… oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequence.29
Here the playwright echoes Lavater’s warning that “The devil sometimes utters the truth, that his words may have the more credit, and that he may the more easily beguile them.”30 Alongside fears of danger from night’s black agents grew the fear that one might be tempted to become the Devil’s own.
This association of the night with temptation and the darkness of one’s own sin appears in a range of contemporary works. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), the protagonist Vindice comments on lust and the temptation to incest, explaining that “if any thing / Be damn’d, it will be twelve o’clock at night.” “That twelve,” he adds, “is the Judas of the hours, wherein, / Honest salvation is betray’d to sin.” The dark temptation represented by the Weird Sisters in Macbeth also appeared on the English stage through the nocturnal temptations of Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and in the form of the Black Dog in The Witch of Edmonton (c. 1621).31
The growing emphasis on temptation and the night is especially clear in the development of Doctor Faustus. In contrast with Marlowe’s later version, neither the German Historia von Johann Fausten of 1587 nor the English Faust Book of 1588/89 connects Faust’s initial temptation and fall with the night. In the German text Faustus “summoned the devil at night between nine and ten o’clock,” and at midnight ordered the spirit to appear to him the next morning at his home. After this morning “disputation” Faustus bade the spirit return in the evening. Only the following morning, described in the text as “The Third Conference of Doctor Faustus with the Spirit and the Promise He Made” does Faust sign in blood the fatal contract.32 The English Faust Book repeats this sequence of events.33 In the A-text of Doctor Faustus, written and first performed in late 1588 or 1589, Marlowe compresses the action into two night scenes: Faust’s conjuring of Mephistopheles (“Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, / … dims the welkin with her pitchy breath, / Faustus, begin thine incantations”), and the subsequent conversation (“Go and return to mighty Lucifer, / And meet me in my study at midnight”) in which Faustus signs away his soul.34 In Marlowe’s account Mephistopheles works to seduce Faustus by night with the full array of temptations and illusions at his disposal. The questions asked by Faustus underscore this association: “Is it not midnight? Come, Mephistopheles” (2.1.28); “Is that the reason he tempts us thus?” (2.1.40).35 The B-text of the play, first published in 1616, emends the setting of Faustus’s first conjuration to “Now that the gloomy shadow of the night, / … dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,” consonant with this emphasis on nocturnal diabolical temptation.36
2.3 Witchcraft
The emphasis by Lavater, Nashe, Marlowe, and Shakespeare on the power of the “cunning fowler … [who] spreads his nets of temptation in the dark” was fundamental to the narratives of witchcraft which flourished in this period, especially in the understanding of the witch’s pact with the Devil and the nocturnal sabbath. When our perspective on witchcraft moves from the stage to the stake we are confronted with the grim reality of witch persecution in early modern Europe. In recent decades, scholars of early modern witchcraft have given some order to the bleak record of suspicion, accusation, torture, and confession that remains from the early modern witch persecutions.37 These scholars have identified several key aspects of early modern witchcraft, starting with witchcraft beliefs and practices in popular magic, and in rumors and accusations at the local level, where almost all trials for witchcraft began. They have also contextualized the legal sources created by the witch trials: witness testimony and the statements and confessions of defendants, coerced by torture or its threat. Demonological works and discussions of Satan and witchcraft in a broad range of other texts and images provide the intellectual and cultural background of the witch persecutions. In the crucible of the witch trials these aspects intersected to produce vivid scenes of nocturnal seduction by the Devil and shadowy gatherings in his service. Early modern theologians and jurists described the initial temptation by the Devil as leading to a pact or contract, often physically consummated, followed by participation in the witches’ sabbath. Suspended between the demonology of the learned and the confessions of the accused, accounts of nocturnal temptation by the Devil and descriptions of witches gathering at night were fundamental to early modern popular culture, to the legal mechanisms of witch persecutions, and to learned demonology.
When we consider the night in each aspect of the early modern construction and persecution of witchcraft, we see some of its most distinctive contours. Here I will draw much of my evidence from the heartland of persecution for witchcraft, the area of eastern France and the Holy Roman Empire from the duchies of Luxemburg and Lorraine to the prince-bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg.38 Over half of all known trials for witchcraft in all of early modern Europe took place in this politically and confessional fragmented area.39 Influential demonological works of the period were written in the region or made reference to it, foremost Jean Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Peter Binsfeld’s Tractat von Bekantnuss der Zauberer und Hexen (1590), and the Démonolâtrie (1595) of Nicolas Remy. French, German, and English historians have published thorough local and regional studies of witchcraft in the area.40
The universal belief in magic and spirits was the foundation of all witch persecution. “Popular beliefs” about magic and maleficia were held by people of all ranks, even if they sometimes clashed with learned views on witchcraft. Witchcraft was real and threatening. From this point a key observation emerges: time and again we see peasants and other common people demonstrating both the knowledge and the desire to initiate a prosecution for witchcraft. Scholars have uncovered both a wide knowledge of demonology and demon lore and a pattern of initiative “from below” in the witch persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and villagers often sought magical aid against witchcraft before turning to local authorities for help.41
In the witch persecutions common and learned views of witchcraft met, but they did not necessarily agree. Authorities inscribed “the witch of the church” over “the witch of the people”; the latter was dangerous but hardly diabolical.42 In popular beliefs about magic and witchcraft, the night played an ambiguous role, corresponding to the place of the night in folk beliefs in general. One cannot generalize about the extraordinary range of associations of the night found in the multi-volume German folklore guide, the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, except to say that the night was not uniformly associated with evil, nor did the clear light of day guarantee any protection against the Devil or his agents. Certain spells and rituals were best performed by night, but these practices were usually intended to help, not harm.43 The extensive accounts of popular magic in Saxon witch trials show no particular correlation between maleficia, beneficial magic, night, and day.44
Specific studies in the history of folklore reveal several deep and positive associations with the night in early modern Europe. Strange references to “night journeys” in Alpine folklore and witchcraft trials give us glimpses of local popular belief in the “phantoms of the night” (Nachtschar), a nocturnal group of mysterious people who “danced joyously on remote meadows and mountain pastures, [and] met in certain houses for sumptuous dinners.”45 Those who saw the night phantoms and opened their homes to them received magical gifts: good luck, the ability to play music, or perhaps second sight. The idea of the phantoms of the night is not easily distinguished from other folk beliefs documented in northern Italy, the Alps, Germany, and France from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, such as references to the Benandanti, “the good society” or “the blessed people.” In all of these cases the groups are described as nocturnal and beneficent. Indeed, as Carlo Ginzburg’s work on the Benandanti of Friuli and Wolfgang Behringer’s study of Chonrad Stoeckhlin, a village “shaman” in the Bavar
ian Alps, reveal, in their first encounters with church and state authorities, these “good people” of the night did not even think to hide their nocturnal associations, so sure were they of the legitimacy of their magical night companions and journeys.46
But what stood behind the magical beliefs of the common people? By the middle of the sixteenth century, intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political authorities worked hard to demonstrate that the Devil underwrote all magical practices, and that all “phantoms of the night” were witches. In his Guide to Grand-Jury Men (1627) Richard Bernard presented the diabolical covenant as the basis of all magic: “an expressed league is made with the Devil … that is, the Witch with spirits … Now what other can that be, with whom the Enchanter is in league, but the Devil? … The story of Faustus confirms it, and all the relations of Witches with us.”47 This view meant diabolizing nocturnal phantoms, practices, and symbols traditionally seen as benign or even beneficial. For scholars today, the best-known examples of this demonization appear in the work of Carlo Ginzburg and Wolfgang Behringer. Both have shown how rural folk described their roles as Benandanti or travelers with the Nachtschar, and how officials of the church and state forced these men and women into the framework of learned demonology, then condemned them.48
Whether Benandanti, flamboyant visionaries, or wise women of the village, all were aligned with the Devil in countless sermons, tracts, and ordinances.49 The Elizabethan pastor George Gifford, writing in 1593, decried all popular magic as witchcraft:
I might reckon up her that deals with the sieve and the shears, and a number of such trumperies, in all which the most holy name of God is polluted, and if any thing be done, it is done wholly by the effectual working of Satan. God hath given natural helps, and those we may use, as from his hand against natural diseases, but things besides nature he hath not appointed.
Across the confessions of early modern Europe, this diabolization of everyday magic and superstition recast popular and elite views of the night; Ginzburg and Behringer both provide revealing studies of common people caught in the authorities’ diabolization of the night. Gifford represented the diabolization as a foregone conclusion, asking: “Those which have their charms, and their night spells, what can they be but witches?”50 As we will see below in chapter 7, villagers maintained a rich nocturnal culture despite the authorities’ diabolization of the night.
Because most prosecutions for witchcraft began with local accusations, witness testimony appears frequently in trial records. In contrast with the testimony of the accused, extracted by torture or its threat, witnesses testified under less coercion and showed themselves more strategic. Their testimony often provides clear evidence of popular beliefs despite the leading questions they were asked.51 Bernard’s guide to the investigation of witchcraft advised the prosecutor to ask “the suspected witch’s whole family” whether “they have heard the suspected … speak of their power to hurt this or that, or of their transportation, to this or that place, or of their meetings in the night there?”52 This line of questioning sought to pair daytime maleficia with night-time gatherings. But witnesses often presented a more benign view of the night, seen for example in the 1603 witness testimony of the young Caspar Johann of Hüttersdorf.53 At the trial of 60-year-old Schneider Augustin, he testified that after his evening meal
he laid himself down to sleep on the hay in his master Meyer’s barn. He awakened after his first sleep and saw that it was quite light in the barn; soon a great dance broke out on the threshing floor of the barn: the people danced back-to-back. In this company he, the witness, actually saw and recognized among others Schneider Augustin of Honzrath; this Schneider Augustin was by a wagon, which had been loaded with hay and stood on the threshing floor, and sat on a windowsill and blew on a huge, hideous instrument, making a terrible sound. The company discussed whether to move the wagon out, but after discussion decided to let it stay there. The whole thing lasted almost an hour and then disappeared with a great whoosh, and then it was dark in the barn again. He the witness could neither move nor spoke during all this time.54
As Eva Labouvie has observed, the scene described here is hardly diabolical. The dancing back-to-back to hideous music resembles an inverted peasant dance rather than a black mass or witches’ sabbath. There is no reference to the Devil or to maleficia practiced or planned, and no emphasis on the late hour of this gathering (after the “first sleep”) as particularly wicked. The relatively tame nocturnal gathering in this testimony is reflected by an English woodcut of the mid-seventeenth century showing a witches’ dance by the light of the moon (Figure 2.1). This image, illustrating the chapbook tale of Robin the cobbler, “punish’d bad as Faustus with his devils” for making a diabolical pact, nonetheless resembles a peasant dance more than any diabolical witches’ sabbath.55
Figure 2.1 Woodcut showing a witches’ dance, from The Witch of the Woodlands; or the Cobler’s New Translation (London, n.d. [early eighteenth century]), p. 2.
However described or represented, the sabbath was key to witch trials. In Caspar Johann’s testimony we see incrimination through “participation” at the gathering, which was the focus of all discussions of the dance or sabbath in trial testimony. Witchcraft persecutions needed accounts of the Sabbath to extend the chain of accusation, and this witness obliged. The protocol records that he “actually saw and recognized” Schneider Augustin of Honzrath.
Confessions extracted through torture confirmed and consolidated the authorities’ view of witchcraft.56 These coerced accounts went beyond witnesses’ testimony to construct a description of witchcraft from within. The true crime of witchcraft was service to the prince of darkness, and so the questions posed to accused witches and the confessions elicited focused on two typically (though not necessarily) nocturnal events: the initial agreement with the Devil (often consummated sexually), and the witches’ sabbath. These confessions appear like palimpsests on which popular and legal views of witchcraft and the night overwrite one another. Their references to the night fuse the traditional sense that the Devil might appear at any time with the authorities’ belief in the ubiquitous power of the Devil. Attitudes toward the night appear more uniformly negative in the testimony of accused witches, reflecting the more structured demonological writings and interrogation manuals. The Westphalian jurist Heinrich von Schultheis provided in his 1634 treatise on How to Proceed with Interrogations into the Gruesome Blasphemy of Witchcraft, a list of questions designed to elicit the whole nocturnal fantasy:
Questions for interrogating the witches regarding
their teacher
the body of the Devil
how they test their arts
maleficia
the place of dancing
the worship service
what they do after the dance
eating and drinking
honoring the Devil
praying to the Devil
blasphemy.
Schultheis also related several accounts of travelers and others who stumbled across nocturnal sabbaths.57 A manuscript interrogatory used in the prince-bishopric of Eichstätt in 1617 included questions on “strange gatherings,” asking of the accused witch “where she travelled to, and how they could get away in the dark night?” Interrogators were instructed to ask “whether and how they saw in the dark night; [and] what kind of light was present?” at the sabbath.58
The official narrative of witchcraft began at night. As Thomas Nashe asked in 1594: “When hath the devil commonly first appeared unto any man but in the night?” The expectation of a nocturnal encounter was ubiquitous but not rigid. Across Europe, confessed witches reported first meeting the Devil whenever they were alone, often at night but also by day.59 The account of the widow Feylen Suin, convicted of witchcraft in the jurisdiction of the imperial abbey of St. Maximin (near Trier) in 1587, can stand for many others. “Once upon a time,” her testimony began, “she was at home, sitting by the fire and her children were sleeping.” She thought back on her inabil
ity to buy grain to feed her family earlier that day when “suddenly the Devil, in the form of a young apprentice with a long black robe, came to her.” He consoled her and offered her money. She gave in to his temptations, denied God and “all his dear saints and the Mother of God” and had sexual relations with him (“Coitum exercuit membro frigidissimo etc.”) to consummate their agreement.60 Among the ninety-seven women and men from two villages (Longuisch and Kirsch) in the same region tried for witchcraft in the period 1587–1640, all but three confessed to first encountering the Devil alone, typically at night. Over half first met the Devil at home, including ten who encountered him in their beds at night. The interrogators of these accused witches focused relentlessly on the sexual consummation of their agreement with the Devil: all ninety-seven confessed witches in the Longuisch and Kirsch sample admitted to sexual relations with the Devil immediately upon their first encounter with him.61
The place of the night in these narratives varied. As the accused witch Niclas Fiedler, former mayor of Trier, confessed after repeated torture in 1591: “twelve years ago a black man came to him behind his house, between day and night, when his wife was suffering a long-lasting illness and he was very sad.”62 The accused witch was almost always described as being alone when first tempted by the Devil, and when the physical (usually sexual) consummation of the agreement between the Devil and the witch took place. This isolation, usually at night, supported narratives that confirmed the learned view of witchcraft and provided the evidence necessary for conviction, i.e., a confession of succumbing to the Devil’s temptation and entering physically into an agreement with him. Two confessions from Guernsey from 1617 reveal the relative unimportance of the night in the first encounter with the Devil: Collette Du Mont confessed that “she was quite young when the Devil, in the form of a cat, appeared to her in the Parish of Torteval as she was returning from her cattle, it being still daylight, and that he took occasion to lead her astray by inciting her to avenge herself on one of her neighbors.” Her co-defendant Isabel Becquet first met the Devil “in the form of a hare. [He] took occasion to tempt her, appearing to her in broad daylight in a road near her house.” Isabel Becquet then confessed that the Devil later sent Collette Du Mont to her house to fetch her for the sabbath “during the ensuing night.”63
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