The trouble with the “confessions” is that they were usually obtained while the accused witch was being tortured. Torture was routinely applied until the witch confessed to having made a pact with the Devil and having flown to a sabbat. It was continued until the witch named the other people who were present at the sabbat. If a witch attempted to retract a confession, torture was applied even more intensely until the original confession was reconfirmed. This left a person accused of witchcraft with the choice between dying once and for all at the stake or being returned repeatedly to the torture chambers. Most people opted for the stake. As a reward for their cooperative attitude, penitent witches could look forward to being strangled before the fire was lit
Let me describe a typical case among the hundreds documented by the historian of European witchcraft, Charles Henry Lea. It took place in 1601 in Offenburg, a city located in what later became West Germany. Under torture, two vagrant women had confessed to being witches. When urged to identify the other people whom they had seen at the sabbat, they named the baker’s wife, Else Gwinner. Else Gwinner was brought before the examiners on October 31, 1601, and stoutly denied any knowledge of witchery. She was urged to spare herself unnecessary suffering, but she persisted in her denial. Her hands were tied behind her back and she was hoisted off the ground by a rope tied to her wrists—a system known as the strappado. She began to scream, said that she would confess, and begged to be let down. When she was let down, all that she would say was “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Torture was reapplied but only succeeded in rendering her unconscious. She was removed to prison and was tortured again on November 7 by being hoisted three times on the strappado—with progressively heavier weights attached to her body. On the third hoist she shrieked that she could not endure it. They let her down, and she confessed that she had enjoyed “the love of a demon.” The examiners were dissatisfied and wanted to know more. They hoisted her again with the heaviest weights, exhorting her to tell the truth. When she was set down again, Else insisted that “her confessions were lies to escape the suffering” and that the “truth was that she was innocent.” Meanwhile the examiners had arrested Else’s daughter Agathe. They took Agathe to a cell and beat her until she confessed that both she and her mother were witches and that they had caused crop failures in order to raise the price of bread. When Else and Agathe were brought together, the daughter retracted the part that implicated her mother. But as soon as Agathe was alone with the examiners, she reconfirmed the confession and begged not to be brought face-to-face with her mother again.
Else was taken to another prison and worked on with thumbscrews. At each pause she reconfirmed her innocence. Finally she again admitted that she had a demon lover but nothing more. Torture was resumed on December 11 after she once again denied all guilt. On this occasion, she passed out. Cold water was dashed in her face, and she screamed and begged to be let go. “But as soon as the torture was intermittent she revoked her confession.” At last she confessed that her demon lover had taken her on two flights to the sabbat. The examiners demanded to know whom she had seen at these sabbats. Else named two people—Frau Spiess and Frau Weyss. She promised to reveal more names later. But on December 13, she revoked her confession, despite the efforts of a priest who confronted her with additional evidence obtained from Agathe. On December 15 the examiners told her that they were going “to continue the torture without mercy or compassion until she should tell the truth.” She became faint, but asserted her innocence. She repeated her previous confession but insisted that she was mistaken about having seen Frau Spiess and Frau Weyss at the sabbat: “There was such a crowd and confusion that identification was difficult, especially as all present covered their faces as much as possible.” Despite the threat of additìonal torture, she refused to seal her confession with a final oath. Else Gwinner was burned to death on December 21, 1601.
In addition to the strappado, the rack, and thumbscrew, the witch hunters used chairs with sharp points, heated from below, shoes with pricks, bands with needles, red-hot irons, red-hot pincers, starvation, and sleeplessness. One contemporary critic of the witch craze, Johann Matthäus Meyfarth, wrote that he would give a fortune if he could banish the memory of what he had seen take place in the torture chambers:
I have seen the limbs forced asunder, the eyes driven out of the head, the feet torn from the legs, the sinews twisted from the joints, the shoulder blades wrung from their place, the deep veins swollen, the superficial veins driven in, the victim hoisted aloft and now dropped, now revolved around, head undermost and feet uppermost I have seen the executioner flog with the scourge, and smite with rods, and crush with screws and load down with weights, and stick with needles, and bind around with cords, and burn with brimstone, and baste with oil and singe with torches. In short, I can bear witness, I can describe, I can deplore how the human body is violated.
Throughout the witchcraft craze, any confession made under torture had to be confirmed before sentence was passed. So the records of the witchcraft cases always contain the formula: “So and so has of free will confirmed the confession made under torture.” But as Meyfarth indicates, such confessions were worthless for the purpose of separating genuine from spurious witches. What does it mean, he asks, when one encounters the formula: “Margaretha, before the bench of justice, has of free will confirmed the confession made under torture”?
It means that, when after unendurable torment she confessed, the executioner said to her, “If you intend to deny what you have confessed, tell me now and I will do better. If you deny before the court, you come back to my hands and you will find that I have only played with you thus far, for I will treat you so that it would draw tears from a stone.” When Margaretha is brought before the court, she is in fetters and her hands so tied “that it brings the blood.” By her side stand the gaoler and executioner and behind her armed guards. After the reading of the confession, the executioner asks her whether she confirms it or not.
The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper insists that many confessions were made to public authorities without any evidence of torture. But even such “spontaneous” and “freely given” admissions must be evaluated against the more subtle forms of terror that the examiners and judges had at their disposal. It was established practice among the witchcraft examiners first to threaten torture, then to describe the instruments to be used, and then to display the actual instruments. Confessions might be elicted anywhere along the way. The effects of these threats probably shaded off onto pretrial “confessions” that today seem to be “spontaneous.” I don’t deny the existence of genuine confessions or of “genuine” witches, but it seems to me highly perverse on the part of modern specialists to treat the use of torture as if it were a minor aspect of the witchcraft inquiries. Examiners were never satisfied until the confessed witches named additional suspects, who subsequently were routinely indicted and tortured themselves.
Meyfarth mentions a case in which an old woman who had been tortured for three days admitted to the man whom she had named, “1 have never seen you at the sabbat, but to end the torture I had to accuse someone. You came into my mind because, as I was being led to prison, you met me and said you would never have believed it of me. I beg forgiveness, but if I were tortured again, I would accuse you again.” The woman was returned to the rack and confirmed her original story. Without torture, I cannot see how the witchcraft craze could have claimed so many victims, no matter how many people really believed that they flew to the sabbat
Virtually every society in the world has some sort of witchcraft concept. But the European witch craze was more ferocious, lasted longer, and produced more victims than any other similar outbreak. When witchcraft is suspected in primitive societies, painful ordeals may be used as part of the attempt to determine guilt or innocence. But in no cases that I know of are witches tortured into confessing the identity of other witches.
Even in Europe, it was only after 1480 that torture was used this way.
Before 1000 A.D. no one was executed if a neighbor allegedly saw them with the Devil. People accused each other of being sorcerers or witches and of having supernatural powers to do evil. And there was much speculation about certain women who could journey through the air and cover great distances at enormous speeds. But the authorities took little interest in systematically hunting down witches and forcing them to confess their crimes. In fact, the Catholic Church originally insisted that there were no such things as witches flying through the air. In the year 1000 A.D. it was forbidden to believe that such flights really took place; later, after 1480, it was forbidden to believe that they did not take place. In 1000 A.D. the Church officially maintained that the ride of the witches was an illusion produced by the Devil. Five hundred years later, the Church officially maintained that those who claimed that the ride was merely an illusion were themselves in league with the Devil.
The older viewpoint was governed by a document called the Canon Episcopi. Referring to the people who believed that bands of witches fly through the night, the Canon warned: “The faithless mind thinks these things happen not in the spirit but in the body.” In other words, the Devil can get you to believe that you or others go on night rides, but neither you nor they can really do it. The test of what “really” means and of its decisive difference from later definitions of “reality” is that no one whom you or your fellow dreamers believe was along on the ride can be charged with wrongdoing. It is only a dream that they were there, and others are not to be held accountable for what they do in your dreams. The dreamer, however, is having evil thoughts and should be punished—not by being burned but by being excommunicated.
It took several centuries to reverse the Canon Episcopi, making it an heretical offense to deny that witches transported themselves in body as well as in spirit. Once the reality of the journey had been established, it became possible to question each confessed witch concerning the other people who were at the sabbat. Torture applied at this juncture guaranteed that a breeder reaction would take place. As in advanced model atomic furnaces, every burnt witch automatically led to two or more additional candidates for burning. To help the system run smoothly, there were additional refinements. Expenses were kept down by forcing the witch’s family to pay the bill for the services of the torturers and the executioners. The family was also billed for the cost of the fagots and for the banquet which the judges held after the burning. Considerable enthusiasm for witch-hunting could be built up among local officials, since they were empowered to confiscate the entire estate of any person condemned for witchcraft.
Aspects of the mature witch-hunt system were perfected as early as the thirteenth century, but not as part of the struggle against witches. The Church first authorized the use of torture not against witches, but against members of illicit ecclesiastical organizations that were springing up all over Europe and threatening to break the monopoly that Rome held on tithes and sacraments. By the thirteenth century, for example, the Albigensians (also called Cathari) in southern France had developed into a powerful independent ecclesiastical body with its own clergy who met openly under the protection of dissident factions of the French nobility. The Pope had to call for a holy war—the Albigensian Crusade—to preserve southern France for Christendom. The Albigensians were eventually exterminated, but many other heretical sects such as the Waldenses and the Vaudois took their place. To combat these subversive movements, the Church gradually created the Inquisition, a special paramilitary office whose sole function was to extirpate heresy. Pursued by the Inquisition in France, Italy, and Germany, the heretics went underground, formed clandestine cells, and held secret meetings. Finding their efforts thwarted by the enemy’s secret operations, the papal inquisitors requested authorization to use torture to force heretics to confess and name their accomplices. This authorization was granted in the middle of the thirteenth century by Pope Alexander IV.
While the Waldensians and Vaudois were being tortured, witches still enjoyed the protection of the Canon Episcopi. Witchcraft was a crime, but it was not heresy—since the sabbat was a figment of the imagination. But with the passage of time, papal inquisitors became more and more disturbed by the lack of jurisdiction over witchcraft cases. Witchcraft, they argued, was no longer what it used to be in the days of the Canon Episcopi. A new and much more dangerous kind of witch had developed—a witch that actually could fly to sabbats. And these sabbats were just like the secret meetings of the other heretical sects, only the rites were even more loathsome. If witches could be tortured like other heretics, their confessions would lead to the discovery of a vast body of secret conspirators. At last Rome yielded. A Pope named Innocent issued a bull in 1484 that authorized inquisitors Heinrich Institor and Jakob Sprenger to use the full power of the Inquisition to extirpate witches throughout Germany.
Institor and Sprenger convinced the Pope with arguments which were subsequently presented in their book The Hammer of the Witches, forever after the compleat witch hunter’s manual. It is true, they admitted, that some witches only imagine that they attend the sabbat; but many are actually transported there bodily. In either event, it is the same thing, since the witch who goes only in imagination sees what is taking place as reliably as the one whose body is transported. As for those cases where a husband has sworn that his wife was in bed at his side while others have testified that she was at a sabbat, it was not his wife whom he touched, but a devil taking her place. Perhaps the Canon Episcopi had claimed that the flight was only imaginary, but there was nothing imaginary at all about the damage the witches were doing. “Who is so dense as to maintain … that all their witchcraft and injuries are phantastic and imaginary, when the contrary is evident to the senses of everybody?” Every conceivable misfortune—loss of cattle and crops, death of children, illness, aches and pains, infidelity, sterility and insanity—has been caused by witchcraft. The Hammer of the Witches concluded with a detailed account of how witches were to be identified, arraigned, tried, tortured, convicted, and sentenced. The witch-hunting system was now complete, ready to be applied throughout Europe for the next two hundred years, with devastating results, by both Catholic and Protestant witch hunters. Ready to produce, year in and year out, an unending supply of new witches to replace the ones who were imprisoned or burned.
Why was the Canon Episcopi overruled? The simplest explanation is that the inquisitors were right: Witches were meeting at secret sabbats—even if they didn’t get there on their broomsticks—and they actually constituted as much of a threat to the security of Christendom as the Waldenses or the other clandestine religious movements.
Recent discoveries about the practical basis of broomstick flight have made this theory untenable. Professor Michael Harner of the New School for Social Research has shown that European witches were popularly associated with the use of magical salves and ointments. Before riding through the air on their broomsticks, the witches “anointed” themselves. One of the typical cases cited by Harner is that of a witch in seventeenth-century England who confessed that “before they are carried to their meetings, they anoint their Foreheads and their Hand-wrists with an Oyl the Spirit brings them (which smells raw).” Other English witches reported that the “Oyl” had a greenish color and that it was applied to the forehead with a feather. In early accounts, the witch is said to have applied the ointment to a staff, after which “she ambled and galloped through thick and thin, when and in what manner she listed.” Anointing of both the pole and the body is reported in a fifteenth-century source also cited by Harner: “They anoint a staff and ride on it … or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.” Another source states: “Witches, male and female, who have pact with the devil, anointing themselves with certain unguents and reciting certain words are carried by night to distant lands.”
Andrés Laguna, a sixteenth-century physician practicing in Lorraine, described the discovery of a witch’s jar “half filled with a certain green unguent … with which they were anointing them
selves: whose odor was so heavy and offensive that it showed that it was composed of herbs cold and soporiferous to the ultimate degree, which are hemlock, nightshade, henbane and mandrake.” Laguna obtained a canister full of this ointment and used it to carry out an experiment on the wife of a hangman in Metz. He anointed this woman from head to toe, whereupon “she suddenly slept such a sound sleep, with her eyes open like a rabbit (she also fittingly looked like a boiled hare), that I could not imagine how to wake her.” When Laguna finally managed to get her up, she had been sleeping for thirty-six hours. She complained: “Why do you wake me at such an inopportune time? I was surrounded by all the pleasures and delights of the world.” Then she smiled at her husband who was standing there, “all stinking of hanged men,” and said to him, “Knavish one, know that I have made you a cuckold, and with a lover younger and better than you.”
Harner has brought together a number of such reported experiments with ointments involving the witches themselves All the subjects fell into a deep sleep, and upon being awakened, insisted that they had been away on a long journey. So the secret of the ointment was known by many people who lived at the time of the witch craze, even though modern historians have generally tended to forget or minimize it. The best eyewitness statement on the subject was made by one of Galileo’s colleagues, Giambattista della Porta, who obtained the formula for an ointment containing nightshade.
As soon as it is finished, they anoint the part of the body, having rubbed themselves very thoroughly before, so they grow rosy.… Thus on some moonlit night they think they are carried off to banquets, music, dances, and coupling with young men, which they desire most of all. So great is the force of imagination and the appearance of the images, that the part of the brain called memory is almost full of this sort of thing; and since they themselves, by inclination of nature, are extremely prone to belief, they take hold of the images in such a way that the mind itself is changed and thinks of nothing else day or night
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 17