In fact, the forces concealed by the forests were simply those of nature and the natural world – which were ‘unregenerate’ in the Church's eyes. It is a cliché that the gods of any religion tend to become the devils of the religion that supplants it. Before the advent of Christianity, the domains of the Roman Empire had recognised the god Pan as the supreme deity presiding over the natural world. Pan was the goat-horned, goat-tailed, goat-hoofed figure who reigned over the natural world's vigorous, tenacious, ruthless and ostensibly chaotic life. He enjoyed particular prerogatives in matters of sexuality and fertility. Under the authority of the Church, Pan was officially demonised and characterised as satanic. There was ample precedent for such procedures. Centuries earlier, to cite but one instance, the Phoenician mother goddess Astarte had been subjected to a forcible sex change and transformed into the demon Ashtaroth.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, most European peasantry continued to acknowledge Pan, or his sometimes older regional equivalents, in one form or another – as Herne the Hunter, for example, as the horned god Cernunnos, as the Green Man, as Robin of the Greenwood or Robin Goodfellow, who became conflated eventually with Robin Hood. Nor was it Pan alone who received such homage. Along the borders of modern France and Belgium, the Roman moon goddess of the hunt, Diana, was known as Diana of the Nine Fires, and fused with her ancient antecedent, Arduina, from whom the Ardennes derives its name. Such deities retained their currency despite the advent of Christendom. European peasants might attend church on Sunday, hear Mass and assimilate on one level the rites and teachings of Rome. At the same time, however, they would still leave milk in saucers and make numerous other kinds of offering to placate the older forces lurking in the forests around them. And they would sneak out at the appropriate dates of the year for the Walpurgisnacht or ‘Witches’ Sabbath’, for the pagan observance of solstices and equinoxes, for fertility rites, for festivals and carnivals in which the gods of the old religion figured prominently, albeit in disguised and Christianised form. In almost all communities, moreover, there was invariably at least one elderly woman revered for her wisdom, her capacity to tell fortunes or see into the future, her knowledge of herbal and meteorological lore, her skill as a midwife. They were often trusted and consulted, especially by other women, more readily than the local priest. The priest represented powers that might determine one's posthumous fate and destination. But there were many matters for which these powers often seemed too majestic, too awesome, too sternly judgemental, too abstract or remote to be pestered. The typical village crone, on the other hand, would provide a conduit to powers more immediate and readily accessible. It was she, rather than the priest, who would be consulted on such issues as weather and crops, the welfare of livestock, personal health and hygiene, sexuality, fertility and childbirth.
From the time of its first introduction into Europe, the Church had had to contend with pagan residues and vestiges, from elves, gnomes, trolls and fairies to the august horned god himself. On occasion, it had attempted to demonise them and stamp them out. A document of the ninth century, for example, mentions ‘the demon whom the peasants call Diana’ and asserts: ‘Some wicked women, reverting to Satan… profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts.’1 More frequently, the Church came to an uneasy accommodation with its pagan antecedents and sought to hijack them when possible. For instance, the Irish goddess Brigit, patroness of fire, was effectively subsumed by a putative saint of the same name. Thus churches and Christian shrines were habitually built on sites previously sacred to pagan believers. In AD 601, Pope Gregory I established this practice almost as official policy. In a letter to an abbot, the Pope wrote that he had
come to the conclusion that the temples of the idols among that people should on no account be destroyed. The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed with holy water, altars set up in them and relics deposited there. For if these temples are well-built they must be purified from the worship of demons and dedicated to the service of the true God. In this way, we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may abandon their error and, flocking more rapidly to their accustomed resorts, may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the Holy Martyrs whose relics are enshrined there.2
The Inquisition enabled the Church to adopt a more aggressive policy, to take the offensive against the vestiges of paganism. In consequence, the former reluctant tolerance was to be officially abrogated giving way to persecution. Elves, gnomes, trolls and fairies were to be condemned and castigated as demons or demonic powers. The horned god of nature – the Green Man in his various manifestations – was to be transformed into Satan. Participation in the old pagan rituals was to be labelled witchcraft or sorcery. And belief in witchcraft or sorcery was to be formally classified as a heresy, with all the punishments accruing thereto. According to the historian Keith Thomas:
Witchcraft became a Christian heresy, the greatest of all sins, because it involved the renunciation of God and deliberate adherence to his greatest enemy.3
Through what the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper calls ‘the device of an extended definition of heresy’,4 the pagan foundations of European civilisation were to be brought under the Inquisition's jurisdiction.
By implication this jurisdiction was to extend even to natural disasters. Famine, drought, flood, plague and other such phenomena were no longer to be attributed to natural causes, but to the working of infernal powers. Not only madness, but even outbursts of temper or hysteria were to be ascribed to demonic possession. Erotic dreams were to be attributed to visitations by incubi or succubi. Midwives and traditional village ‘wise women’ – those familiar with herbal lore or adept at dispensing advice – were to be branded as witches. Fear and paranoia were to be promulgated until they clamped the entirety of Europe in a vicelike grip. And in this atmosphere of pervasive terror, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, were to become victims of official ecclesiastical murder.
The Hammer of the Witches
For centuries, the Church was profoundly confused in its attitude towards witchcraft. Most priests, especially in rural areas, were poorly educated and seldom left the local population in which they themselves were rooted. In consequence, they would share the local population's unquestioned belief in the reality of witchcraft – in the capacity of the village crone, for example, to exercise occult powers, to blight a crop, produce diseases in livestock, cause mysterious deaths. Whether they observed their vow of celibacy or not, they would hardly have much knowledge of gynaecological matters; and many of them were undoubtedly rendered queasy by what must have seemed the unclean complexities of female plumbing. In her aptitude for dealing with such things, in the trust and confidence she inspired in other women, the village crone would almost daily confront the priest with empirical and demonstrable proof of his own inadequacy and inferiority. For such priests, witchcraft was an unimpugnable reality, and one that fostered a sense of rivalry and resentment.
Until the late fifteenth century, however, official Church dogma denied the reality of witchcraft. The blighted crop, the diseased cattle, the unexplained death might be ascribed to the work of the devil or to natural causes, but not to the village crone. So far as the Church was concerned, witchcraft was a delusion disseminated by the devil. The sin, therefore, was not witchcraft itself, but belief in witchcraft, and the practices attending such belief. By virtue of belief in witchcraft,
the witch has abandoned Christianity, has renounced her baptism, has worshipped Satan as her God, has surrendered herself to him, body and soul, and exists only to be his instrument in working the evil… which he cannot accomplish without a human agent.5
As early as the ninth century, accounts of witches flying to their Sabbath had been declared fantasy by the Church – but anyone subscribing to such f
antasy was deemed to have lost his faith, and thus to be proved ‘an infidel and a pagan’. This position was subsequently to be enshrined as an article of Canon Law. Those who believed in witchcraft had supposedly lost their faith and slipped into a delusion. Because it resulted from loss of faith, such delusion was held to constitute heresy.
Around the mid fifteenth century, the Church's position began to change. In 1458, one Inquisitor, a certain Nicholas Jaquerius, argued that ‘the existing sect of witches’ was altogether different from the heretics cited in the relevant sections of Canon Law.6 In other words, the Inquisitor insisted, the power exercised by witches was very real, and not to be dismissed as fantasy. In 1484, the Church performed a complete and dramatic about-face. A Papal Bull of that year completely reversed the former position and officially recognised the putative reality of witchcraft. In this Bull, the Pope declared:
It has indeed lately come to our ears… that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces… of Mainz, Cologne, Trèves, Salzburg and Bremen, many persons… have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees.7
Seven years later, in 1491, the University of Cologne issued a warning that any argument against the reality of witchcraft ‘was to incur the guilt of impeding the Inquisition’.8 By dint of flamboyant circular reasoning, the position was rendered unassailable shortly thereafter by the Inquisitor of Como, who stated that
numerous persons have been burned for attending the Sabbat, which could not have been done without the assent of the Pope, and this was sufficient proof that the heresy was real, for the Church punishes only manifest crimes.9
According to a modern historian:
No longer content with accusations of sorcery, or even with the suggestion that sorcery inherently entailed demonic magic, judges now wanted to portray the magicians as linked in a demonic conspiracy against the Christian faith and Christian society. The sorcerer, intent only on specific acts of malice against particular enemies, gave way before the company of witches committed to the destruction of Christendom.10
In the past, it had been heresy to believe in witchcraft. Now, at a single stroke, it became heresy to disbelieve. A mechanism had been established from which – for anyone the Church wished to find inimical – there was no escape. A prevailing atmosphere of wholesale paranoia was generated. And scapegoats could now be called to account even for natural disasters, thus exonerating both God and the devil. Given the raging misogyny of the Inquisitors, almost invariably the scapegoats in question would be women.
In the Bull of 1484 which officially recognised the reality of witchcraft, Pope Innocent VIII specifically mentioned two individuals by name:
And although Our dear sons Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger… have been by letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors… We decree… that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment and punishment of any person, without let or hindrance.11
Heinrich Kramer was a Dominican who, around 1474, had already been appointed Inquisitor for Salzburg and the Tyrol. At Salzburg, he served as spiritual director of the Dominican church. In 1500, he was to be appointed Papal Nuncio and Inquisitor for Bohemia and Moravia. His colleague, Johann Sprenger, was also a Dominican, the prior of the Order's convent at Cologne. In 1480, he became Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne. A year later, he was appointed Inquisitor for the provinces of Cologne, Mainz and Trèves. In 1488, he became head of the Dominican Order's entire German province.
Around 1486, some two years after being cited in Pope Innocent VIII's Bull, Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger produced a book. This text must surely rank among the most notorious and – in the deepest moral sense of the word – most obscene works in the entire history of Western civilisation. It was entitled Malleus Maleficarum, ‘Hammer of Witches’, meaning a hammer to be used against witches; and, at more than 500 pages in modern editions, it did indeed constitute, quite literally, a hammer. So popular was it that by 1520, a mere thirty-four years after its appearance, it had gone through thirteen editions. It has remained in print ever since; and perversely enough there are still people who take it seriously. As recently as 1986, it was newly translated into English and extolled in a rhapsodic panegyric by Montague Summers, an eccentric would-be esotericist and self-appointed expert on vampires and werewolves. According to Summers, the Malleus is ‘among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books of the world’.12 In case such praise should prove too tempered or too moderate, Summers concludes:
It is a work which must irresistibly capture the attention of all men who think, all who see, or are endeavouring to see, the ultimate reality behind the accidents of matter, time and space.13
In legal, lurid and often pornographic detail, the Malleus undertakes to adumbrate supposed manifestations of witchcraft. It purports to be a definitive do-it-yourself manual not only for Inquisitors, but also for judges, magistrates, secular authorities of all kinds and by extension every sufficiently deranged upstanding citizen who has reason or unreason enough to suspect the presence of witchcraft around him. In fact, it constitutes a compendium of sexual psychopathology, and is an illuminating illustration of pathological fantasy running exuberantly out of control. With an obsessiveness that would betray itself immediately to any modern psychologist, the text focuses – indeed, dotes – on diabolic copulation, on intercourse with incubi and succubi, on sundry other forms of erotic experience and sexual activity (or inactivity) attributable by the infected imagination to demonic forces. It offers techniques of diagnosis and prognosis. It adumbrates therapeutic procedures and supposedly remedial punishments. It furnishes formulae and recipes for exorcisms. In its treatment of its subject matter, it aspires to positively encyclopedic scope and scale. And it became, in effect, a species of surrogate Bible for Inquisitors, and not for Inquisitors alone. As Montague Summers says – correctly, on this one occasion – in his misplaced encomium, the Malleus
lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority. It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant legislature.14
The Malleus begins by asserting explicitly
the belief that there are such beings as witches is so essential a part of the Catholic faith that obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion manifestly savours of heresy.15
Here is a flagrant echo of the Papal Bull of 1484, which reversed the Church's previous position by officially recognising the supposed reality of witchcraft.
Having stated its basic premise, the Malleus proceeds to elaborate:
This then is our proposition: devils by their art do bring about evil effects through witchcraft, yet it is true that without the assistance of some agent they cannot make any form… and we do not maintain that they can inflict damage without the assistance of some agent, but with such an agent diseases, and any other human passions or ailments, can be brought about, and these are real and true.16
In other words, the infernal forces are powerless in themselves. They can only work their evil through the conduit of some human agency. In consequence, human beings are now to be blamed for misfortunes previously ascribed to God's unfathomable behaviour, to the processes of the natural world or to demonic malevolence beyond the Inquisition's reach. Should anything go wrong in the well-ordered functioning of things, there will now be someone to punish for it.
According to the Malleus's free-associative logic, witches at their most powerful can raise hailstorms and tempests. They can invoke lightning and cause it to strike men and animals. They can cause impotence and sterility in men and animals. They can also cause plagues. They can murder children as offerings to demonic forces. When no on
e is watching, they can make children fall into bodies of water and drown. They can prompt a horse to go mad under its rider. They can cause either great love or great hatred in men. They can kill men or animals with a glance – the so-called ‘Evil Eye’. They can reveal the future. They can travel through the air, ‘either in body or imagination’.
The Malleus recognises that some Inquisitors may prove diffident about dispensing punishment, if only through fear of demonic attacks or counterattacks on themselves, demonic preemptive strikes or reprisals. It accordingly offers reassurance that witches
cannot injure Inquisitors and other officials because they dispense public justice. Many examples could be adduced to prove this, but time does not permit it.17
Time was obviously pressing. The authors of the Malleus still had some 500 pages to write, developing and amplifying their thesis. They therefore contented themselves with only a modicum of further reassurance:
There are three classes of men blessed by God, whom that detestable race cannot injure with their witchcraft. And the first are those who administer public justice against them, or prosecute them in any public official capacity. The second are those who, according to the traditional and holy rites of the Church, make lawful use of the power and virtue which the Church by her exorcism furnishes in the aspersion of Holy Water, the taking of consecrated salt, the carrying of blessed candles… the third class are those who, in various and infinite ways, are blessed by the Holy Angels.18
In other words, the Church possesses its own superstitions, its own magical rituals and practices, which are intrinsically superior simply because they stem from the Church. And in the ‘Holy Angels’, the Church has its own disincarnate occult allies, who are intrinsically more powerful than the disincarnate occult allies of the witch.
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