To understand the witch craze, we must be willing to identify a species of reality that is separate from, and opposed to, the lifestyle consciousness of both the witches and the inquisitors. For Professor Russell, it is sufficient that the clergy and the nobility thought witchcraft was dangerous and subversive. “What people thought happened,” he says, “is as interesting as what ‘objectively’ did happen, and much more certain.” But this is precisely the point made by Institor and Sprenger: you are responsible for what you do in someone else’s dreams!
We have to make up our minds about certain events. Else Gwinner did not have intercourse with the Devil, and that is not an uninteresting or uncertain conclusion considering the fact that she was carbonized for having done it.
As in the case of each of the seemingly bizarre lifestyles that I have taken up so far, the witch craze can’t be explained in terms of the consciousness of the people who participated in it. Everything hinges on the observer’s readiness to indulge or oppose the fantasies of the various participants.
If witchcraft was dangerous heresy, as the Inquisition insisted, there is no mystery about why the Inquisition should have become obsessed with suppressing it. If, on the other hand, witchcraft was a relatively harmless, if not largely hallucinatory, activity, why was there so much effort spent on suppressing it—especially when the Church was being pushed to the limits of its resources by the great military-messianic upsurge of the fifteenth century?
This leads to a crucial question concerning what happened as distinct from what people thought happened. Is it true that the Inquisition was devoted to the suppression of the witch heresy? The assumption that the main business of the witch hunters was the annihilation of witches rests on the professed lifestyle consciousness of the inquisitors. But the contrary assumption—namely, that the witch hunters went out of their way to increase the supply of witches and to spread the belief that witches were real, omnipresent, and dangerous—rests on very solid evidence. Why should modern scholars accept the premises of the inquisitor’s lifestyle consciousness? The situation demands that we ask not why the inquisitors were obsessed with destroying witchcraft, but rather why they were so obsessed with creating it. Regardless of what they or their victims may have intended, the inevitable effect of the inquisitorial system was to make witchcraft more believable, and hence to increase the number of witchcraft accusations.
The witch-hunt system was too well designed, too enduring, too grim and stubborn. It could only have been sustained by interests that were equally enduring, grim, and stubborn. The witchcraft system and the witch craze had practical and mundane uses apart from the stated goals of the witch hunters. I am not referring here to the emoluments and petty advantages which I described earlier—the confiscation of property and the fees charged for torture and execution. These rewards help to explain why the technicians of the witch hunt went about their work with lively enthusiasm. But such benefits were part of the apparatus of witch-hunting rather than one of its causes.
I suggest that the best way to understand the cause of the witch mania is to examine its earthly results rather than its heavenly intentions. The principal result of the witch-hunt system (aside from charred bodies) was that the poor came to believe that they were being victimized by witches and devils instead of princes and popes. Did your roof leak, your cow abort, your oats wither, your wine go sour, your head ache, your baby die? It was a neighbor, the one who broke your fence, owed you money, or wanted your land—a neighbor turned witch. Did the price of bread go up, taxes soar, wages fall, jobs grow scarce? It was the work of the witches. Did plague and famine carry off a third of the inhabitants of every village and town? The diabolical, infernal witches were growing bolder all the time. Against the people’s phantom enemies, Church and state mounted a bold campaign. The authorities were unstinting in their efforts to ward off this evil, and rich and poor alike could be thankful for the energy and bravery displayed in the battle.
The practical significance of the witch mania therefore was that it shifted responsibility for the crisis of late medieval society from both Church and state to imaginary demons in human form. Preoccupied with the fantastic activities of these demons, the distraught, alienated, pauperized masses blamed the rampant Devil instead of the corrupt clergy and the rapacious nobility. Not only were the Church and state exonerated, but they were made indispensable. The clergy and nobility emerged as the great protectors of mankind against an enemy who was omnipresent but difficult to detect. Here at last was a reason to pay tithes and obey the tax collector. Vital services pertaining to this life rather than the next were being carried out with sound and fury, flame and smoke. You could actually see the authorities doing something to make life a little more secure; you could actually hear the witches scream as they went down to hell.
Who were the scapegoats? H. C. Erik Midelfort’s unique study of 1,258 witchcraft executions in southwestern Germany during the period 1562 to 1684 shows that 82 percent of the witches were females. Defenseless old women and lower-class midwives were usually the first to be accused in any local outbreak. As additional names were wrung from the first victims, children of both sexes, and men, began to figure more prominently. During the culminating panic phase characterized by mass executions, innkeepers, a few wealthy merchants, and an occasional magistrate and teacher would be put to death. But as the flames licked closer to the names of people who enjoyed high rank and power, the judges lost confidence in the confessions and the panics ceased. Doctors, lawyers, and university professors were seldom threatened. Evidently the inquisitors themselves and the clergy in general were also quite safe. If on occasion some poor bewildered soul was foolish enough to have seen the bishop or the crown prince at a recent sabbat, she surely brought upon herself tortures beyond recounting. Small wonder that Midelfort could find only three instances of accusations of witchcraft against members of the nobility, and not one of those so accused was executed.
Far from being “the reflection of an institutional structure that was found wanting,” the witch mania was an integral part of the defense of that institutional structure. This can best be seen by comparing the witch mania with its contemporary antithesis, military messianism. The witch mania and the military-messianic movements both incorporated popular religious themes that were partially endorsed by the established Church. They both built upon the existing lifestyle consciousness, but with totally different consequences. Military messianism brought the poor and the dispossessed together. It gave them a sense of collective mission, diminished social distance, made them feel like “brother and sister.” It mobilized people over whole regions, focused their energies upon a particular time and place, and led to pitched battles between the propertyless and pauperized masses and the people who were at the top of the social pyramid. The witchcraft mania, on the other hand, dispersed and fragmented all the latent energies of protest. It demobilized the poor and the dispossessed, increased their social distance, filled them with mutual suspicions, pitted neighbor against neighbor, isolated everyone, made everyone fearful, heightened everyone’s insecurity, made everyone feel helpless and dependent on the governing classes, gave everyone’s anger and frustration a purely local focus. In so doing, it drew the poor further and further away from confronting the ecclesiastical and secular establishment with demands for the redistribution of wealth and the leveling of rank. The witch mania was radical military messianism in reverse. It was the magic bullet of society’s privileged and powerful classes. That was its secret.
Return
of the Witch
AFTER BEING branded as superstition and suffering years of ridicule, witchcraft has returned as a respectable source of titillation. Not only witchcraft, but all kinds of occult and mystical specialties, ranging from astrology to Zen and including meditation, Hare Krishna, and the I Ching, an ancient Chinese system of magic. Catching the spirit of the times, a textbook titled Modern Cultural Anthropology recently won instant success by declaring: “Human fre
edom includes the freedom to believe.”
The unexpected resurgence of attitudes and theories long held to be incompatible with the expansion of Western science and technology is associated with the development of a lifestyle which has been given the name “counter-culture.” According to Theodore Roszak, one of the movement’s adult prophets, counter-culture will save the world from the “myths of objective consciousness.” It will “subvert the scientific world view” and substitute a new culture in which the “non-intellective capacities” will reign supreme. Charles A. Reich, another minor prophet of recent years, speaks of a millennial state of mind which he calls Consciousness III. To achieve Consciousness III is “to be deeply suspicious of logic, rationality, analysis, and of principles.”
In the lifestyle of the counter-culture, feelings, spontaneity, imagination are good; science, logic, objectivity are bad. Its members boast of fleeing “objectivity” as if from a place inhabited by plague.
A central aspect of counter-culture is the belief that consciousness controls history. People are what goes on in their minds; to make them better, all you have to do is give them better ideas. Objective conditions count for little. The entire world is to be altered as a result of a “revolution in consciousness.” All we need do to stop crime, end poverty, beautify cities, eliminate war, live in peace and harmony with ourselves and nature, is to open our minds to Consciousness III. “Consciousness is prior to structure … The whole corporate state rests on nothing but consciousness.”
In the counter-culture, consciousness is stimulated and made aware of its untapped potential. Counter-culture people take journeys—“head trips”—to broaden their minds. They use pot, LSD, or mushrooms “to get their heads together.” They rap, encounter, or chant in order to “freak out” with Jesus, Buddha, Mao Tse-tung.
The aim is to express consciousness, demonstrate consciousness, alter consciousness, raise consciousness, expand consciousness—anything but objectify consciousness. To the Aquarian, mind-blown, stoned, freaked-out partisans of Consciousness III, reason is an invention of the military-industrial complex. It should be “offed” like any other “pig.”
Psychedelic drugs are useful because they allow “illogical” relationships to seem “perfectly natural.” They are good because, in Reich’s words, they make “unreal what society takes most seriously: time schedules, rational connections, competition, anger, excellence, authority, private property, law, status, the primacy of the state.” They are a “truth serum that repeals false consciousness.” One who has achieved Consciousness III “does not ‘know the facts.’ He doesn’t have to because he still ‘knows’ the truth that seems hidden from others.”
Counter-culture celebrates the supposedly natural life of primitive peoples. Its members wear beads, headbands, body paint, and colorful tattered clothing; they yearn to be a tribe. They seem to believe that tribal peoples are nonmaterialistic, spontaneous, and reverently in touch with occult sources of enchantment.
In the anthropology of counter-culture, primitive consciousness is epitomized by the shaman, a figure who has light and power but never pays electric bills. Shamans are admired because they are adept at “cultivating exotic states of awareness” and at roving “among the hidden powers of the universe.” The shaman possesses “superconsciousness.” He has “eyes of fire that burn through the ordinariness of the world and perceive the wonders and terrors beyond.” Using hallucinogens and other techniques such as self-asphyxiation, and hypnotic drums and dance rhythms, the shaman, according to Roszak, “cultivates his rapport with the non-intellective sources of the personality as assiduously as any scientist trains himself to objectivity.”
There is much to be learned about the counter-culture from a consideration of Carlos Castaneda’s popular hero Don Juan, a mysterious superconscious Yaqui Indian “man of knowledge.” Castaneda writes of his experiences as a fledgling anthropology student who wanted to penetrate the separate, nonordinary reality of the shaman’s world. Don Juan accepted Castaneda as an apprentice, and Castaneda set out to write a doctoral dissertation based on Don Juan’s teachings. To remake Castaneda into a “man of knowledge,” Don Juan introduced the innocent student to various hallucinogenic substances. After encountering a transparent luminescent dog and a hundred-foot gnat, Castaneda began to doubt that his normal reality was any more real than the nonordinary reality to which his mentor had conducted him. At the outset, Castaneda was intent on finding out how a “man of knowledge” conceives of the world. But the apprentice gradually began to feel that he was learning something about the world itself.
“It is stupid and wasteful,” noted another anthropologist, Paul Riesman, in a New York Times book review, “to think of Don Juan’s knowledge—and that of other non-Western peoples—as no more than a conception of some fixed reality. Castaneda makes it clear that the teachings of Don Juan do tell us something of how the world really is.”
Wrong on both counts. Castaneda does not make anything clear. And Don Juan’s “separate reality” is not unfamiliar to “Western peoples.”
Castaneda’s most famous hallucinogenic trip is very reminiscent of matters I discussed here earlier. Don Juan and Castaneda spent several days preparing a paste from yerba del diablo—“devil’s weed”—mixed with lard and other ingredients. Under Don Juan’s supervision, the apprentice spread the paste on the soles of his feet and up the insides of his legs, reserving the largest part for his genitals. The paste had a suffocating, pungent smell—“like a gas of some sort.” Castaneda straightened up and started to walk, but his legs felt “rubbery and long, extremely long.”
I looked down and saw Don Juan sitting below me; way below me. The momentum carried me forward one more step, which was even more elastic and longer than the preceding one. And from there I soared I remember coming down once; then I pushed up with both feet, sprang backwards and glided on my back. I saw the dark sky above me, the clouds going by me. I jerked my body so I could look down. I saw the dark mass of the mountains. My speed was extraordinary.
After learning how to maneuver by turning his head, Castaneda experienced “such freedom and swiftness as he had never known before.” At last he felt obliged to descend. It was morning and he was naked and a half-mile from where he had set out. Don Juan assured him that with practice he would become a better flyer:
You can soar through the air for hundreds of miles to see what is happening at any place you want, or to deliver a fatal blow to your enemies far away.
Castaneda asked his teacher, “Did I really fly, Don Juan?” and the shaman replied, “That’s what you told me. Didn’t you?”
Then I really didn’t fly, Don Juan. I flew in my imagination, in my mind alone. Where was my body?
To which Don Juan rejoined:
You don’t think a man flies; and yet a brujo [witch] can move a thousand miles in one second to see what is going on. He can deliver a blow to his enemies long distances away. So does he or doesn’t he fly?
Does this sound familiar? It should. What are Don Juan and Castaneda debating if not the respective merits of the Canon Episcopi and Institor and Sprenger’s Hammer of the Witches? Does the witch fly in mind alone or in body also? At last, Castaneda asks Don Juan what would happen if he tied himself to a rock with a heavy chain: “I’m afraid you will have to fly holding the rock with its heavy chain.”
As we learned from Professor Harner, European witches flew after rubbing themselves with salves and unguents containing the skin-penetrating alkaloid atropine. Professor Harner also informs us that atropine is an active ingredient in the Datura genus of plants, known in the New World as Jimson weed, thorn apple, Gabriel’s trumpet, mad apple, and devil’s weed—the last being the variety whose root made Castaneda airborne. In fact, Harner predicted that Castaneda would fly like a witch before Castaneda rubbed himself with devil’s weed:
Several years ago I ran across a reference to the use of a Datura ointment by the Yaqui Indians of Northern Mexico, who reportedly rubbe
d it on the stomach “to see visions.” I called this to the attention of my colleague and friend, Carlos Castañeda, who was studying under a Yaqui shaman, and asked him to find out if the Yaqui used the ointment for flying and to determine its effects.
So shamanistic superconsciousness is the consciousness of witches favorably regarded in a world no longer threatened by the Inquisition. The “separate reality” previously unknown to smugly objective “Western peoples” is so much a part of Western civilization that a scant three hundred years ago “objectifiers” were burned at the stake for denying that witches could fly.
In the first chapter, I cited the claim that the expansion of “objective consciousness” inevitably results in a loss of “moral sensibility.” Counter-culture and Consciousness III represent themselves as humanizing trends concerned with the restoration of sentiment, compassion, love, and mutual trust in human relationshops. I find it difficult to reconcile this moral posture with the interest expressed in witchcraft and shamanism. Don Juan, for instance, can only be described as amoral. He may know how to “rove among the hidden powers of the universe,” but he is not troubled by the difference between good and evil in the traditional Western sense of morality. His teachings are, in fact, devoid of “moral sensibility.”
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 19