Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Divination was seen as the primary goal of much magic using elements of earth, air, water, and fire. Words became magical when spoken as enchantments, and objects wrapped around parts of the body became magical as medicinal ligatures. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth century, the idea of natural magic, which dealt with the unseen powers of nature, came into new prominence. Natural objects such as stones, plants and animals, under the influence of planetary movements, were seen as occult or the magic of the unseen and “natural magic was the science of such powers”415 The influence of Arabic education brought new ideas on all occult sciences, including alchemy, astrology into intellectual prominence, greatly broadening the horizons of the elite of all religions.

  Additionally, the idea of inanimate objects having spirits or power or personality came to be taken into consideration. This had long been an integral part of shamanism, whereby the shaman had spirit helpers in the world of non-ordinary reality. In the most elementary sense, the majority of people tended to view magic as natural phenomena, while ecclesiastical writers repeatedly preached that all magic involved reliance on demons. This significant difference will have very serious ramifications in the future, particularly for women. According to Keickhfer, “Early Christian writers in effect introduced a distinction between religion and magic which had not previously been made and which was not easily understood except from a Christian viewpoint.”416 Subsequently, the Christian Church in Rome passed laws called canons which were against the practice of magic and as Christianity became “dominant,” magic fell ever more under suspicion.417 “For pagans, daimones were neutral spirits, intermediate between gods and human beings and capable of serving either good or evil purposes. For Christians, as for most Jews, they were angels who had turned against their creator and turned wholly to evil.”418 It was not a great leap for churchmen to later view magic as a competitor with Christianity. And then “While there is no reason to think that women alone practiced magic, both (Greek and Roman) pagan and Christian writers ascribed it primarily to them.”419

  After the official conversion of Roman Emperors to Christianity, the practice of magic became a capitol offense. In contrast, during the Dark Ages northern magic of the Runes and the old Nature Religion native to the Europeans, inherited from those who migrated, took deep roots throughout the continent which was no longer under Greco-Roman dominance. There is a canon titled Episcopi dated to the ninth century Frankish church synod (assembly) which “condemned the belief of certain women that they rode through the air at nighttime on the back of animals, in the company of the goddess Diana. For believing in such things rather than for participating in them, these churchmen proscribe penance.”420 This exact scene will be re-described for centuries. It is the classic shamanic spirit trance journey to non-ordinary reality to accomplish retrieval of information (divination) or healing practices, which are brought back to the community to be used for their benefit. The Goddess Diana is the huntress/protector. She was never associated with men, never gave birth to children. The women of Diana either dedicated their entire lives to Her service and to celibacy, or spent some proscribed time with Her away from family, in order to concentrate on spiritual practice. In all cases, Diana is a personification of women’s independence directly transmitted from the matriarchal cultures which flourished centuries before.

  During the Middle Ages, the practice of some form of magic was spread across a wide spectrum of different people from females who were midwives, folk healers, shamans, and diviners to males who were monks, priests, or surgeon-barbers. From village wise women monks learned about medicinal herbs, and their specific properties then grew them in monastery gardens to use for healing their brothers. Conversely, folk healers appropriated healing charms from the local clergy, and “before medicine became a university subject there was little to distinguish physicians from lay healers.”421 But soon that would change. For instance, “English physicians in the 1420’s tried to secure an Act of Parliament prohibiting practice of medicine without a university education, and specifically excluding women from all medical practice.”422 Although this attempt failed, others would succeed. In time, women were only permitted to practice midwifery, and because this was not university certified, it fell into the realm of the unprestigious and suspect of employing magical remedies.

  As an ironic counterpoint, the availability of paper and the arrival of new technology in the form of the printing press, along with increased ability of people to read, enabled books written in local languages instead of Latin, to be widely circulated. “Medical writing taught people how to heal themselves: how to let their own blood, how to examine their own urine, what herbs to use in treating their ailments … if the Late Middle Ages saw a flowing of popular education generally, they were also a golden age for magic.”423 Knowledge of astrology was assimilated not only into medicine but also into government. Alchemy became an obsession for both spiritual and financial reasons. Both astrology and alchemy were kept quasi-secret from the masses on the theory that knowledge is power. The Humanist movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a time when scholars included vigorous devotees of magic bringing this study into the Renaissance. Those who were interested in the Hebrew tradition of magic and mysticism studied the Kabbalah, asserting the magical power of Hebrew words. All of these practices were viewed with skepticism by the Church of Rome, and most would soon fall under persecution by virtue of association with demons, but the darkest and most feared form of magic was actually practiced exclusively by churchmen who were male clergy in what some have called the clerical underworld of the Roman Church. This practice was called necromancy.

  Originally the word meant divination (mantia) by conjuring the spirits of the dead (nekroi) … when Medieval writers interpreted such stories (both Biblical and Greco-Roman) however, they assumed that the dead could not in fact be brought to life but that demons took on the appearance of diseased persons … by extension then, the conjuring of demons came to be known as necromancy and … was explicitly demonic.424

  What were the elements that went into the creation of this clerical underworld in which necromancy flourished?

  The word “cleric” at this time covered a multitude of different states of being: any man, or even boys, who had their hair cut in a tonsured manner as pious intent to be ordained to priesthood; a man ordained not as a priest but to lower orders such as a doorkeeper, lector, exorcist or acolyte, students in medieval universities who were ordained as a matter of course because all universities were church oriented. In addition, there were a veritable host of male lay persons who performed tasks associated with prayer, sometimes only to avoid punishment for other offenses, who also claimed to be clerics. Antipope Benedict XIII (1394–1423) was accused of necromancy and of using the infamous book of magic called The Death of the Soul, as well as being part of a conspiracy in liege with Franciscan magicians in Southern France.

  And what did all these men have in common? First, they were all educated with a command of Latin. Second, they all had basic knowledge of church rites and of exorcism. Third, they were willing and ready to take frequent excursions into the land of the dead.

  When Dominican inquisitor Nicholas Eymericus (1320–99) wrote in his Directory for Inquisitors that he had confiscated Table of Solomen and Honoris the Necromancer’s Treasury of Necromancy acquired directly from the magicians themselves and burned them (the books) in public, he revealed his intimate knowledge of both the contents of the books and the men accused of practicing from them. These books recommended the following practices: baptizing images, fumigated the head of a dead person, adjuring one demon by the name of a higher demon, inscribing characters and signs, invoking unfamiliar names, mixing the names of demons with those of angels and saints to form perversions of prayer, fumigating with incense or aloes or other aromatics, burning bodies of birds and animals, casting salt into the fire. And there are more overt practices described such as genuflecting in demons’ honor, promising them obedienc
e, devoting themselves to the service of demons, singing chants in their honor, offering them blood sacrifice. The clerics fast, macerate themselves, observe chastity, dress themselves in only black or white garments. Though many texts were burned, many books of necromancy were hidden and survived the flames, and it is from them that these practices have been verified.425 But other books were burned along with their male practitioners in Spain, Italy, Germany, France and England during the Inquisition in those countries.

  Uses for necromancy were always adverse. Primarily it was intended to affect the minds of other people against their will, to drive them mad, to inflame them to either love or hatred, to keep them from being able to sleep or eat. Secondarily, the necromancers created illusions such as a vehicle in the form of a boat or horse, such as a banquet feast or the raising of the dead. But apparently the most important work was that of secret divination, such as is contained in the extant Munich Handbook which gives detailed instructions for divinatory necromancy. Clerics also made use of young boys and believed that information would appear as the image of a virgin boy in a crystal mirror, a sword blade or on a boy’s fingernail.426 The main elements of necromancy are magic circles filled with signs and inscriptions, conjurations, and sacrifices: invoking spirits at crossroads, scattering milk and honey in the air, placing ashes, flour, salt in a jar for the circle, offering coal, bread, cheese, three shoeing nails, barley and salt as presents. These elements of necromancy are usurped practices taken from European folklore and from ancient women’s religion, which had the opposite purpose of ensuring health, fertility, and peace. But misused in sinister ways by male clerics, they became perversions of spirituality.

  In conclusion, necromancy is a blend of various practices, all incorporated into the framework of explicitly demonic magic. Essentially, however, “necromancy is a merger of astral magic and exorcism. The former is a foreign import derived from Islamic culture; the latter is essentially a domestic product … (With) the influence of Jewish tradition … even in early Christianity, forms for exorcism seem to have been molded according to Jewish practice (i.e. reliance on holy names as forces to use against demons).”427

  In the Middle Ages magic was not only everywhere, but its power was almost universally taken for granted. Some thought it was detrimental to the Church. Others thought it endangered individual people. Still others worried about its use in political upheavals or threats of death. All understood that necromancers consciously invoked demons in order to accomplish their mission. And with the proliferation of clerical necromancy, situated within the Catholic Church and its extraordinary power base, many people had ample justification for concern. When the Church itself, through the officers and courts of their Inquisition, turned its efforts toward the control or spread of magic, it did so because it believed magic “may rely on demons even when it seems to use natural forces, and it makes sacrilegious use of holy objects or blasphemously mingles holy with unholy words.”428 Secular courts and lawmakers believed that magic could cause harm to people, and that reasoning was the basis for their penalties against its practice. For the ordinary person the idea of magic, whether natural or demonic, was regarded as a universal lifelong factor. In reality, the power of the Church meant that many secular rulers in the Middle Ages were under the influence of churchmen and issued secular laws which clearly reflected clerical concerns. Indeed, there were many times when ecclesiastical canon legislation was transmitted nearly intact into secular civil codes all over Europe. The legislation of the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, was fierce:

  In a capitulary for the newly conquered Saxons he declared that all those found guilty of sorcery or divination should be turned over to the Church (of Rome) as slaves, while those who sacrificed to the Devil (i.e. Germanic gods) should be killed. In his General Admonition for his kingdom in 789 Charles included provisions against enchanters and other magicians; these measures were taken over from the early church canons sent to him for his enforcement by Pope Hadrian.429

  This is an early example of state/church enmeshment whereby the Church of Rome formulated policy, and the state then enforced as civil law. A few years later, the ecclesiastical assembly (synod) of 800 CE at Freising issued instructions:

  When people have been charged with incantation, divination, weather magic or other sorcery and have been captured, the archpriest of the diocese should subject them to a thorough examination in the hope of eliciting a confession. If necessary, they should be tortured, though not to the point of jeopardizing their lives; they should be kept in prison until they resolve to do penance for their sins.430

  But, the practice of magic by the European populations did not diminish. Why would it? Everyone believed in it both conceptually and practically, and they were able to testify to its effectiveness over time.

  As early as the thirteenth century, a guide to inquisitional interrogation by the church lists numerous forms of magic, and almost all of these are taken directly from the books of necromancy. Pope John XXII directed the inquisitors against necromancers and other magicians. “There is no reason to doubt that the defendants in these cases (Florence, 1384) were in fact necromancers (men). Indeed, a great many of the trials in the late Middle Ages, especially in the fourteenth century, seem to have been directed against clerics engaged in necromancy.”431

  The laws against the practice of magic were modified from region to region. Some included love magic and some did not, but as the trials of necromancers, citing magic as an accusation increased in the later Middle Ages, the prosecution and methods of punishment underwent major changes.

  Professor Guido Ruggiero in his work Binding Passion, tales of magic, marriage and power at the end of the Renaissance in Italy, particularly in Venice working from original Inquisition records, details the attitudes about and punishments for practicing magic.

  In this context, it is interesting to consider for a moment the old paradigm that sees magic as a power for the powerless and suggest a more complex reading of the situation, at least in the late Renaissance. Noting that this type of eclecticism was more popular among women and the lower classes, we might consider that magic was a complex and creative way of encountering the world that allowed the cultivation of other ignored powers to be found there by those unwilling to accept the marginality assigned them by social and political conventions. In turn, this creativity underlines a truism concerning the position of both women and the lower classes in Renaissance society: a lack of access to more apparently regular channels of power that made some willing to seek power outside those channels … Significant in this context was a whole other range of love magic concerned with the domestic sphere, where hearth, kitchen utensils, doorsill, stairs and bed took on special deeper meanings – as if women had discovered the deeper powers in the world assigned to them.432

  The practice of love magic was probably as ancient as humanity. The power of love and sex on the human psyche is undeniable. Also undeniable is the association of the power of love and sex with women. Once people in the Western World began to see the positive aspects of womanhood diminish, this reality started causing serious problems.

  … seeking the Devil’s aid in matters of passion were an endeavor that had been aided by the Church’s own vision of sexuality. As the Church’s position that much if not all sexual passion was the work of the Devil became a more general view, it was a logical conclusion that those who wished to have power over the sexual world should work with the Devil.433

  In the last decade of the 1500’s, “Religion in rural areas like Friuli and much of the Veneto was still largely in the hands of women – priestesses, not priests … with the late sixteenth century and the Catholic reform movement, this feminine Christianity was challenged by the masculine hierarchy … but to truly win male dominance … the Church required considerable repression.”434 In a trial before the Inquisition in 1591, the original accusations, the majority of testimony and the focus of the inquisitors was on a group who saw themselves as “contro
llers of its powers in everyday life: the women healers, signers and love magicians of Latisana.… many of the women labeled witches found their powers in what might be called a ‘popular’ Christianity … that could be used for the crucial necessities of life … healing, joining people in matrimony or friendship, and thwarting evil.”435 But the stance of the Church on this issue of power had been clear for generations: There was to be only one master of spiritual power in this world and that was the Church. “The women of Latisana, in contrast, were attempting to control love, marriage, friendship, and health in their village by manipulating the spiritual powers of Christianity.” And while the male priests of the Church were often imported from other areas, “the women priests of popular Christianity were normally integrated into the community as wives and mothers and perhaps even as the matriarchs of women’s networks.”436 These women construed love magic as a profession, as they did healing, which the Church called popular medicine. In order to make both unacceptable, the Church was trying to make a distinction between medicine and magic. “Medicine was to be corporal and mechanical: magic went beyond the corporal to the spiritual. Thus it was illicit, and as the latter was the domain that the Church was staking out solely for itself. Here again we find the Inquisition … pressing to eliminate the spiritual from medicine.”437