The Witch
Page 30
Bloodsuckers, Wolf-riders and Ladies
In the Alps and Pyrenees, and the lands immediately south of them, a rich crop of folkloric motifs features in prosecutions for witchcraft, one of them certainly very ancient. This is the figure of the strix, the night-flying, child-killing female demon. By the Middle Ages, if not earlier, it was, as said, being merged with that of the human witch, and this composite directly underlay the formation of the early modern stereotype of the satanic witch. It has been shown how it appeared in the first trials which embodied that stereotype, in 1424, and how in the Pyrenees the word for that kind of demoness, bruja, changed into that for a witch; in Italy the same thing happened, as striges, the Latin plural for strix, became the standard learned term for witches, and gave rise to the modern Italian strega, meaning a witch. The persona remained with the name. When an Italian witch-hunter, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, wrote a book to justify his activities in 1523, he called it simply Strix.48 Among the characteristics of the stereotypical witch which he assembled was that of killing babies by pricking them with needles and sucking their blood. His principality of Mirandola was on the northern plain of Italy, near Modena; further south, at Perugia and Siena, women were also tried for this offence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.49 In northern Spain, likewise, the initial outbreak of accusations against child-murdering witches in the 1420s was followed by others, over a broader area, in the following hundred years.50 In about 1450 a Castilian bishop denounced the new concept of the satanic witch as a fantasy, and especially the belief that these bruxas got through chinks or turned themselves into animals in order to enter houses to suck babies’ blood.51 This belief underlay accusations of witchcraft in northern Spain until the end of witch trials there: it was the major spur behind the great Basque witch-hunt of 1609–14.52
Across most of early modern Europe, killing infants and young children was one of the most important crimes alleged against witches, and was, as said, fundamental to the development of the new idea of witchcraft; but this vampiric element, derived from the strix, was confined to the northern edge of the Mediterranean basin. It continued eastwards to the limits of Italy, in Friuli, where the witches fought by benandanti were said slowly to consume the flesh or blood of small children, so that they wasted away.53 As ancient Roman rule had done, and as the belief in dream warriors also did, this concept crossed the boundary between Italian and Slavonic linguistic zones, so that in the modern folklore of Serbia, the special crime of witches was to kill babies in this manner. During the witch trials in Croatia, women confessed to eating the hearts of children, and leaving them to die slowly. Croats also believed that witches, in the form of cats, sucked the blood of adults.54 The special characteristic of the modern vampire, as a blood-sucker, may indeed have developed from this concept of the witch, as it came to be applied to the restless dead in the eighteenth century.55
In a part of the western Alps, a completely different local tradition obtained: that witches rode wolves to go about their nocturnal attacks. This was found in north-west Switzerland, from Basel to Luzern and Konstanz, a region in which wolves represented as great a menace from the natural world as witches did in the human one; so in this sense it was natural that they were twinned. Wolves abounded, however, in other parts of Europe without becoming steeds for witches, so the element of the caprice of local imagination is also at work here. Elsewhere in the regions where wolves and witches were both feared, and associated, the wolves were regarded as being either disguised demons serving or commanding the witches, or the witches themselves, changed by demons into wolf form or given the appearance of one by illusion.56 The exception, of course, was Livonia, where some locals at least believed that it was benevolent service magicians who were the werewolves. At any rate, the motif of the wolf-ride occurred in both trials and literary works across this particular expanse of Swiss mountains and valleys, and the roots of it seem lost.57
The important medieval belief in the nocturnal travels of the ‘lady’ or ‘ladies’ also played a notable part in the trials, but only in a few locations: the Alps, northern Italy and Sicily. The stereotypical witch portrayed by Pico della Mirandola not only fed on babies but attended ‘the game of the Mistress’ to feast and have sex; in his diabolized view of this event, she offered consecrated hosts to the Mistress, for defilement. Pico’s territory was close to that of Modena, where one woman confessed in 1532 to going to ‘the game of Diana’, where she profaned the Christian cross and danced with demons on the orders of ‘the lady of the game’. Another in 1539 was recorded as saying that she went to a witches’ sabbath over which ‘a certain woman’ presided.58 Across the Plain of Lombardy from Modena, at the foot of the Alps, was Brescia, where a woman tried in 1518 said her mistress was a beautiful lady called ‘Signora del Zuogo’ (Lady of the Game), who was served by other human followers and by devils. Up in the mountains of south Tyrol, in the Italian-speaking Val di Fiemme, it is the goddess Venus, or ‘Erodiade’ (Herodias) who features in the confessions taken there in 1504–6. Venus had probably migrated from the German-speaking lands to the north, where the legend of her court in a mountain, the Venusberg, was well established by the end of the fifteenth century: a confession by a man in 1504 directly reflected that legend, by speaking of entering that mountain and finding its most famous inhabitant, the knight Tannhäuser, there, as well as ‘the woman of the good game’ (who was not, apparently, Venus). All were, again, demonized for the trials: Venus was said to travel with a retinue of black horses, and to turn into a snake from the waist down for half of each week, while ‘Erodiade’ was now an ugly black woman in black clothes who travelled on black cats.59 The ‘good game’ or ‘good society’, with or without its lady, also featured in trials in Lombardy and the Italian Alps in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries at Como, Mantua, Ferrara, and the Valtellina. Its westernmost occurrence in this context was in the Val di Susa in west Piedmont, and its easternmost involved one of the benandanti of Friuli: it spanned trials for magic in the northern Italian linguistic zone.60
North of that, in the German-speaking Alps, nocturnal spirit cavalcades and processions featured much less in the early modern trials, unless described purely as those of witches and demons making for the sabbath. The outstanding exception was Wolfgang Behringer’s ‘Shaman of Oberstdorf’, the service magician condemned for witchcraft who came from Germany’s most southerly village in a remote valley near the border between Bavaria and Austria. In Behringer’s skilful reconstruction of his belief system, he had mixed together mainstream Christian concepts such as angels, heaven and purgatory with a local folk one of the Nachtschar (‘night company’), benevolent night-flying spirits.61 The only other apparent reference to such phenomena in a judicial process in the northern half of the Alpine zone comes from Interlaken, far to the west, in 1572, when the local Bernese governor reported a woman who claimed to travel with the Nachtvolk (‘night people’).62 This paucity of records from trials is the more remarkable in that popular traditions of such spectral night-wanderers were common in this region, as discussed earlier, as were prosecutions for witchcraft. It may be that the lack of any recognized leader for the spirits concerned, north of the Alpine watershed, made them more difficult to assimilate to the stereotypical witches’ assemblies; but the assimilation should still have been easy to make had people wished it. Far south of its northern Italian stronghold, however, the tradition of the roaming nocturnal ladies, with a leading goddess-like figure and selected human adherents, was very much alive, and prominent in trials, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This was in Sicily, where Gustav Henningsen found around seventy cases from that period in which the local inquisitors tried donas di fuera (ladies from outside), the service magicians described earlier, who claimed to have gained their knowledge from the superhuman ‘ladies’ – bearing the same name – with whom they made contact at night.63
One other old, and possibly very ancient, folkloric motif was found
in the north Italian trials involving the ‘lady’ and her ‘good game’: a magical rite whereby an animal, normally an ox, which had been consumed in the feast at the ‘game’, was restored to life at the end. This has been extensively studied by Maurizio Bertolotti, and usually involved an alleged process of gathering the bones and hide of the animal together and touching them with a staff or stuffing them with straw. The trick was essentially a deceit, because the animals died permanently soon after or were lastingly enfeebled: it was really portrayed as a means of diverting suspicion from the witches.64 It is recorded in confessions of people tried for diabolic magic at Milan, Canavese, the Val di Fiemme, Modena and Bologna between 1390 and 1559, and represents an extension of the convenient medieval belief, commonly found in accounts of visits by spirit hosts to houses, that after they and their human friends feasted there, the food and drink that they consumed was magically replenished, to leave no trace of the theft. It had, however, an independent origin from this more general belief, for it was attested in two successive accounts of the miracles of St Germanus, both dating from the eighth century, in which the saint restores a calf. It is also in Snorri Sturluson’s thirteenth-century stories of the pagan Norse deities, presumably based on older tradition, where it concerns the resurrection by the god Thor of a flock of goats, using his hammer. Bertolotti argued that the saint’s miracle was derived from the story of Thor, and that behind Thor in turn stood a prehistoric hunting myth centred on a superhuman ‘Lord of the Animals’ who caused the prey of hunters to be reborn and so ensured a continuing supply of food.
Wolfgang Behringer has made a further contribution to the study of the motif, by bringing in more miracles attributed to medieval Christian holy men from the Netherlands – St Pharaildis, St Thomas of Cantimpré and Wilhelm Villers – who were all said to have restored animals to life in a similar fashion. He acknowledged that all these stories may have been inspired by the Bible, and specifically by the vision of the valley of dry bones in the Book of Ezekiel, but thought this less likely than Bertolotti’s hypothesis of a pagan hunting myth as the point of origin. In support of this, he cited not just Snorri but Burchard’s condemnation, quoted before, of the enduring popular belief that the cannibal witches of Germanic mythology restored to a brief life the people whom they killed and ate. He also produced ethnographic parallels, of a Caucasian tribe that thought that its god of the hunt revived animals killed by his devotees and the habit of Siberian hunters who left the bones of their kills unbroken to make resurrection possible. He referred to similar beliefs from elsewhere in Asia, and Africa.65 All this is entirely plausible, though the absence of the resurrection of an animal from bones and hide in any actual ancient pagan source, Greek or Roman, must give some pause to a conclusive acceptance of it. What the ancient world gives us instead is an idea, expressed most vividly in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, that witches could magically restore a human being whom they had killed in the night to a brief, but convincing, appearance of full life; this would harmonize with the Germanic tradition quoted by Burchard. As things stand, the European tradition of the use of miracle and magic to resurrect a slaughtered animal from its body parts is a medieval one; and its most obvious function in the witch trials is to represent a fantasy whereby relatively poor people could enjoy huge free meals of beef without payment or retribution. This sense of privilege and gratification lies, as has been suggested before, at the heart of the medieval beliefs in spirit hosts of the night who swept up favoured humans.
Mediterranean Mildness
As was said earlier, the great majority of the early modern executions for witchcraft occurred between 1560 and 1640. This was also the period in which the regional inquisitions that defended the purity of the Roman Catholic religion in the Western Mediterranean basin, and which represented some of the most formidably efficient investigative and punitive machines in Europe, launched a determined attack on magical practices of all kinds. The results, however, have come to be recognized as remarkably mild: several thousand prosecutions for magic yielded at the very most five hundred death sentences.66 This was because of a general lack of a sense of danger from a satanic conspiracy, so that charges of collective devil-worship, and of pacts with Satan, were very rare. Torture was seldom used on those arrested, and there was little pressure on them to name accomplices: on the whole, witches were treated as ignorant folk deluded by the Devil, not as dangerous criminals.67 At Venice the inquisitors held over six hundred trials concerning magic between 1550 and 1650, about a fifth of which were for witchcraft, but most ended in acquittal and none in execution.68 Similarly, no executions are recorded in Sicily, and the notorious Spanish Inquisition managed to try more than five thousand people for using magic between 1610 and 1700, without burning any.69 The Portuguese one put one person to death for such an offence, although it regularly tried cases that concerned magic and sometimes prosecution of them rose to peaks.70 The inquisitors in Malta not only regularly prosecuted people for using magic but held two mass trials in the seventeenth century, one involving forty women, and yet passed no death sentences.71 When Louise Nyholm Kallestrup compared the sentences passed by seventeenth-century courts for acts of magic in Denmark and the district of Orbetello in the Papal States of Italy, she found that the lightest sentence in the secular Danish system more or less matched the harshest pronounced by the inquisitors at Orbetello.72
Such a pattern calls out for explanation, and at first sight the presence of deep-rooted popular traditions in the Mediterranean lands concerned, which worked against savage witch-hunting, seems a plausible potential answer. Such a factor has in fact been argued for Spain by Gunnar Knutsen, who has drawn attention to the hundreds of executions recorded in the northernmost provinces in the decades around 1600, mostly by secular courts, and the absence of them further south. In a study of Catalonia and Valencia, he has contrasted the situation in the former, where the idea of demonic witchcraft took root readily among a traditionally Christian rural population in close contact with French culture, with that in the latter. There the peasantry consisted largely of recently converted Muslims, who retained from Islam a belief that magicians should be able to control demons rather than become their servants, together with a weak fear of witchcraft and a limited concept of Satan. They transmitted these notions to at least some of their Christian neighbours.73 There must be truth in this picture: after all, it has been shown how existing folkloric concepts enabled the new stereotype of the satanic witch to root itself very early in the Spanish Pyrenees, and spread through that region. There was no Islamic influence in mainland Italy, but in much of the peninsula (as in much of Spain) there was a lively belief in the power of the ‘evil eye’ to blight unintentionally and as a force of nature rather than of the Devil, of the sort which has been identified as dampening down a fear of witches elsewhere in the world.74
It is very likely that such cultural factors did act to prevent a ready reception of the image of the demonic witch in much of the Catholic Mediterranean world; and more may be uncovered by local studies.75 It is also, however, apparent that in themselves those factors are insufficient to explain the relative absence of witch-hunting in that world during the period when it was most prevalent elsewhere in Europe. After all, northern Spain and Italy had been cradles of the new image of witchcraft and settings for many of the early trials for it, and northern Italy had produced some notable early proponents of the need to hunt witches. The bishop of Brescia burned sixty people in 1510 and sixty-four in 1518.76 The Italian Alps and the Plain of Lombardy were indeed probably the area of most regular and lethal witch-hunting during the first century in which the new stereotype of the witch was in existence. Even in the southern Spanish region of La Mancha, six people were executed for offences related to magic between 1491 and 1510.77 Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that the concept of the demonic witch was spreading far across the Mediterranean basin, and that there was sufficient public belief in it to create the conditions for savage witch-hunting had
the authorities been inclined to that. At Venice, people regularly confessed to making pacts with demons to obtain their desires, and the witches’ sabbath featured in six confessions from rural areas of the republic. Crowds called for women to be burned as witches, and churchmen read the works of demonologists who advocated witch-hunting.78 Novara, at the extreme northern end of Piedmont, and the extreme north-western end of Italy, was exactly the sort of Alpine environment that had fostered the new image of satanic witchcraft; yet in 1609–11, at the height of the trials in Northern Europe, the episcopal inquisition there prosecuted eleven people who confessed to full participation in the sabbath, and all escaped with prison sentences.79 In Tuscany in 1594 a friar drunk on demonology tortured a midwife into admitting that she worshipped Satan at the sabbath and murdered children on his instructions.80 In the Otranto region of south-eastern Italy, it is plain from the legal records that fear and hatred of witchcraft were much stronger among the general populace than among churchmen.81 In Valencia in 1588 the inquisitors were faced with a teenage girl who claimed to have had sex with the Devil, and in the following century with a woman accused of flying into houses to bewitch the inhabitants, and a man offering his services as a witch-finder.82 Sicily produced a woman in 1587 who claimed to ride with others through the air on billy-goats to worship a royal couple of spirits who presided over a feast and orgy.83 Malta contained people who confessed to invoking Satan, and the early modern Portuguese frequently talked of demonic pacts, and occasionally of night flights by witches and of the sabbath.84
Clearly, then, popular belief throughout Italy and Iberia, and their attendant islands, could have assimilated the new model of witchcraft, and counter-balancing cultural traits could only have slowed down that assimilation. Another factor must have been at work, and Gunnar Knutsen spotted it in his comparison between Catalonia and Valencia: in the former, the Spanish Inquisition was much weaker than in the latter, and less able to restrain the lay magistrates who responded more avidly to a public fear of witchcraft. Such restraint was the crucial determinant of result: in Valencia the girl who confessed to having sex with Satan was sentenced to religious instruction (after a beating), the woman accused of night flight was acquitted, and the would-be witch-finder was punished. In all the other cases of alleged diabolism cited above, similar moderation was observed and the diabolic elements played down by the inquisitors: the woman who was forced to confess to demonic witchcraft by the Italian friar was then released on the orders of his superior. General studies of the history of the respective inquisitions reveal a gradual formulation of central policy that made such outcomes at first possible and then mandatory.