Europe's inner demons

The complaint against these people was not primarily or necessarily that they harmed their neighbours by occult means but that they attended the sabbat. Collective worship of the Devil in corporeal, usually animal form; sexual orgies which were not only totally promiscuous but involved mating with demons; communal feasting on the flesh of babies — these constituted the essence of witchcraft as it was imagined and formulated by educated specialists during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Practices which in earlier centuries had been vaguely ascribed to certain heretical groups, notably the Waldensians, now constituted an independent offence, which in time came to be called the crimen magiae. Admittedly,

maleficium was not excluded — at the end of the sabbat the Devil commonly required his followers to report on the harm they had recently brought about, and instructed them on the harm they were expected to do during the coming weeks or months. Nevertheless, in this version of witchcraft, maleficium

was of secondary importance. Here a witch was not simply a malicious, dangerous person but an embodiment of evil; above all, an embodiment of apostasy.

Left to themselves, peasants would never have created mass witch-hunts — these occurred only  where and when the authorities had become convinced of the reality of the sabbat and of nocturnal flights to the sabbat. And this conviction depended on, and in turn was sustained by, the inquisitorial type of procedure, including the use of torture. When suspected witches could be compelled, by torture, to name those whom they had seen at the sabbat, all things became possible: the mayor and town councillors and their wives were just as likely to be accused as were peasant women.

The great witch-hunt itself lies outside the scope of this book, but a few brief comments are called for. It reached its height only in the late sixteenth century, and it was practically over by 1680—with the trials at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 as a belated epilogue. It was an exclusively western phenomenon — eastern Europe, the world of Orthodox Christianity, was untouched by it. Within western Europe, no distinction can be drawn between Roman Catholic and Protestant countries — both were equally involved. On the other hand, not all areas of western Europe were equally involved. Spain, Italy, Poland, the Low Countries, Sweden experienced mass witch-hunts, but only in limited areas and for limited periods. England saw little of mass witch-hunts, though some hundreds of women were executed (by hanging, not burning) for doing harm by occult means. In Scotland, France, the German states, the Swiss Confederation, mass witch-hunts were carried out with great intensity and ferocity. Yet even there, the centres of activity constantly shifted: an area which had never burned a single witch would suddenly begin to burn witches by the dozen; another, which had been burning witches for years, would suddenly stop; in some areas little or no witch-hunting took place. Everything depended on the attitude of the authorities — the prince, or the town council, or the magistrates. The authorities in turn could be influenced to take up witch-hunting by the writings of such codifiers as Bodin or Del Rio, or by the example of neighbouring states. They could also be influenced to abandon it by writings of such men as Weyer or Spee, or by some particular paradox arising from the trials — not least the risk that they themselves would be accused of attending the sabbat.

Many attempts have been made to estimate the total number of individuals burned as witches in Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is a fruitless enterprise: the records are too defective. Some of the best-known estimates, which put the figure at some hundreds of thousands, are fantastic exaggerations. On the other hand those who would argue, from the statistics for English witch-trials, that there never was a great European witch-hunt at all are also in error. For certain areas of the European mainland reasonably complete records do exist, and some of these have been studied in detail. They show beyond all possible doubt that the great witch-hunt is no myth.

Dr Guido Bader, in a thesis published in 1945, gives statistics for executions in the Swiss cantons between 1400 and 1700.⁽⁵¹⁾ He found that, in the Confederation as a whole, 8,888 persons were tried and 5,417 are known to have been executed — though he adds that the real number of executions was probably far higher. The number of trials and executions varied enormously from canton to canton. In the single canton of Vaud 3,371 persons were tried between 1591 and 1680 — and all, without exception, were executed; for the half-century from 1611 to 1660 alone, the figure is 2,500.⁽⁵²⁾