Witch hunt
A witch hunt, or a witch purge, is a search for people who have been labeled witches or a search for evidence of witchcraft. Practicing evil spells or incantations was proscribed and punishable in early human civilizations in the Middle East. An intensive period of witch-hunts occurring in Early Modern Europe and to a smaller extent Colonial America, took place from about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 executions.[a][1] The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other regions, like Africa and Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea, and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia, Cameroon and South Africa today.
In contemporary English, "witch-hunt" metaphorically means an investigation that is usually conducted with much publicity, supposedly to uncover subversive activity, disloyalty, and so on, but with the real purpose of harming opponents.[2] It can also involve elements of moral panic,[3] as well as mass hysteria.[4]
Anthropological causes
[edit]The wide distribution of the practice of witch hunts in geographically and culturally separated societies (Europe, Africa, New Guinea) since the 1960s has triggered interest in the anthropological background of this behaviour. The belief in magic and divination, and attempts to use magic to influence personal well-being (to increase life, win love, etc.) are universal across human cultures.
Belief in witchcraft has been shown to have similarities in societies throughout the world. It presents a framework to explain the occurrence of otherwise random misfortunes such as sickness or death, and the witch sorcerer provides an image of evil.[5] Reports on indigenous practices in the Americas, Asia and Africa collected during the early modern Age of Exploration have been taken to suggest that not just the belief in witchcraft but also the periodic outbreak of witch-hunts are a human cultural universal.[6]
One study finds that witchcraft beliefs are associated with antisocial attitudes: lower levels of trust, charitable giving and group participation.[7] Another study finds that income shocks (caused by extreme rainfall) lead to a large increase in the murder of "witches" in Tanzania.[8]
Silvia Federici posits this expanding violence against women as stemming from dispossession of land and female autonomy. A clear separation from mystical mythologies. She names it as both as a historical phenomenon, as well as one that continues today as capitalism and privatization spreads into the global south.[9]
History
[edit]Ancient Near East
[edit]Punishment for malevolent magic is addressed in the earliest law codes, which were preserved in both ancient Egypt and Babylonia, where it played a conspicuous cultural role. The Code of Hammurabi (18th century BC short chronology) prescribes that:
If a man has put a spell upon another man and it is not yet justified, he upon whom the spell is laid shall go to the holy river; into the holy river shall he plunge. If the holy river overcomes him and he is drowned, the man who put the spell upon him shall take possession of his house. If the holy river declares him innocent and he remains unharmed the man who laid the spell shall be put to death. He that plunged into the river shall take possession of the house of him who laid the spell upon him.[10][11]
The Hebrew Bible condemns sorcery. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 states: "No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one that casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord"; and Exodus 22:18 prescribes: "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".[12] Tales like that of 1 Samuel 28, reporting how Saul "hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land",[13] suggest that in practice sorcery could at least lead to exile, and the Hebrew verb הכרית, translated in the King James Version as "cut off", can also be translated as "kill wholesale" or "exterminate".[14]
In the Judaean Second Temple period, Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BC is reported to have sentenced to death eighty women who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day in Ascalon. Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing false witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.[15]
Ancient Greco-Roman world
[edit]No laws concerning magic survive from Classical Athens.[16]: 133 However, cases concerning the harmful effects of pharmaka – an ambiguous term that might mean "poison", "medicine", or "magical drug" – do survive, especially those where the drug caused injury or death.[16]: 133–134 Antiphon's speech "Against the Stepmother for Poisoning" tells of the case of a woman accused of plotting to murder her husband with a pharmakon; a slave had previously been executed for the crime, but the son of the victim claimed that the death had been arranged by his stepmother.[16]: 135 The most detailed account of a trial for witchcraft in Classical Greece is the story of Theoris of Lemnos, who was executed along with her children some time before 338 BC, supposedly for casting incantations and using harmful drugs.[17]
During the pagan era of ancient Rome, there were laws against harmful magic.[18] According to Pliny, the 5th century BC laws of the Twelve Tables laid down penalties for uttering harmful incantations and for stealing the fruitfulness of someone else's crops by magic.[18] The only recorded trial involving this law was that of Gaius Furius Cresimus.[18]
The Classical Latin word veneficium meant both poisoning and causing harm by magic (such as magic potions), although ancient people would not have distinguished between the two.[19] In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[20] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[19] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, "then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world".[19]
Under the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis of 81 BC, killing by veneficium carried the death penalty.[19] This law banned the trading and possession of harmful drugs and poisons, possession of magical books and other occult paraphernalia. Emperor Augustus strengthened laws to curb these practices, for instance in 31 BC, by burning over 2,000 magical books in Rome, except for certain portions of the hallowed Sibylline Books.[21][22] While Tiberius Claudius was emperor, 85 women and 45 men accused of sorcery were executed.[23] By the 3rd century AD, the Lex Cornelia had begun to be used more broadly against other kinds of magic deemed harmful.[19] This included potions and expanded to the creation, possession and use of magical books. The punishment for this crime varied amongst the classes. Poor magicians would receive the death penalty for their crime while rich magicians would have their relations and land taken away. Any magician who sold their practices was burned at the stake.[19]: 61
Persecution of witches continued in the Roman Empire until the late 4th century AD and abated only after the introduction of Christianity as the Roman state religion in the 390s.[24]
Middle Ages
[edit]Christianisation in the Early Middle Ages
[edit]The German author Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan argued in History of the Witchcraft Trials that the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, murdered by a mob in 415 AD for threatening the influence of Cyril of Alexandria, may have been, in effect, the first famous "witch" to be punished by Christian authorities.[25] Cyril's alleged role in her murder, however, was already controversial among contemporary sources,[26] and the surviving primary account by Socrates Scholasticus makes no mention of religious motivations.[27]
The 6th century AD Getica of Jordanes records a persecution and expulsion of witches among the Goths in a mythical account of the origin of the Huns. The ancient fabled King Filimer is said to have
found among his people certain witches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae. Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his race and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps, a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech.[28]
The Councils of Elvira (306 AD), Ancyra (314 AD), and Trullo (692 AD) imposed certain ecclesiastical penances for devil-worship. This mild approach represented the view of the Church for many centuries. The general desire of the Catholic Church's clergy to check fanaticism about witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees of the Council of Paderborn, which, in 785 AD, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch. The Lombard code of 643 AD states:
Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds.[29]
This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which, stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. Other examples include an Irish synod in 800 AD,[30] and a sermon by Agobard of Lyon (810 AD).[b]
King Kálmán (Coloman) of Hungary, in Decree 57 of his First Legislative Book (published in 1100), banned witch-hunting because he said, "witches do not exist".[32][33] The "Decretum" of Burchard, Bishop of Worms (about 1020), and especially its 19th book, often known separately as the "Corrector", is another work of great importance. Burchard was writing against the superstitious belief in magical potions, for instance, that may produce impotence or abortion. These were also condemned by several Church Fathers.[34] But he altogether rejected the possibility of many of the alleged powers with which witches were popularly credited. Such, for example, were nocturnal riding through the air, the changing of a person's disposition from love to hate, the control of thunder, rain, and sunshine, the transformation of a man into an animal, the intercourse of incubi and succubi with human beings, and other such superstitions. Not only the attempt to practice such things, but the very belief in their possibility, is treated by Burchard as false and superstitious.
Pope Gregory VII, in 1080, wrote to King Harald III of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death upon being suspected of having caused storms or failure of crops or pestilence. There were many such efforts to prevent unjust treatment of innocent people.[c] On many occasions, ecclesiastics who spoke with authority did their best to disabuse the people of their superstitious belief in witchcraft.[36][37] A comparable situation in Russia is suggested in a sermon by Serapion of Vladimir (written in 1274~1275), where the popular superstition of witches causing crop failures is denounced.[d]
Condemnations of witchcraft are nevertheless found in the writings of Augustine of Hippo and early theologians, who made little distinction between witchcraft and the practices of pagan religions.[39] Many believed witchcraft did not exist in a philosophical sense: Witchcraft was based on illusions and powers of evil, which Augustine likened to darkness, a non-entity representing the absence of light.[39] Augustine and his adherents like Saint Thomas Aquinas nevertheless promulgated elaborate demonologies, including the belief that humans could enter pacts with demons, which became the basis of future witch hunts.[40] Ironically, many clerics of the Middle Ages openly or covertly practiced goetia, believing that as Christ granted his disciples power to command demons, to summon and control demons was not, therefore, a sin.[39]
Whatever the position of individual clerics, witch-hunting seems to have persisted as a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the early medieval period, notable rulers prohibited both witchcraft and pagan religions, often on pain of death. Under Charlemagne, for example, Christians who practiced witchcraft were enslaved by the Church, while those who worshiped the Devil (Germanic gods) were killed outright.[39] Witch-hunting also appears in period literature. According to Snorri Sturluson, King Olaf Trygvasson furthered the Christian conversion of Norway by luring pagan magicians to his hall under false pretenses, barring the doors and burning them alive. Some who escaped were later captured and drowned.[41]
Early secular laws against witchcraft include those promulgated by King Athelstan (924–939):
And we have ordained respecting witch-crafts, and lybacs [read lyblac "sorcery"], and morthdaeds ["murder, mortal sin"]: if any one should be thereby killed, and he could not deny it, that he be liable in his life. But if he will deny it, and at threefold ordeal shall be guilty; that he be 120 days in prison: and after that let kindred take him out, and give to the king 120 shillings, and pay the wer to his kindred, and enter into borh for him, that he evermore desist from the like.[42]
In some prosecutions for witchcraft, torture (permitted by the Roman civil law) apparently took place. However, Pope Nicholas I (866 AD), prohibited the use of torture altogether, and a similar decree may be found in the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.[10]
Later Middle Ages
[edit]
The manuals of the Roman Catholic Inquisition remained highly skeptical of witch accusations, although there was sometimes an overlap between accusations of heresy and of witchcraft, particularly when, in the 13th century, the newly formed Inquisition was commissioned to deal with the Cathars of Southern France, whose teachings were charged with including witchcraft and magic. Although it has been proposed that the witch-hunt developed in Europe from the early 14th century, after the Cathars and the Knights Templar were suppressed, this hypothesis has been rejected independently by virtually all academic historians (Cohn 1975; Kieckhefer 1976).
In 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared that Inquisition would not deal with cases of witchcraft unless they were related to heresy.[e][44] Although Pope John XXII had later authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcerers in 1320,[45] inquisitorial courts rarely dealt with witchcraft save incidentally when investigating heterodoxy.
In the case of the Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of Milan was not sure what to do with two women who, in 1384, confessed to have participated in the society around Signora Oriente or Diana. Through their confessions, both of them conveyed the traditional folk beliefs of white magic. The women were accused again in 1390, and condemned by the inquisitor. They were eventually executed by the secular arm.[46]
In a notorious case in 1425, Hermann II, Count of Celje accused his daughter-in-law Veronika of Desenice of witchcraft – and, though she was acquitted by the court, he had her murdered by drowning. The accusations of witchcraft are, in this case, considered to have been a pretext for Hermann to get rid of an "unsuitable match," Veronika being born into the lower nobility and thus "unworthy" of his son.
A Catholic figure who preached against witchcraft was popular Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444). Bernardino's sermons reveal both a phenomenon of superstitious practices and an over-reaction against them by the common people.[47] However, it is clear that Bernardino had in mind not merely the use of spells and enchantments and such like fooleries but much more serious crimes, chiefly murder and infanticide. This is clear from his much-quoted sermon of 1427, in which he says:
One of them told and confessed, without any pressure, that she had killed thirty children by bleeding them ... [and] she confessed more, saying she had killed her own son ... Answer me: does it really seem to you that someone who has killed twenty or thirty little children in such a way has done so well that when finally they are accused before the Signoria you should go to their aid and beg mercy for them?
Perhaps the most notorious witch trial in history was the trial of Joan of Arc. Although the trial was politically motivated, and the verdict later overturned, the position of Joan as a woman and an accused witch became significant factors in her execution.[48] Joan's punishment of being burned alive (victims were usually strangled before burning) was reserved solely for witches and heretics, the implication being that a burned body could not be resurrected on Judgment Day.[48]
Transition to the early modern witch-hunts
[edit]
The resurgence of witch-hunts at the end of the medieval period, taking place with at least partial support or at least tolerance on the part of the Church, was accompanied with a number of developments in Christian doctrine, for example, the recognition of the existence of witchcraft as a form of Satanic influence and its classification as a heresy. As Renaissance occultism gained traction among the educated classes, the belief in witchcraft, which in the medieval period had been part of the folk religion of the uneducated rural population at best, was incorporated into an increasingly comprehensive theology of Satan as the ultimate source of all maleficium.[f][g] These doctrinal shifts were completed in the mid-15th century, specifically in the wake of the Council of Basel and centered on the Duchy of Savoy in the western Alps,[h] leading to an early series of witch trials by both secular and ecclesiastical courts in the second half of the 15th century.[i]
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued Summis desiderantes affectibus, a Papal bull authorizing the "correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising" of devil-worshippers who have "slain infants", among other crimes. He did so at the request of inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who had been refused permission by the local bishops in Germany to investigate.[52] However, historians such as Ludwig von Pastor insist that the bull neither allowed anything new, nor was necessarily binding on Catholic consciences.[j] Three years later in 1487, Kramer published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (lit., 'Hammer against the Evildoers') which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. The book was condemned by top theologians of the Inquisition at the Faculty of Cologne for recommending illegal procedures and for being inconsistent with Catholic teaching.[54] Despite this, it was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts.[55]
In Europe, the witch-hunt craze was negligible in Spain, Poland, and Eastern Europe; conversely, it was intense in Germany, Switzerland, and France.[56]
Early Modern Europe and Colonial America
[edit]The witch trials in Early Modern Europe came in waves and then subsided. There were trials in the 15th and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into decline, before becoming a major issue again and peaking in the 17th century, particularly during the Thirty Years' War. What had previously been a belief that some people possessed supernatural abilities (which were sometimes used to protect the people), now became a sign of a pact between the people with supernatural abilities and the devil. To justify the killings, some Christians of the time and their proxy secular institutions deemed witchcraft as being associated to wild Satanic ritual parties in which there was naked dancing and cannibalistic infanticide.[57] It was also seen as heresy for going against the first of the Ten Commandments ("You shall have no other gods before me") or as violating majesty, in this case referring to the divine majesty, not the worldly.[58] Further scripture was also frequently cited, especially the Exodus decree that "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18), which many supported.
Witch-hunts were seen across early modern Europe, but the most significant area of witch-hunting in modern Europe is often considered to be central and southern Germany.[59] Germany was a late starter in terms of the numbers of trials, compared to other regions of Europe. Witch-hunts first appeared in large numbers in southern France and Switzerland during the 14th and 15th centuries. The peak years of witch-hunts in southwest Germany were from 1561 to 1670.[60] In the Catalan Pyrenees during the Kingdom of Aragon, in 1424 the Code of Ordinances of the Àneu Valleys were enacted and is the first legal text in Europe that specifically addresses the persecution of witchcraft and provides insight into medieval legislation related to the phenomenon of witchcraft.[61] The first major persecution in Europe, when witches were caught, tried, convicted, and burned in the imperial lordship of Wiesensteig in southwestern Germany, is recorded in 1563 in a pamphlet called "True and Horrifying Deeds of 63 Witches".[62] Witchcraft persecution spread to all areas of Europe. Learned European ideas about witchcraft and demonological ideas, strongly influenced the hunt for witches in the North.