Europe's inner demons

There is a further reason why the notion of a secret society of witches cannot be satisfactorily explained by postulating the real existence of such a society. As we shall see in a later chapter, present-day anthropologists have found very similar notions firmly embedded in the world-views of “primitive” societies in various parts of the world. Bands of destructive witches who kill human beings, especially children; who travel at night by supernatural means; and who foregather in remote spots to devour their victims — these crop up again and again in anthropological literature. But anthropologists are agreed that these bands exist in imagination only; nobody has ever come across a real society of witches. And that indeed is the nub: from Jarcke and Mone onwards, the tradition we have been considering has suffered from the same defect, of grossly underestimating the capacities of human imagination.

Taken as a whole, that tradition itself forms a curious chapter in the history of ideas. Over a period of a century and a half, the non-existent society of witches has been repeatedly re-interpreted in the light of the intellectual preoccupations of the moment. The theories of Jarcke and Mone were clearly inspired by the current dread of secret societies; that of Michelet, by his enthusiasm for the emancipation of the working classes and of women; those of Murray and Runeberg, by the Frazerian belief that religion originally consisted of fertility cults; those of Rose and Russell, maybe, by the spectacle of the psychedelic and orgiastic experiments of the 1960s.

But it is time to turn to the other traditional explanation of how the stereotype of a sect of witches came into being in medieval Europe.

7. THREE FORGERIES AND ANOTHER WRONG TRACK

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Most historians who were not persuaded that a sect of witches really existed have accepted that the stereotype came into being during, and as a result of, the Inquisition’s campaign against Catharism in southern France and northern Italy. They have also been in agreement about the immediate consequences: in France, the execution of the first living example of the stereotype, a woman burned at Toulouse in 1275; the first mass trial and execution of witches, carried out in 1335, also at Toulouse; other similar trials, resulting by 1350 in the execution of some 400 persons at Toulouse and a further 200 at Carcassonne; in Italy, a woman of Orta, in the diocese of Novara, tried and presumed burned some time between 1341 and 1352; further trials and executions around 1360, in the neighbouring diocese of Como.

These particulars are to be found already in the earliest scholarly history devoted to the witch-trials, that by Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan, published in German in 1843;⁽¹⁾

they are given very fully in Joseph Hansen’s great history, published in German in 1900;⁽²⁾ and they are still to be found in the most recent histories by the most reputable scholars. They are nevertheless false from start to finish: none of these things really happened. The entire story can be shown to rest on three fabrications, dating respectively from the fifteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As what is involved amounts to a major revision of the history of the witch-hunt, the matter calls for detailed exposition — and if detailed expositions can sometimes be tedious, this one has at least the attraction of the bizarre.

Hansen’s influence on twentieth-century historians has been so great that it is reasonable to start with him. He mentions the earliest case in three separate passages, the most striking of which can be translated as follows: