Sociology and causes of the European witch-hunts

[Denise Morgan (Helping Hand)]

Sociology and causes of the European witch-hunts

 

One theory for the number of Early Modern witchcraft trials connects the counter-reformation to witchcraft. In south-western Germany between 1561 and 1670 there were 480 witch trials. Of the 480 trials that took place in southwestern Germany, 317 occurred in Catholic areas, while Protestant territories accounted for 163 of them.^[85] During the period from 1561 to 1670, at least 3,229 persons were executed for witchcraft in the German Southwest. Of this number 702 were tried and executed in Protestant territories, while 2,527 were tried and executed in Catholic territories.^[86] Nineteenth-century historians today dispute the comparative severity of witch hunting in Protestant and Catholic territories. “Protestants blamed the witch trials on the methods of the Catholic Inquisition and the theology of Catholic scholasticism, while Catholic scholars indignantly retorted that Lutheran preachers drew more witchcraft theory from Luther and the Bible than from medieval Catholic thinkers.”^[85]

 

Other theories have pointed that the massive changes in law allowed for the outbreak in witch trials. Such laws pointed out heretical nature, and punished all aspects. Another theory is that rising number of devil literature popularized witchcraft trials, in which the German market saw nearly 100,000 devil-books during the 1560s.^[87] Another assumption is that climate-induced crop failure and harsh weather was a direct link to witch-hunts. This theory follows the idea that witchcraft in Europe was traditionally associated with weather-making.^[88] Scholars also imply that a connection between witchcraft trials and the Thirty Years’ War may also have a direct correlation.^[89]

 

While the previously mentioned theories mainly rely on micro level psychological interpretations, another theory has been put forward that provides an alternative macroeconomic explanation.^[90] According to this theory, the witches, who often had highly developed midwifery skills, were prosecuted in order to extinguish knowledge about birth control in an effort to repopulate Europe after the population catastrophe triggered by the plague pandemic of the 14th century (also known as the Black Death).^[91] Citing Jean Bodin's "On Witchcraft", this view holds that the witch hunts were not only promoted by the church but also by prominent secular thinkers to repopulate the European continent.^[92] By these authors, the witch hunts are seen as an attempt to eliminate female midwifery skills and as a historical explanation why modern gynecology - surprisingly enough - came to be practiced almost exclusively by males in state run hospitals. In this view, the witch hunts began a process of criminalization of birth control that eventually lead to an enormous increase in birth rates that are described as the "population explosion" of early modern Europe. This population explosion produced an enormous youth bulge which supplied the extra manpower that would enable Europe's nations, during the period of colonialism and imperialism, to conquer and colonize 90% of the world.^[93] While historians specializing in the history of the witch hunts have generally remained critical of this macroeconomic approach and continue to favor micro level perspectives and explanations,^[94] prominent historian of birth control John M. Riddle has expressed agreement.^[95]

 

As this theory has an alternative macroeconomic explanation some scholars oppose it. Diane Purkiss argues "that there is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also some parts of the Continent, midwives were more than likely to be found helping witch-hunters.^[96] Also the fact remains that most women used herbal medicines as part of their household skills, and a large part of witches were accused by women.^[97]

 

The modern notion of a "witch hunt" has little to do with gender,^{[dubious – discuss]} the historical notion often did. In general, supposed "witches" were female. Saith noted Judge Nicholas Rémy (c.1595), "[It is] not unreasonable that this scum of humanity, [witches], should be drawn chiefly from the feminine sex." Concurred another judge, "The Devil uses them so, because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations."^[98]

 

Gender

 

Gender played an important part in the witch trials because on the whole the vast majority of the victims were women. According to the historian R. W. Thurston, 75–80% of the victims across both Europe and North America were women,^[99] whilst according to Anne Llewellyn Barstow, 80% of those accused and 85% of those executed in Europe alone were allegedly women.^[100][101] Barstow claimed that a combination of factors, including the greater value placed on men as workers in the increasingly wage-oriented economy, and a greater fear of women as inherently evil, loaded the scales against women, even when the charges against them were identical to those against men.^[102] Thurston saw this as a part of the general misogyny of the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, which had increased during what he described as "the persecuting culture" from that which it had been in the Early Medieval. He noted that at the time, women were generally considered less intelligent and more susceptible to sin than men, an idea influenced by the character of Eve in the Bible.^[103] Whilst not all of those who condemned witchcraft in this period specifically condemned women as well, there were those who did, for instance, in the Malleus Malificarum, Sprenger and Kramer stated that:

 

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colours!^[104]

 

In a few countries however, men accounted for the majority of the accused. In Iceland, for instance, 92% of the accused were men,^[101] and in Estonia 60% of the accused victims were male, mainly middle-aged or elderly married peasants, and known healers or sorcerers.^[105] Modern scholars agree that the witch hunts cannot be explained simplistically as an expression of male misogyny, as women were frequently accused of witchcraft by other women,^[106] and female midwives and ‘white witches’ were particularly responsible.^{[107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114]} It is also recognized that the anti-women agenda of works on witchcraft has been greatly exaggerated.^[115]

 

Alternate theories

 

The Witch-Cult Hypothesis

 

Whilst the Enlightenment-era sociologists and historians had declared the witch trials to be nothing more than mass hysteria, some people in Europe had begun to develop a "totally novel" idea about how these trials had come about. They speculated that, contrary to the established idea, there really had been a cult of practicing witches meeting for secretive religious meetings during the Early Modern period, and that they had been members of a non-Christian religion, which was not Satanic, but a remnant of pre-Christian paganism. The origins of this theory appeared in 1749, when the Italian Girolamo Tartarotti published his idea that the image of the Satanic witch had been influenced by surviving pagan iconography, and this same idea was put forth once again in 1844 by the German folklorist Jakob Grimm. As later historian Ronald Hutton remarked, "Neither [Tartarotti or Grimm], however, supported the notion that those prosecuted as witches were practitioners of a surviving pagan religion, although both were later misquoted as doing so."^[116]

 

The first author to actually put forward the pagan Witch-Cult hypothesis was the German professor of law Karl Ernst Jarcke, when in 1828 he published the claim that the witch religion, which he treated in a very negative manner, had been originally pagan, but had developed into a form of Satanism as the Christian Church portrayed it as such. Jarcke's ideas were followed by the German nationalist historian Franz Josef Mone, who in 1839 adapted the theory, claiming that the pagan religion that evolved into Satanism was that of Greece rather than his native Germany, a people whom he thought were too civilised to have developed such a "barbaric" religion.^[117]

 

In 1862, the French historian Jules Michelet published La Sorciere, in which he put forth the idea that the witches had been following a pagan religion that opposed the Roman Catholic hierarchy and upper classes.^[118] However, the theory achieved its greatest attention when it was taken up by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who published both The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931). In these such works, she claimed that the witches had been following a pre-Christian religion devoted to fertility which she termed "the Witch-Cult" and "Ritual Witchcraft". She claimed that this faith was devoted to a pagan Horned God whom the Christian authorities had demonised as the Devil, and involved the celebration of four Witches' Sabbaths each year: Halloween, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh.^[119][120]

 

Even at the time, various academic historians challenged and dismissed Murray's hypothesis; W.B. Halliday, an expert on ancient religion, for instance noted that her hypothesis relied upon "documents torn from the background of their own age and divorced from the serious study of their historical antecedents."^[121] Later historians and folklorists who were critics of Murray, such as Elliot Rose^[122] and Jacqueline Simpson,^[123] later deconstructed Murray's argument in its entirety and exposed its flaws.

 

Neopagan interpretations

 

In the early twentieth century, a number of individuals and groups emerged in Europe, primarily Britain, and subsequently the United States as well, claiming to be the surviving remnants of the pagan Witch-Cult described in the works of Margaret Murray. The first of these actually appeared in the last few years of the nineteenth century, being a manuscript that American folklorist Charles Leland claimed he had been given by a woman who was a member of a group of witches worshipping the god Lucifer and goddess Diana in Tuscany, Italy. He published the work in 1899 as Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. Whilst historians and folklorists have accepted that there are folkloric elements to the gospel, none have accepted it as being the text of a genuine Tuscan religious group, and believe it to be of late nineteenth century composition.^[124]

 

Subsequently, in 1939, an English occultist named Gerald Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a surviving group of the pagan Witch-Cult known as the New Forest coven, although modern historical investigation has led scholars to believe that this coven was not ancient as Gardner believed, but was instead founded in the 1920s or 1930s by occultists wishing to fashion a revived Witch-Cult based upon Murray's theories.^[126] Taking this New Forest coven's beliefs and practices as a basis, Gardner went on to found Gardnerian Wicca, one of the most prominent traditions in the Neopagan religion now known as Wicca, which revolved around the worship of a Horned God and Goddess, the celebration of festivals known as Sabbats, and the practice of ritual magic. He also went on to write several books about the historical Witch-Cult, Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), and in these books, Gardner used the phrase "the burning times" in reference to the European and North American witch trials.^[127] In the following few decades, various other Neopagan witches appeared in Britain and the United States claiming that they were the inheritors of the ancient Witch-Cult, including Robert Cochrane, Sybil Leek, Charles Cardell and Victor Anderson. The idea that the Wiccan religion was the continuation of the pagan Witch-Cult which Christian authorities had tried to wipe out during "the burning times" was subsequently popularised by other prominent Wiccans, such as Doreen Valiente, Alex Sanders, Zsuzsanna Budapest, Raven Grimassi and Starhawk, but by the 1980s came to be rejected by a number of Wiccan authors who realised that it lacked a historical basis, such as Scott Cunningham. Indeed, folklorist Jacqueline Simpson noted in 1994 that "Even the Wiccans are beginning to see how flimsy is the alleged historical evidence for the antiquity and continuation of their 'Old Religion'... many now hold that the factual truth or falsity of the Wiccan view of history is an unimportant question - all that matters is its emotive power as myth and symbol."^[128]

 

Feminist interpretations

 

A figure of nine million victims (or "nine million women" killed) in the European witch-hunts is an influential popular myth in 20th century feminism and neopaganism. The nine million figure is ultimately due to Gottfried Christian Voigt. The history of this estimate was researched by Behringer (1998).^[129]

 

Voigt published it in a 1784 article, writing in the context of the Age of Enlightenment, wishing to emphasize the importance of education in rooting out superstition and a relapse into the witch-craze which had subsided less than a lifetime ago in his day. He was criticizing Voltaire's estimate of "several hundred thousand" as too low. Voigt based his estimate on twenty cases recorded over fifty years in the archives Quedlinburg, Germany. Based on records of the 29 year period 1569 to 1589, he estimated about 40 executions in this period, and extrapolated to about 133 executions per century.^[130] Voigt then extrapolated this number to the entire population of Europe, arriving at "858,454 per century" and for an assumed 11 centuries of witch-hunts at "9,442,994 people" in total.^[131] Voigt's number was rounded off to nine million by Gustav Roskoff in his 1869 Geschichte des Teufels ("History of the Devil"). It was subsequently repeated by various German and English historians, notably the 19th century women's rights campaigner Matilda Joslyn Gage^[132][133] by Margaret Murray (1921), and notoriously in Nazi propaganda, which in the 1930s used witches as a symbol of northern völkisch culture, as opposed to Mediterranean or "Semitic" Christianity. The 1935 Der christliche Hexenwahn ("The Christian Witch Craze") claimed that the witch-hunts were a Christian, and thus ultimately Jewish, attempt to exterminate "Aryan womanhood". The survey of judicial records taken by Himmler's Hexen-Sonderkommando within the SS has proven useful for modern estimates of the number of victims.^[134] Mathilde Ludendorff in her 1934 Christliche Grausamkeit an Deutschen Frauen ("Christian cruelty against German women") also repeated the figure of nine million victims.^[135]

 

Voigt's and Roskoff's nine million figure is too high by a factor of at least 100 according to modern estimates, but it has kept on being repeated throughout the second half of the 20th century, by Gerald Gardner (1954) and subsequently in Gardnerian Wicca and second wave feminism, as late as in the 1990 The Burning Times film and the lyrics of the 2005 Burning Times album by Christy Moore.

 

Curiously, not only the nine million estimate of Voigt's has proven influential, but his estimate of "133 Quedlinburg executions per century" also has an involved history, appearing as the claim that 133 witches being burnt in the year 1589 alone in Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (1880, revised 1910), and even as a mass-execution of 133 witches on a single day in Quedlinburg in Gustav Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels (1869, p. 304). Reference to this supposed mass-execution as factual was made as late as 2006 in the third edition of Brian P. Levack's The Witch Hunt in Modern Europe (p. 24). Reference to an alleged execution of 133 witches in Osnabrück as factual appears as late as 2007 in John Michael Cooper, Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis night: the heathen muse in European culture, 1700-1850 (p. 15).^[136]

 

Apparently, Voigt's estimate of the "average number of executions per century in Quedlinburg" happened to coincide with the number of victims in a spurious report of a singular mass execution in a single day in Osnabrück distributed in the late 1580s. References to this supposed mass execution as factual is also found in 19th century literature, sometimes together with the claim that the four prettiest of those condemned were lifted out of the flames and carried away through the air before they were burned.^[137] Finally, Roskoff (1869) seems to have mixed up "133 executions on a day in Osnabrück" with "133 executions per century in Quedlinburg" to arrive at "133 executions on a day in Quedlinburg". The Osnabrück report seems to originate with a flyer first distributed in 1588, claiming an execution of 133 witches on a single day in "this year". The flyer was later reprinted, in 1589 and during the 1590s, with the reported event always kept as occurring in "this year". This sensationalist headline perhaps reflects the historical mass execution in Osnabrück of 121 witches during the summer of 1583 (in the course of about five months, not on a single day), the highest number of executions by far recorded for any year in this city (Pohl 1990)^[138]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_Early_Modern_Europe