Europe's inner demons

Yet if that is the main purport of Russell’s argument, it is not the whole purport; for, like so many before him, he also believes that witchcraft was partly rooted in folk practices and beliefs connected with fertility. Fully aware of the inadequacies of Margaret Murray’s work, he nevertheless takes her central thesis seriously. Like Runeberg, he holds that fertility rites, with dancing, eroticism, banqueting and the rest, were transformed by the pressures of a hostile Christian society into the witches’ sabbat.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Moreover he considers that “enormous weight” has been lent to Runeberg’s view by the researches of the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg. As he sees it, Ginzburg’s book

I Benandanti, published in 1966, illustrates how members of a fertility cult were transformed into witches. Up to 1610 a group of peasants in the district of Friuli in northern Italy fought pitched battles at night against “members of the local witch cult”; by 1640, after a generation of inquisitorial trials, they were generally regarded, and even regarded themselves, as being Devil-worshipping witches. In Russell’s view “no firmer bit of evidence has ever been presented that witchcraft existed”.⁽⁴⁸⁾

Such is the case presented in Witchcraft in the Middle Ages for believing that there really was an organization, indeed a sect, of witches. It is presented with great erudition and persuasiveness — and nevertheless it completely fails to stand up.

To deal first with the matter of the fertility cult: the whole argument is based on a misreading of I Benandanti. For as described by Ginzburg, the Friuli peasants did not really fight battles with “members of the local witch cult” — they went into cataleptic trances during which they dreamed

that, mounted on boats and cats, they fought witches. All that happened physically was that they lay motionless in bed, as though dead, for a couple of hours. The true significance of Ginzburg’s researches will be considered in a later chapter. Here it is only necessary to note that they do not in any way confirm Runeberg’s contention that real gatherings of fertility cultists were transformed, by persecution, into witches’ sabbats.

That Russell should so misunderstand the purport of Ginzburg’s book is itself significant. It points to a methodological confusion which leads him into other, more serious errors. “What people thought happened”, he writes, “is as interesting as what ‘objectively did happen’, and much more certain.”⁽⁴⁹⁾ No doubt — but the two things are by no means the same. Thirty or forty years ago great numbers of Germans believed that world affairs were in the hands of the Jews, who in turn were controlled by a secret government known as the Elders of Zion; while great numbers of Russians believed that Soviet society was riddled from top to bottom by followers of Trotsky who were also agents of the “imperialist” powers. In both cases, the prevalence of such beliefs facilitated the destruction of many millions of human beings. The historian’s interpretation of those events will differ greatly according to whether he regards the beliefs as having been substantially correct or, on the contrary, grossly misguided. In the case of the great witch-hunt the situation was, as we shall see, more complex than in the modern persecutions; but it is still the historian’s task to distinguish between fact and fantasy so far as is humanly possible.

The task is not as insuperable as Russell, in certain passages, makes it sound. My own grounds for not accepting the existence of a sect of orgiastic, infanticidal, cannibalistic, Devil-worshipping heretics between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries have been given in detail in Chapter III and need not be repeated here. Russell himself explicitly states that charges of ritually murdering children and consuming their blood were “absurd” when brought against Jews;⁽⁵⁰⁾ had he included the case of the Fraticelli in his study, he might have concluded, as I did, that similar stereotyped accusations were no more justified when levelled against heretics. My grounds for not accepting even in part the tales of witches’ sabbats, as they were retailed from the fifteenth century onwards, have been made abundantly clear in the course of the present chapter. In my view, stories which contain manifestly impossible elements ought not to be accepted as evidence for physical events.