Who Burned the Witches? (Part 1)

The stench of their burning is with us yet. The stakes and gibbets where witches perished by the tens of thousands during Earl Modern times still stand in popular imagination. For historians, the Great European Witch-Hunt has been an ongoing controversy, one easily contorted to suit the prejudices of every age.

Since the Enlightenment, rationalists have liked to cite witch-burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and religious (usually Catholic) bigotry run amok. Leftists today still denounce it as a cynical plot by the strong against the weak. Writing history that way was simple: researchers catalogued horrors, disparaged religion (or at least someone else’s religion), and celebrated the triumph of science and liberal government. The history of witchcraft seemed a settled issue in 1969 when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his classic essay, “The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”

But since the 1970s, new voices clamored to reopen the question. Adherents of the emerging Neo-pagan movement claimed victims of the witch-hunt as their martyred forebears. They mourned a “Pagan Holocaust” of nine million secret nature-worshippers exterminated centuries ago by bigoted Christians. Gerald Gardner, founder of modern Wicca, had called the era of persecution “the burning times.” Although his reading of history, as well as his history of Wicca itself, has been soundly debunked, Pagan proponents Margot Adler and Starhawk (née Miriam Simos) kept preaching Gardner’s teachings because “invented history is satisfying myth.” (Current Pagan leaders acknowledge that Gardner was factually wrong.)

Nine million women burned is a figure conveniently larger than the Jewish Shoah, but it has no basis in reality. The figure originated with an eighteenth-century anticlerical German lawyer who extrapolated the toll in one city to all of Europe, as if witch trials happened everywhere. Pioneer American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage cited this number in her book Woman, Church, and the State (1893) whence it became embedded in radical feminist consciousness. Anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin referred to mass “gynecide.” Second-wave feminists saw witches as the natural enemy of patriarchy–Mary Daly suggested women use “witch” as a liberating label–and rallied around them as Old Leftists did around the leaders of the Spanish Republic. For such feminists as for Pagans, playing the victimization card strengthens solidarity.

Meanwhile, those of a Green persuasion, a group overlapping with Pagans and radical feminists, charge that suppressing witchcraft deprived medieval people of alternative medicine and estranged them from ancient Earth wisdom. In their 1973 book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, feminist and environmentalist writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English argued that witches were actually midwives targeted by their rivals—male physicians. Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant blamed patriarchal science for “the death of Nature” in her 1990 book of that title.

Popular culture is steeped in themes of cruel Christians persecuting Earth-loving witches. But although the general public may not have noticed, more than fifty years of academic research has demolished both the old Enlightenment certainties and new EcoPagan fancies. Archival studies conducted in different regions of Europe have more accurately measured who killed how many of whom under what circumstances. Adopting the tools of anthropology and psychology, historians have now reconstructed the social context in which witch-hunts happened. They also have a clearer picture now of how witchcraft theories developed and what intellectual bases supported them.

For example, historians now realize that witch-hunting was not primarily a medieval phenomenon. It peaked in the seventeenth century, during the rationalist age of Descartes and Newton. Persecuting suspected witches was not an elite plot against the poor, nor was practicing witchcraft a mode of peasant resistance. The lower classes were eager to see witches punished; elite skeptics wanted to spare them. Catholics and Protestants hunted witches with comparable vigor. Church and State alike tried and executed them. It took more than pure Reason to end the witch-craze.

Nor were witches secret Pagans serving an ancient Triple goddess and Horned god. Paganism was never a charge in Western European witch trials. The fabulous figure of nine million women burned is more than 200 times the best estimate of 50,000 killed during the 500 years from 1400 to 1800—a large number but no Holocaust. Neither was this era exclusively a burning time. Witches were also hanged, strangled, beheaded, and drowned. Witch hunting was not woman-hunting: up to twenty percent of all suspected witches were male. Midwives were not especially targeted, nor were witches liquidated as obstacles to professionalized medicine and mechanistic science.

These revisions will not entirely comfort Catholics, however. Catholics have been misinformed about the Church’s role by apologists eager to present the Church as innocent of witches’ blood to disparage Protestants and refute Enlightenment claims about Catholic guilt. Catholics need to hear that the theories that set the great witch-hunt in motion were developed by Catholic clerics before the Reformation.

But the great European witch-hunt was remarkably slow in coming. Many cultures around the world have long believed—and still believe–in wielders of occult powers. Witches were born; sorcerers were made. Traditionally, witches have innate abilities like shapeshifting, inflicting the evil eye, or enthralling victims. Sorcerers, however, must learn how to use their spells, tools, potions to control nature, but can apply them for good or evil ends by working white or black magic. Only the harmful kind was condemned.

The Church was born into a world where these concepts were commonplace. What Christianity uniquely did was to turn the ambivalent spirits (daimones) summoned by magicians into demons from Hell. Magical works were mere illusion; Satan was behind them all. The Church claimed a monopoly on the supernatural. Anything accomplished outside her control, even if it seemed beneficial, was diabolical. Distinctions between witchcraft and sorcery, black and white magic began to blur into one forbidden realm of evil.

The early Church had inherited Roman laws regarding maleficent magic, laws that treated witchcraft as a crime. But to St. Augustine, the fundamental problem with magic lay in idolatry and illusion. Although false practices associated with witchcraft resided only in the will, not actual deeds, they were sinful nevertheless. Following Augustine’s guidance, an anonymous text known as the Canon Episcopi became part of canon law. (Although mistaken for a ruling from the Council of Ancyra in 314, it was actually composed in the ninth century.) It declared that belief in the reality of night-flying witches was heresy because there was no such thing as an actual witch. Expulsion and penance were in order—not execution. Following Canon Episcopi precluded believing in the witch’s Sabbath, where Satan’s minions flew to worship him in blasphemous rituals followed by disgusting bacchanals.

While witches were largely ignored, the High Middle Ages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the bloody suppression of heretics, notably the Albigensians in Provence. Measures against Jews, ceremonial magicians, and sexual deviants also grew harsher. These groups were associated with a stereotyped set of blasphemies, orgies, and outrages that included infanticide and cannibalism. Ironically, pagan Romans had accused the first Christians of the very same crimes and Christians had said the same things about Gnostics.

The Papal Inquisition, modeled on the inquisitio procedure in ancient Roman law, was developed to deal with the rising tide of miscreants. Diocesan authorities were ordered to seek out and punish heretics by Lucius III’s decree Ad abolendum (1184). Innocent III (1198-1216) taught that heresy was treason against God and therefore a capital crime. Gregory IX (1227-1241) dispatched heresy-hunting teams of Dominican friars to judge offenders outside of existing legal systems. Innocent IV’s bull Ad extirpadam (1252) permitted the use of torture to obtain confessions of heresy, something previously excluded under canon law.

Suddenly, the idea that witchcraft was a reality rather than a heretical illusion revived. The inquisitors who had cut their teeth on heretics were devouring accused witches as well by the end of the Middle Ages. This was not simply a matter of shifting scapegoats to meet market demand. Society had learned to fear supernatural evil working through human conspiracies. So, the sinister figure of the esoterically schooled magician fused with that of the petty village wise-woman or cunning man to create a new menace—the diabolical witch.

After the first wisps of this change drifted up in the late fourteenth century. Its flames burst forth around 1425 in the Savoy region in what is now southeastern France and in the canton of Valais in Switzerland, near the borders of France and Italy. The area saw more than 500 witch trials before the Reformation erupted in 1517.

Meanwhile, witch-hunters’ manuals appeared, most notably the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), published in 1486. Its authors, Heinrich Kraemer and Jacob Sprenger, were experienced Dominican inquisitors who had been commissioned by Innocent VIII’s bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (1484) to hunt witches in Germany. Reversing the old principle of Canon Episcopi, Kramer and Sprenger proclaimed that not believing in the reality of witches was heresy. Witches regularly did physical as well as spiritual harm to others and allegiance to the Devil defined witchcraft. Kraemer and Sprenger exhorted secular authorities to fight witchcraft by any means necessary.

Malleus Maleficarum (notice the feminine possessive of “witches”) was a viciously misogynous tract. It depicted women as the sexual playmates of Satan, declaring: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.” Sprenger, nevertheless, had a deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin and had previously founded the first rosary confraternity in 1475. It has been suggested that Sprenger was not actually Kraemer’s co-author.

Malleus Maleficarum was not a complete guide. It failed to discuss the diabolical pact that bound witches to their master, the Sabbat, familiars (imps in animal form who aided witches), and night-flying. But those elements did not necessarily appear in every witchcraft case. Although the Malleus itself started no new witch-panics, it was freely used by later writers about witchcraft, Protestant and Catholic alike. The Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition was almost alone in scoffing at its lack of sophistication, advising its judges in 1538 not to take the Malleus too seriously.

The later demonologists who absorbed the Malleus were highly cultured men. They included the Protestant Jean Bodin, “the Aristotle of the sixteenth century” and his Catholic contemporary, Jesuit classicist Martin del Rio. These theoreticians pounded home the principle of crimen exceptum (“the exceptional crime”.) Because witchcraft was so vile an offense, accused witches had no legal rights. “Not one witch in a million would be accused or punished,” Bodin declared, “if the procedure were governed by ordinary rules.” Anyone who defended accused witches or denied their crimes deserved the same punishment as witches themselves, wrote Bodin.

Socially elite prosecutors, demonologists, and judges relentlessly hunted witches with the unquenchable zeal of modern revolutionaries pursuing a political utopia. No cost was too great, in their view, because witch-hunting served the greater good of Christendom. They believed that witchcraft inverted society’s key values, disturbed godly order, violated sexual standards, challenged the divine right of kings, and diminished the majesty of God. It was thought that witch-hunting saved souls and averted the wrath of God by purging society of evil as the End Times loomed.

Commoners, by contrast, simply wanted relief from the evildoers who, they believed, were harming them, their children, their cattle, and their crops. Grassroots complaints started most witch-hunts. If authorities were too slow to act, peasants were quite capable of lynching suspected neighbors.

Although maleficium—physical harm—loomed larger than diabolism in common people’s accusations against witches, their folk beliefs cross-fertilized the learned ones of Bodin and his ilk in complex ways. Through sermons, gossip, trial accounts, and luridly illustrated “witch books” (especially popular in Germany), everyone learned what witches did and how to detect them. And once people started looking for witches, they found them—by the hundreds and the thousands and the tens of thousands.

But that story must wait for Part Two of this essay.

(Editor’s note: A different version of this article ran in CRISIS magazine in October 2001.)