Witchcraft and Magic

Peter Burke in his book, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, adopts an approach that depends
on the assumption that heroes, villains, and fools, of a culture, form a system and “reveal the
standards of that culture by surpassing them, threatening them, and falling short of them
respectively.” Even though one could find the same heroes in many different parts of Europe, Burke
warns his readers against the dangers of treating the popular culture of this period as monolithic.

Women had to ‘know their place’ in society. This is abundantly clear not only in the popular
(masculine) images of women as the villain but even from the images of the heroine. Whether
scolding, stealing, seducing, or causing bad weather, the villainous woman of the early modern
popular culture is portrayed as an intensely active person. Burke points to the preponderance of
women among the accused at witch-trials as the best evidence of the strength of popular traditions
of misogyny in the period. Even anecdotes collected in chap-books emphasised the dangers of
trusting a woman; citing examples of Eve, Delilah and Potiphar’s wife who were seen as
emotionally powerful prototypes of the deceitful female.

People also projected ‘their unacknowledged terrifying desires’ on to the witch. This can be seen in
her portrayal as a traitor within the gates; blaspheming against Christianity, harming neighbours,
eating children, and engaging in sex orgies with the demon. Burke also points to the sharp increase
in witch-prosecutions in the sixteenth century and proposes that the stereotype of an old woman
with supernatural (harmful) powers was a popular belief going back to the middle ages. However,
the stereotype of a witch as a heretic or blasphemer, in league with the Devil, was a learned belief to
which ordinary people were converted only gradually. Despite Russia being immune from the great
witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, we see the appearance of Baba Yaga—a
hideous old woman with an iron nose who flew through the air in a mortar and ate children—in
Russian folklore. What is worth highlighting here is the absence of the idea of a pact between the
old woman and the devil. Superhuman powers were a recurrent feature of outlaw biography and
villains were believed to have them because they were helped by the Devil.

Common in traditional societies, there was an attitude of distrust towards everyone outside a small
circle of friends and relatives. This came from a view of the world as a place of ‘limited good’
where one could only prosper at another’s expense. However, in order to air the hostilities created
by the exiting social order, with all its injustices and deprivations, people needed outsiders (hate
figures like witches, Turks and Jews). This served as an outlet to express the tensions within the
community.

The growing split between learned and popular culture is obvious in the case of witches. In the first
phase of reform, 1500-1650, magic was denounced as pagan survival. Protestants accused Catholics
of practising a magical religion while Catholic reformers wanted to purge popular culture of spells
and charms. Witches were hunted in both Catholic and Protestant countries not because they were
seen to do harm, but because they were heretics and worshippers of goddesses like Diana and
Holde. The second phase of reform, 1650-1800, saw changes in the meaning of words like
‘superstition’; which is also a sensitive indicator of much wider changes in attitude. Before 1650,
the dominant meaning was ‘false religion’, as in phrases like ‘the Mahometan superstition’. After
1650, however, the dominant meaning of the term came to be ‘irrational fears’. Witch-trials
declined in England and France in the late seventeenth century because the magistrates no longer
took witchcraft seriously whereas in the small towns of south-west Germany magistrates no longer
believed themselves capable of identifying witches. Witch-trials in Poland did not decline until the
next century. The withdrawal from popular culture took place at different speeds in different parts of
Europe.

All these witch-hunts, however, were less about witchcraft and more about who would control the
power that the spiritual world had to offer. The classic witch of prescriptive literature— hiding
men’s phalluses—was largely the stuff of fantasy, both interesting and dangerous. But that does not
mean we should forget the many women and men who attempted to manipulate the spiritual world
for power and profit. In a way, in Renaissance, every town and village needed its witches and
magicians, for they provided a crucial source of the absolute necessities of Renaissance society:
honour, love, health, and power.

Belief in magic, according to James A. Sharpe, was one of the distinctive features in the intellectual
life of Europe in the era of the Reformation. The dividing lines between magic and witchcraft in
early modern Europe were hard to define. Generally, “magic” was the label attached to the activities
of occult practitioners who were upper class, educated, and male; while “witchcraft” was used to
describe the activities of those occult practitioners who were poor, uneducated, and female.

In 1550, most educated Europeans believed in the possibility of magic and witchcraft but by 1750
had discarded magic and witchcraft. Science had replaced magic as the way in which the world was
understood. However, one cannot simply attribute the end of elite belief in witchcraft to the
scientific revolution.

There were currents in the Christian thinking of the period which helped in discarding popular
subscription to ideas of witchcraft and magic. A skeptical line, found among sixteenth century
writers such as Scot, was to question the accuracy of translation of the passages related to witchcraft
from the Bible, and to question the comparability of scriptural and the early modern European witch
—what was new was not scientific thinking but a more widespread willingness to accept such
arguments. A welcome contribution to this willingness was an awareness that in many areas judges
were becoming increasingly unwilling to convict in witchcraft trials.

In fact, a number of factors explain the elite withdrawal from belief in witchcraft and magic over
western and central Europe in the decades around 1700. However, the most potent of them, perhaps,
was plain snobbery. Among the lower orders, on the other hand, the fear of the malefic witch and
trust in the cunning man or woman persisted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Edward Bever, in his study Witchcraft, Female Aggression, and Power in the Early Modern
Community, analyses the symbiotic relationship between women and witchcraft in history.
According to him, the conscious and unconscious behaviours associated with witchcraft were also a
source of power. Women, in the late Medieval and early modern period, were particularly likely to
utilise this source of power because: (1) important aspects of it fell within the private domain of
home (food preparation and the tending of social relations), (2) they couldn't use use other sources
of power such as overt violence and legal processes, and (3) it played to their innate and learned
strengths (sensitivity to and manipulation of emotional signals).

Innumerable women, innocent of inflicting conscious or unconscious harm, were victimised by the
campaign against witchcraft. The central dynamic of witchcraft, however, was not this process of
victimisation—it was the struggle for power between the two genders of European society. Witches
used a range of powers from unconscious expressions of anger to premeditated use of poisons to
bring someone to book. While their accusers were men and women, the suspects were
overwhelmingly female. The trials, therefore, on balance, seem to have diminished women’s power
compared to men’s. This, in fact, literally disarmed women of their source of power and helped
precipitate the differential in coercive power between men and women, probably making a crucial
contribution to the “domestication” of women in the early modern period.

Bibliography

Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978.

Sharpe, J.A., “Magic and Witchcraft”, A Companion to the Reformation World, ed.R.Po-chia Hsia,
Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Ruggiero, Guido, “Witchcraft and Magic”, A Companion to the Reformation World, Wiley-
Blackwell, 2006.

Hill, Christopher, “Science and Magic”, The Collected Essay of Christopher Hill, University of
Massachusetts Press, 1985.

Bever, Edward, “Witchcraft, Female Aggression, and Power in the Early Modern Community”,
Journal of Social History, Vol.35, Oxford University Press.