) I highlighted a few passages from a paper by the historian Michael D. Bailey arguing that Christians and Pagans have very different conceptions of magic, and, more specifically, that the "triumph" of Christianity in the Roman world was accompanied by an aggressive Christian campaign to demonize magic generally (that is, magic
I also explained in that post, very briefly, that this sharp distinction between Christian and Pagan approaches to magic is important to bear in mind because, despite being immediately obvious to any objective student of the history of magic, this radical and complete discontinuity between Pagan and Christian views of magic is brazenly and systematically obscured and even assertively denied by certain modern revisionist historians, many of whom are numbered among the most prominent scholars in the field of historical Witchcraft studies. And the motivation for this revisionism, often stated quite explicitly by these researchers, could not be more plain: for these historians are engaged in an ideological campaign to exonerate the Christian religion from any blame for the period of ferocious religious persecution known as the Burning Times, or, less dramatically, as the early modern Witch-hunts.
From the beginning, the Christian conception of magic has always been completly incoherent, not unlike the rest of Christian "theology". This inescapable incoherence derives from the fact that the whole Christian approach to magic is based on a capricious bifurcation of magic into those kinds of magic that are approved by the Christians and those that are condemned by them. Moreover, all officially approved magic is arbitrarily relabeled as something other than "magic". When healing, transfiguration, divination, exorcism,etc. are performed by Jebus and his followers, these are not magical acts, but rather "miracles" attributed to the Holy Spirit, angels and saints. But when precisely the same acts are accomplished by non-Christians (including, most especially, "heretics", who by definition are not considered Christians at all, but rather the most dangerous of all the enemies of Christianity), they are ("magically", one is tempted to say) transformed into "magic", which in the Christian sense of the term is something intrinsically evil, harmful and literally demonic.
In the article reprinted below (and, at least for now, freely available in full at the History Today website,
explains how "triumphant" Christianity sought to establish a regime of thought-control over the minds of the 60 million inhabitants of the Roman world (notice, however, the delicacy of Maxwell-Stuart's phrasing: "As Christianity began to make an impact on the Roman world ...."). Basically, the word "magic" undergoes the same semantic perversion at the hands of the Christians as that meted out by them to the word "daemon".
Christians took Magic, a natural phenomenon that is governed by a set of interrelated over-arching principles, and obnoxiously asserted that some of this henceforth belonged exclusively to them, and that it is not magic at all, but rather the activity of their "Holy Spirit", while all the rest, arbitrarily demarcated by them according to the infantile whims of their "theology", was attributed to the Devil.
[Below is an article by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart looking at the Christian view of Magic generally, and Witchcraft in particular. As mentioned above, the article was published in 2000, and the full text is available online at website of
). I am reprinting here in full both for my own convenience (to make it easy to refer back to) and also because I have learned, the hard way, that just because something exists today on teh interwebs is no guarantee that it will still be there tomorrow!
The Emergence of the Christian Witch
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart examines the impact of early Christianity on notions of magic and definitions of witchcraft.
As Christianity began to make an impact on the Roman world, the
new religion faced two major struggles. On the one hand, it faced a
series of deviations from orthodox theology, in the form of heresies
principally concerned with the exact nature of Jesus and his relation to
God the Father. Second came the challenge of magic. Magical
practitioners were ubiquitous in the pagan world, and their stock in
trade consisted of claims to exercise powers beyond the merely natural
or human.
Prospective converts looked to Christian priests and
monks to work magic more effectively than their pagan equivalents, and
this remained a requirement as long as there were sizeable areas of
Europe to be converted, that is, until at least the twelfth century.
Saints played a major role in this preternatural activity. They worked
wonders, cured the sick, expelled evil spirits and, when death took
them, their relics continued the good work. Hence, amulets of all kinds,
re-cast in Christian guise, pursued the miraculous or magical ends once
sought purely by pagan magic.
Yet when non-Christians realised
that Jesus himself was credited with miraculous cures and exorcisms, and
that the new Church was offering rituals, such as baptism and the
Eucharist, which purported to protect its converts by driving away evil
spirits, and to change bread and wine into the body and blood of the new
god, they maintained that Jesus himself had been a magician, a
wonder-worker of a familiar type, and that what his Church called
‘sacraments’ were no different from rites of magic.
This posed a
problem for the Church. Christian missionaries could draw on pagan
willingness to accept the possibility of the miraculous more or less
without reservation, and hence belief in Christ’s resurrection and the
efficacy of the sacraments; but they also had to explain why the
miracles of Christ himself, or those of the Apostles or later saints
were genuine, whereas those of pagan magicians such as the first-century
AD Simon Magus or his contemporary, Apollonius of Tyre, were
fraudulent.
As well as being accommodated by the Christians,
magic was also re-interpreted in the light of the new religion’s
developing theology. Crucial to this re-interpretation were the figures
of Satan and the daimones, spirits conceived as intermediaries between
the spiritual and material worlds of paganism. Daimones became evil
spirits and in that guise were associated with every branch of magic
because of the supposed pact between them and human beings. The
Christian perception of creation itself underwent a change as everything
took on a Manichaean aspect: God was mirrored by Satan, (even though
Satan was always acknowledged, at least in theory, to be weaker and not
divine); creation became a battle-ground between good and evil, with
humans allowed, by free will, to choose which side they would fight
upon; and angels were divided into ranks and had their counterparts in
Hell.
Sources of malicious preternatural power, such as the evil
eye, continued to exercise potent sway over people’s belief and
imagination, although now they could be countered by rites and symbols
made Christian, while those who inflicted the effects of the evil eye
and malicious magical intention upon their neighbours were likely to be
seen as adherents of Satan, and therefore idolaters and apostates from
the Christian faith.
As a result, the early Christian state came
to treat magicians of any kind and their clients as potential
troublemakers or even enemies. The collection of edicts known as the
Theodosian Code (AD 428), which contained legal pronunciamenti from more
or less the whole of the fourth century, forbade consultation of
magicians or diviners, regarded necromancy as highly dangerous, since it
sought to foretell the future by raising and communicating with the
dead, and imposed the death penalty on practitioners of magic. Those who
confessed to working harmful or poisonous magic (maleficium and
veneficium), or had been found guilty thereof by due process of law,
were not allowed to appeal against their sentences and their families
were liable to lose any possible inheritance; nor were convicted
defendants able to benefit from any Imperial pardons issued in honour of
Easter or to celebrate a birth in the Imperial family. Indeed, being a
worker of harmful magic was considered sufficient cause for awoman to
sue her husband for divorce, as though he were a murderer or a violator
of graves, and some of the edicts went as far as to describe magic in
medical terms, as a pollution which contaminates those who come into
contact with it.
The state, being the state, consistently
attached the death penalty to such practices as these. The Church,
however, did not. Its condemnations were just as consistent and just as
vehement, but it felt unable, whatever the provocation, to inflict the
ultimate penalty. Eager to cure rather than punish what was perceived as
spiritual illness, the Church tended to administer, in a spirit of
stern rebuke tempered by maternal concern, spiritual remedies in the
form of prescribed fasting and prayer. From a plethora of church
councils between the fourth and eighth centuries, we can derive a
picture of the range of magical activities attracted the wrath of the
Christian Church. Women were forbidden to keep watch in cemeteries,
presumably for fear that they might rifle the graves or invoke the
ghosts of the dead; people were not to call angels by names not to be
found in Scripture, a prohibition clearly aimed at the long-standing
habit of including Hebrew and Egyptian names in magical invocations;
while excessive devotion to certain legitimate angels, such as Michael,
was also forbidden, presumably on the grounds that this might be
mistaken for something akin to pagan worship.
'Witches’,
magicians, diviners and the other practitioners of the occult sciences
did not exist on the margins of society in late antiquity; nor were they
confined to a particular group by virtue of their age, sex, or
education. Anyone at all, cleric or layman, might practise magic in some
form at one time or another. We should also avoid drawing strict
boundaries between magic, religion and the natural sciences. Parents
with a sick child, for example, might offer prayers for its recovery,
turning to the priest for exorcism if the illness were of a kind which
warranted that assistance, and seeking the help of an apothecary or
amateur herbalist for infusions or poultices whose ingredients might or
might not be gathered in accordance with astrological calculations, and
put together and administered to the accompaniment of prayers or magical
formulae or both. Magic was not an exotic recourse to which people
turned when religion or ‘science’ in the form of medicine had failed or
seemed to fail them. It was a valid alternative way of seeking to
exercise power, or tap into the hidden forces of creation, for personal
benefit, even if the official line of both church and state declared
that magic was a dubious activity best left alone. In practice, even
those very officials might ignore their own prohibitions and behave as
everyone else. No one questioned the possible reality of at least some
of the effects of magic. Yet it was the danger to the soul and body
inherent in that reality that caused the church and state to fear the
effects of magic; hence their condemnations, decrees and punishments
against it.
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.
Perhaps
the most important factor to influence ecclesiastical and state
authority in relation to magic was the ever-present problem of heresy.
Deviation from doctrinal orthodoxy had been fought by the Church ever
since the earliest years of its establishment, and it was therefore
inevitable that it would take a dim view of any manifestations of magic
which it did not itself approve or control. Thus, for example, Christian
prayers offered with a view to affecting the weather were approved;
pagan prayers and rituals offered to achieve the same were not. As a
result magic and heresy were almost bound to be perceived as two sides
of the same coin.
The consequences of this were significant. The
more closely the two were associated, the more likely it was that
official perceptions of magic would resemble official perceptions of
heresy. Paganism and magic would come to be seen, not as hitherto a
loose diversity of questionable activities which depraved or foolish
individuals persisted in doing for their own selfish ends, but more an
organised movement with its own quasi-theology and liturgy, a distorted
mirror of the true faith and the true Church, one with its own god, its
own angels, its own ‘miracles’, and its own worshippers. Once perceived
in this way, the impulse to uproot heresy, as it was later to come to be
uprooted with the help of the secular authorities doing their pious
duty, became potentially very strong. Thus, in 1437, Pope Eugenius IV
issued a bull addressed to all inquisitors, deploring the fact that so
many people were practising various forms of magic, worshipping evil
spirits, and making pacts with them. Inconsequence of this, he said,
these people were to be arrested, brought before inquisitorial tribunals
and, with the assistance of the local bishops, tried in accordance with
canon law, after which they were to be punished. If necessary, the Pope
added, the secular authorities should be called on to render their
assistance.
By the later Middle Ages Christian teaching on
daimones had become a key element in explaining how witches were able to
operate and why God allowed them to do so. Alfonso de Spina (died
1469), writing in Latin but recording some Spanish terms for spirits and
witches, noted some of their names and types.
Just
as good angels and blessed souls are divided into nine ranks, so evil
spirits fell from these nine into another nine categories, and damned
souls along with them. Those evil spirits who belonged to the higher
grades of the [heavenly] hierarchy became correspondingly worse and more
inferior in that part of the meridian whose ruler the Psalmist has
called ‘the destruction that wastes at noonday’. But there are popular
names for many of these spirits and their various grades. Some are
called fates, others (in Spanish) duende, others incubi and succubi.
Some of them cause wars; others eat and drink with human beings and
appear in their dreams. Some are said to be generated from the smell
given off by a man and a woman during sexual intercourse, or from
planetary rays. Some are hermaphrodites; some are clean and others
filthy. Some deceive men and women who are called jorguinas or brujas in
Spanish. Many people claim to have seen spirits of this type and stick
to the truth of their assertion.
The significance of
this for witches is plain. The daimones, in pre-Christian times neutral
or even benign figures, had gradually been re-interpreted as evil
spirits who mirrored in their organisation and graded powers the angelic
hierarchy. By their fall from Heaven through the increasingly inferior
stages into which the material world was divided, they arrived in the
sublunary, elemental region, where they degenerated and suffered the
same imperfections as humankind, though to a lesser degree and without
the same limitations. They became associated with the practice of magic
in any form, and the conception of magic was so tainted by this
association that it became virtually impossible for Christian
theologians to dissociate the practice of magic from traffic with evil
spirits; when de Spina discussed jorguinas and brujas (different words
for ‘witch’), he used a verb illudere capable of more than one meaning.
The spirits, he said, ‘deceive’ them in the sense of ‘playing with’ them
or ‘making fools of’ them, as well as ‘using them for sexual pleasure’.
His is thus a complex description of a sinister relationship.
The
notion of a pact between human beings and daimones became deep-seated,
and in consequence any act of magic was liable to be interpreted as the
effect of a diabolical alliance between an evil spirit and the human
operator. Moreover, as the Middle Ages proceeded, the habit of blaming
evil spirits for any kind of misfortune grew. God might be all-powerful
and all-merciful, but he was prepared to permit Satan and his evil
spirits to punish people’s sins or to test their faith, as the biblical
case of Job demonstrated. The serried ranks of angels and evil spirits
became opposing armies in a continual war between good and evil; it
could therefore be argued that any human being who practised magic was
liable to be doing so with the help of Satan and thus to be an enemy of
God.
The situation was summed up by the fifteenth-century theologian, Pedro Ciruelo:
Anyone
who maintains a pact or treaty of friendship with the Devil commits a
very grave sin because he is breaking the first commandment and is
sinning against God, committing the crime of treason or lèse majesté.
His action is also contrary to the religious vow he made when he was
baptised. He becomes an apostate from Christ, and an idolater who
renders service to the enemy of God, the Devil.
Matters
had now begun to reach the stage where the image of what is now seen as
the typical early modern witch of the Sabbat could begin to emerge,
although the grounds for the details of her behaviour had been laid a
long time before the fifteenth century. In c.1115, for example, Guibert
de Nogent recorded in his autobiography Monodiae (Solitary Songs)
details of the behaviour of certain heretics from Soissons. They would
meet, he said, in underground chambers where they would light candles
and then, coming up behind a woman who was lying on her stomach with her
naked buttocks on view for everyone to see, they would ‘present the
candles to her’ (by which Guibert probably meant they inserted them
briefly into her anus). After these ritual acts, the candles were
extinguished, everyone shouted ‘Chaos!’ and indiscriminate sexual
intercourse took place. Any baby which might result from this copulation
was then brought to another meeting and thrown from one person to
another throughthe flames of a large fire until the child was dead,
after which its body was reduced to ashes, made into bread, and eaten as
a kind of blasphemous sacrament.
These details were by no means
unique, and similar tales had long been told of all kinds of heretics
and, in the early days, of Christians themselves. Yet they were adapted
with only certain changes to give the picture of witches’ Sabbats, which
rapidly became the norm. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, for
example, the heretical sect known as ‘Waldensians’ or ‘Vaudois’ had
become identified with sorcerers and witches, and Vauderie and
Vaudoiserie were used as synonyms of ‘sorcery’ or ‘witchcraft’; the
amalgamation of the notion of heresy with the notion of magic was now
complete and with magic, it seems, as a whole, although the emphasis did
tend to be upon its maleficent operations.
But if the Sabbat
itself could be related to anti-heretic propaganda, the witches’ flight
thither had other, folkloric roots. A description of something similar
is to be found in the Canon Episcopi, a piece of canon law dating from
c.906.
Certain wicked women turn themselves round to
face the other way behind Satan and, led astray by hallucinations and
figments of their imaginations created by evil spirits, believe and
maintain that during the hours of night they ride upon certain beasts
along with Diana (a goddess of the pagans), or with Herodias and an
innumerable host of women, traversing many areas of the earth in the
silent dead of night; that they obey her commands as though she were
their mistress, and that on specific nights they are called to her
service.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of records
concerning the flight is the degree of scepticism which attended them.
The Canon Episcopi itself calls such stories hallucinations and figments
of the imagination. Burchard of Worms, in the early eleventh century,
condemned these and other claims to magical ability, and prescribed a
penance of forty days on bread and water for seven consecutive years for
anyone admitting to believe in them; while in the twelfth century John
of Salisbury, in a passage devoted to dreams and visions, declared that
there were some people, driven by their sins and the free rein they gave
to their wickedness, who were allowed by God to come to such a pitch of
madness that they believed (in the most wretched and lying manner) that
something they were experiencing in spirit was actually happening to
them bodily. He gives as an example attendance at a Sabbat in the train
of the pagan goddess Herodias. The Dominican Jordanes of Bergamo
introduced medical explanations into the discussion and in c.1460 gave
it as his opinion that evil spirits worked upon the witch’s humours,
stirring them up so that they ascended to the brain and there created
all kinds of imaginings, which caused the witch to believe that he or
she had the power to work magic, be transported from place to place, and
attend the Sabbat to worship the Devil.
Despite these doubts,
however, the story of witches’ flights had a certain allure. Thus in the
mid-thirteenth century Thomas of Cantimpré recounted the anecdote of a
nobly-born girl who, at the same hour each night, was carried away
bodily by evil spirits, and although her brother, a monk, did his best
to prevent this from happening by grasping her firmly in his arms, as
soon as the hour arrived she disappeared. In the early fifteenth
century, Johannes Nider, whose Formicarius is an important repository of
key ideas in the development of the theory of witches’ behaviour, was
told about the experience of a fellow-Dominican who arrived at a village
to be confronted by a woman who claimed that at night she flew with
Diana; and although neither Nider nor his informant believed her story,
the fact of its being told is enough to indicate that belief in such
flight was common. Then in c.1440 Martin le Franc, secretary to the
anti-Pope Felix V, wrote a long poem, Champion des Dames, in which two
speakers exchanged views on witches and their wicked practices. One of
them described women going to the Sabbat on foot or on sticks, ‘flying
through the air like birds’, and the manuscript illustrated the point
with two marginal miniatures showing one woman astride a besom and the
other riding a long, stout staff. Significantly, they flew under the
heading ‘Vaudoises’.
By the second half of the fifteenth century,
then, there had come into existence a notion of the witch which was not
completely at variance with earlier conceptions and models of the
magical operator, but which tended to concentrate on certain newly
developed ‘theatrical’ (as opposed to everyday magical) aspects of her
behaviour. In much of the literature which was beginning to specialise
in these aspects, the witch now seems to have been visualised more or
less as distinctively female. What is more, her activities were
described as those of a person who was less a depraved individual and
more a willing member or adherent of an organised anti-Christian sect of
Devil-worshippers whose aim was to help Satan corrupt the society of
the faithful and thereby swell the ranks of the damned in Hell.
P.G. Maxwell-Stuart is honorary lecturer at St Andrews University. His new book Witchcraft: A History is published by Tempus in November 2000.
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