The Enemy Within (4 page)

It fell to Christianity to move these traditional understandings in a drastically different direction, toward a far more basic dualism. The Christian God was conceived from the outset as the essence of perfection; how, then, to connect Him with any manifestation of evil? Yet the pervasiveness of evil, the
power
of evil, seemed undeniable; hence the necessity of a separate force, an opposite cosmic principle, to explain it. The all-good God, with His all-good Son and “host” of ministering angels,
versus
the all-bad Devil and his own demonic “legions”: around this vast dichotomy would centuries of Christian thought and feeling revolve. Inevitably, there were logical difficulties at its center. A substantially empowered Devil meant, to just the same extent, a
dis
empowered God. The concept of divine omnipotence clashed directly with that of divine beneficence; church-based groups (and individuals) would be obliged somehow to split the difference. The orthodox position was generally a middle one, a partial or “modified” dualism that affirmed God's absolute power, while also (and in some contradiction) acknowledging wide scope for Satan to work his worst in human affairs. But again and again during the first millennium, this formulation would be challenged, usually by way of a more radical and complete dualism. In branch movements like Gnosticism (of the late 2nd and 3rd centuries) and Manichaeaism (3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries) God's perfection, purity, and power were fully counterbalanced by the forces of evil. Moreover, the same tendency would reemerge in numerous other “heresies” later on.

It was, then, within the frame of a modified dualism that mainstream Christianity would continue to grow. And along the way it would continue to confront enemies, both within and without. There was the ancient city and culture of Rome itself, that “seat of Babylon.” There were the Jews, initially coreligionists but quickly recast as bitter antagonists. There were pagans of every sort. Such persistent adversarial conditions meant that the dualist viewpoint was continually reinforced; the other side, whatever its particular coloration, could easily be linked to Satan—or at least to Satan's “influence.” Moreover, the sufferings of the early Christian martyrs, an essential ingredient of Church history, sharpened the issue by personalizing it; the stakes were literally life-and-death. Monasticism was another significant ingredient. Monkish “fathers,” in their desert retreats, launched a long train of patristic literature in which stark confrontation with Satan—temptation by Satan—assault by Satan—was fundamental. The writings of St. Augustine, especially his
Confessions
(composed circa A.D. 400), and later his masterpiece,
The City of God
(413-26), epitomized this theme. God and Satan; angels and devils; this world and the next; heaven and hell; the sacred and the profane; the spirit and the flesh; the saved and the damned: thus a whole panorama of dualisms, amongst which lowly human believers, caught in the midst of a cosmic battle, must somehow find their way.

Pagan gods and pagan ceremony could be fitted right into this overarching paradigm. And frequently they were. So were Gnostics, Manichaeans, and other “apostates” from orthodoxy. So, too, were sorcerers and “magicians” of various types. Magic had occupied a prominent, if ambiguous, niche in classical Greece and Rome. So-called low magic, performed by expert practitioners at the behest of clients seeking direct assistance from gods or demons (usually for morally dubious purposes), was roundly condemned by philosophers such as Plato. Yet “high magic” was something very different—was itself a branch of philosophy, embracing astrology, alchemy, and other forms of arcane knowledge, and affirming as its ultimate goal union with the divine. Early Christianity would, in any case, reject
all
forms of magic, and equate all with sorcery and paganism. The cumulative result was a lumping together of non-Christian beliefs—pagan, magical, heterodox, whatever—and a channeling of the whole into a rhetoric of highly ritualized invective. Solidified by the end of the 6th century, this rhetoric would be widely reinvoked, and repeatedly reinvigorated, for at least another 1,000 years. And within it, the figure of the witch would come to occupy an ever larger, more central, more menacing place.

 
Throughout the rest of the early Middle Ages, from roughly the 7th through the 10th centuries, organized Christianity seems to have held God and Satan in a kind of balance. Schismatic movements were, on the whole, less problematic than before. And witchcraft did not evoke the highest levels of concern. Still, it retained enough presence to prompt occasional sharp rejoinders from secular and ecclesiastical authorities alike. A pair of documents, separated by roughly 100 years in time, can serve to represent the overall range. The first, carrying the imprimatur of Charlemagne, the greatest of the medieval Frankish emperors, was part of a “capitulary” (set of ordinances) issued to the Saxons following conquest of their territory in 786. In it, Charlemagne inveighed severely against “pretended sorcerers” and fortune-tellers; such persons, he said, deserved to be enslaved. He ordered the death penalty for anyone offering sacrifices to the Devil (which might well be taken to mean one or another of the traditional Saxon gods). He also prescribed execution for those who, being “deceived by the Devil, shall believe, as is customary among the pagans, that any man or woman is a striga . . . and shall on that account burn that person to death.” In short, it was the
idea
of witchcraft, the belief
in
witchcraft, that mainly sparked the emperor's indignation. He himself refused to credit such belief, and tried to suppress it in others. Indeed, he sought to halt the persecution of suspected witches by ordering dire punishment for their persecutors.

A second such document, entitled the
Canon Episcopi
, comes from the beginning of the 10th century. This was also a capitulary, anonymously authored in the name of the Church and addressed particularly to “bishops and their officials.” Its opening part denounced “the pernicious art of sorcery,” and urged that “followers of this wickedness” be “ejected” from their home communities. Another section turned to a more specific problem: the “illusion . . . [of ] some wicked women, perverted by the Devil,” that they rode at night with Diana, “the goddess of the pagans,” and her “demon” followers—supposedly for the sake of performing “her service.” The
Canon
exhorted parish priests to “preach . . . to the people that this . . . [is] in every way false,” not to say a mere “phantasm . . . imposed . . . [by] Satan.” All who believed it showed blatant “infidelity,” and, in effect, rejected “the one true [Christian] God.”

The
Canon Episcopi
, like Charlemagne's edict to the Saxons, can be seen as a kind of way station along the route to the full-blown witch-craze. It suggested, first of all, that paganism remained a considerable presence in 9th-century Europe, and that a fertility goddess like Diana might still command a large following (indeed, as the document said, an “innumerable multitude”). It made Satan responsible for “deluding” and “seducing” those followers. And it equated their situation with apostasy. At the same time, however, it scorned the specific beliefs involved—especially night-riding and ceremonial “service” to Diana—as “phantasms.” Finally, it proposed as punishment for “pretended sorcerers” not death, not physical torture, not incarceration, but simple banishment. It seems, therefore, a relatively moderate response, at least when compared with what came later on. Indeed, as the first millennium ended, a far-seeing observer could scarcely have imagined that witchcraft might one day become an overwhelming, society-wide preoccupation. But perhaps the same observer could have identified certain predisposing tendencies, most especially a readiness among many of his contemporaries to link witchcraft and magic with apostasy and heresy—and all of these with the work of the Devil.

 
The belief in magic, including
maleficium,
was a continuous presence in pre-modern Europe; but it did wax and wane over time. The 11th and 12th centuries were a period in which it waxed. This was when Europeans began to recover the philosophy, science, and other “classical” learning of ancient Greece and Rome (largely by way of Arabic texts), including a considerable infusion of high magic. Once again such “mystic arts” as alchemy and astrology would gain a wide following, especially among the educated elite. And once again ecclesiastical authorities would rally on behalf of their faith against what they viewed as a deeply pernicious challenge.

The fundamental issue, as before, was that of divine power, since magic presented its own claims to contact with, and control over, supernatural forces. And the result was decades of highly agitated controversy, as proponents of high magic sought to reconcile their viewpoint with Christian tradition while at the same time disavowing connections to low magic (everyday sorcery and its accoutrements). Church leaders, for their part, rejected any such distinction and fervently reasserted the “diabolical” grounding of magic in all forms. The entire tradition of patristic writing—from its distant progenitor, Augustine, through its chief medieval exemplar, Thomas Aquinas—was united around this theme: magic as superstition, magic as subversion, magic as sacrilege.

The same disputes would be periodically renewed and reenacted, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, as the appeal of high magic was itself renewed. Indeed, magic would find important new venues with the gradual development of a monarchical “court culture” in many parts of Europe. Wherever kings, princes, their families and retinues, plus assorted factotums and hangers-on, competed for influence, magicians of various types—high, low, and in-between—would find a welcoming niche. Within this steadily growing demimonde, conjurors, necromancers, fortune-tellers, alchemists, and soothsayers might be expected to offer just the sort of advantage needed to push one or another courtier ahead.

Seen in very broad perspective, the late medieval Church had entered a new terrain of heightened vulnerability. For even as it struggled to fend off magic on one side, it faced a rising tide of heresy on the other. The small and scattered “Reformist” movements of the 10th and 11th centuries yielded in the 12th to the far more severe challenge of Catharism. This amounted to virtually a separate religion, with its own institutional structure (including a dozen different bishoprics) and a geographical reach across much of France and Italy. Its doctrinal basis was a deep-seated dualism, with good and evil principles radically counterposed. (In some versions Satan was cast as a fully independent deity.) For the Catholic establishment, Catharism could only seem Devil-inspired; yet its own dualist tendency drove the Church at least partway in the same direction.

Another large heretical movement, Waldensianism, would form near the end of the 12th century; it, too, had a dualist slant. And there were numerous lesser deviations as well. (To name just a few: Amalricians, Joachites, Luciferans, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the French pastoureaux, organized groups of ritual flagellants, and adherents of the so-called dance manias). The struggle around and against heresy would continue, at least intermittently, throughout the 13th and 14th centuries. Within mainstream Catholicism, its cumulative effect was to create an especially vivid and pejorative set of stereotypes. Heretics were increasingly viewed as outright Devil-worshipers, acting in secret, given to ritual “orgies” and “abominations” (abortion, infanticide), conspiring all the while to undermine true faith. Moreover, in many of the same times and places, other stereotypes also strengthened—of Jews as kidnappers and ritual murderers of infants, of lepers as willful contaminators of entire communities—with savage pogroms as the direct result. Taken together, these trends have led some to characterize late medieval Europe as a “persecuting society.”

Finally, the ancient stereotype of the Devil was itself in constant process of enhancement and embellishment, so that by the close of the Middle Ages an elaborate diabology was in full view. For one thing, the nomenclature proliferated enormously: Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Mephistopheles, the Prince of Darkness. For another, the physical imagery became elaborate, vivid, grotesque, and shocking. Traditionally represented in animal form—a serpent, a goat, a dog, a wolf—the Devil would henceforth be portrayed as a monstrous hybrid, combining elements of both human and animal appearance with the darkest, most twisted fantasy. Horns, hoofs, tail, body hair, wildly contorted limbs, piercing eyes, ravenous mouth, pointed ears: thus the makings of a kind of inverse iconography, in painting and sculpture no less than in words. As a result the figure of the Devil would come to seem not only larger and more hideous, but also more immediate and personal. And because Romanesque art forms spread to all parts of medieval Europe, especially its cathedrals and churches, this impression was popularized as never before.

In sum, three highly charged images converged here: the magician, the heretic, the Devil. Each was a focal point of both popular and learned belief; each was distinct in some respects, yet was tightly linked to the others. And alongside them stood the witch: also focal, also distinct, also linked, and so positioned as to draw both shape and substance from all the rest. Indeed, many of the same elements appeared almost indiscriminately across this entire spectrum: secrecy, conspiracy, blasphemy, monstrosity, inspiration by the forces of evil.

As time passed, the picture of witchcraft would gain strength from a growing emphasis on its
collective
aspects: shared rites, nocturnal meetings (the so-called
sabbat
) to renounce God and Christ, particular strategies of witch-to-witch recruitment, the making of an explicit “pact” with Satan. Indeed, without the
sabbat
and without pact, witch-hunting on a grand scale would hardly have been conceivable. The former was, for the most part, a creation of medieval Catholic culture; its roots are obscure, but may well have included at least the distorted memory of pre-Christian fertility cults (like those attributed to Hecate and Diana). Pact, for its part, was perhaps the single most energizing notion of all. Endlessly elaborated by learned theologians from the 12th century onward, it would in most versions include a formal rejection of the Christian God, a corresponding pledge of allegiance to the Devil, and a transfer of maleficent powers to the witch—variously sealed by a kiss (on the Devil's backside), by the affixing of a special “mark” (on one or another significant part of the witch's own anatomy), or by sexual intercourse. It was pact that transformed witchcraft from a matter of simple
maleficium
into apostasy and heresy, from individualized and localized sorcery into a massively generalized “plot” to destroy God's plan for the universe.