The Reality of Witchcraft Practices in Early Modern

Europe
By Jo Hedesan. Published in Esoteric Coffeehouse www.esotericoffeehouse.com on 17 Feb 2009.

Everyone remembers the witch hunts of the 1500 and 1600s as an ugly chapter of
Western history. Thousands of so-called witches were burned, drowned, or tortured in
an attempt to get rid of what the Inquisitors called ‘devil worship’. Today, we rarely
believe that the witches were in league with the devil. In fact, during the early 20th
century, scholars thought that witchcraft itself was a complete invention of the witch
hunters (1). Even when some reality to the phenomenon was admitted, witch beliefs
were dismissed as the matter of ‘female hysteria’ or peasant superstition (2).
Beginning with the 1960s and 70s, scholars began to consider witchcraft as more than
a fiction of the Inquisition, and concentrated on analyzing its meaning for the peasant
society (3), (4). Yet even this attempt was marred by a tendency of dismissing
witchcraft as pure imagination.

If most scholarship believed witchcraft had no reality to it, there was one early
dissenting voice: Margaret Murray, who maintained in 1926 that witchcraft was real,
and that it actually represented a European-wide pagan religion dedicated to a horned
god identifiable as Janus or Cernunnos (5). The medieval civilization was thus
divided into the true Christians and the pagan “secret society” that adopted
Christianity only as a facade. In an era of rationalism, numerous scholars rejected
Murray’s work as pure fantasy (6).

Murray may have used her imagination to embellish the facts, but this does not
necessarily mean that the whole phenomenon of witchcraft was imaginary. However,
it was not until Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark studies that scholars began to really
consider this possibility.

Carlo Ginzburg, an Italian scholar, discovered in the 1960s a previously unknown

group of “witches” persecuted in the 1600s. The so-called benandanti (the “good
travelers”) were a group of mostly male peasants in northern Italy (7). According to
their freely given accounts, they met four times a year to fight the evil witches (called
stregoni) in ritualistic battles. They maintained that this activity helped maintain the
fertility of their lands. They further said that they traveled to their battlefield in spirit,
riding on the back of hares or cats. The other side, they argued, were the evil ones;
they destroyed crops and cast spell on children.

Inquisitors did not know what to make of this strange story. Initially, they considered
the benandanti a heretic group and condemned some of them to a few months in
prison. Yet the trials continued on for about fifty years, and under progressive
pressure, finally in 1634 the benandanti admitted they were the same with the evil
witches, and that they were actually worshipping the devil. Their confession became
strikingly similar to the classical witchcraft descriptions of the Sabbath, including
sexual intercourses and killing of children. This case led Ginzburg to maintain that
witchcraft was indeed a real event, except that it wasn’t the ‘demonic’ worship that
Inquisitors made of it. Witchcraft was a remnant of pagan beliefs amongst the Italian
peasantry, which was forcefully set into a ‘straightjacket’ by theology-influenced
Inquisitors.

Ginzburg did not stop here. In a later book, he set to show how the case of benandanti
was not an isolated case, and that in fact there were many examples of the type of
‘witchcraft’ the Italian cult represented (8). Supported by the famous historian of
religion Mircea Eliade, Ginzburg talked about similar ‘secret’ groups from Greece,
Romania, Hungary, and Corsica (9). He then concluded that the beliefs and practices
these groups extolled were of shamanistic origin. Shamanism had been thoroughly
analysed in the classical work on the topic by Eliade (10). Ginzburg concluded that
there was a structural similitude between shamanism and the benandanti and other
groups. He considered that Scythians brought shamanistic beliefs from Asia into
Europe sometime around 1000 BC. He furthermore maintained that the biological
structure of human beings would make their religious experiences similar (11).

Scholars were cautious, if generally impressed by Ginzburg’s theories (12, 13).

Criticism centered on Ginzburg’s apparent failure to account for the history of
witchcraft. Indeed, except for the benandanti case, he pays little attention to the
individual circumstances of the beliefs. Is it really that easy to extrapolate from the
1600s benandanti to the 1900s’ recorded beliefs of Romanian calusari (horse-riders)?
The similarities are indeed striking, but Ginzburg is not concerned with the way the
‘shamanistic’ ideas he espouses translate into history.

Still, Ginzburg’s argument about the ‘shamanistic’ elements of witchcraft is

compelling and provocative. On one hand, he opened a new discussion between the
previously separate fields of folklore / mythology and history. Perhaps more
importantly, it made us realize that European witchcraft was at least to some extent a
reality, rather than a myth, and that peasantry did continue to practice fertility rituals
far into the 1700s. In fact, recent scholarship has become interested in the fact that,
contrary to belief, ‘witchcraft’ did not die in the witchhunts, and that in fact it
survived beyond the witch persecutions (14). In a way, Ginzburg’s work opened our
eyes to the enduring power of popular culture.

References

(1) Lea, H. C. (1888). History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. New York.
(2) Trevor-Roper, H. (1972). Religion, The Reformation, and Social Change. London:
Harmondsworth.
(3) Macfarlane, A. (1970). Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
(4) Thomas, K. (1977). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
(5) Murray, M. (1921). The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University
Press
(6) Rose, E. (1962). A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in the
History of Witchcraft and Diabolism. Toronto.
(7) Ginzburg, C. (1983). The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Baltimore.
(8), (11) Ginzburg, C. (1991). Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. New
York: Pantheon.
(9) Eliade, M. (1975). "Some Observations on European Witchcraft," History of
Religions 14 (3), pp. 149-172.
(10) Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R.
Trask. Princeton
(12) Kieckhefer, R. (1992). Reviewed work(s): Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches'
Sabbath by Carlo Ginzburg. The American Historical Review, 97(3), pp. 837-838.
(13) Cohn, N. (1975). Europe's Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great
Witch Hunt. London: Heinemann.
(14) Gijswijt-Hofstra, M. (1990). The European Witchcraft Debate and the Dutch
Variant. Social History, 15 (2), pp. 181-194.