"That there are such as bee called good Witches, and how they may be knowne."
The problem for Hutton is that there are a great number of sources that directly contradict his theory. These sources incontrovertibly document the fact that, essentially for as long as the English language has existed, the word "Witch" has been used to refer to healers, diviners and other practitioners of beneficial magic who, far from being hated, have been valued and sought after for the good that they do.
Hutton now claims that all such cases in which Witches are referred to as healers, etc, are irrelevant because they are confined to the utterances of "radical, evangelical Protestants" and other "churchmen", whose use of the word "Witch" was wildly divergent from that of "the great bulk of the populace," who only used "Witch" as an epithet for hated, malevolent, evil-doers. This argument is put forward by Hutton in his new article in the latest issue of the Pomegranate journal: Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History.
The thing is, though, that in the sources that Hutton refers to, one never finds the authors putting forward arguments of the form:
A. Those who are commonly referred to as healers, soothsayers and wise-women should instead be referred to as Witches, because they are in fact evil-doers who deceive people into following Satan.
If such arguments could be produced, they would give some validity to Hutton's position. But in every case what we find instead are arguments of the following sort:
B. Those who are commonly referred to as good Witches, because they heal and otherwise appear to do good, are in fact evil-doers who deceive people into following Satan.
Arguments A & B both refer to the same group of people, namely, practitioners of beneficial magic. And both arguments are concerned with how these people should be named, and how they should not be named. Argument A says "do not call them healers, for they are Witches." While Argument B says "do not call them good Witches, for they are not good." Argument A is purely a figment of Ronald Hutton's imagination, while Argument B is found throughout the entire history of the English tongue.
Therefore these sources completely undermine Hutton's claim, for they provide direct testimony as to the ubiquity in common usage of "Witch" to refer to those who do good, and, moreover, that those who were called "Witches" by the common people were also referred to by them as "blessers", "healers", "cunning women", etc.
But please, don't take my word for it. Below are the first two pages of Chapter VIII of Richard Bernard's 1627 book, Guide To Jury-Men. That chapter is entitled "That there are such as bee called good Witches, and how they may be knowne." [For much more along these same lines see also Witches: Good, Bad, and Otherwise.]
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As in Gods Church there be good and bad; So in this kingdome of Satan, there bee good and bad
Witches.These good or white Witches are commonly called blessers, healers, cunning wisemen, or women (for there are of both sexes) but of this kinde, many men.
These haue a spirit also, as one Ioane Willimot acknowledged, and are in league with the Diuell, as well as the bad and black Witches be. By their spirit they learne, who are bad Witches and where they dwell, who are strucken, forespoken, and bewitched, and by them they learne how those doe, whom they vndertake to amend; for the spirit is sent vnto their patients from them: all which the foresaid Ioane Willsmot acknowledged before Authority in her examination.
The profession of these Witches is, for the most part, to heale and cure such as bee taken, blasted, strucken, forespoken, as they vse to speake, and bewitched: all which cures they doe by their compact with the Deuill.
But though these Witches be almost all healing Witches, and cannot doe to man, or beast any hurt, except they procure some other to doe it, yet we may finde, that some of these sometimes haue the double facultie, both to blesse, and to curse, to hurt, and to heale, as it is probable Balaam had at the least in Balaks imagination, Num. 22.6.
The whole text of Benard's book, along with images of the original publication, can be found at the online Cornell Witchcraft Collection: http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=witch;cc=witch;rgn=main;view=text;idno=wit140
Hutton is arguing that regular people used "witch" only for negative magic, and would use other terms for those practicing positive magic, while churchmen tried to get the word "witch" applied to both types of magic-workers. The text you have presented was written by a churchman (a Calvinist Puritan), who is attempting to convince regular people (jurors for a witch-trial) to refer to positive magic-workers ("commonly called blessers, healers, cunning wisemen, or women") as "witches," and to convince these jurors that even their positive powers come from a compact with the Devil. As far as I can tell, the evidence that you provide *supports* Hutton's assertion.
ReplyDelete"So in this kingdome of Satan, there bee good and bad Witches."
ReplyDeleteFTFY. "Good" witches are part of the kingdom of Satan.
Hi Scott. In the text presented here, Bernard clearly states that workers of beneficial magic are "falsly called" "good Witches".
ReplyDeleteCertainly Bernard is not proposing that magical healers should be called "good Witches", rather he is responding to those who do, already "falsly call" them that. There is simply no other way to read this.
But Bernard does not specify *who* is falsely calling them "good Witches" - he may simply be responding to the tendency of *other churchmen* to use the "good Witch" terminology. This cannot be adequately determined from the text. Really, to falsify Hutton's assertion, you need an unambiguous source of non-clerical origin which uses the term "Witch" to refer to a positive magic-worker.
DeleteApuleius you'd have a stronger case if you can find someone actually approvingly calling a magical healer a good witch. Right now it sounds like people slandering healers by lumping them in with witches, using the ironic phrase "good witch".
ReplyDeleteI'm with Hutton on this, so far.
Ashley, that is not a supportable reading of the text. What we have is a contemporary account that reports that magical healers are commonly referred to as "good Witches" and as "white Witches".
ReplyDeleteBernard does not, on his own, refer to them as such, nor does he encourage others to refer to them as such. He is criticizing the popular use of the phrases "good Witch" and "white Witch".
He's saying the opposite, as he makes plain here:
ReplyDelete"These good or white Witches are commonly called blessers, healers, cunning wisemen, or women"
They are commonly called blessers, healers, cunning wisemen, or women. But they really are (in Bernard's view) witches.
He's basically trying to persuade people to think of healers as witches, because they don't already do so. So he comes up with the concept of the "good" or "white" witch, he points out that these folks are still nevertheless of the "kingdom of Satan", and in typical propaganda fashion, refers to them (slanderously) as witches thereafter, and even suggests that this usage is already common.
Yes, he says they are commonly called blessers, etc. But he also says, many time, that they are also commonly called "good Witches" and also (less frequently) "white Witches".
ReplyDelete"to falsify Hutton's assertion, you need an unambiguous source of non-clerical origin which uses the term "Witch" to refer to a positive magic-worker."
ReplyDeleteWell, there is Joseph Addison's 1715 play, "The Drummer, or The Haunted House", which I will be posting about soon.
However, the fact remains that no good reason has been given by you, or by Hutton, to justify discounting the testimony of multiple sources that attribute the phrase "good Witch" to common parlance for referring to practitioners of beneficial magic.
"multiple sources that attribute the phrase "good Witch" to common parlance for referring to practitioners of beneficial magic"
ReplyDeleteIf the text you're talking about here is one of those sources, then you and I have very different understandings of what the phrase "common parlance" means. Bernard refers to "good or white Witches...commonly called blessers, healers, cunning wisemen, or women...." This clearly indicates to the reader that the terms *in common parlance* are blessers, healers, etc., and that Bernard will be using the phrase "good Witch" or "white Witch" to refer to those people, which obviously is *not* the term commonly used or else he wouldn't need to make explicit note of their equivalence. Your continued insistence that "good or white Witch" is a common usage according to Bernard is contrary to the plain meaning of that sentence.
At most that ONE passage is ambiguous. All ambiguity is removed by several other passages, cited in the follow-up post.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm not going to cite them here again, Scott. I've already provided a direct link to the full text of Bernard's book. Go there and do a search on "good Witch". Or don't.
The fact is that there are multiple independent sources that all attribute the phrase "good Witch" to common usage. Many of these come well before the first known instances of the phrase "white Witch" - and Hutton tends to hang his whole theory on that particular phrase.
"At most that ONE passage is ambiguous. All ambiguity is removed by several other passages, cited in the follow-up post."
ReplyDeleteHaving established his preferred terminology, Bernard uses it exclusively in order to reinforce in the reader's mind that the positive magic-workers he's talking about *should* be thought of as witches. This is a fairly basic propaganda technique.
How does attributing the phrase "good Witch" to common usage further Bernard's supposed "propaganda" aims? What kind of a rhetorical strategy is this supposed to be?
ReplyDeleteSince this is supposedly such a "fairly basic propaganda technique", could you give another example of someone using this kind of argument? In fact, I am quite certain that there are no such examples, since "propaganda" must make sense on some level, in order to be persuasive, and the argument that you are attributing to Bernard makes no sense on any level.