MODERN WITCHCRAFT, PT. 3.
by Randall S. Frederick
As should be obvious, in light of the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the dualism of Catharism, people were interested in Satan. If God was all-powerful and had created the world, hearing about a rival to God would have attracted a lot of attention. If God created, could Satan destroy? Were God and Satan the same or different interpretations of the same story? With so many discoveries being made in science and culture, what might the Catholic Church be hiding from the world? These were very real, very pressing questions from the 13th through 15th centuries and in the absence of informed doctrine, all of Europe began to fill the void with folk religion. Martin Luther, writing the theses he would nail to the church door in Wittenburg, felt that Satan was a very real presence, even tangibly so in his friar’s cell. Luther, over the course of his life, will speak of how genuine a fear Satan was for him – as real as the gnomes, sprites, fairies, and forest creatures his parents assured him would kill him if he didn’t go to sleep as a child or obey their parental orders. Which is to say, as Europe and the known world began to ruminate on Catharism’s proposal – that Satan was a true rival to God, demons the equal of any angel – fear of and interest in Satan began to be a burgeoning enterprise for those who traded in religion.
French historian Jean Delumeau believes that the end of the Middle Ages and beginnings of the early Modern Period created widespread fear, a kind of mass pathology, among Western Europe. The world was simply changing too fast for individuals to adapt, creating residual panic. This fear resulted from social, economic, political, and religious transformations taking place at the time and the anxiety was, in some sense, “birth pangs” for Modernity. This fear was intense for lower, even some middling classes of people who perceived the changes as a threat to their well being. Having come from poverty and looking to eke out a living, they were now being told that the assumptions of survival in the world as they knew it were wrong because, lo and behold, the world itself was entirely different – much larger, much more intelligent, much more lucrative. The disparity between present circumstance and the largeness of the world still causes anxiety for us today, how much more then? Bandits, criminals, vagrants, those on the margins of society all represented another form of this discontent. They broke the laws and thumbed their noses at tradition because te rules no longer applied. Albert Einstein, speaking of the Atomic Age, said that “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.” The world had changed and so would they. It is ironic that these forms of resistance increased the degree of anxiety of their contemporaries, ratcheting the world toward pandemic social violence. A violence that, ultimately, most affected those at the bottom of society.
Satan, the Husband of Witches.
All fears must be embodied at some point. According to Delumeau, fear was directed against certain social groups for the betterment of the oppressor. Persecution was an antidote to discontent redirected at Jews, lepers, Muslims, women – especially old women, heretics, and groups already excluded from the construction of the nation. These persecutions diverted attention away from more pressing problems like inflation and taxation, war, crime, and other social ills by shifting the blame (for our purposes, witches) to diabolical conspiracies; state-supported scapegoating strengthened the institutions and coercive mechanisms of the nation-state. Before discussing how women were half the problem by virtue of their birth, we must comment on Satan.
The Satan of Hebrew scripture is ambivalent; he is an adversary of God, certainly, but he is also an agent of God’s providence and restrained in power. The story of Job, for instance, records that Satan is a busy walking the Earth, observing the righteous. He confronts God on the qualities of Job and is allowed to test Job, even kill Job’s family, but restrained from taking the life of a righteous man. In the story, he and his role in God’s purposes is vague, even ambiguous. Scattered across the rest of Hebrew scripture, Satan is not the tempter or challenger to the one depicted in the Christian scriptures. There, he is depicted as a tempter who reinterprets scripture and walks about, at times, “as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” By the time of John’s revelations at the end of the first century, Satan can be seen working through the political structures of Rome, making victims of Christians. He will one day lead a rebellion against God with a host of other fallen angels who become, in time, dark spirits known as demons. If anything, we might say that looking over the story Satan begins to collect power over time. If Job is the oldest story in the Hebrew canon and Revelation the close of the Christian canon, there is a decided difference between the passive wayward angel with a grudge against humanity and the malevolent dragon who eats babies and overthrows nations that he will one day become. Seen on a continuum, we might say that the Satan of the Middle Ages is darker and testing the limits of evil in the world though not a true rival of God just yet. Nevertheless, because of Catharism, there existed the idea of Satan as a fully developed rival of God who had eluded capture and confused the whole world into believing he did not exist but was here now, among the godly people of Europe, as a ravening wolf. Beliefs in the devil and his demonic army really developed in early Christianity and again in the Middle Ages when those original documents were being discovered in libraries as the channels of information and trade unveiled new worlds. Images of the devil during this period and iconographic representations varied a great deal, contributing to the mercurial appearance of that slippery serpent, Satan.
Stepping back, we might also say that the differences in depiction and appearance vary so much because of the relatively slow construction over time towards a final image of a captain of demons with horns, hooves, glowing red skin, the beard of a Spaniard, and pitchfork as in Dante’s Inferno. Whatever the appearance, perhaps even because of the elusive appearance, the devil came to play an important role in the beliefs of most Europeans, linked to a range of activities. Chief among these activities was as a ringleader of sexual misconduct among women.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII announced that those in league with the devil, satanists, were meeting regularly with demons and casting spells to destroy the crops of Germany, aborting infants, causing mischief and curious occurrences, subverting authority by way of criminal activity, and spreading darkness throughout the world. Pope Innocent asked two Dominican friars, Heinrich Kramer (a papal inquisitor of sorcerers from Innsbruck) and Jacob Sprenger to publish a full report on suspected witchcraft. Two years later, they had produced the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”) to establish means of discovering, accusing, revealing, and ultimately punishing witches wherever they might be found. Average Christians, not just the armies of a nation or of the Church, had an obligation to defend their lands by hunting and killing those who opposed God. Conveniently, this united pockets of people under a national banner for a spiritual purpose.
The Malleus told frightening tales, read publicly, of women who would have sex with any convenient demon or passerby, kill their babies, even steal penises. One such story concludes with the chilling reminder, “what is to be thought of those witches who collect as many as twenty or thirty members together, put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat oat and corn?” Given the novelty of the Malleus and the tales contained therein, it would be reprinted thirteen times in the next four decades alone and define the crime of witchcraft more than any sermon, tract, political or philosophical treatise, or papal edict.
Much of the book offers tricks to confuse a witch’s testimony and suggested tests for a judge or prosecutor to reveal a defendant’s guilt and complicity with the devil. The authors suggested, for instance, that a suspect be brought into court backwards to minimize any opportunity to cast dangerous spells or hexes on officials, then to be stripped completely so that their body could be inspected for curious moles or birthmarks – a telltale sign of consort with demons.
by Randall S. Frederick
As should be obvious, in light of the writings of Thomas Aquinas and the dualism of Catharism, people were interested in Satan. If God was all-powerful and had created the world, hearing about a rival to God would have attracted a lot of attention. If God created, could Satan destroy? Were God and Satan the same or different interpretations of the same story? With so many discoveries being made in science and culture, what might the Catholic Church be hiding from the world? These were very real, very pressing questions from the 13th through 15th centuries and in the absence of informed doctrine, all of Europe began to fill the void with folk religion. Martin Luther, writing the theses he would nail to the church door in Wittenburg, felt that Satan was a very real presence, even tangibly so in his friar’s cell. Luther, over the course of his life, will speak of how genuine a fear Satan was for him – as real as the gnomes, sprites, fairies, and forest creatures his parents assured him would kill him if he didn’t go to sleep as a child or obey their parental orders. Which is to say, as Europe and the known world began to ruminate on Catharism’s proposal – that Satan was a true rival to God, demons the equal of any angel – fear of and interest in Satan began to be a burgeoning enterprise for those who traded in religion.
French historian Jean Delumeau believes that the end of the Middle Ages and beginnings of the early Modern Period created widespread fear, a kind of mass pathology, among Western Europe. The world was simply changing too fast for individuals to adapt, creating residual panic. This fear resulted from social, economic, political, and religious transformations taking place at the time and the anxiety was, in some sense, “birth pangs” for Modernity. This fear was intense for lower, even some middling classes of people who perceived the changes as a threat to their well being. Having come from poverty and looking to eke out a living, they were now being told that the assumptions of survival in the world as they knew it were wrong because, lo and behold, the world itself was entirely different – much larger, much more intelligent, much more lucrative. The disparity between present circumstance and the largeness of the world still causes anxiety for us today, how much more then? Bandits, criminals, vagrants, those on the margins of society all represented another form of this discontent. They broke the laws and thumbed their noses at tradition because te rules no longer applied. Albert Einstein, speaking of the Atomic Age, said that “no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.” The world had changed and so would they. It is ironic that these forms of resistance increased the degree of anxiety of their contemporaries, ratcheting the world toward pandemic social violence. A violence that, ultimately, most affected those at the bottom of society.
Satan, the Husband of Witches.
All fears must be embodied at some point. According to Delumeau, fear was directed against certain social groups for the betterment of the oppressor. Persecution was an antidote to discontent redirected at Jews, lepers, Muslims, women – especially old women, heretics, and groups already excluded from the construction of the nation. These persecutions diverted attention away from more pressing problems like inflation and taxation, war, crime, and other social ills by shifting the blame (for our purposes, witches) to diabolical conspiracies; state-supported scapegoating strengthened the institutions and coercive mechanisms of the nation-state. Before discussing how women were half the problem by virtue of their birth, we must comment on Satan.
The Satan of Hebrew scripture is ambivalent; he is an adversary of God, certainly, but he is also an agent of God’s providence and restrained in power. The story of Job, for instance, records that Satan is a busy walking the Earth, observing the righteous. He confronts God on the qualities of Job and is allowed to test Job, even kill Job’s family, but restrained from taking the life of a righteous man. In the story, he and his role in God’s purposes is vague, even ambiguous. Scattered across the rest of Hebrew scripture, Satan is not the tempter or challenger to the one depicted in the Christian scriptures. There, he is depicted as a tempter who reinterprets scripture and walks about, at times, “as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” By the time of John’s revelations at the end of the first century, Satan can be seen working through the political structures of Rome, making victims of Christians. He will one day lead a rebellion against God with a host of other fallen angels who become, in time, dark spirits known as demons. If anything, we might say that looking over the story Satan begins to collect power over time. If Job is the oldest story in the Hebrew canon and Revelation the close of the Christian canon, there is a decided difference between the passive wayward angel with a grudge against humanity and the malevolent dragon who eats babies and overthrows nations that he will one day become. Seen on a continuum, we might say that the Satan of the Middle Ages is darker and testing the limits of evil in the world though not a true rival of God just yet. Nevertheless, because of Catharism, there existed the idea of Satan as a fully developed rival of God who had eluded capture and confused the whole world into believing he did not exist but was here now, among the godly people of Europe, as a ravening wolf. Beliefs in the devil and his demonic army really developed in early Christianity and again in the Middle Ages when those original documents were being discovered in libraries as the channels of information and trade unveiled new worlds. Images of the devil during this period and iconographic representations varied a great deal, contributing to the mercurial appearance of that slippery serpent, Satan.
Stepping back, we might also say that the differences in depiction and appearance vary so much because of the relatively slow construction over time towards a final image of a captain of demons with horns, hooves, glowing red skin, the beard of a Spaniard, and pitchfork as in Dante’s Inferno. Whatever the appearance, perhaps even because of the elusive appearance, the devil came to play an important role in the beliefs of most Europeans, linked to a range of activities. Chief among these activities was as a ringleader of sexual misconduct among women.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII announced that those in league with the devil, satanists, were meeting regularly with demons and casting spells to destroy the crops of Germany, aborting infants, causing mischief and curious occurrences, subverting authority by way of criminal activity, and spreading darkness throughout the world. Pope Innocent asked two Dominican friars, Heinrich Kramer (a papal inquisitor of sorcerers from Innsbruck) and Jacob Sprenger to publish a full report on suspected witchcraft. Two years later, they had produced the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”) to establish means of discovering, accusing, revealing, and ultimately punishing witches wherever they might be found. Average Christians, not just the armies of a nation or of the Church, had an obligation to defend their lands by hunting and killing those who opposed God. Conveniently, this united pockets of people under a national banner for a spiritual purpose.
The Malleus told frightening tales, read publicly, of women who would have sex with any convenient demon or passerby, kill their babies, even steal penises. One such story concludes with the chilling reminder, “what is to be thought of those witches who collect as many as twenty or thirty members together, put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat oat and corn?” Given the novelty of the Malleus and the tales contained therein, it would be reprinted thirteen times in the next four decades alone and define the crime of witchcraft more than any sermon, tract, political or philosophical treatise, or papal edict.
Much of the book offers tricks to confuse a witch’s testimony and suggested tests for a judge or prosecutor to reveal a defendant’s guilt and complicity with the devil. The authors suggested, for instance, that a suspect be brought into court backwards to minimize any opportunity to cast dangerous spells or hexes on officials, then to be stripped completely so that their body could be inspected for curious moles or birthmarks – a telltale sign of consort with demons.