WITCHES AND OTHER DEMONS OF OUR DISCONTENT
Jerry Harkins
Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
…
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
—Macbeth,
Act 4
Like virtually all his contemporaries, it seems
likely that Shakespeare really did believe in witches. Practically everyone always had. Certainly King James did. He (James VI of Scotland, James I of
England) wrote a definitive book about them, the Daemonologie in 1597.
He was working familiar ground.
The first recorded witch, the Witch of Endor, is described in 1 Samuel
28. When God abandoned him, Saul
sought her out and forced her to summon the ghost of the prophet Samuel who
correctly prophesied the imminent death of both Saul and his son. Popes have always been big believers as
have Martin Luther, John Calvin
and Ian Paisley and as are Pat Robertson and the Republican Party of Washington
State whose 1992 platform called for the banning of witchcraft (they also
wanted to outlaw yoga but they lost that one by a wide margin).
We are not talking here about modern practitioners
of Wicca, a peaceable, pagan, feminist nature religion that occasionally dabbles
in ritualistic sorcery and that does not discourage the use of the word
“witchcraft.” Wiccans believe that
they are the heirs of women who performed professional services for communities
as doctors, midwives, therapists, prayer leaders, undertakers and the like and who
were persecuted because they were powerful. Be that as it may, very early in history a very different
image propagated by the persecutors won the day and it is that image we are
dealing with: ugly old women with
large warty noses wearing pointed hats and riding around on broomsticks
preaching heresy, practicing necromancy, concocting noxious potions and casting
fateful spells. It was always said
they were in league or in bed with the devil and that they gained their powers
by worshiping him.
This version of witches gained currency in the
late medieval period which has been described by Will Durant as an era of “…myth,
legend, miracle, omens, demons, prodigies, magic, astrology, divination and
sorcery.” Even the philosophers
and intellectuals were believers.
Abélard, following St. Augustine, said that demons worked their magic through
a deep knowledge of nature’s secrets.
John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres and confidant of Henry II, accused
priests and even an archbishop of black magic. Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the great figures
of the era, was often described as a woman with diabolical powers. Durant cites the Penitential Book of
Exeter as condemning women who “profess to ride on certain nights and on
certain beasts with a host of demons in women’s shape.” The Inquisition began to burn witches
at the stake in 1298. The
overwhelming majority of women, hundreds of thousands of them, who were
tortured and executed for witchcraft and related offenses were ordinary members
of their communities in every way.
A few did purport to practice the black arts but these were mostly
either crazy or users of one of the so-called “hexing herbs” such as deadly
nightshade, henbane or mandrake. Many
were merely religious dissenters labeled as heretics.
The connection with heresy can be misleading. Church and state executed far more
witches than heretics in spite of the best efforts of the Holy
Inquisition. The reason was that
“witchcraft” was a convenient charge to turn public opinion against an accused
heretic. Witchcraft was said to be
heretical per se but it was also
useful because it inspired irrational fear. Thus, Joan of Arc was burned in 1431 having been charged with
five capital crimes one of which was witchcraft. She recanted at first in order to be spared. One of the conditions of her reprieve
was that she revert to women’s clothes but her jailers removed them from her
cell and left only her military clothes.
She was therefore technically burned as a relapsed heretic, not as a witch.
But, in spite of the fact that she
did not mix potions or cast spells, both her inquisitors and the general public
thought she was a witch. As soon
as she died, probably from smoke inhalation, the fire was raked back and her
naked and chained body exhibited to the witnesses. It had none of the conventional marks of a witch. The fire was re-ignited and her body
was reduced to ashes. There are
contemporaneous claims that a black cat was thrown on her pyre, a typical part
of the witch-burning ritual.
Lest you think this is all ancient history, we are
still executing women for witchcraft.
Among governments, Saudi Arabia is a leader in ridding the world of the
scourge of demons. Its religious
police have a special anti-witchcraft unit established in 2009 which prosecutes
several hundred cases a year. Most
convicted witches receive 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison but several have
been beheaded in the public square.
India is worse although the work is carried out at the village level or
by families dishonored by their own women. There have been more than 2,100 documented cases of women
being executed between 2000 and 2012.
Many are burned, some are stoned to death. The national government always promises swift action but rarely
is anyone held accountable. Similar customs prevail in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the Republic of the Congo, according
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the victims are thousands of
children who are routinely abandoned to the streets of Kinshasa because they are
possessed by demons. As you might
guess, in a global economy, the problem is spread through immigration. In 2014, a man in New York City killed
his girlfriend and her daughter with a hammer because, he said, they were
witches who were casting spells on him.
There is a vast literature on witchcraft, ancient,
medieval and modern. The Library
of Congress holds 5,355 books on the subject and Amazon lists 14,746 (most of
which are fiction). In
recent years, scientists have focused not so much on the macabre aspects of the
subject as on its universality and on the social and psychological forces that
give it its sinister fascination.
The question is why have so many diverse communities throughout history
become obsessed by attributing negative phenomena to demonic forces employed
mostly by women? And at least in
its deadliest incarnations, witch hunting does have all the earmarks of mass
obsession. Speculation about its
causes is varied, ranging from specific biological agents to the most esoteric
psychological maladies.
Perhaps the best known explanation is that of
Charles Mackay in his 1841 book Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. “The cup of life,” he wrote, “is not bitter enough to
our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up
hideous things to frighten ourselves at.”
Another modern theory posits that the famous Salem
witch mania was the result of trying to explain the flamboyant behavior of
people who had been accidentally exposed to the ergot fungus Claviceps perpurea which parasitizes rye
and other grains. The behavioral
syndrome induced by the fungus, often called St. Anthony’s Fire, was well known
in ancient times and may have been deliberately evoked as part of the
Eleusinian initiation rites of the cult of Demeter and Persephone. But the Puritans did not know about
ergot. Even if true, it does not explain why unusual behavior
was attributed to witchcraft. It
might be that all evil is caused by the devil but why would Satan need
intermediaries? Any why
particularly in Salem?
Many “victims” of witchcraft experienced one kind
or another of fertility failure.
Their crops withered or they themselves produced stillborn or deformed
babies. Epidemics were another
common evil attributed to witches.
Often enough the precipitating cause was only thought to be evil even if
it had no adverse effects. Solar eclipses,
comets and other astronomical anomalies were sometimes thought to be either the
cause or effect of witchery and, often enough, the cause was unknown. Witches might be divine retribution for
some communal sin which would be an occasion for days of prayer and fasting as
well as for combating the witches directly.
The height of the witchcraft craze in Europe
occurred between 1350 and 1650 a period that coincides with the beginnings of
modernization: the Renaissance,
the Reformation, the rise of the middle class and the birth of empiricism and
experimental science. Marco Polo
returned from China and the Silk Road with reports of great trade opportunities
in 1295 but it wasn’t until the middle of the fifteenth century that these were
taken seriously. The Ottomans
conquered Constantinople in 1453 creating enormous pressures on the Italian
city states to find sea routes to the Orient and finance their exploitation. These were expensive undertakings for
kings and princes who wanted to remain competitive. All these forces constituted challenges to church and state
and created social tensions within and between rural areas and the rising
cities. It was, in short, a period
of rapid change, even upheaval, in all aspects of European life. Against this backdrop, witch hunting may
be seen as a massive, delusional, reactionary response of all the threatened
segments of society.
Again, the case against Joan of Arc is
illustrative. Her inquisitors and
modern commentators often focus on the voices she claimed to hear: St. Michael, the patron of the House of
Valois, and Saints Margaret and Catherine. Neither, of course, took her claim seriously. The Inquisition assumed she was being
controlled by the devil. But the
late middle ages were replete with female mystics who heard heavenly voices and
were tolerated by the church. What
must have disturbed it in Joan’s case was her forthright, almost demure
expression of what we would now call modernist values: the supremacy of the individual
conscience, a disregard of medieval class and gender conventions and, of
course, her seemingly preternatural strategic abilities. She was not the first Protestant martyr
that George Bernard Shaw said she was but she did represent, as the Reformation
would later, a mortal threat to the fabric of the medieval world view.
Joan’s trial represents a subtle turning point in
the prosecution of both heresy and witchcraft. True, the traditional emphasis on Satanic possession had not
even reached its peak in 1431 and would not die out entirely in Europe until
the first decades of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, however, the driving force behind witch
hunting became terrorism in the service of political goals. Joan was caught up in the complex
politics of the Hundred Years’ War which she had managed to upend by turning
the tide against the English. As
time went on, the politics, often sold to the public as religion, would come to
play the leading role in witch hunting.
Sixty-one years after Joan’s death, the “Catholic
monarchs” Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Spanish Jews from Castile and
Aragon. They were not explicitly
charged with witchcraft but the descriptions of their religious rituals were
virtually identical with traditional allegations against witches. Seventy-five years after the expulsion, the
French government of King Charles IX in collusion with the Vatican under Pope
Gregory XIII began a crusade against the Huguenots. It began with the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in which some 25,000 Parisian Protestants were
killed by French mobs and French soldiers. Before it ended in 1715, thousands more had been brutally
killed, 300,000 had undergone forced conversions and 500,000 had fled the
country. There was never any hint
of witchcraft. To the church, the
Huguenots were heretics and to the state they were rebels. In other ways however the crusade inherited
it basic strategy and tactics from the witch manias of the medieval era. It demonized the victims in order to
assure the support of the populace.
Another
hundred years later, the mania had spread to the Puritan colonies of North
America. The most famous example
is the series of trials conducted in and around Salem, Massachusetts in 1692
and 1693. Twenty people were convicted
and executed, mainly on the testimony of children. Except for the fact that the victims were mostly prominent,
well-to-do members of the community, Salem was very much an old style religious
witch hunt. Attracted by “thinking so magical, so paranoid,” Arthur Miller wrote
about it in his 1953 play “The Crucible” as a metaphor for the entirely
political “Red Scare” witch hunt which was just then raging in Washington. The parallels he adduced are
compelling. But Salem was not the
most interesting of the Puritan persecutions.
In 1660,
the Puritans of Boston had hanged Mary Dyer, a Quaker, for refusing to remain
in exile which had been her penalty for proselytizing on behalf of her Quaker
beliefs. Among other things, the
Quakers rejected the idea of a professional clergy in favor of the “priesthood
of all believers.” It seems like a
religious motive but in fact her heresy was actually considered divisive and
contrary to the civic comity promoted by the Puritans. She was also a follower of another
heretic, the antinomian Puritan Anne Hutchinson who had been exiled several
times and finally did not return to Boston. Both women were threatening to the power of the governing
clergy but Dyer might have been tolerated by the ordinary citizens except that
both had given birth to stillborn and seriously deformed babies. For centuries this had been considered
evidence of witchery. There was no
need for an explicit indictment.
Twenty-three years after the birth, Governor John Winthrop heard of it
and had the baby’s body exhumed and exhibited. Again, no accusation was needed.
In the post-industrial world belief in witchcraft
is not extinct but seems restricted to the extreme margins of society. However the impulse to bring “the
other” low is not. It is apparent
in matters great and small, from the Red Scare in the America of the 1950’s to
the recent obsession with what may well have been a memory lapse on the part of
a television news anchor. Brian
Williams stands accused of lying about his involvement in a military incident
in Iraq. The assault is led by The
New York Times which has given the story far more prominent attention than it
would warrant even if true. Not
only was it front page news for a week or more but it has been endlessly
editorialized about and mentioned in unrelated articles in every section of the
paper. The Times probably feels it
is standing up not only for journalistic ethics but for morality itself. It also would be outraged by any reminder
that Mr. Williams is one of its principal competitors.
Arthur Miller was a victim of the Red Scare who
was blacklisted for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee
the names of people he knew who were Communist sympathizers. He wrote “The Crucible,” he said, to
spotlight “…the primeval structure of human sacrifice to the forces of
fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though
imbedded in the brain of social man.”
History amply supports the hypothesis that the witch manias were claimed
to propitiate the gods for otherwise inexplicable misfortunes or to fortify the
power of priests who could do so.
But more frightening is the assertion that such persecution arises from
forces inherent in our social nature.
The Puritans were heirs to an ancient yearning for
social cohesion. John Winthrop
referred to their goal as the creation of a biblical “city on a hill” to be a
beacon for all people. Three
centuries later, President Reagan articulated a similar vision of America as,
“…a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept,
God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and
peace.” Is it possible that such a
vision requires enemies or scapegoats to rally communities in times of
challenge or uncertainty? Are
occasional spasms of witch hunting part of the price we have to pay for a
tranquil society? It is worth
pondering the thought expressed by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac:
Only
the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a
wolf...We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness…but
it all comes to the same thing:
peace in our time. A
measure of success in this is all well and good, and perhaps is a requisite to
objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long
run. Perhaps this is behind
Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is
the salvation of the world.
Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known
among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
