The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Shamanism, and the problem of its definitions, became an issue in the study of early modern witchcraft because of the work of one of Italy’s most celebrated historians, Carlo Ginzburg. Between the 1960s and 1980s, he developed an approach to it based originally on his discovery of an early modern tradition in the Friuli district of the north-east of his country, concerning people called the benandanti, ‘those who go well’. These claimed that at night, when their bodies lay in sleep or some kind of trance, their spirits went forth to do battle with those of witches for the welfare of the community. He saw immediately that this idea corresponded to some of the activities associated with shamans, and detected other traditions of similar figures at places spanning the whole expanse of Eastern Europe. He suggested both that they derived from a common body of ancient ideas, which once covered Eurasia, and that memories of these ideas had helped to create the early modern stereotype of the witches’ sabbath. He was aware of the difficulty of characterizing shamanism, and dealt with it by speaking of ‘elements of shamanistic origin which were by now rooted in folk culture, such as the magic flight and animal metamorphosis’: in other words, people like the benandanti did not necessarily practise shamanism themselves, but drew on old practices which had derived from it or resembled it.4 Carlo Ginzburg’s sense of what shamanism should be bore a striking resemblance to the dominant one during the period in which his ideas were developing. This was a very particular one, articulated by Mircea Eliade, a Romanian refugee who settled in America and became its leading authority on the history of religion: in the 1970s half of all American full professors in that discipline had been his pupils.5 He was also the most influential Western scholar of shamanism during the mid-twentieth century, defining it as a formerly universal and very ancient tradition whereby an elite of warrior magicians sent out their own souls and the platoon of spirits they controlled to do battle with evil forces for the good of their communities.6 The apparent relevance of this model to Ginzburg’s benandanti should be obvious, and Eliade himself perceived and commented on it, proposing that it be extended to other figures found in the folk cultures of south-eastern Europe.7

  Support was forthcoming from Hungarian scholars for an association between particular kinds of European folk magician and shamans. The Hungarian people, the Magyars, had migrated westward into their present homeland from the Eurasian steppes in the early Middle Ages, and spoke a language from the same (Uralic) family as some used by western Siberian peoples who practised classical shamanism. Some Hungarians had by the mid-twentieth century perceived a similarity between shamans and a figure from their own society, the táltos, who was believed to have magical powers which were worked to help others, sometimes in trance or dream and by engaging in spiritual battles with evil powers.8 In the 1980s and 1990s two such scholars became especially active and influential in pursuing such parallels and following up Ginzburg’s suggestions, one a historian, Gábor Klaniczay, and the other a folklorist, Éva Pócs. Together they enlarged upon the fact that the different peoples of south-eastern Europe had obtained a range of purveyors of good magic, under different names, who had allegedly possessed the gift of sending out their own spirits at night to work for the benefit of others, often by fighting destructive forces.9 They were as cautious in the equation of these with shamans as Ginzburg had been. For Klaniczay, the similarities consisted only of ‘shamanistic elements’, while Pócs stated roundly that the European magicians and seers in question ‘cannot be seen as shamans in the strictest sense of the word’. They could indeed only be described as ‘shamanistic’, although she still believed that they were ‘vestiges of a European agrarian shamanism’ which had been practised in a prehistoric past, as Ginzburg had proposed.10 By the 2000s, she also acknowledged that Carlo Ginzburg’s own books made ‘great spatial and temporal leaps without sufficient evidence’, while they remained an important influence upon her. She had come to believe by then both that the definition of shamanism was overgeneralized and that figures such as the benandanti should be better related to European and Middle Eastern cults than Siberian shamans. None the less, she persisted in accepting the idea of a ‘European shamanistic substratum’, though she recognized that it had become controversial. Klaniczay had become still more careful, warning against bringing together remote and perhaps incompatible motifs to construct such a hypothetical ‘substratum’, and emphasizing that the imagery of the witches’ sabbath kept on being reinvented as the early modern period progressed. Ginzburg himself acknowledged by the 2000s that he had possibly underestimated the intricacies of the relationship between the different components of his ‘shamanistic’ complex, and that shamanism might be no more than an analogue to the magical traditions of Europe.11

  By then, however, the association between European magic and shamanism had been enthusiastically adopted by one of the leading historians of the German witch trials, Wolfgang Behringer, in his valuable case study of the prosecution in 1586 of a folk magician from the Bavarian Alps. This man had claimed to have gained his powers as a healer and witch-finder on long journeys at night, in which his soul left his body to accompany either a train of nocturnal spirits, or else an angel. Behringer had no apparent hesitation in dubbing him the ‘Shaman of Oberstdorf’.12 At the same time the association was subjected to consistent criticism, and rejection, by an equally distinguished scholar of the witch trials, the Dane Gustav Henningsen, who was expert in both Scandinavian and Mediterranean Europe. He proposed that the benandanti and similar figures in south-eastern Europe differed from the ‘classical’, Siberian, shamans in four key respects: they were not in control of their trances; they were usually alone when they entered them and only encountered other humans in the course of their soul journeys; they held no public position; and they normally in fact did not enter trance at all, instead dreaming of their journeys while sleeping. He proposed that they be placed in a separate category from shamanism, or indeed from any kind of activity, under any name, which depended on apparently sending out one’s soul or spirit from the body in a public performance. He held that this category consisted of private and passive experiences of seeming soul-journeying, sustained mostly when asleep and dreaming.13 Meanwhile experts in the witch trials of Western Europe, especially those from the English-speaking world, have tended until recently to regard the whole debate as irrelevant to their concerns, largely because of the apparent lack of equivalent figures in their nations to the benandanti and their Hungarian and Balkan parallels.14

  Fairly clearly, the total lack of an agreed definition of shamanism makes it impossible to decide objectively how far it is applicable to European magicians who were believed to send out their souls during trance or dream: some usages of the term certainly comprehend them and some as patently do not. It is equally obvious that there are some similarities between them and the ‘classic’ shamans of Siberia, and some differences, and how far those determine whether the former is analogous to the latter must likewise be a matter for subjective opinion. None the less, a study such as the present one cannot shirk the issue. If its preoccupation is with regional variations in beliefs concerning the witch figure, and their relevance to the early modern trials, then some attempt must be made as part of it to decide whether or not there was a generalized ancient shamanism in Europe, or a shamanic province in it during historic times. To make that possible, the question of definition must now be faced head-on.15 In doing so, the work of providing a global contextualization of European witchcraft beliefs, largely undertaken in the first chapter of the present book, will be completed.

  Setting the Terms

  Éva Pócs, when puzzling over the problem of terminology herself, perceptively noted that ecstatic visionary experience is ‘widespread, commonplace and non-culture-specific’, and as such was found throughout medieval and early modern Europe, among the elite and the populace and in religious and lay contexts.16 A few examples from very different cultures in the European and Mediterranean world may serve to bring home the point. At the
end of the eighth century a historian of the Lombard kingdom, recalling a monarch who had reigned 200 years before, said that he was believed to have the power to send out his spirit through his mouth while asleep, in the form of a tiny snake. In this shape, it had the power to achieve feats such as detecting buried treasure.17 In the 1180s the churchman Gerald of Wales noted the existence in his native country of individuals known collectively as awenyddion or inspired persons. When consulted by clients who wanted to know whether or not to undertake a venture they apparently became possessed by spirits, roaring violently and babbling what seemed nonsense but from which an answer to the question could generally be pieced together. At the end they had to be shaken hard to break their trance and preserved no memory of what they had said. They claimed to acquire their ability in dreams and as a result of profound Christian piety, as they invoked the Holy Trinity and saints before making their prophecies. Gerald found analogies for them in the pagan oracles of the ancient world and in the biblical Hebrew prophets.18 Just over four centuries later, in 1591, a Scot called John Fian claimed that he would ‘lie by the space of two or three hours dead, his spirit taken, and suffered himself to be carried and transported . . . through all the world’. He was confessing (under torture) to dealings with the Devil, and may have been recalling the temptation of Christ, as recorded in the Bible, but could also have been describing an ecstatic experience.19 In 1665, the Jewish sage Nathan of Gaza entered an altered state induced by the singing of hymns by his pupils, in which he danced about before suddenly falling and lying as if dead, with little trace of breathing. In this state, he spoke, in a voice other than his own, the words of a divine entity. He had learned this technique from Hebrew instruction manuals, composed in the sixteenth century.20 Also in the mid-seventeenth century, a friar, Marco Bandini, described a particular class of popular magicians in the Balkan province of Moldavia, then under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. They professed, like service magicians all over Europe, to heal, divine the future and find stolen goods, but did so by going into fits and then falling to the ground to lie motionless for up to four hours. On regaining consciousness they would go into paroxysms again and then emerge from these to reveal the visions that they had received, which would provide what their clients needed. We are not told if they performed these acts in private or before others.21

  All of these people, by entering altered states of consciousness in which they contacted spirits, sent out their own spirits or obtained visions, easily fit the definition of shamanism in some of its most commonly applied formulations. There is a clear value, therefore, in cross-cultural, multi-period comparisons that bring out common patterns in human experience and behaviour. Recognizing and understanding those patterns may in turn assist an analysis of specific phenomena such as attitudes to witchcraft and magic at particular places and times. Broad-brush, inclusive definitions of shamanism could therefore indeed be of genuine use to a historian. They also, however, pose problems. One is that the category of altered states of consciousness can cover markedly different kinds of experience, such as trance, dream, hallucination, delusion, dementia and reverie (each one of which is itself a loose category), and pre-modern sources can make it very difficult to distinguish between them, not least because pre-modern people only sometimes did so. To group all together as shamanism, or ‘shamanistic’ behaviour, does nothing to ameliorate this difficulty. It is certainly important to discuss what traditional human societies have in common, and shamanism provides a convenient umbrella term for direct contacts with spirit worlds by human specialists in other than normal consciousness. The danger is that the umbrella may turn into a dustbin. All human societies until the eighteenth century believed that they had to deal with spirits; what is significant is the range of different ways in which they responded to that belief. A levelling and universalizing language may deprive us of our best chances to explain varying patterns in the historical record, and – as the greatest single aim of a historian – to elicit why particular changes happened in particular places at particular times. Another problem is that it is by no means obvious that scattered case studies such as those noted above represent survivals of a widespread archaic ‘substratum’ of shamanism, as opposed to experiences and techniques which are possible in most societies at most times and are aspects of the non-culture-specific visionary activity noted by Éva Pócs. If shamans are defined as experts in communicating with a spirit world on behalf of others, then it must be beyond doubt that they existed in ancient Europe, because every traditional society has had such experts; such a definition cannot in itself, therefore, offer the potential to say anything very interesting about ancient Europeans in particular. The slightly tighter definition, of experts who perform that communication in an altered state of consciousness, is not a lot more helpful, because it seems that most human beings who claim or are claimed to make direct contact with spirits (including deities) seem to do that in such a state, and in European history have done so under the names of sibyls, oracles, seers, prophets, visionaries, saints and mystics. The quest for shamans is therefore in essence one for individuals who made such contact in ways perceptively different from all those figures, and the fundamental problem of the quest for a ‘substratum’ of them in prehistoric Europe is that such a phenomenon can only be inferred from historical evidence. In other words, it can only be demonstrated if practices surviving in historic times can be proved to be remnants of a more ancient and universal tradition, because material evidence alone (which is all that prehistory leaves) cannot testify to the nature of belief or ritual action. As the only certain proof that such historical practices were survivals of a prehistoric tradition would be direct knowledge of what actually was believed and enacted in prehistory (which is impossible), the investigation starts to go round in a circle.

  It is certainly possible to try to discern from prehistoric European remains apparent traces of activities or beliefs associated with what anthropologists have called shamanism among traditional peoples in the non-European world. These include unusual burial postures, or grave-goods, or personal ornaments; particular motifs in art or architecture; musical instruments; representations of human figures that show them dancing or in the company of animals; possible traces of the consumption of mind-altering substances; and various other phenomena.22 The checklist of possible evidence is, however, so long, and the evidence itself is so ambivalent, that the quest is ultimately fruitless. Each piece of data can be interpreted in ways that have no connection with shamanism, however defined, and although plenty of such ambivalent data can be found in each epoch of European prehistory, the amassing of it does nothing to solve this omnipresent difficulty. So far at least, archaeology has only provided secure testimony to the nature of ritual behaviour when dealing with societies in which material evidence is combined with that of texts.23 The way out of this complex of difficulties chosen here is to go back to basics and ask what it was that first made Europeans take up the word ‘shaman’, and invent that of ‘shamanism’, and find either of them so interesting. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans were familiar with a world of traditional spirituality, in which most people dwelt in small rural communities, were overawed by the forces of nature, feared and negotiated with the empowering entities of those forces, and had local specialists for that work of negotiation. They were also familiar with trance states and ecstatic visions. What they encountered in Siberia still seemed so new and remarkable to them that they had to adopt a native word for its practitioners, to distinguish them from priests, witches, cunning folk, oracles, Druids, prophets, seers, visionaries or any others of the spiritual practitioners already familiar in European culture. By establishing what that alien quality was, it is possible to define with some precision what the essence of shamanism was to the people who first identified it, and then to determine whether that essence was indeed present anywhere in historical Europe.

  Classical Shamanism

  What struck (and generally shocked and appalled) Euro
peans who entered Siberia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the manner in which specialists among its native peoples contacted spirit worlds to safeguard the well-being of their societies: by a dramatic public performance which commonly included the use of music, song, chant or dance, or any combination of those. It was an impressive piece of drama which held the attention, and engaged the senses and imagination, of an audience. In essence, therefore, shamanism was originally defined as a particular ‘rite technique’, and it was something that Europeans found utterly strange, and for which most of them were aware of no real parallel – contemporary or historical – from within their own societies.24 The nature of that technique, and of its practitioners, may be summed up as follows.