Harner, who has been studying the use of hallucinogens by shamans among the Jívaro Indians of Peru, thinks that the active hallucinogenic agent in die witch ointments was atropine, a powerful alkaloid found in such European plants as mandrake, henbane, and belladonna (beautiful lady!) or deadly nightshade. The outstanding feature of atropine is that it is absorbable through the intact skin, a feature used to advantage in belladonna skin plasters for the relief of muscular pains. Several modern experimenters have re-created witches’ ointments based on formulas preserved in old documents. One group in Göttingen, Germany, reports falling into a twenty-four-hour sleep during which they dreamed of “wild rides, frenzied dancing, and other weird adventures of the type connected with medieval orgies.” Another experimenter who merely inhaled the fumes of henbane speaks of the “crazy sensation that my feet were growing lighter, expanding and breaking loose from my body … at the same time I experienced an intoxicating sensation of flying.”
Why the staff or broom that can still be seen between the legs of modern-day Halloween witches? According to Harner, it was no mere phallic symbol:
The use of the staff or broom was undoubtedly more than a symbolic Freudian act, serving as an applicator for the atropine-containing plant to the sensitive vaginal membranes, as well as providing the suggestion of riding on a steed, a typical illusion of the witches’ ride to the sabbat
If Harner’s explanation is correct, then most of the “genuine” sabbat meetings involved hallucinogenic experiences. The ointment was always applied before the witches went to the sabbat, never after they got there. So that whatever lay behind the papal decision to use the Inquisition to extirpate witchcraft, it could not have been the growing popularity of sabbats. What might have happened, of course, is that more people began “tripping.” I won’t rule out that possibility. But the Inquisition was not at all concerned with identifying witches on the basis of their possession of ointments (The Hammer of the Witches has little to say on the subject). It seems to me likely, therefore, that most of the “genuine” witches—the habitual trippers—were never identified, and that most of the people who were burned had never tripped.
Hallucinogenic ointments account for many of the specific features of witchcraft belief. Torture accounts for the spread of these beliefs far beyond the orbit of the actual users of the ointments. But there still remains the riddle of why five hundred thousand people had to die for crimes they committed in someone else’s dreams.
The Great
Witch Craze
MOST PEOPLE don’t know that military-messianic uprisings were as common in Europe from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries as they had been in Palestine in Greek and Roman times. Nor that the Protestant Reformation was in many ways the culmination or by-product of this messianic unrest. As was true of their predecessors in Palestine, outbreaks of messianic fervor in Europe were directed against the monopoly of wealth and power held by the governing classes. My explanation of the witchcraft craze is that it was largely created and sustained by the governing classes as a means of surpressing this wave of Christian messianism.
It is no accident that witchcraft came into increasing prominence along with violent messianic protests against social and economic inequities. The Pope gave permission to use torture against witches shortly before the Protestant Reformation, and the witch craze peaked during the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars and revolutions that put an end to the era of Christian unity.
For the European masses, the passing of feudalism and the emergence of strong national monarchies was a period of great stress. The development of trade, markets, and banking forced the owners of land and capital into enterprises aimed at maximizing profits. This could be done only by breaking up the small-scale paternalistic relationships characteristic of the feudal manorial estates and castle towns. Land holdings were divided, serfs and retainers were replaced by peasant renters and sharecroppers, and self-contained manors were converted into cash-crop agribusinesses. Country folk lost their subsistence plots and family homesteads, and great numbers of dispossessed peasants drifted to the towns, where they sought employment as wage laborers. From the eleventh century on, life became more competitive, impersonal, and commercialized—ruled by profit rather than tradition.
As the pauperization and alienation increased, more and more people began to make predictions about Christ’s second coming. Many saw the end of the world unfolding before their eyes in the sin and luxury of the Church, the polarization of wealth, famines and plagues, the expansion of Islam, and the incessant wars between rival factions of the European nobility.
The foremost theoretician of Western European messianism was Joachim of Fiore, whose prophetic system has been called by historian Norman Cohn, “the most influential one known to Europe until the appearance of Marxism.” Sometime between 1190 and 1195 Joachim, who was a Calabrian abbot, discovered how to calculate when the present world of suffering would give way to the kingdom of the spirit. Joachim believed that the first age of the world was the Age of the Father, the second the Age of the Son, the third the Age of the Holy Spirit The third age was to be the Sabbath or resting time, when there would be no need for wealth or property, labor, food or shelter; existence would be pure spirit and all material requirements would be superfluous. Hierarchical institutions such as the state and the Church would be replaced by a free community of perfect beings. Joachim predicted that the Age of the Spirit would begin by the year 1260. This date became the target of several military-messianic movements based on the belief that Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) was going to usher in the Third Age.
Frederick openly defied the power of the Pope, causing his kingdom to be placed under a papal interdict prohibiting baptism, marriage, confession, and the other sacraments. Supporting Frederick was the fanatic poverty wing of the Franciscan order, known as the Spirituals. They claimed that Frederick would soon perform the role of Antichrist, purging the Church of wealth and luxury and destroying the clergy. In Germany, Frederick was proclaimed Savior by wandering Joachite preachers, who denounced the Pope and administered sacraments and granted absolution in defiance of the papal interdiction. In Swabia, one of these preachers, Brother Arnold, said that Christ would return in 1260 and confirm the fact that the Pope was Antichrist, and the clergy the “limbs” of Antichrist. They all would be condemned for living in luxury and exploiting and oppressing the poor. Frederick II would then confiscate the great wealth of Rome and distribute it to the poor—the only true Christians.
Frederick’s untimely death in 1250 did not destroy the messianic fantasies asociated with his rule. He became a “Sleeping Emperor,” and in 1284 a man who claimed to be the reawakened Frederick attracted followers in Neuss before he was burned for heresy. Savior Fredericks were still being burned hundreds of years later.
Norman Cohn describes a military-messianic document known as the Book of a Hundred Chapters, written at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which predicted that Frederick was coming on a white horse to rule the whole world. The clergy from the Pope on down would be annihilated at the rate of 2,300 persons per day. The emperor would also massacre all moneylenders, price-fixing merchants, and unscrupulous lawyers. All wealth would be appropriated and turned over to the poor; private property would be abolished, and all things would be held in common: “All property shall become one single property, then there will indeed be one shepherd and one sheepfold.”
In preparation for the third age predicted by Joachim of Fiore, bands of men who specialized in beating themselves with iron-tipped thongs began to march from town to town. Arriving in a town square, these “flagellants” would strip to the waist and whip themselves on the back until the blood ran. The flagellants were initially concerned with penitence as a means of “straightening the path” for the third age. But their activities became increasingly subversive and anticlerical, especially in Germany after 1260. When they began to claim that the mere act of participating in one of their process
ions absolved a man from sin, the Church declared them heretics and they were forced to go underground. They surfaced in 1348 as the Black Death swept across Europe. The flagellants blamed the Black Death on the Jews and incited mobs in town after town to massacre the Jewish inhabitants. Setting themselves above Pope and clergy, they claimed that their blood had the power of redemption and that they were an army of saints saving the world from God’s wrath. They stoned the priests who tried to stop them, disrupted regular church services, and confiscated and redistributed church property.
The flagellant movement culminated in a messianic revolt led by one Konrad Schmid, who claimed to be the God-Emperor Frederick. Schmid whipped his followers and bathed them in their own blood as a higher form of baptism. Like New Guinea believers in cargo, the people of Thuringia sold their possessions, refused to work, and prepared to take their places in the angelic choir that would stand closest to the Emperor God after the Last Judgment. This event was set for 1369. Due to the energetic intervention of the Inquisition, Schmid was burned before he could complete his work. Years later, flagellants were still being discovered in Thuringia, and three hundred were burned in a single day in 1416.
One way to get rid of the troublemaking alienated poor was to enlist their aid in the Holy Wars, or Crusades, aimed at recapturing Jerusalem from Islam. Several of these Crusades backfired and turned into messianic revolutionary movements directed against the clergy and the nobility. In the Crusade of the Shepherds, for example, a renegade monk named Jacob claimed that he had received a letter from the Virgin Mary summoning all shepherds to free the Holy Sepulcher. Tens of thousands of poor people followed Jacob about, armed with pitchforks, hatchets, and daggers which they would hold aloft as they entered a town, intimidating the authorities so that they would be given a proper reception. Jacob had visions, healed the sick, gave miraculous banquets in which food appeared faster than it could be eaten, denounced the clergy, and killed anyone who dared to interrupt his sermons. His followers went from town to town, striking down the clergy or drowning them in the river.
The interplay among the essentially conservative but conflicting interests of the Church and the state and the threat of radical lower-class revolution drove Europe steadily closer to the Protestant Reformation. How this process worked can be seen in the Hussite movement of fifteenth-century Bohemia.
The Hussites confiscated church property and tried to compel the clergy to live a life of apostolic poverty. In retaliation, the Pope and his allies initiated a series of repressive campaigns now known as the Hussite Wars. As the violence spread, a third group of combatants emerged out of the pauperized masses. They were known as the Taborites—after Tabor on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus foretold his second coming. To the Taborites, the Hussite Wars were the beginning of the end of the world. They rushed into battle in order to “wash their hands in blood,” led by messianic prophets who insisted that every true priest was under the obligation to pursue, wound, and kill every sinner. After exterminating the enemy, the Taborites expected Joachim de Fiore’s third age to begin. There would be the usual lack of physical suffering or physical want; a community of love and peace, without taxes, property, or social classes. In 1419 thousands of these Bohemian “free spirits” (the originators of bohemianism as a lifestyle) established a commune near the town of Usti on the Luzhnica River. They supported themselves by forays into the countryside, stripping and looting anything they could get their hands on because as men of the Law of God, they felt they were entitled to take whatever belonged to the enemies of God.
Similar movements recurred in Germany throughout the fifteenth century. For example, in 1476 a shepherd named Hans Böhm had a vision of the Virgin Mary. He was told that henceforth the poor should refuse all payment of taxes and tithes in preparation for the coming kingdom. All people would soon be living together without distinction of rank; everyone would be given equal access to woods, water, pasture, and fishing and hunting areas. Crowds of pilgrims advanced on Nikiashausen from all over Germany to see the “Holy Youth.” They marched in long columns, greeted each other as “brother and sister,” and sang revolutionary songs.
The specific form ultimately achieved by the Protestant Reformation cannot be understood apart from the radical military-messianic alternative which frightened the secular powers as much as it frightened the church. Like so many before him, Luther was convinced that he was living in the Last Days, that the Pope was Antichrist, and that the papacy would have to be destroyed before the Kingdom of God could be realized. But Luther’s Kingdom of God would not be of this world; and he felt that preaching rather than armed revolt was the proper way to bring it about. The German nobility welcomed Luther’s mixture of radical piety and conservative politics. It was the right combination for throwing off papal rule without increasing the risk of social upheaval.
Thomas Müntzer, originally a disciple of Luther, supplied the radical counterpoint to Luther’s movement. Luther and Müntzer chose opposite sides in the great peasant revolt of 1525. Luther condemned the peasants in his pamphlet “Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” to which Müntzer replied that the people who supported Luther were themselves “robbers who use the law to forbid others to rob.” Müntzer insisted that what Luther called God’s law was simply a device for protecting property. The “seed-grounds of usury and theft and robbery are our Lords and Princes.” He accused Luther of strengthening the power of the “ungodly scoundrels, so that they shall continue in their old ways.” Convinced that the peasant uprising was the beginning of the New Kingdom, Müntzer took over command of the peasant army. He compared his role to that of Gideon in the battle with the Midianites, and on the eve of encountering the enemy, he told his ill-equipped and untrained peasant followers that God had spoken to him and had promised victory. He said that he himself would protect them by catching the cannonballs in his sleeve. God would never allow his chosen people to perish. With the first cannonades, the peasants broke rank and 5,000 were slaughtered while running away. Müntzer himself was tortured and then beheaded some time later.
The radical wing of the Reformation continued in full force during the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries. Known as the Anabaptist movement, it gave rise to at least forty different sects and dozens of military-messianic uprisings in the Taborite and Müntzer tradition, and was widely regarded by Catholic and Protestant rulers alike as an omnipresent heretical conspiracy to overthrow all property relations and redistribute the wealth of Church and state among the poor. For example, one of Müntzer’s disciples, Hans Hut, announced that Christ would return in 1528 to inaugurate the kingdom of God, with free love and community of goods. The Anabaptists would judge the false priests and pastors. Kings, nobles, and the great ones of the earth would be cast into chains. Melchoir Hoffman, another follower of Müntzer, predicted that the world would end in 1533. Hoffman was succeeded by a baker, Jan Matthys of Haarlem, who preached that the righteous must take up the sword and actively prepare the way for Christ by cleansing the earth of the ungodly. In 1534 Münster, Westphalia, became the center of the Anabaptist movement. All Catholics and Protestants were evicted, and private property was abolished. The leadership was soon taken over by John of Leyden, who claimed to be David’s successor and who demanded royal honors and absolute obedience in what the Anabaptists called their “New Jerusalem.”
During the seventeenth century in England similar radical messianic motifs animated the lower classes, providing much of the energy for the English Civil War. Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army contained thousands of volunteers who believed that a kingdom of “Saints” would be established on English soil and that Christ would descend to rule over them. In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley received a vision commanding him to prepare for the end of the world by establishing a community of “Diggers,” in which private property, class distinction, and all forms of coercion would have no place. And in 1656 Cromwell’s erstwhile supporters, the Fifth Monarchy Men, declared him
Antichrist, and tried to set up a kingdom of the Saints by force of arms—Fifth Monarchy referring to the millennium when Christ would reign for 1,000 years.
• • •
What has all this to do with witchcraft? As I indicated at the beginning of the chapter, there is a close chronological relationship between the onset of the witch craze and the development of European messianism. Institor and Sprenger’s witch-hunting system was approved by Innocent VIII at a time when Europe was bubbling to the brim with third-age prophecies and messianic movements. The witch mania reached its peak in the aftermath of the Reformation—both Luther and Calvin were ardent believers in the dangers of witchcraft—and so did the violent radical protest movements based on revolutionary third-age messianic doctrines.
Is there a practical explanation for the parallel development of messianic social protest and the witchcraft craze? One conventional point of view is that witchcraft itself was a form of social protest. For example, according to Professor Jeffrey Burton Russell—who is an expert on the history of medieval dissent—witchcraft, mysticism, the flagellants, and popular heresy all belong in the same category. “All, to one degree or another, were rejections of an institutional structure that was found wanting.”
I disagree. To explain the witch craze as social protest, you have to go pretty far toward adopting the view of “reality” set forth in The Hammer of the Witches. You have to believe that Europe was infested with great numbers of people who threatened the status quo by gathering together to worship the devil. But if the real flying witches were mainly henbane trippers, they don’t belong in the same category as the Taborites or the Anabaptists any more than junkies belong with Black Panthers. A few people here and there hallucinating about intercourse with the Devil, or casting spells on some neighbor’s cow, were not a threat to the survival of the propertied and governing classes. Witches were probably drawn from the ranks of frustrated and discontented people; but this does not make witches subversive. For a movement to be a serious protest against an established order it must either have explicit doctrines of social criticism, or it must be launched on a dangerous or threatening course of action. Whatever the witches did at their sabbats, if they ever got there at all, there is no evidence that they spent their time condemning the luxury of the Church or calling for the abolition of private property and the end of distinctions of rank and authority. If they did, they weren’t witches but Waldensians, Taborites, Anabaptists, or members of some other radical politico-religious sect—many of whom were undoubtedly burned for witchcraft rather than for their messianic beliefs.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 18