in any, during my own participation, and while I cannot claim any of my colleagues in that field as opponents, I can claim very many of them as acquaintances and some as close friends; something which again the perceptive may detect among the endnotes. I would, however, like to end this section by expressing pleasure in my dealings with two particularly grand old men, and pay tribute to a third.

  The first is Carlo Ginzburg, whom I had seen and heard speak repeatedly ever since I was a young don at Oxford in 1981, but with whom I eventually became friendly at a conference at Harvard in 2009. I remember with especial delight a walk together across Cambridge (Massachusetts) one hot summer evening, on which he told me how he had first discovered the records that revealed the existence of the benandanti. The second is Richard Kieckhefer, with whom – among other activities – I made another summer walk, this time across part of Jerusalem; but it was a much more fraught occasion as we had been dumped by a crooked taxi driver in the wrong district, when the time was coming for me to make an address to the gathering we were both attending. In an exemplary demonstration of mastery over new technology, he produced his phone and used satellite mapping to guide us both on foot, so saving my honour and the programme devised by our hosts. The third is Norman Cohn, with whom my dealings had been very different. We were in each other’s company only once, at Cambridge in 1973 when I was an undergraduate there and he gave a guest paper. In response, I tried to defend Charles Godfrey Leland’s nineteenth-century text, Aradia, as a viable source for our knowledge of medieval and early modern witchcraft; and he annihilated my argument. He did so with perfect courtesy and geniality, and I subsequently of course came to realize that he had been right, but it was still a bruising experience. The fact that his work has subsequently fared so well in mine, including in the present book, is proof of how little personal encounters may affect scholarly judgements; and of how some of the best lessons may be sharp. With that in mind, I dedicate this volume to all three of these giants, in whose shadows I have grown up.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Definitions

  WHAT IS A witch? The standard scholarly definition of one was summed up in 1978 by a leading expert in the anthropology of religion, Rodney Needham, as ‘someone who causes harm to others by mystical means’. In stating this, he was self-consciously not providing a personal view of the matter, but summing up an established scholarly consensus, which dealt with the witch figure as one of tho
se whom he termed ‘primordial characters’ of humanity. He added that no more rigorous definition was generally accepted.1 In all this he was certainly correct, for English-speaking scholars have used the word ‘witch’ when dealing with such a reputed person in all parts of the world, before Needham’s time, and ever since, as shall be seen. When the only historian of the European trials to set them systematically in a global context in recent years, Wolfgang Behringer, undertook his task, he termed witchcraft ‘a generic term for all kinds of evil magic and sorcery, as perceived by contemporaries’.2 Again, in doing so he was self-consciously perpetuating a scholarly norm. That usage has persisted till the present among anthropologists and historians of extra-European peoples: to take one recent example, in 2011 Katherine Luongo prefaced her study of the relationship between witchcraft and the law in early twentieth-century Kenya by defining witchcraft itself ‘in the Euro-American sense of the word’ as ‘magical harm’.3

  That is, however, only one current usage of the word. In fact, Anglo-American senses of it now take at least four different forms, although the one discussed above seems still to be the most widespread and frequent. The others define the witch figure as any person who uses magic (although those who employ it for beneficial purposes are often popularly distinguished as ‘good’ or ‘white’ witches); or as the practitioner of a particular kind of nature-based Pagan religion; or as a symbol of independent female authority and resistance to male domination.4 All have validity in the present, and to call anybody wrong for using any one of them would be to reveal oneself as bereft of general knowledge and courtesy, as well as scholarship. Indeed, the circulation of all four definitions simultaneously is one of the factors that makes research into witchcraft so exciting and relevant to contemporary concerns, and sometimes so difficult. Although the latter two are distinctively modern senses of the word, rooted in the nineteenth century but flowering in the late twentieth, the others are both many centuries old. None the less, the use of ‘witch’ to mean a worker of harmful magic has not only been used more commonly and generally, but seems to have been employed by those with a genuine belief in magic and a resort to it, which signifies the great majority of pre-modern people. Its employment to mean any kind of folk magician, drawing on a longer medieval tradition among hostile churchmen of glossing the word ‘witch’ with Latin terms for a range of workers of apparently beneficial magic, seems to have been a polemical tool to smear all forms of magic-worker by association with the term used for the destructive and hated kind.5 Hence in this book the mainstream scholarly convention will be followed, and the word used only for an alleged worker of such destructive magic. Such a usage may distress some people who nowadays habitually employ the word for workers of magic in general (and especially of benevolent kinds), but I hope that on reading this book they will understand that my choice has some value, given the book’s particular preoccupations.

  Already, however, the need for another definition has been begged, and that is of magic itself. Here the one employed in this book is that discussed and justified at length in an earlier work of mine,6 and used in everything that I have published since that touches on the subject: ‘any formalized practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world’. This I distinguish from religion, defined in that earlier work as ‘belief in the existence of spiritual beings or forces which are in some measure responsible for the cosmos, and in the need of human beings to retain relationships with them in which they are accorded respect’. When a group of people operates it in the same way, it becomes ‘a religion’. It should be clear from these formulations that there can in practice be a considerable overlap between the two, so that, for example, a magical rite can be enacted in order to gain a vision of or interaction with a favourite deity. Magic can indeed constitute a category within religion; but it can also operate independently of it, when humans attempt to manipulate spiritual powers which they perceive as having nothing directly to do with deities, and which they seek to operate for purely practical benefits.

  If the term ‘witch’ will be reserved here for somebody believed to use magic for harmful purposes, what of the many individuals who have claimed to be able to work magic for the benefit of others, and have been believed by others to have this ability? Most if not all traditional human societies have contained such figures. Some have specialized in just one magical technique, and/or in just one service, such as healing, divining, removing the effects of witchcraft, tracing lost or stolen goods, or inducing one person to love another. Others have been versatile in both their methods and the range of tasks they have been credited with performing. In very simple societies, their services have been called upon by the whole community, and they have been given honours and privileges in proportion. In more complex social groups they have operated more as independent entrepreneurs, offering their skills for hire by clients like other kinds of craftspeople. In England they were commonly known as cunning folk or wise people, though when speaking of traditional societies outside Europe, English-speakers more commonly called them medicine men or women (especially in North America), or witch-doctors (especially in Africa). In English-speaking parts of Africa, a common recent expression for them has been ‘traditional healer’, but this is doubly misleading, because the practices used by such people are constantly innovative, to the extent of taking on ideas from foreign traditions, and healing is only part of their repertoire. For many, in fact, divination, especially of the causes of misfortune, is more important, and as they are united most obviously by the claim to special powers conferred by invisible beings, it is their alleged possession of magic that is their main distinguishing feature.7 In this book the term ‘service magician’ will be used for such figures. ‘Cunning’ or ‘medicine’ woman or man, and ‘witch-doctor’ seem too culturally specific, and were only some of a range of popular names used for such people even in English. The more forensic term ‘magical practitioner’ has become increasingly popular of late among scholars, but has the drawback that it logically describes anybody who practises magic, for any purpose, including those who do so for private and selfish ends, and witches. The preferred expression of ‘service magician’ has the virtue of summing up the particular function of these people, which was, and is, to provide magical services for clients. Both witches and service magicians have been thought, among many people, to work with the aid of entities commonly known in English as spirits, and they too need some consideration here. I would define them as superhuman beings, not visible or audible to most people at most times, which are thought to intervene constructively or destructively in the physical and apparent world. The greatest form of spirits, according to this usage, consists of those who are thought to command entire aspects of the cosmos and of activities within it, and who are generally termed deities, the goddesses and gods. There are, however, many lesser varieties conceived of among traditional peoples, from the servants and messengers of a deity down to the animating forces of particular trees or bodies of water, or of outwardly inanimate and human-made objects such as stoves. To call such beings ‘spirits’ is a tradition that has recently fallen out of favour with some anthropologists, and scholars influenced by them, as being too Eurocentric and carrying too much baggage. I retain it because it was coined historically by people who very much believed in the entities in question, and this book is mainly concerned with such ‘insiders’. Furthermore, the meaning that they gave it, which I have stated above, still has common parlance and so aids rather than complicates understanding of it in a historical context. I also, however, use the word ‘spirit’ in a different sense, to describe that part of a human being’s consciousness which is believed by many peoples to have a life independent of the physical body and to be capable of separating from it. The use of the same term for two different purposes is not necessarily confusing, because, as will be demonstrated, the two sorts of entity thus descr
ibed can blend at times.

  Finally, I retain three descriptive conventions from my last book, in which I explained my choice of them at length.8 I employ the term ‘paganism’ to signify the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East, and confine it to an active worship of the deities associated with them. I retain the old-fashioned expression ‘the British Isles’ to describe the whole complex archipelago of which Britain is the largest island (and Ireland the second largest), using ‘British’ simply in a geographical and not a political sense, to reflect the main physical component of the group. Finally, and with some persisting personal unease, I use the traditional abbreviations BC and to denote historical epochs, instead of the more religiously neutral, and recently appeared, BCE and CE. In doing so I am, as before, honouring the prevailing convention of my publisher but also attempting a gesture of gallantry suited to the ideal, which I profess, of tolerance and mutual respect between religions.

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS BOOK IS designed primarily as a contribution towards the understanding of the beliefs concerning witchcraft, and the resulting notorious trials of alleged witches, in early modern Europe. During the past forty-five years, this has become one of the most dynamic, exciting and thickly populated areas of scholarship, on a truly international scale. Among much else, it is a showpiece for the new cultural history, illustrating perfectly the role of the historian in interpreting, explaining and representing to the present world ideas and attitudes that are now officially, and in large measure actually, alien to the modern mind. In the process giant strides have been made in the understanding of the beliefs and legal processes concerned, but a gulf has opened between Anglophone and Continental European approaches to them.