Witchcraft; divination; swearing vows at wells, trees and stones; and gathering herbs using non-Christian incantations. The penances imposed for disobeying were not very severe and do not seem to have discouraged the errant Pagans. Little had changed by the eleventh century when King Canute issued laws against Heathenism or Paganism.
We earnestly forbid every Heathenism: Heathenism is, that men worship idols; that is, that they worship Heathen Gods, and the Sun or the Moon, fire or rivers, water-wells or stones, or forest trees of any kind; or love Witchcraft.6
In other parts of Europe, it was the Goddess who proved hard to suppress. To satisfy those who leaned towards the female aspect of the Divine, in the fifth century the Christian Church authorized the veneration of the Virgin Mary. She was neither Goddess nor entirely human, but something in between, the Panagia Theotokus or Mother of God. This did not satisfy those of a more Pagan outlook. Bishops complained that the Goddess continued to be worshipped under the names of Diana and Herodias. In the tenth century the Bishop of Verona in Italy complained that many people were claiming Herodias as their Queen or Goddess and declaring that a third of the world worshipped her.7
Church and Devil
Initially, the penalties for Witchcraft were relatively mild. The picture began to change in the thirteenth century when the Church formally declared Witchcraft to be a heresy. As all good Christians knew, the heretics were worshippers of the Devil. All the religious and magical practices on which the Catholic Church did not bestow its blessings – other Christian sects, Paganism and magic – were now lumped together. Whatever their aims and virtues, they were declared to be Devil worship. The Christian Church was Devil-obsessed. Despite some setbacks, the first 1,000 years of the Church’s history had been a story of success and increasing power. Now, with the rise of Islam in the East and growing intellectual scepticism in the West, the Christian Church was losing its grip. If the Church’s power was being challenged, there could only be one challenger, for the Church was the Church of God.
All rural communities had their wise women and cunning men who would act as doctors and midwives, who would cure a sick cow, solve the love problems of young men and women, advise those in distress and perform weather magic. Until officialdom espoused the cause of Witch-hunting, any actions against Witches tended to be local activities of the spontaneous, lynch-mob sort which occur when times are hard or when things go wrong in people’s lives and they want someone to blame. Psychologists talk about locus of control. Locus is Latin for place. People with an external locus of control will tend to attribute the causes of their good and bad fortune to people or things outside themselves. Those with an internal locus of control tend to think that they make their own destiny. If things go wrong, it is their own fault and if things go well, it is because they have talent or have worked hard.
Simple peoples tend to have an external locus of control. They ascribe the good and bad things that happen to them, not to their own actions, but to the actions of outside forces – spirits, angels, saints, Gods, demons, ghosts. Medieval Christians tended to ascribe good events in their lives to the work of God and bad events to the work of the Devil. The Devil was believed to need human servants to effect his unscrupulous desires. When something went wrong in people’s life, they looked for someone who could be acting as the Devil’s agent – a practitioner of maleficium, a Witch.
In the main, the accusations made against Witches are those which express the fears of a largely agricultural society – blighting crops; causing animals to die or miscarry; causing illness, miscarriage and death in human beings; and raising storms. These are the negative uses of the powers of the Witch that on the other hand could be used beneficially to produce good harvests, cure sick animals and people, increase fertility of animals and humans, and produce rain in drought. From the fifteenth century on, however, there were also political accusations. Witches were accused of undermining Church and state.
Despite fierce attempts to persecute those Christians whose views did not accord with Catholicism, the heretical sects which later transmuted into the Protestant movement flourished and grew strong. Nowhere was Protestantism stronger than in Germany. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther, an ex-monk, nailed to his church door a list of accusations against the corruption of a Church which took money from people to buy time off from Hell in a form of after-death insurance. It was in strife-ridden Germany that the evil madness of the Witch-hunts began. In 1484, eight years before Christopher Columbus sailed westward to find America, Pope Innocent III issued a Papal Bull8 denouncing Witchcraft and declaring that Witches were blighting fertility by associating with demons. The Bull authorised the Dominican priests Heinrich Kramer and James Sprengler to prosecute Witches throughout Northern Germany. This was followed in 1486 by the publication by Kramer and Sprengler of what became the bible of the inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witchcraft. This was an evil-minded diatribe against women, who were seen as more likely to be Witches, and was full of the sadistic pornographic fantasies of two celibates. It ends with recommendations on how to conduct judicial proceedings against Witches which are nothing less than an official blueprint for torture and murder. These were the opening moves which led to the insanity of the persecutions which swept Europe and later America. The Malleus Maleficarum was translated from Latin into a number of European languages and was an immediate best-seller across Europe. There were nine reprints before 1500, a further five by 1520, and a further 16 editions by 1669.
Church approval made Witch denouncement and Witch persecutions a worthy activity. The fact that the property of condemned Witches was confiscated and distributed to the accusers and persecutors was another incentive. In England, Witch-hunting was a less popular pastime than in mainland Europe. English Witch persecutions, although bad, never reached the severity of their Continental or Scottish counterparts. In most European countries, the penalty for Witchcraft was burning at the stake and confessions were extracted by horrendous torture. In England, death was by hanging. Officially, physical torture was illegal, although the English magistrates did permit more sophisticated forms of psychological torture such as sleep-deprivation. Another saving factor was that the English Protestant Church had broken away from the Catholic Church in the mid-sixteenth century and was less affected by Papal pronouncements. The English attitude to Witches was also influenced by rationalists who did not subscribe to the devil-mongering theories of the Continent. No English edition of Malleus Maleficarum appeared until 1584 and, in the same year, an altogether more psychologically healthy work was published by the Englishman Reginald Scot – The Discoverie of Witchcraft.9 This was an unusual book for the time, written from the point of view of a sceptic. Scot’s book made explicit the connection between ritual magic and Witchcraft and included both Witchcraft practices and magical rites. It also includes some amusing accounts of conjuring tricks.
Overall in Europe, between 150,000 and 200,000 people were executed as Witches; of these around 100,000 came from Germany. The extent to which those accused in the Witch trials were practising ancient forms of Paganism or were village wise women or cunning men is impossible to estimate. It is likely that the majority of those tortured and killed were the victims of the fears and fantasies of a superstitious age – the unusual, the eccentric, those with enemies wanting to settle old scores, and those whose names were blurted out by pitiful torture victims in their desperation to bring an end to their pain.
Fortunately, the New World largely escaped this madness. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the evil of the Witch-hunts crossed the Atlantic to America. It was in the Puritan settlement of Salem, Massachusetts, that the greatest outbreak of Witch hunting began. Most of those accused were the victims of maliciousness and hysteria. Altogether 141 people were arrested, of whom 19 were hanged. One, 81-year-old Giles Corey, who refused to confess to Witchcraft, was crushed to death beneath a wooden plank piled with rocks.
Giles Corey died a martyr, not for Wicca, for this does not seem to have been his faith; but to the powers of irrationality and hate. These powers are still all too alive in the world today.
The Return of the Pagan
Although Pagan religion had been suppressed by the Christian Church, Pagan culture had not. This was preserved in the culture of the country people. Their shrines had been made over to another God, but folk