Witchcraft, Magic, and Superstition in Europe

By Michael D. Bailey
      
            History is often obsessed with beginnings and endings, some more real than others. The Roman Empire fell in 476 when the Germanic warlord Odoacer deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus. The Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther issued his Ninety-Five Theses. The United States was inaugurated with a pen-stroke on July 4, 1776, and the ancient régime fell when the Bastille succumbed to the Parisian mob on July 14, 1789. In 1782, Anna Göldi, a Swiss maidservant, was executed for witchcraft in what is generally regarded as the last fully legal witch trial in Europe. The museum recently opened to honor her in the Canton of Glarus, therefore, memorializes not just any victim of the witch hunts, but Europe’s “last witch.”

           Switzerland has a fair claim to being site of the beginning as well as the end of the European witch hunts, for in the mid-fifteenth century Alpine lands witnessed both the construction of the stereotype of diabolical witchcraft – that is, of witches as demon-worshiping, sabbat-attending servants of Satan – and some of the first applications of that stereotype in trials. Yet these beginnings and endings, and indeed the entire history of European witchcraft, tell only a small part of a much larger story. Belief in the real existence and power of supernatural spirits (demons among them) and of occult natural forces (such as might be contained in witches’ potions and poisons) has been a major aspect of human culture, and certainly of European culture at least until characteristically modern forms of rationality emerged during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perennial too has been the belief that human beings could access and manipulate such power via words and rites, as well as the conviction that certain people would utilize such power for evil ends, and that society needed to be protected from them.

             In my recent book Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present,I have tried to set the important and dismal story of the European witch hunts within this larger history. I have also tried to tell a story without artificial beginnings and endings. I begin in the depths of antiquity and proceed to the twenty-first century. My purpose is not to chart the movement through time of some static construct that modern opinion might label “magic” or “witchcraft,” but rather to trace how successive societies and cultures constructed and categorized such practices, taking into account both what contemporaries might understand as magical (even when they employed no such word) and what modern minds might perceive in the past. I saw no reason to stop in the eighteenth century, with the advent of the Enlightenment, because magical beliefs and practices persist in modern Europe and North America. Modern magical groups, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the early twentieth century, or modern witches (Wiccans) in the twenty-first are often regarded as being wholly separate from the magicians and witches of the past. They certainly occupy a different position in society, and in many ways arise from specifically modern cultural currents. Yet they are nonetheless very much a part of the not-yet-ended history of magic in the West.

Michael D. Bailey is assistant professor of history at Iowa State University.

Comments

[Dove]

Undoubtedly there were reasons why women in general and specific women in particular, were more readily accused of being witches during this period in Western history.

This paper is interesting, to me anyway..

Control of Uppity Women
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/149529-Control-of-Uppity-Women-Behind-Witchcraft-Accusations-