Why Were Witches Burned?

Everyone has it in them to be animalistic, bestial, brutish and beastly.  At the same time, we humans also have a far less pleasant side. 

In the last hundred years, most of the best-known social crimes that exemplify our ability to institutionalize hatred and stupidity have centered around ethnic differences.  European anti-Semitism started off the century with bloody pogroms and progressed to the Holocaust.  The Turks butchered millions of Armenians.  The United States systematically oppressed its black, Hispanic and Native American populations.  More recently, the Serbs and Croats have shown us civilization can still be a blood sport. 

Of course, religious differences also offer excellent excuses for widespread slaughter and destruction.  The Christians have their traditional crusades, the Moslems their holy wars, Communists their purges.  In recent times, from Sri Lanka to Northern Ireland, plenty of killing and cruelty is still justified on the basis of religion. 

So perhaps we don't need sophisticated explanations for the witch hunting that horribly tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, what the historian Rossell Hope Robbins called "the foulest crime and deepest shame of western civilization."  After all, women are weak, women are different; if no one owns 'em, why not kill 'em?  It's the logic of fox hunting, carrier pigeon eradication, buffalo slaughter. 

The complexity of real life, however, usually falls somewhere in between simple blame and the tangled skeins of academic analysis.  It is true that the witch hunts were typical of all mob-hysteria persecutions, and in this sense, the logic and dynamics of the persecution had little to do with witches.  The paranoia, blame-hunger and blood-thirst of the mob were manipulated and exploited by all kinds of different individuals and groups for all kinds of different reasons, most of which were unrelated to witchcraft. 

By the time that witch hunting became a "craze" in the seventeenth century, it had a completely irrational character.  Like twentieth-century anti-Semitism, or the child-abuse hysteria that has recently turned Wenatchee law-enforcement into a tragi-comedy, it was based on fears and fantasies that seem incredibly far-fetched in retrospect.  Yet the roots of such bizarre fears can often be traced back many generations in a culture, where they started out as much more understandable. 

Take anti-Semitism as an example.  I remember sitting on a bus in Kraków in 1975 beside a relatively well-educated librarian who patiently explained to me that all of Poland's woes stemmed from the Jewish conspiracy controlling the country.  When I objected that there were, for all practical purposes, no Jews left in Poland after 1945, he just shook his head at my unbelievable American naiveté.  The Jews were always there; the Jews were always responsible for misfortune.  I asked him if he personally knew of any Jews in Kraków.  He said not; they were hidden high up in the government.  As we discussed this, I realized that we were really talking about a mystical proposition, not a political one.  What astonished me was that for him, it was a commonplace, something everyone knows.  I didn't mention to him that part of my own ancestry is Jewish. 

The roots of his convictions go all the way back to 1492, when a great many of the Jews expelled from Spain were welcomed by the tolerant Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  A number of them ended up in the free German towns, where they were ultimately forbidden to own property or engage in trades, and so were forced to become bankers and money-lenders.  The Lithuanian nobility hired others as overseers and tax collectors for the vast and distant estates in the Ukraine.  Centuries of owing money to Jews in cities and paying taxes to Jews in the Ukraine helped create a deep-seated irrational anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe that was nonetheless understandable. 

What is interesting is that as the conditions contributing to such anti-Semitism disappeared, the feelings themselves actually intensified.  Deprived of any apparent cause or explanation, the long-standing prejudice grew and changed into the kind of mystical scapegoating that I encountered in 1975.  These were the feelings that made pogroms possible and that Hitler was able to exploit so horribly. 

Despite a huge body of new scholarship devoted to witchcraft and witch hunting over the past twenty years, comparable roots for the witch hysteria are still not clear.  I think, however, that a fairly straightforward explanation for the initial local hostility to witches among the villagers can be found in the Inquisition's records, and is reflected in the absurd accusations routinely leveled at them.  The same sources also suggest several additional reasons why the Catholic and Protestant churches might have wished to attack witches. 

Before considering these reasons, it is worth mentioning what recent scholarship has taught us did not happen.  We can no longer, for example, blame witch hunting on the corruption of the Catholic Inquisition, as did Rossell Hope Robbins.  That is not to say that the Inquisition was without blame.  In isolated cases, accusations of witchcraft may well have been motivated by a desire to confiscate the property of a well-to-do family.  Also, reading the accounts of torture used against the accused, it is hard not to suspect that inquisitors, like their civil colleagues, were all too often closet sadists who used the apparatus of witch persecution to indulge denied sexual appetites at the cost of other people's lives.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of witches tried were poor, not wealthy, and whatever sadism may have motivated prosecutors, the accusations themselves generally originated in the villages, with strong grass-roots support.  In the unusual instance when a witch was acquitted, it was not unusual for a local mob to lynch her anyway.  Unpleasant as the Inquisition may have been, it turns out, as historian John Tedeschi and others have shown, to have been a model of restraint compared to the civil courts. 

While recent research has found no evidence of the widespread underground fertility cults and Goddess worship that Margaret Murray and Anton Meyer postulated in the 1920s as the hidden rationale of the witch hunts, scholars do continue to find evidence that the practice of magick was a commonplace part of village life. 

Magick alone, however, is not enough to explain church hostility to witches, particularly since village magick generally seems to have had a comfortably Christian context.  The churches were usually content to ignore or co-opt harmless local pagan customs.  Yet a mounting body of evidence suggests that both Catholic and Protestant churches did actively support witch persecutions at a local and regional level as part of a campaign to Christianize the countryside.  The churches' participation only makes sense if witches actually held enough power in the villages to threaten church interests. 

How could older, unmarried, common women have posed any real threat to church interests?  Demographic studies showing that, in most of Western Europe, accusations were frequently leveled at such women have convinced many male historians that these women must merely have been convenient scapegoats for pent-up village frustrations, outsiders who lacked male protection in a patriarchal village structure, powerless targets for man's natural dog-beating propensities. 

The key piece of the puzzle that historians are missing, to my mind, is medicine.  I believe that health care issues go a long way toward explaining why villagers ended up fearing and hating witches, and why the churches regarded them as serious competitors for local power.  The churches did not claim to be able to heal physical sickness, but the witches did. 

Imagine life in the countryside before the advent of modern hygiene and medical care.  Imagine how often people suffered and died from illnesses that we now routinely prevent or cure.  Think how much we're willing to spend on health care today.  Think about your parent, sibling, lover or especially your child lying sick and dying.  How important would it be to you to get them help? 

There were no rural "doctors" in the fifteenth century.  Doctors were male, often university educated, more dangerous than most diseases and were usually leeches on the wealthy.  In the countryside, wise women and midwives were the only recourse against ills of the body.  Not coincidentally, they were the ones most often burned as witches. 

Medicine is and always has been a major business.  It placed the women who practiced it at the very core of village life, which explains why the local priests and pastors found their power threatening.  At the same time, they bore a terrible responsibility.  Armed only with herbal lore and their grandmothers' spells, they were expected to combat every kind of disease and injury.  Death was inexorable, yet for them as for any doctor, every death seemed a failure, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the village. 

As malpractice insurers know, the death of a child is the worst; bereaved parents seem to experience an anguish deeper than normal grief.  Yet in those days, infants routinely died of disease in terrible numbers.  As a magickal healer and wise woman, how do you explain a child's death to the parents?  How do you excuse the failure of your craft? 

Interestingly enough, many healers handled this situation by attributing a child's inexplicable death to witches, who were somehow able to "eat" children by a magick that expressed itself as wasting illness.  Guido Ruggiero, in Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance, discusses this excuse at some length in the context of Inquisition records relating to a group of healers in the village of Latisana in Friuli. 

In the short run, blaming witches had the compelling advantages of deflecting both the parents' blame and one's own feelings of guilt.  In the long run, however, it constantly confirmed a widespread popular belief that women who practiced magick sometimes used that magick to kill children.  Ruggiero reports instances where healers directly or indirectly implicated rivals and competitors as the child-eaters in question.  This is human nature at work; not pretty, but recognizable. 

In later times, it was very often the illness or death of a child that sparked a witch persecution.  Didn't everyone know that generations of children had died from malicious spells, by healers' own admissions?  You might deny one case, or two, but every village probably had dozens of examples to draw from.  One of the first signs of witchcraft that interrogators always looked for was that the accused ate or otherwise harmed children. 

While helpless dependence on the healers combined with anger at children's deaths was undoubtedly what most inflamed the villagers against "witches," the Christian churches saw the wise women as powerful proponents of non-Christian values.  An almost universal accusation against them was that they organized and enjoyed sex orgies.  Most researchers reject such charges of orgiastic revelry as pure fabrication, and dismiss as simple misogyny frequent clerical complaints about women's overbearing carnality. 

Considering the demographics, though, I suspect these accusations reflect an underlying truth.  Women survived both war and plague in far greater numbers than men, and often significantly outnumbered them as a result.  Which of the sexes is more interested in carnality under conditions of equal access is open to debate, preferably accompanied by lots of experimentation, but I would strongly assert a priori that women who are not getting laid are hornier on average than men who are.  In short, it is quite possible that there were a lot of very horny women around. 

What is more, the churches were not good at throwing parties.  You could trust them for a parade, an elaborate saints-day celebration or Easter pageant, but when it came to a wild midnight dance with lots of good music and action in the bushes, you just couldn't count on the local priest or pastor.  So who do you turn to but the village healers, particularly since their biggest business aside from health care was selling love magick?  Of course, nothing would be more likely to convince the ascetic Christians that these women were agents of the devil than that they helped organize the night-time parts of holiday festivities, at planting and at harvest, at solstice and equinox. 

Finally, as a minor aside, there are all the reports and accusations of out-of-body night flying on broomsticks, grass-stalks and animals, or with fairies.  Several scholars have suggested that the more poisonous herbs used in witch's ointments could have had strong enough psychotropic effects to induce such hallucinations.  Combine this with the fact that a fair number of people are able to achieve very nice trance states through suggestion, without any chemical help, and I think it's reasonable to suspect that wise women dabbled in mind-altering experiences.  Granted, this is largely speculation, but it would make sense out of a very common and otherwise nonsensical accusation. 

What I'm suggesting is that popular hatred against witches derived primarily from the responsibility borne by women as the sole providers of health care to the rural population, facing constant onslaughts of disease over which their herbs and magicks had discouragingly capricious power.  The excuses that these healers understandably made for their failures, particularly in cases where apparently healthy children sickened and died, reinforced a popular belief that some healers were inexplicably malicious. 

I'm also suggesting that sex was as lively in the countryside then as it's always been, if somewhat clandestine, and that the large group of unattached women were undoubtedly eager to participate.  Such libidinous activity would certainly have excited the hostility of various factions in the Christian churches.  With less basis, I also wonder if people were not routinely experimenting with mind-altering effects beyond those of alcohol. 

The key point that many male scholars studying witchcraft continue to miss is that witches really were the main players in the witch drama: These otherwise invisible women actually did play a central role in European village life. 

There is a vast wealth of interesting books about the burning times.  Among them, I particularly relied on Jeffrey Russell's History of Witchcraft; Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans (1980)  and Early Modern European Witchcraft, Centres and Peripheries, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (1990).  The latter contains a number of noteworthy essays, including "Inquisitorial Law and the Witch," by John Tedeschi, an interesting, but to me oversubtle analysis by Carlo Ginsburg of the concept of a witch's sabbath, and an intriguing article by Gustav Henningsen about parallels between this hypothetical celebration and the activities of an actual Sicilian fairy cult.  The best picture of village witchcraft that I've found is provided by Guido Ruggiero's Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the Renaissance (1993). 

About the time I was writing this article, several newer books appeared that I didn't consult, namely Brian P. Levack's The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1995), and Anne Barstow's Witchcraze : A New History of the European Witch Hunts (1995).  Also worth mention is Alan Kors' and Edward Peters' Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History (1972), of which a 2nd edition appeared in 2000.  More recent studies include Robin Briggs' Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (2002), and Bengt Ankarloo (et al), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials (2003).

There also some earlier studies that have strongly influenced our views on the witch persecutions, such as Margaret Murray's The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921), Rossell Hope Robbins' The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonolgy (1959)  and Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (1970).  For anthropological perspectives, Lucy Mair's Witchcraft (1969)  and Edward Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1950)  are frequently cited. 

(originally published in 1996 in Widdershins volume 2, issue 4).