Witchcraft

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Witchcraft

Witchcraft embraces a range of phenomena whose meanings vary according to historical and cultural context. It encompasses a belief system described by anthropologists and common to many cultures; a historical phenomenon responsible for the execution of tens of thousands of women and men in early modern Europe and its colonies; and a modern religious movement that seeks to reclaim the worship of the divine feminine. This entry treats each of these separately, emphasizing the differences as well as the relationships among them.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPTS OF WITCHCRAFT

At the most basic level, a witch is a person who is believed to have the ability to harm others through supernatural (i.e., nonphysical) means, either through magic, or simply by wishing them ill. Witches are typically thought to work within their own societies: They harm neighbors and kin, and are thus imagined as a particularly terrifying threat. Their motivation is seldom rational; rather, they work from sheer malice or envy, and are sometimes believed to be under the control of an evil force they cannot resist. Witchcraft is never an isolated phenomenon; it is usually thought to be part of a tradition, whether inherited or learned, that includes other witches. Wherever there is a belief in witchcraft, humans also believe that it can be fought, either through countermagic, by depriving witches of their powers, or by destroying the witches altogether. Most societies with witchcraft belief also have unwitchers, individuals who specialize in finding and eliminating the magical harm caused by witches.

Belief in witchcraft is extremely widespread in human societies, occurring on every continent; but it is not universal. It occurs most frequently in small-scale agricultural societies with a stable settlement pattern, where neighbors have intimate knowledge of one another and social relationships are intense and multilayered. Each society with witchcraft belief has its own unique set of cultural variables and parameters that specify the gender of alleged witches, their activities, physical characteristics, and relationships to factors such as age, sexual activity, and social class. In European cultures, witches were commonly assumed to be women, but this assumption is by no means universal. Similar cultures may differ greatly in the gender attributed to witches. The South Pacific islands of Trobriand, Dobu, and Fergusson are all within sight of one another off the northeastern New Guinea coast. Their inhabitants are genetically and culturally similar, and have frequent contact with one another through maritime systems of exchange. All share a belief in witchcraft, but on Trobriand witches are always male; on Fergusson, they are mostly female; and on Dobu they might be of either sex, though women are feared more.

Cultures with a belief in witchcraft often imagine witches as the very opposite of everything considered right in society. A witch is someone who disregards social rules, flouting even the most basic conventions regarded as standards of decency. Because the basic rules that maintain social order are similar cross-culturally, witches tend to be imagined in similar ways. Often, the most heinous crimes imaginable are projected onto witches; they are said to commit murder and incest, to engage in cannibalism and indiscriminate orgies, to have the ability to transform into animals, and to eat or otherwise abuse corpses.

It follows that individuals who flout other kinds of social rules, or who appear anomalous in other ways, stand a chance of being accused of witchcraft. For example, among the Azande of southern Sudan, those who did not behave as good neighbors, who had many quarrels within the village, or who had a history of violent behavior were more frequently accused of witchcraft. Among the Navajo of the American Southwest, those who appeared greedy and refused to share with their families were vulnerable to witchcraft accusations. Belief in witchcraft thus serves as a form of social control, reinforcing sanctioned behaviors and creating a threat against those who violate social norms.

According to anthropologists, witchcraft beliefs can serve a number of important functions. They delineate the boundaries of acceptable behavior, allow for the expression of taboo thoughts and fantasies, maintain positive social relationships by discouraging the open expression of hostility, and attempt to explain the reasons behind otherwise unexplained negative events: illness, calamities, natural disasters, and death.

Witchcraft beliefs may also serve to explain the unexplainable. In all human cultures there are some experiences that are difficult to understand; these include experiences as diverse as sleep paralysis, near-death experiences, and dissociative states that produce very strong physical sensations, leading believers to interpret them as signs of a spiritual reality. Such experiences figure prominently in folklore about witches and witchcraft. In Newfoundland, for example, people often attributed the experience of sleep paralysis to being "hagged" or "hagridden," believing that a malevolent witch sent her spirit out to torment them in their sleep. The belief that witches cause this phenomenon may have arisen as an attempt to explain certain symptoms of sleep paralysis: a physical sensation of a weight on the chest or a presence pressing down on the sleeper.

Witchcraft beliefs become dysfunctional and deleterious when they divide communities, heighten fears, and fuel existing hostilities. This sometimes occurs during moments of great social transformation, when ordinary witchcraft beliefs may erupt into full-scale panics, leading to an escalation in the number of accusations, trials, and executions of alleged witches. This was the case in the early modern European witch craze.

WITCHCRAFT IN WESTERN CULTURES

In the West, the witch stereotype has been associated with women since ancient times. It is unclear how this association developed, or at what point in prehistory it emerged; but nearly all the portrayals of witches from classical literature are women. Men associated with magic in classical texts are sorcerers, individuals who acquire the power to manipulate reality through ritual. Some scholars have suggested this reflects a division of gender roles in early Indo-European societies in which men specialized in the public, communal, and political aspects of religion, while women concentrated on domestic magic. Because of their childbearing abilities, women were looked upon as repositories of powerful natural forces. These forces could be harnessed for positive ends such as healing and prophecy, but they could also be used for evil purposes.

Witchcraft and sex have been linked in European folklore from the earliest times. The witches of classical myth and literature were primarily concerned with acquiring love, or obtaining vengeance after a love had gone bad, a stereotype that persisted into the Middle Ages and early modern period. Yet this may represent an instance of projection on the part of the men who were writing these tales, rather than a reflection of social reality. The archaeological record has left hundreds of defixionum tabellae, or curse tablets, that petition deities to bind the objects of the author's erotic affection or to punish lost loves for their faithlessness. Of those for which the gender of the writers can be determined, there are more than four times as many curse tablets written by men as by women. This may simply indicate that men, by virtue of their privilege, had greater access to literacy, money to pay someone to write a tablet for them, or both; but it presents a provocative example of the gap between cultural fantasies of women as magic workers and social reality.

Roman law, like the laws of other early European societies, strictly forbade the practice of magic for harmful ends. But everyday magic for protection, healing, and good luck was practiced throughout the empire by a variety of people. Women practiced certain types of magic as an extension of their domestic responsibilities. Thus mothers would protect their children by hanging bullae, small pouches filled with amulets to bring good luck and keep away evil, around their necks. Women also used their practical knowledge of herbs to make medicines for their families. Some specialized in midwifery, using plants to induce or prevent miscarriages, ease labor pains, and prevent conception. Because the pre-Christian worldview did not separate the natural world from the supernatural, healers also invoked the help of gods and spirits to assist in their work. With the advent of Christianity, many of these practices acquired a Christian veneer, substituting the names of saints for those of earlier deities. While these folk practices changed over time, they continued to be a part of women's household responsibilities and acquired wisdom until quite recently.

Folk magic and beliefs about witchcraft persisted into the Middle Ages, but early Christianity regarded them as merely superstitious and did not take great pains to punish or persecute those who held them. This began to change during the late medieval period, as numerous factors came together to make religious and civil courts take cases of witchcraft more seriously.

The first factor was the continued existence of a belief in witchcraft accompanied by the practice of folk magic and unwitching. The second, related aspect was the survival of elements from pagan religions in the folklore of Christian Europe. In some parts of Europe, women believed that they participated in nighttime spiritual journeys led by the goddess Diana or other supernatural female figures. These nighttime spiritual assemblies would dance, feast, and occasionally enter the homes of neighbors, rewarding the hospitable and punishing the slovenly. During the Middle Ages, the Christian view of these beliefs changed; while early in the period, they were seen as merely superstitious and mistaken, toward the tenth and eleventh centuries, they began to be considered heretical. The Canon Episcopi, a legal document of the Frankish kingdom issued about 900 ce, condemns "wicked women … who believe that they ride out at night on beasts with Diana, the pagan goddess…. Such fantasies are thrust into the minds of faithless people not by God but by the Devil." Gradually, the folk concept of the games of Diana was transformed into the diabolical sabbat, a nocturnal assembly of witches under the direction of the devil where horrible acts took place.

A third element was the emergence of a dualist cosmology. According to this worldview, two principles, one evil, personified by Satan, and one good, personified by God, struggled for control of the cosmos. As various Christian heresies arose to challenge aspects of church teachings, ecclesiastical courts were established to find them and root them out. Heresy became the link between witchcraft, the devil, and fears of a conspiracy to overthrow Christianity. Accusations first leveled at heretics, such as calling up evil spirits, indulging in orgiastic sex, killing and cremating children conceived at previous orgies and use their ashes in blasphemous parody of the Eucharist, renouncing Christ and desecrating the crucifix, and paying homage to the devil, became standard elements in witchcraft accusations. By the fifteenth century, the classical formulation of diabolical witchcraft had been established. Its chief elements were (1) pact with the devil, (2) formal repudiation of Christ, (3) the secret, nocturnal meeting, (4) the night flight, (5) the desecration of the Eucharist and the crucifix, (6) orgy, (7) sacrificial infanticide, and (8) cannibalism.

The final element was the Inquisition. Initially organized by the church to identify and eradicate heretics, the Inquisition was never well organized or particularly effective; in fact, most cases of witchcraft were tried before the secular courts. Nonetheless the Inquisition provided one essential ingredient of the witch craze: the inquisitors' manuals. These manuals told inquisitors what signs of Satanism to look for, what questions to ask, and what answers to expect. The best known of these was the Malleus maleficarum (The witch hammer), by two Dominican inquisitors. Published in 1486, the Malleus went into many editions in many languages, outselling any other book except the Bible. Deeply misogynistic, the Malleus colorfully detailed the diabolical, orgiastic activities of witches and helped persuade public opinion that women were at the center of a cosmic plot directed by Satan that threatened all Christian society.

THE WITCH CRAZE

Between 1450 and 1700, as many as 100,000 may have perished in what has been called the European witch craze. In most of northern and central Europe, between 75 and 80 percent of its victims were women. There was no "typical" witch. The accused and imprisoned ranged from children as young as eight or nine to elderly women; from the very poor to those who possessed lands; from healers and midwives to farmers and craftspeople to beggars. There are a number of reasons why the witch craze focused specifically on women.

First and foremost was the dominant worldview combining ancient beliefs about witches as women with the Biblical narrative blaming Eve for the fall from Eden. Because of Eve's sin, all women were thought to be more susceptible to temptation by the devil. Social and economic factors also contributed to women's victimization. Women had little recourse to social power or economic resources of their own, and depended on husbands, fathers, and male relatives for support. Women without male relatives to support them became economically marginal, often resorting to begging in order to survive. These women were vulnerable to charges of witchcraft, and lacked relatives to defend them if they were brought to trial; they became easy targets for a community's fears and resentments. Many "crimes" of witchcraft took place in the domestic sphere: They involved causing illness in animals or children, disrupting the making of butter, luring away husbands and lovers, and other domestic troubles, reflecting tensions between women. Healers and midwives were most often women; when something went wrong with their patients, they could be accused of having caused it through malevolent spells. Women were also more inclined than men to use words in disputes with neighbors, where men might resort to physical violence; in a culture that ascribed magical power to words, this led to suspicions of witchcraft being leveled more often against women. Accusations could be useful in pressuring nonconformist women into more subservient behavior. Finally, the construction of the myth of diabolical witchcraft itself represented an inversion of the social world. As men dominated the everyday world, so women were imagined to hold power in the devil's dystopia, where they engaged in a perversion of women's proper domestic roles: Instead of life-sustaining activities such as food preparation, child care, and nursing, they cooked and consumed babies, brewed poisons, and caused illness. Instead of monogamous sexual relations with their husbands, they engaged in intercourse with the devil and indiscriminate orgies with demons and other participants in the sabbat.

Not all victims of the witch craze were women. Often male relatives of accused witches were also caught up in the net. In Spain and Italy, where the Inquisition was strongest, men were more frequently executed for heresy, whereas women accused of witchcraft were often given the opportunity to repent. In Finland and Iceland, however, men outnumbered women as accused. This may have reflected local male-dominated shamanistic practices in which men were more likely to be associated with magic than women.

During the witch panic, tens of thousands of innocent people were persecuted and hundreds of thousands terrified and intimidated. Ordinary people often invoked the discourse of diabolical witchcraft to prosecute neighbors for petty jealousies and resentments characteristic of small-scale societies. The panic migrated from Europe to its colonies; both North and Latin America suffered witchcraft persecutions of their own as a result of the importation of Christianity. There as in Europe suspicion fell more often on women, whether indigenous practitioners of folk magic in areas dominated by Spain and Portugal, or ordinary village women who fell afoul of local political tensions, as in Salem, Massachusetts. The Salem incident began with several young girls suffering from unexplained illness, or "fits," as they were described. While the cause of the illness is unclear, some scholars have theorized that it may have been caused by ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that may have been growing on the settler's rye during what was an unusually wet summer. In contrast, others have argued that the girls' play with folk divination was threatening to the male-dominated Puritan society, and that their accusations were an attempt to exonerate themselves. In either case, it is clear that the young girls were in a subdominant social position, and their accusations gave them a temporary form of authority.

By the mid-eighteenth century, increasing urbanization and the influence of the Enlightenment made witchcraft accusations a thing of the past. Belief in witchcraft and the practice of unwitching persisted in some rural areas of Europe and its colonies, in some cases into the early twenty-first century.

MODERN NEOPAGAN WITCHCRAFT

Romanticism, an intellectual movement that arose in Europe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, laid the groundwork for a new permutation of witchcraft: neopaganism. Romanticism located authenticity in the folklore of European peasants, which was presumed to contain elements of ancient pagan religions. This led to a renewed interest in both folklore and paganism, reflected in the art and literature of the time, and to a revisionist interpretation of the witch. The French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and other writers of the mid-nineteenth century suggested that European witchcraft was really a widespread fertility cult surviving from pre-Christian paganism. Such arguments influenced anthropologists and folklorists at the turn of the century, such as James Frazer (1854–1941) and Margaret Murray (1863–1963). In 1899 amateur folklorist Charles Leland (1824–1903) published Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches, a text claiming to present evidence that witchcraft was the survival of a pagan cult of Diana. Aradia influenced Murray to write The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), in which she argued that witchcraft was the survival of a pre-Christian pan-European fertility cult centered on the worship of a great goddess and her horned consort, later misunderstood as devil worship. While the evidence Murray presented in favor of her argument was scanty, her work became very influential in popular circles.

In 1954, only three years after England repealed the last of its anti-witchcraft laws, Gerald B. Gardner (1884–1964) published Witchcraft Today, in which he claimed to have discovered the last surviving witch coven in England. In fact, Gardner probably cobbled together elements of revival witchcraft from his experiences with various occult and theatrical groups. Gardner's claims of having discovered an ancient religion were spurious, but he launched a legitimate new religious movement that has gained many adherents throughout the world. In the 1960s, Gardnerian witchcraft, also known as Wicca and the Craft, combined with emerging feminist and environmentalist movements to create a feminist, goddess-centered brand of New Age spirituality. Spurring interest in this movement, the feminist artist and author Merlin Stone published When God Was a Woman (1976), arguing that Hebrew monotheism had supplanted earlier pagan worship of a great mother goddess in which women had central and powerful roles. The feminist writers Z Budapest (b. 1940) and Starhawk (Miriam Simos; b. 1951) began women's covens in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, reclaiming the idea of the witch as empowering to women. Z Budapest's women-only Dianic tradition focuses on the worship of the goddess Diana, imagined as a single creatrix who is called by various names in different cultures. Starhawk is credited with the development of Reclaiming witchcraft, which mixes elements of feminism with environmentalism and political activism, and includes men in its groups. Rituals, which coincide with full moons and eight sabbats, or holy days, focus on self-realization and empowerment, healing the earth from environmental degradation, political consciousness-raising, and other positive ends. Women have central roles as priestesses and authors of liturgy.

The overall number of revival witches is difficult to estimate, but scholars calculate that it is one of the fastest-growing new religious movements, with at least 500,000 adherents in North America alone, approximately 60 percent of them women. Neopagan witchcraft offers a sense of the feminine principle in the divine, a principle almost entirely forgotten in the masculine symbolism of the great monotheistic religions. And its eclectic paganism promotes a sense of the variety and diversity of the sacred.

see also Magic; Shamanism; Witch Trials, Europe.