The Enemy Within (9 page)

Often enough, witchcraft would appear right at the center of this trend, alongside energetic programs of social reform. The drive for religious and political conformity imposed a kind of moral cleansing on the populace as a whole, with the figure of the witch held up as the quintessential subversive—the enemy incarnate—plotting against both God and the state. Put differently: the ideal of political order seemed virtually to require an antithesis of
dis
order; and witchcraft might conveniently serve that purpose. It was no coincidence that witch-hunting peaked in Scotland in the 1590s, when King James I (himself the author of a fervid demonological tract) was beginning his reign. And the same factors were at work in several of the major German witch-hunts of the early 17th century. Indeed, it seems reasonable to describe most of the latter as state sponsored, since secular authorities were usually at their forefront (albeit in close cooperation with church leaders).

Taking a very long view here, one can see the key role of privileged and powerful groups in large-scale witch-hunting. Whereas village witchcraft in the traditional mode would mostly involve persons of lower rank (who at least occasionally aimed accusations up, at their social betters), the great outbursts of the “craze” period were generally aimed down, from the rulers against the ruled. As such, they served to build and to reinforce enduring patterns of hierarchy.

Of course, in some respects this question is answered by way of religion: witches as minions of Satan, as enemies of God. But behind and beneath such consciously articulated doctrine lay another level of popular belief—this one at least partly
un
conscious and
un
articulated, yet deeply influential nonetheless. There, too, witchcraft played a central role.

Wherever found, witchcraft served as a favorite mode of
explanation
for painful and baffling experiences. Disappointment and failure could be conveniently attributed to witchcraft: failure in work (crops that didn't grow, cattle that didn't thrive, butter that wouldn't churn, beer that went sour in the basement barrel); failure, too, in human relations (unrequited love, broken friendships, not to mention the various neighborhood enmities that might lead directly to witchcraft charges). In short, here was a way to avoid, or divert, the burden of responsibility. To be sure, playing the part of witchcraft victim was itself a vexed, even risky, business, but owning up to one's personal shortcomings might feel much worse.

All such experiences belonged to what another historian has called “a world of wonders” filled with the manifestations of supernatural influence. In such a world little happened by chance; to the contrary, events of every sort were seen as caused, and motivated, in highly specific ways. Misfortune and failure—to consider that important problem once again—evoked a broad range of potential “reasons.” Besides witchcraft, the chief possibilities included: God's punishment for sin, or some other, perhaps inscrutable, aim of “Providence”; the movement of the stars, the alignment of the sun and moon; human plotting, or some similar expression of malign intent; and various kinds of “natural”—or, as we would say, mechanical—forces. (To be sure, personal incompetence might also figure in.)

In confronting such a daunting array, the plain folk of Europe had long deployed a variety of countermeasures, including many designed specifically for protection against witchcraft. Traditional charms and invocations might serve, at the least, to hold anxiety in check: a horseshoe hung over a doorway, a bottle of urine thrown into the fire, a mysterious rhyme said aloud three times (possibly suggested by direct consultation with local “cunning folk”). However, the two great 16th-century reformations, Protestant and Catholic, sought to suppress the use of all such “remedies” as being themselves a form of magic. For many among the clergy, prayer and prayer alone, became the recommended response to witchery. But this, in turn, could seem disarming to some who received the recommendation. From then on they would have to face the onslaught of witch-enemies without their accustomed means of defense, and might turn instead to the courts. Thus did religious reform work, in yet another way, to stoke the fires of panic witch-hunting.

Emotions, those “primary motives of man,” served everywhere to energize witch-hunting. Take emotions out while leaving the rest intact, and you have no craze certainly, and perhaps not much in the way even of small-scale episodes.

Always, to begin with, there was interest and excitement of extraordinary intensity. Mere talk of witchcraft sharpened the senses and elevated the pulse. Rumor and gossip about witches passed from person to person, and neighborhood to neighborhood, in typically breathless tones.
Have you heard? Did you see? Be sure to look out for . . .
Then, as matters proceeded, with charges made and evidence heard, the level of feeling rose higher still.
Would you believe? Can you imagine? At last we understand. . . .
Finally came the verdict; if it was
guilty as charged,
death would usually be the prescribed punishment. The resultant execution scenes were nothing less than high drama, replete with confessions (sometimes), further accusations (occasionally), fires rising, bodies burning or hanging, lives ending, as large and fascinated crowds looked on.
How shocking! How uplifting! How terrible! How just! . . . God's will be done. Amen.

As to the witch herself, the predominant imagery expressed a range of deeply-rooted, intensely negative feeling. She was motivated—so people thought—by a special kind of jealous anger, what (in British cases) was formulaically called “malice and envy”; here, indeed, was her emotional wellspring. She would act as she did because she resented—no,
hated
—her victims, and coveted their “goods.” Moreover, the Devil himself, her patron and leader, was invariably depicted as a fount of “infernal wrath.”

Perhaps accused witches were, in actual fact, unusually angry folk; the record suggests as much, but scarcely proves it. What seems more clear is the way they drew out anger from their accusers and victims. To bring a suspect to trial was, of course, a hostile, and potentially murderous, act. The process can be reconstructed, in psychological terms, as follows. A quarrel with a suspected witch leaves her supposed victim feeling angry and wishing to attack. But the victim cannot easily own up to such feelings, and so unconsciously assigns them to his or her adversary. She or he then proceeds to a formal accusation against the intolerably “angry” witch. This maneuver allows the victim to have it both ways: the unwelcome affect and the inadmissable wish are indulged and disowned at the same time.

But anger was far from the whole of it. No less important was fear—or, to use a stronger, more apposite term, outright terror. Witches and their works were nothing if not terrifying. The threat they posed was enormous: to health and safety, to livelihood, to the very preservation of life. Moreover, in psychological terms they endangered the foundations of the self. By targeting fertility and the whole realm of human generativity, they stirred deep concerns about personal adequacy and efficacy (and its obverse, helplessness). The threat was cosmic too; the Devil and his legions would, if they could, destroy all that gave life meaning. Hence those who cast themselves as witchcraft's victims presented, in their various testimonies, a virtual catalogue of fear-filled hours, days, years—much of it reflecting the very substantial ways in which emotion might distend and distort their experience. Victims gripped by terror would blunder into all sorts of difficulty: would injure themselves or their property, would forget, would misjudge, would lose track. Sometimes their actual powers of perception might be compromised. Bewitchment might make them blind, or deaf, or mute (at least for a time); alternatively, they might see, hear, and feel things that weren't “really there.” Moreover, at the extreme outer edge, even their ability to sustain life might be imperiled. Modern medical science recognizes a phenomenon, sometimes called “voodoo death,” where extreme affective stress brings dire physiological change—in heart rate, in adrenal production, in the nervous, circulatory, and other key bodily systems. The eventual result can be a severe decline in blood pressure, leading finally to death from an acute state of shock. This process has been observed in present-day cultures where witchcraft belief remains strong. And it presumably explains at least a portion of the cases, from earlier times, in which people were seen as “bewitched to death.” Thus would witchcraft prove, in a sense, directly efficacious; intense emotion, especially fear, created the means of its own confirmation. Moreover, the process was circular. Fear of injury by witchcraft led to actual injury—which, in turn, led to more fear—and so on.

Anger and fear, fear and anger: thus the two great emotional engines of witch-hunting. Without them this entire history would be different.

 
By the mid-17th century, the great witch-hunt had peaked. England endured a considerable panic in the 1640s, when Hopkins and Stearne prowled the countryside in search of “those who follow Satan.” And (as previously noted) there would be similar episodic outbreaks across several parts of Europe in the decades to follow. But, as a whole, witch-hunting was set on a course of decline.

A current of skepticism about all such matters had been gradually building—first and foremost among the educated elite, for whom a “rational” religion (and way of life) would soon become
de rigueur.
Theologians were carefully refining their notions of God, so as to make His “superintendency” of the universe more orderly, more regular, more amenable to human understanding. Within this revised framework of belief, sudden and mysterious interventions caused by the Devil or witchcraft seemed less and less plausible. Nature itself was yielding its secrets to a new “mechanical philosophy” personified by the likes of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Pierre Bayle. Boyle's chemical experiments, for example, sapped the underpinnings of traditional alchemy. And the work of various other investigators served to recast understanding of magnetism and electricity, which had long been associated with occult influence, as the movement of microscopic particles.

Through all this intellectual and scientific advance coursed a new spirit of questioning, of what we now call empiricism. Demonstration, replication, proof: thus the hallmarks of a dawning “Age of Reason.” The middle and later decades of the eighteenth century would carry the process several stages further. Then, in “Enlightened” circles such as those of the French
philosophes,
organized religion itself came under direct attack. Catholicism, in particular, was identified with the forces of reaction, and the witch-hunts of the preceding centuries were reinterpreted as both a cruel delusion and an instrument of Church-inspired oppression.

Inevitably, the law—and the entire panoply of judicial process—would reflect these elite-culture trends. In England, for example, a Parliamentary Act of 1736 repealed all previous statutes on witchcraft. It would be illegal henceforth to call another person a witch, or to harm him or her in that connection. Moreover, an open claim to possess magical powers might also lead to prosecution and imprisonment. In short, belief in witchcraft, rather than harmful
maleficium
itself, became the focus of concern; the act presumed that such belief was illusory, and pernicious in its public effects. Another statute, passed in 1824 and commonly known as the Vagrancy Act, further proscribed “pretending or professing . . . to tell fortunes, or using any other subtle craft, means, or device . . . to deceive and impose”; again it was “professing,” not practice, that concerned the Parliament.

With these laws on the books, and with a generally skeptical attitude now well established among the ruling groups, formal prosecution of witchcraft became impossible. However, among country people in both Britain and continental Europe, old ways and old beliefs survived. “Cunning folk” would remain a strong village-level presence well into the nineteenth century. As before, their activities encompassed a broad range of folkloric and magical ministrations (including some expressly designed to counter witchcraft); at least occasionally they might be viewed as witches themselves. Moreover, where legal recourse was denied, putative victims and accusers could resort instead to informal modes of response: counter-magic, threats, petty harassment, shunning, and personal violence up to and including outright lynching. There were at least occasional “witch mobbings” in England throughout the 19th century, with one reported as late as 1945.

Even later, the idea of witchcraft hung on, and with it a propensity to “hunt” for perpetrators. This was true especially of small communities on the margins of modernity, where cultural developments, including education, did not much penetrate. Indeed, in such places vestigial remnants of the old belief system can be found right to the present: versions of the Evil Eye, for example, ritual cursing to achieve some malignant effect, and such seemingly bizarre notions as the “riding” of unfortunate victims at night, during sleep. Under certain conditions, village folk may yet feel inclined to personalize the source of their difficulties, and may then band together to punish individual suspects in their midst, through isolation and gossip (if nothing more).

Thus does the long arc of witch-hunting stretch from the 2nd century to the 21st, from Roman proconsuls to scattered groups of our own contemporaries. Though trending further and further downward over many successive generations, it has not quite reached its end point even today.