Introduction to a History of Witchcraft in Europe

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Perhaps the easiest way to approach the confusion and discrepancies that exist between modern pagan witchcraft and historical witchcraft is to look at the subject in terms of the two classical systems of thought that underpin each type of witchcraft. Whilst the magical element of Wicca is ultimately a child of the Neo-Platonic Renaissance, historical witchcraft beliefs had their foundations in medieval Aristotelian thought. The Aristotelian scholars of the Middle Ages believed that magic could only be performed with the aid of demons, hence the accusation that all witchcraft was the work of the Devil. The Renaissance thinkers, however, postulated that magic was a natural science and that absolutely no demons were necessary in order for humans to relate magically to their environment. Whilst Neo-Platonism posited a natural explanation for magic, Aristotelianism posited a supernatural explanation.

The Neo-Platonic system of thought became the dominant one among occultists who, since the Renaissance, have largely viewed the practice of magic in Neo-Platonic terms as an entirely natural phenomenon. In modern Wicca this Neo-Platonic occult philosophy of Natural Magic has found a bedfellow in the pantheistic pagan spirituality born out of the eighteenth-century Romantic movement. Wicca has given structure to a religious impulse that animates and imbues the whole of the natural world with a vital life force that moves in cycles of both generation and destruction and permeates and connects every living being. Gods, goddesses, faeries and spirits are viewed either as personifications of this holistic life force or as a non-material entities arising from nature. There is no particular concept of good and evil, and man-made evils are generally seen as the result of alienation from nature and the life force that sustains it.

This witchcraft is a whole world (and system of thought) away from the witchcraft that began to take shape under the dominant Aristotelian worldview of the Christian Middle Ages and eventually settled into its classic stereotypical from towards the end of the fifteenth century. It is this view of witchcraft with which we will concern ourselves from now on. In this view, the witch was believed to make a pact with the Devil, whom she worshipped at nocturnal gatherings known as the Sabbat (or Sabbath), which usually took place in some wild and remote area or cave. She flew to the Sabbat with her fellow witches, usually on a broomstick, and there they paid homage to the Devil, whom they worshipped. They invoked demons, cooked up gruesome feasts consisting largely of the flesh of unbaptised babies, and then extinguished the lights and copulated indiscriminately with whomever was closest to hand. The Devil himself, or one of his lesser demons, presided over these Sabbats, and he usually appeared in the form of a man described as being black or dressed in black. At other times he appeared in the form of a goat, a dog, a cat, a toad, or some other animal. The Devil baptised his witches with a special identifying mark, known as the Devil's Mark, and they served him by committing various acts of maleficia, malicious and harmful sorcery, which usually took the form of bewitching their neighbors' cattle or children, blasting crops, and causing illness and death in their local communities. The witches gained their magical abilities from the Devil and were often aided in their destructive work by demons, who frequently took the form of familiars, or magical pets.

Whilst the ideological foundations for this witchcraft lie in the Middle Ages, it was not a medieval invention. It occurs both before and after the medieval era. Belief in witchcraft can be traced back into antiquity and the widespread persecution of witches popularly known as the Witch Craze did not get under way in earnest until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of us are familiar with the so-called 'Burning Times', in which those accused of witchcraft were tortured and burnt at the stake. The seemingly epidemic proportions of these executions  has led to the term 'craze' being applied to these outbreaks of witch-hunting, which appear to the modern observer to have been the result of some form of mass hysteria. To a large extent, the Witch Craze was a Western European phenomenon and witchcraft developed very differently in Western Europe than it did in Britain and the peripheral regions of Europe. In fact, the main force of the Witch Craze was concentrated within a relatively small central band of Western Europe encompassing France and Germany. The historian Robert Thurston has observed that 'one could draw a circle within a 300-mile radius around Strasbourg that would encompass well over 50 per cent of all witch trials'.

Historians have long sought to explain why the Witch Craze took place when and where it did. It is a phenomenon peculiar to a particular moment in European history, yet the belief in witchcraft was nothing new, and certainly not limited to Europe. The historical study of witchcraft has focused primarily on piecing together the many elements of European witch beliefs that ultimately combined to cause the deaths of an estimated 40,000 people for the alleged 'crime' of witchcraft during the Witch Craze. Many functional theories have been put forward to try to explain the Witch Craze, from social, economic and religious strife to the oppression of women and the need to find scapegoats on whom to blame misfortunes and natural disasters. While all these theories have a valid role to play in understanding the many factors that contributed to both the rise of witch-hunting in general and individual witch-hunts in particular, none of them satisfactorily explains the entire phenomenon. There is no 'one size fits all' theory that adequately covers the history of European witchcraft. Modern historians have concentrated on examining the relationships between the many cultural, religious and legal strands that gradually accumulated and evolved throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period and that created the unique set of conditions which allowed the Witch Craze to find form. Both the classic stereotype of the witch that developed on the Continent and the Devil she was alleged to serve were composite figures drawn from a number of different ideological and cultural sources, and fed by a variety of changes in the legal and social make-up of European society over a number of centuries. The belief in witchcraft did not fully exist in the classic, stereotypical from until the end of the fifteenth century, and it is to the preceding centuries that historians must look in order to unearth the origins of the witch beliefs that laid the foundations for the Witch Craze.

Witches and witchcraft have always been present in society in one form or another. In early medieval Europe common sorcerers and cunning folk were largely tolerated as part of the social fabric of daily life. Most jurisdictions had laws against using magic to inflict harm or cause death but prosecutions were not widespread. By the late medieval period and into the early modern period, however, witchcraft had taken on a very new and distinct meaning. The causes for this change in perception were mainly rooted in a new paranoia that was shaking the foundations of European society. Between the years 1000 and 1400 Europe underwent a major transformation in its social and political outlook. The military threat posed by invading Muslim armies, the split with the eastern Orthodox Church, the rise of heresy and the devastating arrival of the Black Death all combined to create a new siege mentality in the European psyche that would radically alter many aspects of social, spiritual and political life. Medieval Europe perceived itself as under attack and the later Middle ages were overflowing with conspiracy theories; Jews, lepers, heretics and infidels were all targeted as the new 'enemies from within', plotting to destroy European Christendom in a diabolical conspiracy engineered by Satan himself. Gradually the figure of the witch began to emerge as the ultimate symbol of this covert evil working against society from within and the paranoia of the Middle Ages was carried over into the early modern period, sustained and propelled by a deep-seated fear of the Devil.

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The Parallel Universes Theory in the Middle Ages

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 In 1277, Etienne Tempier was the bishop of Paris, and there was talk that, at the Sorbonne, members of the arts faculty - the professors of the non-theological side of the school - were teaching heretical ideas, mostly derived from Aristotle's writings. The Pope himself, a former Sorbonne theology professor, had written to ask Tempier to look into these rumors.

The bishop responded with a list of 219 propositions that he condemned as heretical. Any arts faculty who taught them would be excommunicated from the church and would lose their livelihoods as professors.

This 13th century disagreement between two university departments, arts and theology, would prompt medieval thinkers to consider ideas that might seem surprisingly modern. By rejecting a key Aristotelian principle, Tempier inspired later medieval scholars to develop a multiverse theory and to consider the possibilities of faraway planets and alien beings. From knocking out of scientific dogma, new ideas began to grow.

In the 19th century, Pierre Duhem, a scientist and historian, re-examined the history of medieval scientific thought and came up with a controversial thesis: there was, essentially, no "scientific revolution" during the Renaissance, only a continuation of work that was already happening in the "dark ages" of medieval thought. In particular, Duhem thought that Tempier's 1277 condemnations liberated Europe's Christian thinkers from Aristotle and opened up the way to the development of modern science.

Conventional historians sometimes take a skeptical view of Duhem, but in the case of medieval multiverses, at least, it's possible to follow a trail from one of Tempier's condemnations to ideas that emerged more than a century later about infinite worlds, full of alien creatures.

Among the ideas that Tempier condemned was a principle of Aristotelian thought that held that the "first cause" (or, as medieval scholars would have said, God) could not have made more than one world. The logic went something like this: Earth was among the world's four key elements, and one of its principles was that it moved towards the center of the world. If there was a neighboring world to ours, though, with earth at its center, that earth wouldn't be moving towards the center of our world. Since that violated the rules of how earth behaved, there could only be one world.

To Tempier, this idea went against a key theological principle: God was all-powerful and could accomplish whatever he willed. Since there couldn't be limits to God's power, there could be multiple worlds, if he wanted to make them.

Some medieval thinkers took this as a challenge. They started to look more closely, for instance, at previous Aramaic comments on Aristotle and considered what else might be possible. They found new ideas that were outside the bounds of the Aristotelian physics of the day.

Richard of Middleton, for instance, who lived in the second half of the 13th century, responded to Tempier by affirming that it could be possible to have more than one universe: "God could have and could still now create another universe." He tried to reconcile this with Aristotelian thought by arguing that the matter of a second world would stay in its own separate universe, and earth elements would gather at the center of each.

A later scholar, William of Ware, developed this idea further. What did it mean to talk about another world, he wondered? He didn't think it was possible to have two neighboring universes: by definition, the universe should include all the creatures ever made. So how could there be more than one? He argued instead that multiple worlds would have to be entirely separate, with no way of interacting - what today we might think of as parallel universes.

By the 15th century, medieval ideas about the universe had spun far from Aristotle's idea of a single world, with earth concentrating at the center. The theologian and astronomer Nicholas of Cusa, who lived from 1410 to 1464, believed that if you were able to leave the earth, you would find multiple luminous bodies existing alongside our own world - far-off stars, planets and moons. He ever went so far as to imagine that these planets might be inhabited: he thought the sun might have bright, intellectual inhabitants, whereas the moon might have a "lunatic" population. This was still about a century before Galileo would famously reject the idea of a geocentric world and put the sun in the middle of the universe.

These medieval thinkers were working from a religious idea about divide power. But this line of inquiry prompted a scientific openness, too, to different ideas about the physical world and how it might work. Following Tempier's prompt led medieval scholars to some surprisingly modern ideas about parallel universes and exoplanets.

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