Dispelling Modern Witchcraft Myths

“We call to the Great God this night of longest day. Join us as the Sun, fiery Lord of the Heavens who blesses our land with the sunshine that makes our world grow! Join us as the Creator who joins with the Great Mother to bring forth new life! May your purifying light and fire bless us this night and drive away all that is negative in our lives. Be a part of our rites as you are a part of our lives! Hail and Welcome!” (from a Midsummer Ritual, Patheos)

Gavin Ashenden, speaking about baptism, says that “we need to reinhabit a metaphysical world in which repentance from the reality of sin is the way into the Church, and the struggle with the reality of the devil and the demonic are the marks of authentic pilgrimage.”

His blog explains why he is upset with the changes approved by the Church of England. As Trevor Grundy notes in “Religious News”:

“In the traditional service, godparents are asked whether they are ready to renounce the devil and all his works for the sake of the child being baptized. The new wording, approved Sunday (July 13), only asks whether parents and godparents will “turn away from sin” and “reject evil.”

And another member of the local clergy says that the devil is very real, and the Island of Jersey is rife with witchcraft.

Now this can easily make people prejudiced. Someone else I know says they have seen witches at the dolmens.

The problem is that what is happening is that a model of witchcraft is being applied in a modern setting to people who are definitely not witches in the traditional sense, in popular folk-beliefs.

This is the witchcraft that was the focus of one of the worst mass panics in history – the period of the 16th and 17th centuries which were the time of the witch-craze, when thousands were burnt or hanged after accusations that they were witches.

The model story, which invariable proved to be true in the confessions - made after duress or torture had been applied – was of witches meeting in secret in covens (usually of  unlucky 13), to partake in a black mass – an inversion and perversion of the Christian Eucharist – and worship the devil. That itself betrays the cultural background of the story. 13 is not universally unlucky; in Italy, for example, it is 17.

Of course, in these stories were fantastical elements, of witches flying to their meetings, or flying out to sea, and conjuring storms while riding the wind. These elements are usually expunged from the kind of narratives that Gavin Ashenden would have us believe, or they are explained away as hallucinations caused by ointments. Although it would be strange if Gavin Ashenden did so, as his main argument is that we should not be restricted to the limitations of our world-view.

In fact, as Norman Cohn pointed out in “Europe’s Inner Demons”, there was originally an accusation made against the early Christians by Pagans on dark rites that was almost identical in form to that attached to witches later on by Christians!

Most accusations against people accused of witchcraft were in fact done not by witch-finders – Hammer films have a lot to answer for – but by neighbours who wanted to settle grudges.

Such accusations could be deadly, once people found themselves caught in the net, but it should be noted that it was the civil and not the religious authorities who tried people for witchcraft, and if found guilty sentenced them to death. It was the Civil Courts in Jersey and Guernsey who sentenced many people to be strangled and burnt.

That dark period seems to be omitted in Philip Bailhache’s book “A Celebration of Autonomy: 1204-2004 800 Years of Channel Island's Law”. It was the relative autonomy of the Channel Islands which allowed the Island’s judges to sentence people to death for witchcraft, which was perhaps not something to celebrate.

Accusations from neighbours with grudges can be seen more recently. When we look back at the Occupation years, as the BBC points out:

“Dozens of letters were sent to the German Field Commander informing on other islanders who were selling or hoarding food, helping escaped slave workers, or listening to the radio. The post office tried to intercept as many of the letters as they could - steaming them open and destroying them. Letters that got through often led to death or deportation for those that were informed on.”

Louisa Gould was denounced to the Germans for helping a Russian slave worker; she died eventually in the Gas Chambers in Ravensbruck. Who denounced her? Her neighbours.

This is the pattern of the witch trials, as documented in historian Robin Brigg’s “Witches and Neighbours” in which accusations come from neighbours, and as Briggs shows, contrary to popular notions about men persecuting women, most of the accusers tended to be women themselves.

What has this to do with modern witchcraft at the dolmens? It is true that rituals are performed at the dolmens, but these are by modern day pagans – such as Wiccans or Druids. Calling them witches, and attributing to them all the baggage that is the legacy of the witch craze is not only mistaken, but also betrays a mindset that can be seen clearly in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”., where it is also alluding to what was called a witch-hunt of Joseph McCarthy and panic about reds under the bed.

In other words, it fosters fear and panic and superstition, and a frame of mind in which people are demonised. It begs the question: where is the devil? With the Wiccans and Druids and their earth-magic, with their ethical beliefs against doing harm, or those who would cast them in the role of witch, and drum up hatred and fear?

We should have learnt by now that demonising a group of people, like the Nazis did with the Jews, or in more recent times, in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, leads to violence, murder, and a disregard for justice.

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament call the figure of Satan, “the accuser”. It seems to me that those who accuse others of dark witchcraft which has its roots in blind prejudice and fear have far more in common with Satan than those who practice peaceful earth rites.

Here’s part of a Wiccan ritual:

Oh great Goddess and God,
All nature vibrates with Your energies
And the Earth is bathed with warmth and life.
Now is time of forgetting past cares and banes,
Now is the time for purification.

Oh fiery Sun,
Burn away the non-useful, the hurtful, the bane,
In Your glorious power.
Purify me! Purify me! Purify me!

There’s not much there about evil and devil worship, not surprisingly, because neither Wicca nor Druidry have anything to do with that either now or historically. They are pagan, but not Christian perversions, they have no concept of  a devil, and as can be seen, both here, and with the quote from which I started, they actually have a lot in common with Christianity in this desire for purity and purification.

And here’s part of another one:

Take the Herb Pouch and hold above your head, saying:

By thy power, oh sacred herbs, may the Lord of the Sun
Burn away the hurtful, the troublesome, and the painful,
Leaving me purified through His warmth and Light.

It is about time that the fog of ignorance and fear was dispelled. I’ve written this post to try and dispel some of that ignorance.

Renouncing the accuser (Satan) in the baptism service should also mean renouncing the very human impulse to accuse and blacken others.

When you hear people taking about a lot of witchcraft in Jersey, when you hear about people talking about devil worship, you may understand why local pagans don’t make a big show of their beliefs and rituals.

I’ll finish with the close of another Pagan Midsummer ritual, which as you can see, has high ethical principles underpinning it and rather like baptism, uses water for purification.. 

I would point out that the use of water in rituals for purification is very widespread in many religions, including ancient and modern paganism, and not the monopoly of Christianity. Examples can be seen, for instance, in the ancient Babylonian Tablets of Maklu. Purification by water was an important part of Greek and Roman personal religious practices predating Christianity. And in 632 BC, Epimenides of Crete purified the entire city of Athens with water. So this part of the ritual is looking back to a precedent in ancient paganism, not Christianity.

Dip the forefinger of your right hand into the cauldron water, and trace a pentagram on your forehead, saying: Let my mind be open to the truth. 

Anoint your lips saying:
Let my lips always speak the truth.

Anoint your heart area, saying:
Let my heart seek the ways of the Goddess, now and always.

Anoint the centres of your palms, saying:
Let my hands be gifted to work in magical ways.

Anoint the soles of your feet, saying:
Let my feet ever walk upon the sacred paths!

Jersey Misinformation on Donkipedia

I've been looking at the Donkipedia page on witch trials in the Channel Islands and there is a lot of misinformation. Heaven help anyone using this page as a serious historical reference!

For instance;

Witchcraft

"Witchcraft was widespread in Jersey in the 16th and 17th centuries, as it was elsewhere in Europe."

That should read "belief in witchcraft". There is no evidence that witchcraft was actually present in the "classic" form which we find in Margaret Murray of groups meeting in covens of 13, celebrating "black masses". No one ever came across any witches participating in any such event, outside of later folk tales such as those relating to Rocqueberg. If the authorities had known that such as place was a known haunt of witches, as is supposed to be the case, they would almost have certainly gathered evidence or caught miscreants in the act.

Pagan Gods

"Pagan gods, who formed no part of the Christian faith, were worshipped as devils. There was such a fear of these devil worshipers that for the well-being of the community it was considered important to seek out and destroy them. "

There is no documentary evidence that there was a belief in devil worship in Jersey; there is no evidence at all - despite Balleine's speculation (largely based on Margaret Murray) - of any worship of pagan gods in Jersey around the time of the witch trials.

The nearest to any pagan worship would be the placing of votive offerings for good luck, such as at the Gran Mere in Guernsey. There is no evidence that this was more than folk belief and custom rather than any organised pagan cult, much as people "touch wood" or see omens in numbers of magpies seen even nowadays. Does everyone who counts magpies, or touches wood, or doesn't walk under ladders count as a pagan worshipper? I think not. Even if there were survivals - like votive offerings at sites - this doesn't mean that it was pagan worship. Traditions of folk magic, divination and, herbalism persist today, but are not part of cohesive belief systems such as we find in the ancient world.

A modern example would be bonfire night - very popular, and the tales of Guy Fawkes are still told, but it is nowadays hardly a hate-fest of Protestants against Catholics; it is just an excuse to have a fire festival and fun. Most of those attending probably do not have any strong religious beliefs of any sort.

The late Issac Bonewits comments (with wry humour):

Sure the medieval peasants went out into the woods and held orgies, sure they built need-fires at certain times of the year, sure they followed the agricultural customs of their ancestors --- anyone who's read Frazer's Golden Bough knows that. None of this activity necessarily proves that they had any idea, magically or religiously, of what they were doing. This is why outside observers must always be making stupid remarks like "the peasants really did this because..." or "they didn't know it, but they were actually worshipping an old Pagan god named Irving, who was..."

You do not need a religious or magical reason to perform customary or enjoyable acts. The mere fact that "this is the way my Grandfather did it" or that, "actually, I've always rather enjoyed orgies," is more than sufficient to assure that some form or other of that act will be perpetuated in the future. After all, in magic and religion, as in many other fields, one does not always have to consciously understand what one is doing in order to get results (though it helps). Just because a group of peasants is performing a ritual of possible magical efficacy, does not mean that they have had someone train them in the art of magic, or that they have the slightest idea of what they are doing.

Ordeals

Donkipedia notes that:

In Jersey, disputes were settled by 'The Judgement of God' and trials were by Cross, Water and Fire. In the first, the litigants were made to stand in a position resembling the cross, with their arms outstretched. Whoever stayed in this position the longest must have right on their side because, as we all know, God looks after his own. The second trial - by water - really does fall into the category of cruel and devious. A heavy weight was placed at the bottom of a cauldron of water, which was then brought to boiling point. The accused was made to plunge their hand in the cauldron to retrieve the weight and then carry it for a distance of nine feet. Their hand was then wrapped and sealed and had to remain like this for 3 nights. If, after this time, the hand was healthy, he would be judged to be innocent. If it showed signs of scalding, then it proved his guilt. The trial by fire was the same, except that here the accused had to carry a red hot iron for nine feet before having his hand bandaged.

The source for this appears to be verbatim from http://www.jaynesjersey.com/witchcraft.htm

No source is given on that site. None of the legal material which I have studied (the Mirror of Justice etc) gives any evidence for this kind of trial, nor do any of the cases (as reported in Balleine or Pitts). The actual trials involved imprisonment in Gorey Castle, and repeated interrogation before the lesser court. The legal procedure for all cases was as follows. The accused was first indicted before the Cour de Cattel and asked to submit his case to the "Grand Enquete du Pays" which had the ability to condemn them to death. Incidentally, the Cour de Cattel was abolished in 1862, and with it, the extant procedural rules for witch trials.

Physical torture as such is not evidenced - Guernsey had thumbscrews but the Jersey records don't mention this, although shaving for witches marks would have been humiliating and degrading - look at treatment of prisoners in Iraq by Americans - and months in the cold damp dungeons on a starvation diet of bread and water, without any idea what would happen next, would have also applied considerable duress. It would be considered torture by today's standards.

The only trial by ordeal mentioned in the earliest legal records for sorcery (not witchcraft as such) is by casting the victim from a high cliff, which suggests a possible basis for the Geoffrey's leap story, which is possibly a garbled account based on such a trial.

I sincerely hope the Donkipedia site is adjusted to provide better documented information, rather than speculative "facts". Elsewhere the site is very good - it's just here that it falls down badly.

Links
http://www.guernsey-society.org.uk/donkipedia/index.php5?title=Witchcraft
http://www.spiritualitea.com/articles/briefhistory.shtml
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/witch-trials-in-jersey-and-guernsey/12656704

Social Changes and the Witch Trials in Jersey

The witch trials begin in Guernsey around 1563 and end in 1634. In Jersey, apart from one case which ended in a banishment in 1736, they began in 1562 and ended in 1661. What was happening in the society at that time? If we look at the changes taking place, a pattern begins to emerge. The pattern is similar in both Islands, but this survey will concentrate on Jersey, and will look at the background against which Jersey became to degree isolated from England, and under that degree of autonomy, and the strictures of a Calvinism regime, the conditions are ripe for the failure of legal governance within the Island, and the consequent burning of people as witches.

The Burning Begins

In 1558, Queen Mary died, and Elizabeth came to the throne. The islands reverted to Protestantism, and the Calvinist form of Protestantism. The reason for this is simple - the Islands were French speaking, and persecution had driven the French Protestants (Huguenots) to seek refuge in the Jersey and Guernsey, bringing with them the French form of Protestantism, which took its lead from Geneva. During Mary's reign, some of the Protestant leaders in Jersey and Guernsey themselves sought refuge in Calvin's Geneva. So it is not surprising that, as Balleine's History notes that they "naturally gravitated to the French model." Under this model, there was "a complete scheme of government by ministers, elders and deacons", with Consistory courts for each Parish to watch, and where necessary impose penalties on those whose behaviour was deemed to be immoral and indecent. The iron hand of "La Police et Discipline Ecclesiastique" was a law which everyone had to obey, and the Calvinism catechism had four hundred questions and answers in which everyone had to be drilled to learn by heart!

As the Island was French speaking, the Geneva Bible was in use, and the services followed Calvin with a French Huguenot prayer book rather than the English book of Common Prayer. Jersey Churches were referred to as "temples", and the Reformation removal of church fabric continued, with a letter of 1561 noting the destruction of organs and stained glass windows. Unlike Lutherism, Calvinism had no place for rousing hymns, but only the chanting of metrical psalms.

In this new regime, there was no place for archbishops, bishops or deans, and while the Bishop of Winchester was nominally responsible for the Islands (from 1569), in practice a severely Protestant Channel Islands were a good bulwark against Catholic France, the old enemy, and Elizabeth I was too shrewd to interfere in the local ecclesiastical affairs of the Islands, if it was in her interest to turn a blind eye. In Jersey, she permitted the Huguenot prayer book in the Town Church alone "provided that the residue of the parishes continue the Order of Service ordained within this realm", but no efforts were made to enforce this order which was firmly ignored by the other Parishes.

There had to be a counter-reaction, and from 1559, we hear of night revels in Jersey, and masked men, seizing farmer's horses to ride through the countryside. Guernsey too had its masked revels, and young people in particular seem to have rebelled against the strict discipline imposed on every aspect of their lives.

It is with this background in mind that we can see how the witch mania developed. Clandestine meetings at night could fuel the suspicions of a severe Puritanical society, and unlike England until the Civil War, there was no judicial hierarchy to impose order from above and ensure good governance. Instead the local courts became the mechanisms by which injustices were perpetrated, and people were exiled, maimed, or put to death.

An End to Judicial Autonomy

It is only after the end of the English Civil War, the end of the Commonwealth, and the restoration of Charles II as King of England that we notice a cessation in the witch trials, and in 1661 Sir Philippe de Carteret became Bailiff on the resignation of Sir George de Carteret. The Royal Mace was presented to the Island by the King in 1663. Also in 1661, the Ecclesiastical Court was revived by Phillipe Le Couteur newly appointed as Dean of Jersey, and no infringement of Anglican Church order was permitted, and a French version of the revised prayer book, just issued in England, was translated by Jean Durel.

The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (against any redress for any acts committed by Republicans short of regicide) expressly named Jersey, but Jersey Jurats tried to plead that it did not apply in Jersey, and only after English Law Officers had twice ruled otherwise, was on the third occasion registered in the Court Books to remove all doubt that it applied locally.

We can see here a vast change in the structure of Jersey society, from the removal of Rectors who still wanted to go the Calvinist way, and would not bow down to the imposition of the Anglican order, to the Jurats who also tried to implement their own rules of justice, and again, albeit more slowly, were overruled by the English Parliament in that body's ability to enforce its authority on the Island. With this background, we can better understand why it was that the witch mania ceased to have legal backing, even if the popular belief persisted. Once more the judiciary, while able to act independently, could be referred if necessary to the English Parliament (as in the case of the Act of Indemnity), and the kind of misrule in which the legal authorities, such as the Bailiff, could authorise burnings was no longer permissible because it ran counter to the English Crown's restoration of ecclesiastical and judicial oversight.

Note:
Witchcraft in the Channel Islands is still available at:
http://www.lulu.com/content/4786194

Dark Figures and Number Laundering: Christian Aid's Death and Taxes

"Nine million Witches were martyred in the Burning Times."

I start with a digression, whose importance will become very clear later. It is by way of illustration as to how "dark figures" - estimates of invisible numbers - are created, and how via a process known as "number laundering", they achieve popularity and remain in circulation, even after they have been subjected to critical scrutiny and debunked.

This figure was by a German historian in the late eighteenth century who took the number of people killed in a witch hunt in his own German state and multiplied by the number of years various penal statutes existed, then reconfigured the number to correspond to the population of Europe. Professor Behringer traced the estimate of nine million victims back to wild projections made by an 18th-century anticlerical from 20 files of witch trials. The figure worked its way into 19th-century texts, was taken up by Protestant polemicists during the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Germany, then adopted by the early 20th-century German neopagan movement and, eventually, by anti-Christian Nazi propagandists. In the United States, the nine million figure appeared in the 1978 book "Gyn/Ecology" by the influential feminist theoretician Mary Daly, who picked it up from a 19th-century American feminist, Matilda Gage.

The modern estimate is much reduced;

For witchcraft and sorcery between 1400 and 1800, all in all, we estimate something like 50,000 legal death penalties," writes Wolfgang Behringer in "Witches and Witch-Hunts" (Polity, 2004). He estimates that perhaps twice as many received other penalties, "like banishment, fines or church penance

In fact, and almost counter to intuition, the death toll is decreasing as more and more trials are discovered.

As historian Jenny Gibbons points out:

If historians simply reported the number of executions, more deaths would obviously mean a higher death toll. But that isn't what scholars do. They can't -- they know that we're missing many court records and that several areas have never been thoroughly studied. Because of this, scholars compensate for lost records and missing data. That's why if you look at the table of estimated deaths, you'll see that the estimated death toll is about three times as high as the number of recorded executions.

Why do new trials have little impact on the death toll? Because they're replacing estimates. These newly discovered deaths aren't trials we never dreamed existed -- they come from previously unstudied areas and courts. When you "add" those new trials to the total, you also have to "subtract" the estimated deaths that scholars used to add for this same area. And since older estimates tended to be extremely high, new trial data usually ends up decreasing the death toll.

Now all that is ancient history, but it has a significant relevance to today.

Looking at Tax Evasion, the Christian Aid report looks at two methods of tax evasion -

Our figures deal with just two of the most common forms of corporate evasion. The first of these is known as 'transfer mispricing', where different parts of the companies sell goods or services to each other at manipulated prices. Again, the potential scope of this practice can be seen from the staggering fact that some 60 per cent of all world trade is now thought to take place between global corporations and their subsidiaries. The other, 'false invoicing', is where similar transactions take place between unrelated companies. We calculate, from just these two activities, that the loss of corporate taxes to the developing world is currently running at US$160bn a year (£80bn). That is more than one-and-a-half times the combined aid budgets of the whole rich world - US$103.7bn in 2007.

Our figures are derived from the work of Raymond Baker, a senior fellow at the US Center for International Policy. To arrive at his findings on transfer mispricing, he and his researchers conducted 550 interviews with heads of trading companies in 11 countries - all on condition of anonymity.

What are Christian Aid doing here? Clearly the methodology is similar to that of the counting of Witch Trials. They take the result of one study, look at how much tax is evasion is taking place from the 550 interviews in this study, and any other figures they have gleaned from public trials, and then multiplied numbers to get the larger figure. This assumes - as with the early calculations on the witch trials - that the "missing figures", what statisticians call "dark figures" - follow the same pattern on a larger scale.

Frequently we hear in reports that what is revealed - either in corporate corruption and tax evasion that comes to light - is just the tip of the iceberg, and the same kind of extrapolation as went on with the witch trials is made here. The numbers gets repeated from places ("billions in lost taxes") and by being repeated undergoes what the statistician Joel Best calls "number laundering" - it takes on a life of its own, and becomes legitimate because it is continually repeated from place to place.

A statistic's origin--perhaps simply as someone's best guess--is soon forgotten, and through repetition, the figure comes to be treated as a straightforward fact--accurate and authoritative. The trail becomes muddy, and people lose track of the estimate's original source, but they become confident that the number must be correct because it appears everywhere. It barely matters if critics challenge a number, and expose it as erroneous. Once a number is in circulation, it can live on, regardless of how thoroughly it may have been discredited. Today's improved methods of information retrieval--electronic indexes, full-text databases, and the Internet--make it easier than ever to locate statistics. Anyone who locates a number can, and quite possibly will, repeat it... Electronic storage has given us astonishing, unprecedented access to information, but many people have terrible difficulty sorting through what's available and distinguishing good information from bad. Standards for comparing and evaluating claims seem to be wanting. This is particularly true for statistics that are, after all, numbers and therefore factual, requiring no critical evaluation. Why not believe and repeat a number that everyone else uses?

In fact, the Witch trials were scattered, with clusters of intense activity, and other locations with little or no activity. The more detailed count, as Gibbons notes, reduces numbers.

Let me give you an example. Before Poland's Witch trials were counted, Bohdan Baranowski guessed that 15,000 Polish Witches died. Today, Polish historians are studying the Polish court records. They've found several hundred executions, and assume that the final death toll will be approximately 1,000. When their research is done, we will have "discovered" maybe 500 new trials. But the death toll for the Burning Times will *drop* by 14,000 because we didn't find as many trials as we expected to.

The same may well be true of the missing millions lost through corporate evasion. We simply do not know. But there is a very great danger in making use - however well intention - of figures that may well not be representative of the whole. By overstating their case in this way, Christian Aid may well ensure that in the long term, it will be seriously undermined. The corruption that comes to the surface may not be the tip of the iceberg, it may be most of the iceberg. We simply don't know. But let me finish by saying that I am sympathetic to their case, even if I think their numbers simply do not add up. As Joel best says:

When activists have generated a statistic as part of a campaign to arouse concern about some social problem, there is a tendency for them to conflate the number with the cause. Therefore, anyone who questions a statistic can be suspected of being unsympathetic to the larger claims, indifferent to the victims' suffering, and so on.


Links

Counting the Witch Trials
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/national/22beliefs.html
http://www.summerlands.com/crossroads/remembrance/_remembrance/00000082.htm

Books of the Post:
Best, Joel. Damned Lies and Statistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.
Loseke, Donileen R. Thinking about Social Problems. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999.
Paulos, John Allen. Innumeracy. New York: Random House, 1988.

Witch Craze (2004): A Review

Witch Craze by Lyndal Roper: A Review

---

This is a study of the time of the persecution of people as witches in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which she tries to understand why it took place then, why it was not geographically universal, and what kinds of fears, fantasies and confessions were apparent at the time. As Lyndal Roper points out any historical explanation should, in part, explain "why the witch hunts were so heavily concentrated in the German speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, why so many of the victims were women" (around 80%) with - in Germany "a shocking preponderance of old women", which given the life expectancy of the time, meant over forty. "Global religious persecutions will not work: in Germany, Catholic prince-bishoprics were the most fearsome witch-hunters, but in Catholic Italy, Portugal and Spain, the number of deaths were comparatively small. Calvinist Scotland suffered a very serious witch hunt and Lutheran Sweden had a very late outbreak of witch-hunting in which many children were involved."

There is a stereotypical idea of this period, popularised most strongly by Margaret Murray in her consideration of the witch craze as persecuting a pagan "old religion" which avoids looking at the evidence, and the problems arising from it. Lyndal Roper, in this study, suggests various ways of making sense of the historical record, and understanding the terrors and fantasies erupting in society at the time. As she says, she was surprised because she began the study expecting to look at confessions of sex with the devil, flying to the sabbath, or satanic rituals, and while these facets were there, they did not predominate: "what surprised me most when I began to read the detailed trial records of women who were accused of witchcraft was that they talked not about sex and forbidden desire, but about birth, about breastmilk that dried up, about babies who sickened and died, and about the room where the women spent their 'lying in', the period of six weeks after the birth of a child."

In fact, as she discovered "the fears that surrounded witches were not just about the deaths of infants and the early weeks of motherhood, but featured animals and crops, in short, fertility itself". The society in which these people lived was one at subsistence level, with a precarious economy, and years of poor harvests. "Marriage often had to be postponed, and many could never afford to wed. To be a fertile wife with plenty of children was to be honoured and respected. To be an old woman frequently meant poverty, infirmity, and humiliating dependence on the young." The image of the witch across Europe was remarkably consistent "she was an old woman, and she attacked young children".

During this period, Europe was recovering from "the little 'ice age'", from the late 16th century to the mid 17th, "a combination of perishingly cold winters and wet summers and autumns which brought bad harvests as the grain rotted". Everywhere there was "hunger, disease and death". Apocalyptic visions of a society "under assault from the devil made sense". The peasants had "fears of sick cows, outbreaks of hail, mysterious insects and various diseases". To try to stem the problem of a greater population than food supply, it was now that governments enacted regulations forbidding marriages unless couples could support themselves, and introducing legislation to control marriage.

How could the old woman support herself, in a society where women's status was closely tied to their reproductive capacity? Invariable, the old women acted as midwives, helped the mothers with the infants, and could also milk cows; in these capacities, they were placed in the worst possible place when children died, and milk went off; if men were impotent, it was felt that this came from the baleful presence of the infertile woman. And fears of fertility also come into the pictures of the time, where a common them of the fantasy links the post-menopausal woman with a young man, she sexually desiring him, even though she cannot give him children; there is a terror about failure in fertility, and this is one of the forces driving the persecution, which merges with the fantastic confessions under torture of satanic rites.

Other factors that Lindal Roper discusses are the breakdown of law, how the civic authorities in local communities take the law into their own hands, and where this occurs, witch hunts break out; the fragmentation of the mediaeval unity by the Reformation, where there is a culture of suspicion against heresy, not unlike Stalin's Russia - including the interrogation methods which elicit what the torturers want to hear; and again linked with fertility, and infant death, the idea of the old woman preying on children, wanting to consume them, which we see most clearly in the original version of Hansel and Gretal, although it is still present in later versions.

This is an interesting book, which shows that where a particular nexus of factors came together, it just needed a spark to set witch-hunts alight, and underlying this was a terror of loss of fertility and death, a society in which natural disasters were understood in a pre-scientific way which we can barely begin to understand. Nevertheless, Lyndal Roper helps us to understand that better, and this book is a fine contribution to the study of the witch craze.

Witches and Familiars

These are a few historical jottings on the subject of witches and their familiars.

At the time of the witch trials, (16th/17th century), familiars appeared in two forms:

1) animals, usually pets, such as cats (traditionally black, but that is a folklore gloss) associated with a person, or in a folklore tale.

Bear in mind that a cat was not the domestic pet of today, was also kept to keep down vermin. In Shakespeare (Macbeth), it is a "hedgepig".

2) forced confessions, in which the victim told of the devil appearing in the form of a cat, dog, raven, etc. These may not have
existed at all.

The two were conflated in popular imagination.

Note that the "Great Cat Massacre" in Paris (1730), as Robert Darnton has shown, was to do with print shop workers revenge at harsh working conditions imposed by their masters; the masters wives kept many cats as a sign of prestige, "one kept twenty-five cats. He had their portraits painted and fed them on roast fowl". At this time, the workers were being given rotten meat that the cats refused to eat! So this episode, contrary to some internet postings, has nothing to do with witchcraft.

Cat massacres earlier in the Middle Ages seem to have followed much the same pattern, as well as a general animal cruelty of the time as sport for fun! (e.g. dancing bears, cock-fighting etc.) and there is nothing in the records to indicate any association with witchcraft or familiars.

Sites such as Witches Brew (http://www.witchs-brew.org/shadows/animals/familiar.html) suggest that cat torture was to do with witchcraft, but this is unlikely; we forget what horrible entertainments the villagers of the Middle Ages would do to animals "just for fun". The feast of fools in Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" captures the cruelty of the times very well.

There is a precis of Danton's work (with original document extracts) at:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/2539/History/Cat_Massacre.html

There is an excellent article at:
http://www.hulford.co.uk/familiar.html

The Role of the "Familiar" in English Witch Trials

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Other References:

"Feline Fortunes: Contrasting Views of Cats in Popular Culture." by
Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, "Journal of Popular Culture". Volume: 36.
Issue: 3., 2003

"Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe." by Stuart Clark, 1999

"Folk-Lore of Shakespeare." by T. F. Thiselton Dyer, 1884