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.