The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  What may emerge from this sequence of suggestions is how small the European contribution to the Western tradition of ceremonial magic was, even though some Europeans took it up with enthusiasm in all centuries since the twelfth. Whatever the priority of Egypt in it, this magic was essentially a product of the Near East, which may be proposed to have made three huge contributions to European views of the supernatural, in successive waves. The first affected European paganism, by encouraging it to treat its deities as a squabbling family, with individual and collective stories attached to its members. The second was the delivery of Christianity, and the third was the provision of ceremonial magic, as an ideology and practice that could be combined with most religions. At the same time, this magic represented a way of dealing with superhuman beings that was at odds with Christianity, and indeed with pre-Christian European tradition. Each successive flowering of it was part of a more general period of intense creativity in European and Near Eastern religiosity. Its appearance was contemporary with the burgeoning of the pagan mystery religions and of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermetism, the development of rabbinical Judaism, and the growth and triumph of Christianity. Its next period of development was that of the maturation of Islam as a major religion, and the next accompanied the twelfth-century renaissance of Western Christianity. The period of the Renaissance proper and the Reformation saw another great flowering of ceremonial magic, and then another followed in the spiritual ferment of late nineteenth-century Europe, and then (arguably) another in that of the late twentieth-century West. Its story seems to be inseparable from that of European and Near Eastern religion as a whole.

  5

  THE HOSTS OF THE NIGHT

  IN THE POPULAR imagination, the nights of medieval and early modern Europe abounded with spectral armies and processions, and these phantasms have come to play an important part in the explanations made by some leading scholars of the mental construct that became the early modern witches’ sabbath. The major historiographical development which led to a linkage between them and that construct was the collapse of an earlier system of explanation for the early modern witch trials: the belief, held by a succession of authors between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, that the people tried for witchcraft had been practitioners of a pagan religion that had survived from antiquity and was now annihilated by the witch-hunts. This was first developed by German academics, and spread from them to the French, becoming widely adopted among English-speaking writers by the end of the nineteenth century. It was never orthodoxy among experts in the trials themselves, though those remained few until the later twentieth century; rather, it was taken up by professional scholars in other fields and disciplines, and by non-academic authors. It ably served a range of those. To conservatives and reactionaries, it was initially a way of defending the trials, by arguing that although witchcraft itself could no longer be taken seriously, the people accused of it were still adherents of bloodthirsty and orgiastic old cults that deserved to be punished and repressed. Liberals, radicals and feminists could reverse these claims, by portraying the pagan witch religion as being a joyous, life-affirming, liberating one which venerated the natural world and elevated the status of women, strongest among the common people and pitted against everything that the established Churches, aristocracies and patriarchies represented; which is why (this tradition could claim) the latter brutally crushed it. Those who disliked all religion could use this theory of witchcraft to undermine the idea that the medieval and early modern periods had been ages of universal and passionate Christian faith, because Europe had apparently harboured a rival religious allegiance, which had exercised most attraction among ordinary people. This did not necessarily involve any greater admiration for the imagined pagan witches, who could be regarded as followers of a different sort of ignorance and superstition from that of the elite. In England an increasingly fervent idealization of the shrinking countryside, and yearning for a sense of timeless and organic continuity there to offset the traumatic processes of urbanization and industrialization, found comfort in the idea that it had long hidden a paganism that had revered the natural, green and fertile.1 In the early and mid-twentieth century, one British writer came to be especially associated with the hypothesis, a distinguished Egyptologist called Margaret Murray, who wrote about witchcraft (among other subjects) as a sideline to her own, primary, discipline. Her prominence as an advocate of witchcraft as a pagan survival derived from a number of factors. One was her remarkable longevity, so that she continued to publish on the subject for forty years, and another was the passionate certainty with which she argued her case. Also significant was that she wrote at greater length upon it than most of her predecessors, and unlike most of them drew upon primary historical sources (though always published texts, mostly British) to support her assertions. It reinforced her dominance of the idea that witchcraft had been a pagan fertility cult that she tended not to credit any predecessors with it and that when she wrote of it in a popular forum (such as the entry on witchcraft in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which she was invited to contribute) she did so as if it were established fact. That is why by the mid-twentieth century the idea had commonly become known as ‘the Murray thesis’, which gave a misleading impression both of its longevity and of the number of previous writers who had embraced it. Her passionate advocacy meant that by then it not only made a considerable impression on the general public in the English-reading world, but had also been accepted by a number of historians who were expert in other fields, some very eminent. By the 1960s doubts were being raised about it, but general belief in it only really collapsed among specialists in medieval and early modern studies during the years around 1970, with the publication of detailed studies of local witch trials based on comprehensive studies of the archival records (which Margaret Murray had neglected).2 These have continued to the present and left no doubt that witchcraft was not a surviving pagan religion, or any other kind of separate and coherent religion. The idea that it had been was never accepted by historians whose primary expertise lay in the witch trials, and all that was needed to sink it was for those scholars to become more numerous and better known. None the less, it had been a hypothesis worth testing.

  Its demise in a sense put back the historiographical clock to the beginning of the nineteenth century, returning to general acceptance the idea that the concept that had inspired the trials, of witchcraft as a religion dedicated to Satan and the systematic commission of evil magic, had been a tremendous delusion. This in turn posed the question more acutely of how, in that case, such a delusion could have arisen, and one of the first coherent answers was provided by Norman Cohn in 1975. His whole book was effectively a reply to the notion that witchcraft had been an actual religion, and he suggested that the satanic stereotype for one had derived instead from two different sources. One was the tradition, which had originated in pagan Rome and been taken into medieval Christianity, of accusing groups within society, who embraced a religion which did not conform to the dominant norm, of a collection of antisocial activities which usually included sexual orgies, ritual murder and cannibalism. The other strand had consisted of popular beliefs in night-flying and night-prowling beings, some again descended from pagan times. Here Cohn drew attention to the figures of the strix and the Germanic cannibal-witch, but also to the importance of very widespread medieval reports of night-roving processions and bands, some consisting of the dead and some of the followers of a superhuman female figure. He suggested that these two separate streams of fantasy had combined to create the late medieval and early modern myth of the satanic conspiracy of witches, and of the assembly, the ‘sabbath’, at which they met and worshipped the Devil.3 In its essentials, Cohn’s model has stood the test of time, and remains the basic one for the understanding of the early modern persecution of alleged witches.

  These developments presented problems for Carlo Ginzburg, who was unusually conscious of the importance of folk beliefs in witch trials because of h
is work on the Italian benandanti, who represented an extreme case of that importance. His first publication of that work was in Italian, in 1966, at a time when the ‘Murray thesis’ was being questioned but still widely accepted. He accordingly temporized when speaking of the reality of a witch religion: after all, Margaret Murray had used records derived from the far side of Western Europe to his own, and so their accounts did not really interconnect. He made it clear that the benandanti conducted their presumed magical abilities in a state of trance or in dreams, while holding out the possibility that they represented a sectarian association with common beliefs which might have met in reality (something the evidence does not disprove but nowhere proves). In 1983 the English edition of his work came out, and by then the ‘Murray thesis’ had perished among professional historians. He therefore made plain that his own work had not confirmed that witches had met for communal rites in the early modern period, but felt that it was still true that the images and ideas that had underpinned the notion of the early modern witch religion drew heavily on folk traditions which themselves derived ultimately from an ancient pagan fertility cult. He did not, however, suggest that the cult concerned had itself survived through the Middle Ages and that the people accused of witchcraft had still practised it.4 At the end of the 1980s Ginzburg produced his own general study of the origins of the image of the witches’ sabbath, in which he restated this idea on a grander scale. He made full acknowledgement of the fall of the ‘Murray thesis’, declaring that by that date ‘almost all historians of witchcraft’ agreed that it was ‘amateurish, absurd, bereft of any scientific merit’. He agreed that this polemic was ‘justified’, but feared that it had diverted his colleagues from an interest in the origins of the symbols of which the stereotype of the sabbath was composed, even though they ‘document myths and not rituals’. In this fear he was correct, as the new wave of local studies tended to neglect the question of how the popular elements in beliefs and accusations had originated. In stating it he chose to distance himself from Norman Cohn, one of the few authors who had faced that question directly, and did so in two ways. The first was to argue that the short-term development of the image of the religious and social deviant – in the fourteenth century – was more important than the long-term history of European stereotyping of deviancy that Cohn had reconstructed. The second was to minimize the importance of the ancient and folkloric elements in Cohn’s model, by claiming that Cohn had shown no interest in their origins, treating them instead as examples of human psychology or anthropology.5

  In reality, these two gifted historians had much fundamentally in common, as both emphasized the twin streams of tradition which had fused to create the idea of the sabbath: that of the stereotype of the religious and moral deviant (save that Ginzburg emphasized the final, fourteenth-century, development of it) and that of fantasies, also rooted in ancient belief, about night-roaming beings (save that Ginzburg, taking the benandanti as his normative group, neglected the predatory demoness and concentrated on bands and processions). Ginzburg also differed in that he was interested in tracking that ancient belief beyond its historical manifestations into a reconstructed prehistoric mental world, being willing in the process to make analogies, notably that with shamanism, and to presume the former existence of a single fertility religion or shamanic rite technique, or at least a single complex of either, which had spanned Eurasia. In doing this, he was actually adhering to a much older tradition of scholarship, which, like the idea that early modern witches had been pagans, had developed in the nineteenth century. This depended on two assumptions. The first was that the further back in human time one went, the more unified and cohesive human belief tended to become, so that the plurality of religions found in ancient Europe and of folkloric motifs found in medieval and modern Europe were actually fragments of a single prehistoric tradition; this idea was greatly encouraged by, if it did not actually derive from, the Bible. The other was that modern folk customs and stories were often if not mostly fragmentary survivals from a pre-Christian past, and thus could be treated as the historic equivalent of fossils. This view produced the belief that, if collected and reassembled, and sometimes also combined with the customs and stories of ‘primitive’ peoples in the non-European world, they could be used to reconstruct a convincing picture of prehistoric religion, and so perhaps of human mental evolution. Both ideas were developed primarily in Germany, but then taken up enthusiastically by the Victorian and Edwardian British, of whom the most celebrated became Sir James Frazer. They were rejected by most historians and anthropologists in the course of the early twentieth century, both because their conclusions were incapable of objective proof and because the technique of putting together so much heterogeneous data, without regard for context (and often with none for its actual history) began to worry too many people.6 Both, however, underpinned the representation by Mircea Eliade of shamanism as an archaic and once universal tradition of spiritual combat; and Eliade had been inspired by Frazer.7 Not only is Eliade’s formulation of shamanism similar to that of Ginzburg, but Farzer’s influence played a part in Ginzburg’s interpretation of the benandanti.8

  A few other authors accomplished the same work as Cohn and Ginzburg, of rejecting Margaret Murray while retaining an interest in the folkloric roots of beliefs in witchcraft. One was Éva Pócs, who used mainly south-eastern European material both to emphasize the element of popular lore in those beliefs and its derivation from ancient thought systems, and the difference of this exercise from that enacted by Murray and her predecessors. The distinction, as Pócs formulated it, was that the latter had believed in the reality of witches’ gatherings, whereas she was identifying memories, preserved in accounts of witchcraft, which combined recollections of real societies of folk magicians (whom she nowhere suggests were pagans) with ultimately ancient beliefs in fairies, demons and battles between the spirits of special humans. In the process she generously and correctly drew attention to the importance of Norman Cohn in first pointing to the significance of that popular lore.9 Another was Gustav Henningsen, who wrote a large book to show explicitly how the kind of material used by Margaret Murray to demonstrate the existence of a witch religion in fact did nothing of the kind, while also providing one of the most fascinating local studies of how a popular belief in night-flying spirits could get mixed up with notions of witchcraft.10 The present study naturally follows in this dual tradition, and its precise concern now is with the medieval tradition of nocturnal hosts of spirits, which looms large in the work of all these distinguished predecessors from Norman Cohn onwards. It is time to look more closely at the ancient beliefs from which it is supposed to derive, and also at the exact nature of the tradition itself.

  The Construct of the Wild Hunt

  In modern times the roaming nocturnal spirit-bands of the medieval imagination have often been blended together under the label of ‘the Wild Hunt’, an umbrella which can cover an assembly of the human dead, or of living women and men, in spirit or bodily form, or of non-human spirits or demons. Sometimes such an assembly has been called the Furious Army, or the Herlathing, or Herlewin’s Army, or Hellequin’s Army. It often has an identifiable divine or semi-divine leader, either female (called Diana, Herodias, Holda, Perchte or by other names or by variants on those names) or male (called Odin or Wotan, Herla or Herne the Hunter or sometimes identified as King Herod or Pontius Pilate); and sometimes both, in partnership.11 In his first work on the benandanti, Carlo Ginzburg drew attention to the importance of the Hunt in creating key images for the witch trials, calling it a night ride of prematurely dead humans led by a fertility goddess. To him it ‘expressed an ancient, pre-Christian, fear of the dead seen as mere objects of terror, as unrelenting maleficent entities without the possibility of any sort of expiation’, which became Christianized in the twelfth century.12 Éva Pócs duly followed suit, declaring that when popular traditions of night-roaming spirits are examined,