European witchcraft
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European witchcraft is witchcraft and magic that is practiced primarily in the locality of Europe.
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History of European witchcraft
- "In the world of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages, it is impossible to define someone as a witch (as opposed, for example, to an amateur herbalist, a heretic or a scold), and none of the legislation of the time attempted to do so. Offenders were designated offenders by virtue of their performing various actions or wearing certain objects declared by the legislation to be condemned or forbidden. For all practical purposes, the 'witch' had not yet been invented. There were only practitioners of various kinds of magic, both male and female, who might belong to any rank of ecclesiastical or lay society, and whose actions might, or might not, bring them within the compass of canon or secular law, depending on external factors which were usually local but could, from time to time, be more general."
- Source: P.G. Maxwell-Stewart, The Emergence of the Christian Witch
From the earliest recorded use of the term 'witch' to about the mid-19th century, witches were universally associated with evil, under the belief that the witch's magical powers were granted by Satan in exchange for the witch's soul. A few folk tales, however, refer to kindly witches. Many outrageous claims were made about the powers of witches, which include the ability to fly, to transform oneself or others into animals or other shapes, and to curse one's enemies. On the other hand, these powers were associated with folklore monsters long before the arrival of Christianity.
It was extremely dangerous to be accused of being a "witch", since a common punishment was to be executed, sometimes by being burnt at the stake, the standard punishment for heretics (and witchcraft was merely a form of heresy). Both in North America and in Europe thousands of people, men as well as women, were put to death as witches at various points in history. Some of the worst witchhunts were in Germany, though there are documented cases of torture and murder in the name of stopping witchcraft in nearly every European country. Massacres of suspected witches still take place today, in Africa.
Most people who were killed as witches were probably hapless midwives, herbalists, widows, spinsters, social outcasts, or victims of revenge seekers. For example, some researchers wholly attribute the Salem witch trials in 1692 to rivalries between opposing political forces in Salem, Massachusetts. See the extensive discussion under witchhunts.
Typical practices
The characterization of the witch in Europe is not derived from a single source. Popular neopagan beliefs suggest that witches were female shamans who were made into malicious figures by Christian propaganda. This is an erroneous oversimplification and presumes that a recognizable folklore figure must derive from a single historical precedent (a female, maligned magic-worker). The familiar witch of folklore and popular superstition is a combination of numerous influences.
Witches were credited with a variety of magical powers. These fall into two broad categories: those that explain the occurrence of misfortune and are thus grounded in real events, and those that are wholly fantastic.
The first category includes the powers to cause impotence, to turn milk sour, to strike people dead, to cause diseases, to raise storms, to cause infants to be stillborn, to prevent cows from giving milk, to prevent hens from laying and to blight crops. The second includes the power to fly in the air, to change form into a hare, to suckle familiar spirits from warts, to sail on a single plank and perhaps most absurd of all, to go to sea in an eggshell. Eggshells are still superstitiously crushed to prevent this usage.
Witches were often believed to fly on broomsticks or distaffs, or occasionally upon unwilling human beings, who would be called 'hag-ridden'. Horses found sweating in their stalls in the morning were also said to be hag-ridden. A typical legend from Scandinavia concerns the sorceress Maran who causes pain by riding at night on people or horses; she flies to her victim by broomstick. Some believe that supposed visitations of Maran were actually a heart disease, causing the victim to awake in a panic.
The accused witch Isobel Gowdie gave the following charm as her means of transmuting herself into a hare:
- I shall go into a hare;
- With sorrow and such and great care;
- And I shall go in the Devil's name
- Until I come home again.
Witches also appear as villains in many 19th- and 20th-century fairy tales, folk tales and children's stories, such as "Snow White", "Hansel and Gretel", "Sleeping Beauty", and many other stories recorded by the Brothers Grimm. Such folktales typically portray witches as either remarkably ugly hags or remarkably beautiful young women. In the classic story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, witches from both ends of this spectrum play important roles.
Traditionally, a white witch was a cunning man or wise woman, who sold magical services to ward off or reverse the effects of witchcraft. Modern neopagan witchcraft rejects the labels of 'black' and 'white' witchcraft, claiming that witchcraft has no moral polarity. This attitude is wholly modern and has no foundation in historical belief.
Witchcraft and the Roman Catholic Church
Beginnings
The advent of Christianity suggests that potential Christians, comfortable with the use of magic as part of their daily lives, expected Christian clergy to work magic of a form superior to the old Pagan way. While Christianity competed with Pagan religion, this concern was paramount, only lessening in importance once Christianity was the dominant religion in most of Europe. In place of the old Pagan magic methodology, the Church placed a Christian methodology involving saints and divine relics — a short step from the old Pagan techniques of amulets and talismans.
Middle Ages
Early Christianity attempted to put a stop to the pre-existing pagan practice of hunting and killing witches. When Charlemagne imposed Christianity upon the people of Saxony in 789, he proclaimed:
- "If anyone, deceived by the Devil, shall believe, as is customary among pagans, that any man or woman is a night-witch, and eats men, and on that account burn that person to death... he shall be executed."
- Source: Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Early British Isles
Similarly, the Lombard code of 643 states:
- "Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female slave as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds."
- Source: Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Early British Isles
This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to believe in it was heretical. [1] (http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/witch/canon.html) The Church of the time, rather than opposing witchcraft, opposed what it saw as the foolish and backward belief in witchcraft. To believe that witchcraft could possibly have any power was to deny the supreme power of God. This teaching remained authoritative until the 13th century.
- "It is also not to be omitted that some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights. But it were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many others into the pit of their faithlessness. For an innumberable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true and, so believing, wander from the right faith and relapse into pagan errors when they think that there is any divinity or power except the one God."
- Source: the Canon Episcopi
The mass burnings of heretics, so often held up as evidence of the early Church's attitude, did not occur for another seven hundred years after the Church was established; and the witch hunts began eleven centuries afterward. As Ron Hutton notes, 'during that long interval, Christendom itself changed.'
Witches are therefore not localised Christian distortions of pagans but people alleged to have both the ability and the will to employ supernatural effects for malignant ends. This belief is familiar from other cultures, and was partly inherited from paganism. The belief that witches were originally purely benign does not derive from any early textual source. The earliest written reference to witches as such, from Aelfric's homilies, [2] (http://www.ealdriht.org/witchcraft.html) portrays them as malign. The tendency to perceive them as healers only begins in the 19th Century, with Jules Michelet whose novel La Sorciere, published in 1862, first postulated a benign witch. [3] (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4177/historyofw.html)
It was in the Church's interest, as it expanded, to suppress all competing Pagan methodologies of magic. This could only be done by presenting a cosmology in which Christian miracles were legitimate and credible, whereas non-Christian ones were "of the devil". Hence the following law:
- "We teach that every priest shall extinguish heathendom, and forbid wilweorthunga (fountain worship), and licwiglunga (incantations of the dead), and hwata (omens), and galdra (magic), and man worship, and the abominations that men exercise in various sorts of witchcraft, and in frithspottum (peace-enclosures) with elms and other trees, and with stones, and with many phantoms."
- Source: 16th Canon Law enacted under King Edgar, 10th century A.D.
While the common people were aware of the difference between witches, who they considered willing to undertake evil actions, such as cursing, and cunning folk who avoid involvement in such activities, the Church attempted to blot out the distinction. In much the same way that culturally distinct non-Christian religions were all lumped together and termed merely "Pagan", so too was all magic lumped together as equally sinful and abhorrent. The Demonologie of James I explicitly condemns all magic-workers as equally guilty of the same crime against God.
See also
| This article is part of the Witchcraft series |
| African witchcraft - Asian witchcraft - European witchcraft - Middle Eastern witchcraft - North American witchcraft - South American witchcraft |
External links
- House Shadow Drake (http://www.shadowdrake.com/) (traditional witchcraft information, chat, and community groups)
- Witches' Voice (http://www.witchvox.com/) (neo pagan news site)