6
WHAT THE MIDDLE AGES MADE OF THE WITCH
THUS FAR, AN examination of the relationship between specific themes in medieval culture and their ancient antecedents has revealed some perhaps unexpected contrasts. In the case of ceremonial magic, dependent on the transmission of texts copied by a literate elite, the continuity with the ancient world, and the survival of names and ideas from it, seems to have been greater than has traditionally been considered. On the other hand, in the case of beliefs concerning spectral processions of the night, which have long been thought by scholars to have derived directly from pre-Christian tradition, the lines of transmission seem to be a lot harder to prove than has been presumed. It remains to confront directly the issue of how the Middle Ages dealt with the central theme of this book, the figure of the witch. This chapter will tackle that problem and in doing so propose answers to three more: what difference the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of Europe made to attitudes to magic and witchcraft; how seriously witchcraft was treated in the course of the Middle Ages; and how the stereotype of the witch as a practitioner of a satanic religion, which underpinned the early modern witchcraft trials, came to evolve.
The Immediate Impact of Christianity
It was remarked earlier that the Christian religion which underpinned the early modern witch trials combined the whole range of ancient traditions which individually established parts of a context for witch-hunting: Mesopotamian demonology; Persian cosmic dualism; a Graeco-Roman fear of magic as intrinsically impious; Roman images of the evil witch; and the Germanic concept of night-roaming cannibal women. Comments by respected scholars have not been lacking, indeed, to credit the Christian faith with an inherent propensity to encourage the persecution of magicians. Valerie Flint has argued that its institutionalized and monopolistic traits made it automatically into a state religion that demanded tighter control of human dealings with spirits, most of which became evil by definition.1 Richard Kieckhefer has pointed out that Christianity redefined magic in a totally new way, as the worship of false gods, alias demons.2 Michael Bailey has agreed, observing that Christians always posited a more fundamental distinction between religion and magic than that imagined by pagans and Jews.3 All this is correct, but there are two obvious features of the history of magic that provoke counterbalancing reflections. One is that the early European witch trials commenced a thousand years after the triumph of the new religion, raising the problem of why, if its ideology was so well suited to hunt witches, it took so long to do so. The second is that, as discussed earlier in this book, the pagan Roman Empire had proved perfectly capable of enacting a savage code of laws against magicians, based on wholly traditional attitudes, at precisely the same time as it was persecuting Christians with an equal brutality. It is, in fact, that legal and cultural context, of established and intense official hostility towards magic, that provides the reasons for the Christian perspective on the subject. It presented early Christians with an acute problem: that the miracles credited by them to their Messiah and his apostles could look like those promised by, or attributed to, ceremonial magicians. This charge was levied against them by some of their most effective pagan critics, such as Celsus, who wrote the first comprehensive attack on the new religion in the second century. The reply provided by the leading Christian theologian Origen became the standard one: magicians used rites and incantations, but true Christians only the name of Jesus and the words of the Bible, and a reliance on the power of their deity: a formula which plugged directly into the long-established Graeco-Roman distinction between religion and magic.4 Almost two hundred years later, Augustine of Hippo worked it up into its enduring form, which persisted through the Middle Ages: that the acts of magicians were accomplished with the aid of demons, whereas the miracles of Christian saints were made possible by the intervention of the one true God.5
The polemical position that Christianity established with regard to magic, therefore, was a defensive one formulated to cope with a serious challenge to its own credibility and public image, and set firmly in the context of existing Graeco-Roman attitudes. It also, however, drew on essential traits of its own, one of which was an extreme manifestation of the Mesopotamian (and thus the Hebrew) fear of demons. Even by the traditional standards of the Fertile Crescent, early Christian demonology was uniquely polarized, depending on the acceptance of a cosmic force of pure evil in the universe, and all-pervasive. The driving of demons out of people whom they had possessed and were afflicting was a chief task of Christ himself, his apostles and the early saints, and these evil spirits were their main enemies, as any perusal of the New Testament, Apocrypha and early hagiographies reveals. On the whole, however, these same texts were much more concerned with direct confrontations between Christian champions and demons than between those champions and human servants of the demons. The problem that early Christians had with (pagan or Jewish) magicians focused on them as rival exorcists and healers, and also as objects of official suspicion and condemnation with whom Christians might too readily be conflated, as Celsus actually did conflate them. The ‘magicians’ Simon Magus and Elymas, and itinerant Jewish exorcists of the classic ancient Mesopotamian sort, already feature in the Acts of the Apostles as fools or charlatans, and one of the traits of the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation is pharmakeia, still the standard Greek word for potion-based magic.6 These motifs were multiplied and amplified in subsequent early Christian literature, but never add up to make that literature a body of witch-hunting documents. The magicians portrayed are too weak, and easily bested by Christian holy men, to represent dangerous opponents, and there is none of the special association of women with bad magic found in ancient Roman and Jewish sources.7 Jesus himself was not interested in magic, and when the apostle Paul condemned it, he did so as a sin on a level with anger and lechery, and not as a lethal crime.8 All this forms the background to what happened after the year 312, as Christianity became the dominant religion in the empire and the one professed by most of its emperors (and by all after the year 363). In the fourth century, a series of church councils passed decrees which forbade Christians, and clergy in particular, to have anything to do with ceremonial magic, and included divination as part of that.9 Imperial law adapted accordingly during the same century and the next, the big shift in it being to redefine practices that had been normative in ancient paganism, such as divination by official temple personnel and sacrifice as a religious act, as superstitious or magical, and therefore forbidden. When dealing with ceremonial magic, however, and harm caused by magical means, the laws did little more than reinforce what had already been laid down under pagan emperors.10 This continuity would none the less still mask significant change if the existing laws against ceremonial magic, and all forms of harmful magic, were enforced more rigorously than before.
An impression that this was indeed the case is provided in a series of famous passages by the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus. He recorded that following a law of Constantius II, in 358, which declared that magicians across the empire were enemies of humanity, anybody who wore an amulet to cure a disease, or passed a tomb after dark, was in danger of denunciation and execution. Being seen near a tomb was fatal because of suspicion that the person concerned was hunting for human body parts for use in spells. This wave of trials was followed by three more, at intervals between 364 and 371, under the brother emperors Valentinian and Valens. Those began by mainly affecting the Roman senatorial class, but expanded over time to target commoners. Whole libraries were burned by their owners for fear they might be thought to contain magical texts. These persecutions affected both Rome itself and the eastern provinces, and torture was freely used to obtain evidence. Ammianus made clear that in most cases the pressure to prosecute came from the top, from emperors leading recently established and insecure dynasties and afraid of conspiracy: the charge of using magic had returned, for the first time in three hundred years, as a weapon in central politics.11 His pictur
e of serious persecution in that century is supported by a text from the 330s, a handbook on astrology, one of the main forms of divination, by Firmicus Maternus. It contains no less than seven examples of horoscopes cast to determine whether the person concerned would be charged with using magic!12 The sense of a fourth-century society at least at times gripped by a fear both of magic itself and of accusations of using it, is further confirmed by the work of Libanius, a pagan scholar of the mid to late part of the century. Having moved around the eastern provinces, he settled in Antioch, one of the four most important cities of the empire, to become its leading philosopher and orator. His writings contain many reflections on his career, which reveal that the charge of employing magic to overcome competitors was a standard one in the professional rivalries of the age. Libanius himself incurred it four times, once being formally tried and acquitted, and once banished from the imperial court and the city in which it resided. In old age he found himself apparently on the receiving end of a spell, when he was prostrated by headaches, which ceased when the dried corpse of a chameleon was found in his lecture hall, its head between its legs and one forefoot closing its mouth. He recovered when it was removed, and though now convinced that he had been bewitched, he magnanimously made no attempt to find the culprit.13 Libanius also composed a model speech, put into the mouth of an imaginary citizen in an eastern Roman city, which described how magicians used both demons and the spirits of the dead as agents to inflict quarrels, poverty, injury and disease upon living humans. The ghosts were helpless servants, but the demons actively delighted in causing harm.14 This is a fictional example of rhetoric, given to an imagined character, but there is nothing in Libanius’s other writings to show that he would have disagreed with it, and the speaker seems to be a pagan like himself, showing how such beliefs spanned the different religions. One of Libanius’s pupils later became the leading Christian churchman John Chrysostom, who recalled how as a boy he had almost been caught up in a hunt conducted by soldiers for ceremonial magicians at Antioch. He and a friend had fished a book out of the river, inspired by curiosity, and found to their horror that it was a handbook of magic, flung away by its owner to avoid detection. As it was now in their possession, they were themselves in mortal danger of being accused as magicians, and remained so until they found a safe means of getting rid of it in turn.15
It seems then that at times and places in the fourth century the laws against magic were enacted with great severity, and that both the fear of bewitchment and the fear of accusation of it, and of other forms of magic, could be powerful in this period. What is less easily deduced is that Christianity had any decisive role in producing this situation. Certainly, it sought to profit from the latter, by increasingly demonizing paganism and associating magic with it, but the fourth-century drive against magicians seems to have been a direct development of earlier, pagan, attitudes, and united the various religious groups. It was a natural projection of the increasingly savage hostility towards magic found in the third-century codes, which may itself have been provoked by the new and sophisticated, text-based ceremonial magic which appeared in the period and may have come from Egypt. Neither Ammianus nor Libanius gave Christians any credit for orchestrating the fourth-century persecutions in the name of their faith; rather, Ammianus blamed insecure new imperial dynasties, led by ruthless new men, who appointed other parvenus to conduct investigations designed to root out treason and criminality in their administrative districts. A succession of historians has studied the trials concerned, and, while they have disagreed over the extent to which these were an expression of hostility between different social groups, they have tended to play down the religious factor, seeing Christianity as abetting rather than causing the persecution.16 The latter slackened during the fifth century, although the grip of Christianity was by then stronger and the laws against magic had been further augmented and codified. No convincing explanation has been proposed for this, and it may be simply that the imperial authorities were too preoccupied with invasion, civil war and heresy, as the western half of the empire collapsed, to give much attention to magicians.17
Recent studies have examined different ways in which the new religion adapted to, and exploited, contemporary attitudes to magic. One has traced the manner in which Christian leaders in the late Roman Empire such as Augustine, John Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea (another pupil of Libanius) used old Roman literary tropes of women casting spells to deceive or ensnare men in order to damn magic in general as pagan: another example of the way in which pre-Christian ideas and images could be employed by the new religion for its own purposes.18 Another has pointed to the ways in which tales recorded by monks between the fourth and seventh centuries reflected and propagated hostility to magicians. The latter are portrayed as working for hire to cause harm to the rivals or enemies of their paymasters, and as being thwarted by good Christians, after which some of them are burnt and others beheaded.19 Other historians have examined the ways in which Christians used magic itself, mostly relying on Egyptian evidence. Some carried it on with rites, in the manner of the pagan magical papyri, though often in simplified fashion, combining Christian expressions with esoteric figures and names.20 Others attempted to stay within the ground rules laid down by Origen, offering spells to help clients obtain their desires which depended on scriptural quotations, appeals to the true God and his angels, versions of Christian liturgy, and consecrated oil or water. The authors seem often or mostly to have been monks, who thereby fulfilled much the same role as the ancient Egyptian lector priests.21
Witchcraft and Magic in the Early and High Middle Ages
There long existed a scholarly belief that the first thousand years of Christian supremacy in Europe witnessed very little witch-hunting. Back in the 1920s a pioneering historian of European magic, the American Lynn Thorndike, commented of the period up to 1300 that ‘of the later witchcraft delusion . . . we have found relatively few harbingers’.22 At the opening of the recent surge of research into the early modern trials, in the late 1960s, the leading British scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper stated firmly that ‘in the Dark Age there was at least no witch-craze’, and that the early modern belief in witches was ‘a new and explosive force’.23 In the mid-1970s, in a pair of works which laid down much of the agenda for the subsequent quest for the meaning of the early modern trials, his compatriot Norman Cohn and the American Richard Kieckhefer both agreed. The former wrote that ‘there is little positive evidence of maleficium [i.e. witchcraft] trials before 1300’, while the latter concurred that before 1300 ‘the incidence of witchcraft was so rare that it is impossible to detect patterns of accusation’. Certainly, even in the early fourteenth century ‘the rate of prosecution was low indeed’, and diminished still further in the middle decades.24 In 2004, however, Wolfgang Behringer mounted a challenge to this orthodoxy, arguing that early medieval law still prescribed the death penalty for witchcraft, and that the lack of legal records for the time could conceal many trials. He pointed out that chronicles from the period referred to executions of suspected witches across Europe, in some places more frequently than in the early modern period.25 His argument is not wholly polarized against the preceding belief, as Cohn had accepted that while trials were rare, there were some dramatic cases of the lynching of suspects by mobs, which Behringer counted in his record of persecution. Moreover, Behringer himself conceded that there did seem to be a relative lull in action against witchcraft in Western Europe between 1100 and 1300, which he ascribed to an improved climate, which generated greater security. None the less, his challenge to the twentieth-century portrait of relative medieval tolerance has reopened the question of how much witch-hunting actually went on in early and high medieval Europe; and that must now be considered.
Before confronting it directly, it must be acknowledged that the official attitude of early medieval Christians to magic, as defined by orthodox churchmen, was generally uncompromisingly hostile. Following the argument developed by the time of Augustine, it r
egarded all attempts to wield spiritual power to achieve material ends as demonic unless deployed by its own accredited representatives, and using only prayer, Scripture or its liturgy as instruments. It had, moreover, greatly enlarged the category of demons by consigning to it all the deities of paganism, and its definition of magic, and thus of forbidden uses of ritual power, including most if not all forms of divination and of traditional charms and spells used to heal and protect. It may be pointed out once again that this was in many ways a development of pagan attitudes. Roman emperors had striven to control or banish forms of divination that were not associated with traditional religion, and (as said) increasingly ferocious laws were passed against magicians in general. None the less, it was a development, and an enlargement, summed up in the fact that all forms of magic became officially described as maleficium, a term reserved before for deeds which caused actual harm.26 By an opposite process of linguistic cross-fertilization, the Roman word sortiligium or sortilegium, meaning divination by the casting of lots, transformed in the course of the early Middle Ages into one frequently used for all forms of magic, and in particular for the least reputable kinds, involving the invocation of spirits (and therefore, to the orthodox, of demons). In step with this, the Roman sortiarius, the term for somebody who told fortunes with lots, turned into the Old French sorcerie and through it into the English ‘sorcery’, which had the same broad usage as the medieval Latin sortiligium.
The Witch Page 23