Europe's inner demons

Dr H. C. Erik Midelfort has made a detailed study of south-west Germany.⁽⁵³⁾ He calculates that in a period of a little more than a century, from 1561 to 1670, at least 3,229 persons were executed in that area.⁽⁵⁴⁾ The figures for particular places are even more startling. In the little town of Wiesensteig, sixty-three women were burned in a single year, 1562.

⁽⁵⁵⁾ In the small, secluded territory of Obermarchtal, with a population of some 700 poor peasants, in the three years 1586-8 forty-three women and eleven men were burned, i.e. nearly 7 per cent of the population.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Such massive killings occurred only when supposed witches were forced by torture to denounce others whom they had seen at the sabbat. Midelfort gives an example: “When Ursula Bayer denounced eight other persons, we know that four of them were executed with her on 16 June 1586, and two later; only two escaped trial and torture.”⁽⁵⁷⁾

In June 1631 the small town of Oppenau, in Württemberg, with a population of 650, was drawn into the witch-hunt that had been proceeding in the neighbouring territories for a couple of years. In less than nine months fifty persons had been executed in eight mass burnings, and 170 further denunciations were awaiting consideration by the court — at which point the judges began to have doubts about the correctness of their proceedings.⁽⁵⁸⁾ It would be easy, but pointless, to multiply the examples; those given are enough to show how untypical the English case was. The decisive factors are not in doubt: really massive witch-hunts occurred only where the concept of witchcraft included the sabbat and where judicial procedure included torture — and in England, save in rare instances, neither circumstance applied.

The great witch-hunt is only now beginning to be studied on a European scale, but already this much is certain: it was not, in the main, a cynical operation. Financial greed and conscious sadism, though by no means lacking in all cases, did not supply the main driving force: that was supplied by religious zeal. Even torture appeared, to most of those who employed it, not only legitimate but divinely required. The witch was regarded as being not only allied to the Devil but in the grip of a demon, and the purpose of torture was to break that grip. Each trial was a battle between the forces of God and the forces of the Devil — and the battle was fought, inter alia, for the witch’s own soul: a witch who confessed and perished in the flames had at least a chance of purging his or her guilt and achieving salvation. On the other hand, it was held that God would give an innocent person strength to withstand any amount of torture. And it is true that the few — about one in ten, at the height of the witch-hunt — who could hold out were usually set free. In this sense torture became the successor to, and substitute for, trial by ordeal.

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The great witch-hunt can in fact be taken as a supreme example of a massive killing of innocent people by a bureaucracy acting in accordance with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths. It illustrates vividly both the power of the human imagination to build up a stereotype and its reluctance to question the validity of a stereotype once it is generally accepted.

Much work remains to be done before the dynamics of the great witch-hunt can be fully understood. Meanwhile it is at least possible to suggest one fruitful line of enquiry. When operating separately the two different notions about witches inspired two very different kinds of witch-trial; but they could also be combined, and this is what commonly happened at the height of the great witch-hunt. A certain collusion, no doubt unconscious, occurred between the peasantry on the one hand and the authorities — and notably the magistrates — on the other. An old woman is arrested for witchcraft. At once, neighbours come forward to accuse her of harming their children or their cattle— whereupon the magistrates compel her to admit not only to those acts of maleficium

but also to having entered into a pact with a demon, having copulated with him for years and having formally renounced Christianity. They also compel her to speak of the sabbat and to name those whom she saw there.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Behind the accusations from below and the interrogations from above lie divergent preoccupations and aims. Just how they interlocked deserves detailed examination. It might well provide the key to what still remains one of the most mysterious episodes in European history.^†

NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS