The Enemy Within (8 page)

Meanwhile, still further out along the same spectrum, the truly large cities of the period—London and Paris, for example—saw relatively few witch trials of either the ordinary or the panic type. In their case, experience was so impersonal and diffuse that the old forms of
ad hominem
suspicion could hardly take hold. Rapid population turnover, the differentiated and complex urban economy, the growth of bureaucracy, the general atmosphere of life
en masse:
such factors, individually and together, served as antidotes to witchcraft.

These points lead to another important and controversial question, that of “functionalism.” The term, and the concept, belong to modern anthropological study, from which witchcraft historians have borrowed quite liberally. The question is whether witchcraft was to some extent advantageous—hence “functional”—for the communities in which it lay embedded. And the answer is decidedly mixed: yes, maybe, no, and sometimes quite the contrary.

Witchcraft served, first of all, to line out crucial boundaries of behavior. The figure of the witch epitomized and personified evil. To trace that figure in detail was to identify the particular qualities deemed most negative by the community at large; hence, in a very basic sense, witchcraft belonged to the realm of moral philosophy. But this element extended beyond simple boundary marking, to embrace boundary
maintenance
as well. The fear of being labeled a witch undoubtedly influenced individual conduct, for persistent wrongdoing would invite such labeling. Even victims of witchcraft could come under suspicion; neighbors might ask, why have these particular persons been singled out for attack? Thus did moral philosophy mutate into a potent instrument of social control.

And it went further still. The presence in a village community of a suspected witch worked both to deflect hostility from other targets and to concentrate blame, like a boil on the body that pulls in toxic fluids. To bring the suspect eventually to trial was, in effect, to lance the boil and release its toxicity. Court proceedings were in most instances a highly collaborative affair; neighbors took action as a group, and so reaffirmed their common bonds. The action was shared, the goals were shared, the feelings (fear, excitement, relief ) were shared. And when the proceedings were over—especially if the witch and her wickedness had been fully excised—the community felt a sharper, more unified sense of itself. Put differently: it was cleansed.

This is admittedly a too-simple and schematic view; the reality of particular cases could easily become much more complex. Communities were not always of one mind about a suspect; if she had determined defenders, a trial might leave deep residues of bitterness or outright division. Furthermore, with panic witch-hunts it is hard to see any positive social function at all. Beyond the toll in lives lost, there would be massive disruption of familiar routines: work stopped, trade frozen, governance bent out of shape. In large-scale cases, witchcraft might tear a community apart and leave such devastation in its wake that full recovery would take decades or generations.

The picture, then, is truly ambiguous: sometimes gain (for the group, obviously not for the accused and her kin), sometimes severe, even catastrophic, loss. That witchcraft was deeply, elaborately threaded into the fabric of community life can hardly be doubted. But no single “functionalist” formula will stretch to cover the entire range.

Witchcraft could mean remarkably different things to different people. And class (or “rank,” as people of the time would have said) was indeed a major divider. Peasants and all those who made a living with their hands approached witchcraft in an immediate, specific, fundamentally practical way—as a potential threat to everyday security. Particular forms of
maleficium
were their chief point of concern. Gentlefolk—in short, all who were
not
obliged to work with their hands—shared this concern but added to it a strong interest in the more broadly “diabolical” aspects, Satan's relentless machinations and the cosmic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. And among the “gentle,” a subgroup of the most literate and educated people, especially the clergy, placed the greatest emphasis on the diabolical; for them,
maleficium
was but a subordinate part of a much larger whole.

In the small-scale witchcraft cases, as noted already, the usual starting point was an accusation by one villager or several against another. However, in order to reach the point of an actual trial, and then perhaps a conviction, it helped greatly if prominent local leaders decided to add the weight of their own influence. It was, in many instances, a combination of interest from different social levels that proved decisive against the accused. Or it could go another way: an accusatory process might shut down at a certain point because community leaders withheld their support. At least occasionally, magistrates would directly refuse to validate some particular charge; then a verdict might be set aside and a defendant released. Throughout these oft-repeated dramas one feels a certain tension between the viewpoints of “common” and “gentle” folk. Sometimes they were fully aligned; sometimes they were at odds; often enough they mixed, and jostled, and eventually found their way to a middle ground.

Even among the ranks of the “common” there were finely graded distinctions between some who had a bit more and others with a bit less. A good many witchcraft accusations followed a pattern that some historians now refer to as “the refusal-guilt syndrome.” One villager, in a state of evident need, would approach another to request assistance: some food perhaps, or drink, or wood for the fire, or simply a chance to perform paid work. Then the request was refused, for whatever reason:
We have not enough for ourselves; we've already promised someone else; we need to save for the future.
And this led to personal recrimination, including—so the refuser might later claim—threats by the refused:
I shall be even with you.
As a further step, the refuser would experience some “loss” or difficulty of a seemingly mysterious nature. From all of which he would draw the inevitable conclusion:
Witchcraft! She was angry, and spiteful, after I turned her away. And this is her revenge.

In peasant communities across Europe an ethic of neighborly cooperation, and of charity toward those “in want,” had governed daily life for centuries. So the refusal at the heart of this little scene constituted a breach; the refuser was left feeling guilty, and vulnerable, and perhaps (at some level) anticipating punishment. In fact, versions of the same sequence might appear in all sorts of contentious exchange, whenever the reasons for a person-to-person rebuff seemed questionable. But the refusal-guilt element, in particular, suggests a close link to traditional neighborly values—at a moment in history when those values had begun to erode. Especially in a place like Britain, as the first serious stirrings of market capitalism became evident, “individualism” was a growing cultural presence. And witchcraft cases took shape on the cusp of that momentous development.

The refusal-guilt pattern produced accusations that aimed down the ladder of social and economic status, from those a rung or two higher up toward others underneath. But there were also situations in which the aim went up. Perhaps a market-minded producer seemed overly self-regarding and “individualist”; he might then open himself, or members of his family, to charges of witchcraft “from below.” This reminds us that witchcraft accusation was an extremely flexible and adaptable weapon: useful in some contexts for defending established positions and in others for launching a tradition-subverting attack.

Much of the energy behind the great witch-hunts during the “craze” period derived from a supercharged intensity about religion. As the Protestant Reformation proceeded past its initial stage and engaged head-on with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, ideas clashed, attitudes hardened, emotions strengthened on every side. Taken together, the two great movements served to Christianize and spiritualize European culture in ways both broad and deep. Their goals became fully evangelical; vernacular preaching exposed ordinary folk to religious and moral exhortation as never before. Gone was the old sense that religion belonged chiefly to specialists (priests and monks); henceforth, each individual soul must take direct responsibility for his or her spiritual condition. This was, of course, the doctrinal heart of Protestantism, but it was also evident in practice among newly energized Catholics.

In such a context, witchcraft loomed larger than ever. The appalling menace it presented would certainly extend to all branches of “true religion”; hence the need for vigilance was constant. Unbelief, apostasy, and sin in every conceivable guise were rolled together in the figure of the witch. And behind her, towering over her, stood the Devil himself; he, too, seemed more immediate, more personal, more dangerous than before. It was also important that the Bible be taken in increasingly literal ways. This included a famous line from the Book of Exodus: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The word itself was suffused with Satanic implication; “a witch” meant, first and last, a person sworn to do the Devil's bidding.

Both Catholics and Protestants contributed hugely to witch-hunting. Much of the supportive ideology, as well as strategy and tactics, was shared between them. The idea of diabolic pact, for example, held central importance on both sides. And torture was a prime instrument of persecution almost everywhere, with England as a notable exception. Still, it does seem that the quantitative profiles of witch-hunting—Catholic versus Protestant—diverged over time. Whereas in the 16th century their victim totals were roughly similar, in the 17th Catholics forged ahead while Protestants gradually fell back; the 10 largest witch-hunts at the height of the craze in southern Germany (1600-1630) were all based in Catholic communities. There were also significant differences of emphasis: Protestantism made much of the witch's individual relationship to the Devil, while Catholicism stressed its collective aspect, as exemplified by the
sabbat.
Catholic views were loaded with sexual preoccupation:
incubi
and
succubi
as “copulating demons”; promiscuous orgy as a feature of the
sabbat;
witchcraft as a cause of both impotence in men and infertility in women. The equivalent Protestant imagery downplayed sexuality but elevated the theme of sheer aggression: the “blasting” of crops and fields; injury to personal property and competence, and to lives.

Yet, once again, such differences fade when seen in any truly comprehensive perspective. For the most part, Protestant and Catholic witch-hunters—clergy and laity alike—worked in a competitive (if unacknowledged) tandem. Furthermore, differences
within
their respective ranks were sometimes much greater than those between. In fact, it would be wrong to see either Catholic or Protestant opinion on witchcraft as a monolith. Variable shadings of belief, and even quite basic structural contradictions, were present in both systems. Witchcraft theory was always a matter of debate and dispute; its leading parts could be, and often were, subject to shifting forms of interpretation. There were well-known, widely read skeptics and doubters: for example, the German physician Johann Weyer and the British country philosopher Reginald Scot. Weyer spoke for a considerable group of Continental thinkers, all of whom in one way or another rejected the usual claims made for witchcraft. The Devil, said Weyer, was even more powerful than generally realized and had no need whatsoever for assistance from human followers. Scot, on the other hand, argued that witchcraft belief implicitly slighted God's own stature, by attributing “to a creature the power of the creator.” Both writers, and others too, decried the way hapless old women—in Scot's words, “lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and . . . poor . . . wretches”—were such frequent targets of witch-hunting. Most of the accused, they argued, had little means of defense, and some who confessed were simply deluded or deranged. Such strands of belief extended into the “craze” years the old, moderate
Episcopi
tradition, according to which diabolism was dwarfed by the reach and powers of Providence.

The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed the birth of the modern nation-state. Within that era, a traditional and very medieval jumble of geopolitical arrangements—autonomous cities and towns, principalities, fiefdoms, duchies, baronies, bishoprics, kingdoms, and so on, right up to the vast but nebulous entity of the Holy Roman Empire—began gradually to realign into a somewhat more orderly checkerboard of “states.” Meanwhile, the powers of rule became concentrated in national or regional centers, where newly-expanded bureaucracies would exercise them on an increasingly regular basis.

Religious belief in general, and witchcraft belief in particular, helped fuel this evolutionary process. In most of the emergent states, ruling elites were eager to harness the influence of the church, whether Catholic or Protestant, to their own ultimately secular purposes; there was no easier way to acquire legitimacy. In Scotland, for example, a revised and refurbished monarchy used the arrival of Calvinism as the means to extend control over a previously fragmented citizenry. In England, too, monarchy was greatly strengthened by the establishment of a nationally based Anglican church. In Germany a raft of smaller state-units solidified themselves on the principle of
cuius regio, eius religio
(whoever rules, his religion): some were strongly Catholic, others just as strongly Protestant. Thus did Christianity, in one guise or another, serve as political ideology, redefining orthodoxy and helping to make state power felt at ground level.