Europe's inner demons

If Arno Runeberg had troubled to trace Murray’s quotations back to their origins, he would perhaps never have produced Witches, demons and fertility magic

at all. But once published — by the Finnish Academy of Sciences in 1947 — the book lent new credibility to Murray’s central thesis. For it is by no means an unsophisticated work. It contains a mass of valuable information about European folk-beliefs, much of it directly relevant to the age-old popular image of the witch. It has no use at all for such fancies as the aboriginal race of dwarfs, or even for the Dianic cult in the sense of a homogeneous religion. Precisely because it avoids such eccentricities it has persuaded some serious historians, right down to the present day, that the witchcraft we hear of at the close of the Middle Ages was indeed derived from a fertility cult.⁽²⁸⁾

Runeberg starts from pre-historic times. In a world still dominated by the wilderness, primitive hunters and farmers developed a form of magic which was intended to influence the spirits of forests and rivers and mountains. Popular fertility rites, such as have survived in many peasant communities almost to the present day, are derived from that magic. But apart from these rites, which were celebrated publicly, with the whole village participating, there existed a secret art, known only to specialists, i.e. to professional magicians. These magicians were men and women who had learned how to penetrate into the world of nature-spirits, how to become like those spirits, how to influence them and to partake of their powers. In the primitive world-view, nature-spirits and magicians alike “bestow fertility, wealth and strength on whomever they wish, at the same time that they smite their enemies with sickness and death”.⁽²⁹⁾

The notion of the maleficent magician, or witch, arose from that of the “magical transfer”: witches used magic to procure fertility and abundance in their own crops and herds, which implied inflicting a corresponding deprivation on one’s neighbours.

The magicians formed associations, which met secretly, at night, to perform communal rites; and by the close of the Middle Ages these associations were being severely persecuted by the Church, for practising a pagan cult. The Cathars were also being persecuted; and it was only natural that the two harassed and outlawed breeds should form an alliance, should indeed amalgamate. Effected in the first instance in the inaccessible valleys of southern France and of the Alps, this alliance or amalgamation gave rise to a new heretical sect, which spread gradually over vast areas of western Europe. This is the sect that we meet in the protocols of the witch-trials and the books of the witch-hunting magistrates. For Cathars and magicians alike, under the pressure of persecution, turned to Devil-worship. Traditional magic was transformed: “The participants in the ‘sabbath’ were no longer made up of primitive people who tried to influence fertility for their own benefit and according to their own conception of nature, but of sensation-mad, degenerated individuals who actually were convinced that they worshipped Satan himself. The incarnated deity of the witches was enacted by adventurers and rogues…”⁽³⁰⁾

In support of his view Runeberg lists a number of similarities between, on the one hand, the accounts of the witches’ sabbat and, on the other hand, various peasant rites and beliefs connected with fertility. The large sabbats were commonly supposed to be held at Easter, May Day, Whitsuntide, Midsummer, All Saints’ Day, Christmas or Lent; these are also the times for fertility rites. The sabbats were supposed to involve circular dances; these can be compared with the dance around the May-pole. Banqueting and love-making figure in both kinds of ceremony, and so do figures in animal masks. Runeberg points out, too, that the witches’ Devil has some very unexpected features: he is often called by a name which is far more appropriate to a wood spirit than to the Devil of Christian demonology. Moreover at the end of the sabbat the Devil sometimes burns himself up — and this also happens to various puppets representing the corn-spirit or the wood-spirit. All this leads Runeberg to the truly Frazerian conclusion: popular fertility rites and the secret fertility rites of the witches have one and the same object — to kill the “old” spirit of nature and then to resurrect the same spirit in a new, youthful guise. Through all the deformations resulting from contact with Catharism and from the pressures of ecclesiastical persecution, this original sub-structure can still be discerned.