Europe's inner demons

Clearly the “case” which Rose uses to clinch his argument was taken not from the original sources but from Murray. It is a revealing slip. Though he wrote his book largely in order to combat some of Murray’s more glaring fallacies, he remained under her influence. By her selective use of sources Murray had been able to persuade others as well as herself that there really were covens, in the sense of fixed, local groups of witches; this was indeed one of her most original contributions to the misinterpretation of history. Rose adopted the idea of the coven without, it would seem, ever recognizing its origin or questioning its validity. Like Runeberg, he wrote a better book than the Witch-Cult. Like Runeberg, he made ingenious suggestions as to what an organization of witches might have been like. But when one asks for proofs that an organization of witches really existed, nothing is forthcoming beyond those sources which Murray had already offered — and which, when examined, turn out to be full of the wildest fantasies.

Less read, perhaps, than they used to be, the works of Montague Summers still deserve mention in this context. Both The History of Witchcraft and Demonology and The Geography of Witchcraft

were originally published, in 1926 and 1927 respectively, in the Kegan Paul series “The History of Civilization”, edited by that eminent Cambridge personality C. K. Ogden. Both were republished as recently as 1963-5; and some of their basic contentions continue to be taken seriously by some historians down to the present day. Summers claimed, though with doubtful justification, to be in holy orders. What is certain is that he was a religious fanatic: a Roman Catholic of a kind now almost extinct — obsessed by thoughts of the Devil, perpetually ferreting out Satan’s servants whether in past epochs or in the contemporary world; horrified yet at the same time fascinated by tales of Satan-worship, promiscuous orgies, cannibalistic infanticide and the rest. He was also a prolific writer, whose productions included, in addition to the works mentioned above, half a dozen editions and translations of witch-hunters’ manuals, three books on werewolves and vampires, a book on the Marquis de Sade and numerous editions of Restoration comedies.

For Summers witches were what the witch-hunters of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries said they were: members of a conspiracy, organized and controlled by Satan, to bring about the destruction of Christianity and the spiritual and physical ruination of mankind. The confessions given in witchcraft trials and the stories in the manuals and memoirs of witch-hunting magistrates are accepted as true in essentials. “We know,” he writes, “that the Continental stories of witch gatherings are with very few exceptions the chronicle of actual fact.”⁽³⁸⁾ And again: “There persists a congeries of solid proven fact which cannot be ignored, save by the purblind prejudice of the rationalist, and cannot be accounted for save that we recognize that there were and are organizations deliberately nay, even enthusiastically, devoted to the service of evil.”

⁽³⁹⁾

Not that Summers himself wholly denies the claims of rationalism, for he follows Murray in playing down the manifestly impossible features in the accounts of the sabbat. Where a sabbat story can be made to look natural by omitting certain details, he omits them. The physical presence of the Devil at the sabbat is interpreted as Murray interpreted it: men impersonated the Devil (and sure enough, one of those men was Francis Stewart, Earl of Both well). As for flight through the air, Summers claims that it rarely figures in such accounts (though in fact it is a stock feature).⁽⁴⁰⁾

In his basic outlook Summers is utterly opposed to Murray and her disciples: for them witchcraft is a purely human creation, for him it is an extreme manifestation of the unremitting war of Satan against God. But he is just as convinced as they that an organization of witches existed, and held meetings — and just as unable to produce any credible evidence for that view; or rather, any evidence that remains credible if pursued to its source.

The school of thought we have been considering is by no means extinct, even amongst professional historians. On the contrary, it has recently found a new and vigorous exponent in Professor Jeffrey Russell, of the University of California. Professor Russell is a distinguished medievalist who has specialized in the history of religious dissent. His Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, published by the Cornell University Press in 1972, is by far the most learned attempt ever made to show that witchcraft really was an organized, anti-Christian religion. It could well convince many who have not been convinced by any of the works mentioned above.