Europe's inner demons

The fantasy is first met with in the second century, when pagan Greeks and Romans attached it to the small Christian communities in the Empire. These unfortunate people found themselves accused of holding meetings at which babies or small children were ritually slaughtered, and feasts at which the remains of these victims were ritually devoured; also of holding erotic orgies at which every form of intercourse, including incest between parents and children, was freely practised; also of worshipping a strange divinity in the form of an animal.

In medieval Christendom various dissenting groups, or heretical sects, were accused of similar practices — and in addition of sacrilegious acts, such as spitting and trampling on the crucifix, and adoring Satan in corporeal form in some more or less obscene fashion. It came as a surprise to me to find that the dissidents who were so accused were not, as has commonly been supposed, primarily the exotic and non-Christian Cathars but, on the contrary, devoutly Christian groups such as the Waldensians and the Fraticelli. In all cases it proved possible, by a re-examination of the evidence, to clear these groups of charges which to some extent have hung over them for five or six centuries. Very similar accusations were used by the French king Philip the Fair to effect the destruction of the Order of the Knights Templars; and in this case too I argue that they were baseless.

The latter part of the book is devoted to showing how this age-old tradition contributed to the European witch-hunt. That great persecution reached its height only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and no attempt is made here to retell the grisly story: the book scarcely ventures beyond the middle of the fifteenth century. But the witch-hunt would never have taken on such massive dimensions without the notion of the witches’ sabbat. How that notion came into being, indeed how the whole stereotype of the witch came into being, is studied in detail. The results run counter to many widely accepted ideas. A certain tradition of historical thinking, extending from the 1820s down to the present day, has encouraged the belief that there really was a secret society of witches, or else a pagan cult which was so interpreted by the Church. This belief is responsible for the proliferation of “covens” and similar groups at the present time; but when scrutinized, the historical evidence simply dissolves. On the other hand the alternative view, which on the whole has been more favoured by historians — that the society of witches was a fiction elaborated by the Inquisition in the fourteenth century — proved to be based on various forgeries which have hitherto escaped detection. I was compelled to look elsewhere for a viable explanation. The vogue of ritual or ceremonial magic amongst the upper strata of late medieval society proved to have contributed far more than is commonly supposed to the stereotype of the witch; and the same can be said of certain standardized trance or dream experiences amongst the peasantry. I argue that the great witch-hunt became possible when these practices and experiences were interpreted in terms of the traditional stereotype of the clandestine, systematically anti-human society.

The last chapter of the book touches on another, singularly vexatious problem. It has long been realized that the witch-trials that took place in England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were very different, not only in scale but also in atmosphere, from the mass witch-hunts that were sweeping large areas of the Continent in the same period. In recent years Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay on the European witch-craze on the one hand, the studies of English witchcraft beliefs by Mr Keith Thomas and Dr Alan Macfarlane on the other, have highlighted the contrast. I show that a similar contrast between individual witch-trial and mass witch-hunt can sometimes be observed on the Continent itself; and I try to explain how it came about. The explanation would seem to lie in the fact that whereas the mass witch-hunt reflected above all the demonological obsessions of the intelligentsia, ecclesiastical and lay, individual witch-trials reflected above all interpersonal fears and hatreds at village level; and I suggest that future research might well concern itself with the interactions between the two.

Such is the subject-matter of this book. It is vast enough as it stands; and if anyone should be tempted to comment on the omission of the Jews — who were of course also repeatedly accused of killing Christian children and drinking their blood, of torturing the Host and of worshipping Satan — he may be referred to the standard work by Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and The Jews, originally published by Yale University Press in 1943.