Witches: Myth and Reality

Samhain and All Hallow's Eve

"When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurly-burly's done. When the battle's lost and won.
That will be ere the set of sun...
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air."

-- Macbeth, Act I, Scene I

"witch"

1. a person believed to have magic power: sorceress
2. an ugly old woman: hag
3. a charming or alluring girl or woman"

-- The Merriam Webster Dictionary

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

-- Exodus 22:18

Our present-day view of the witch is similar to that of the famous three witches in William Shakespeare's Macbeth -- three ugly old hags huddled around a bubbling cauldron, who possess magical powers and evoke emotions of fear and perhaps revulsion from the "normal" people in society. Witches also arouse our curiosity; their ability to use charms, cast spells, and divine the future have long enticed mere mortals, as they beguiled noble Macbeth.

Entwined with our curiosity about witchcraft, however, is the conviction that witches are somehow evil, somehow unholy. The Bible explicitly condemns sorcery and basically invites the persecution of witches. But what was the source of this belief? Were witches inherently evil, or were they falsely accused of evil acts by zealots and opportunists from rival religions?

The word "witch" has become over the centuries a pejorative term, used frequently as a mild curse word for a woman disliked. In European antiquity, however, before the rise of the organized Christian Church, the witch had a different meaning altogether. The witch was seen as a wise person, usually a wise woman, one who was skilled in the healing arts. She may have had a knowledge of ancient herbal medicine and was often a midwife as well. Her religious beliefs, if she had any, were more often than not a faith based on a respect for Nature -- a faith in the Sun, the Moon, the forest, and in livings creatures. The witch had a special reverence for the seasons of the year and the seasonal festivals celebrating the change in the weather relating to the harvesting of crops.

True ancient witchcraft, contrary to the popularly mistaken notion, had nothing to do with the Devil or Satan -- an evil being who was in fact found in the predominant, subsequent religion of Europe, namely, Christianity. The ancient witches who worshipped Nature in their Old Religion did not even recognize the existence of Satan.

Over centuries the witch would come into direct conflict with the new Christian hierarchy which rejected the pagans' awe of nature and the importance of women in such a belief system. (In pre-Christian Europe, naturally, most people originally followed a pagan faith.) Ancient witches, or priestesses, recognized a Goddess as well as a God (and indeed since antiquity had an assortment of several gods and goddesses). Eventually, these witches would be challenged by the Church for popularity among the common folk. Indeed, at first the Church denied the purported powers of witchcraft, claiming they were superstition or delusion, and that God alone had supernatural powers. Later the Church would reverse itself and claim that witches were real -- evil creatures in league with the Devil, which only the Church (as the representative of God) could stamp out.

Starting mainly in the late 14th century in Europe, witches began to suffer persecution, torture, and eventual annihilation in many cases. The wholesale slaughter of alleged witches would continue into the 1700s. Mainly women were murdered, although sometimes men were accused of witchcraft as well and suffered the horrendous consequences. Indeed, in keeping with Exodus 22:18, the rivals of the witches would "not suffer" them "to live." Sometimes the witch haters killed because of their pseudo-religious fanaticism or irrational fears; other times they killed for the profits. Money could be made from witch hunting.

Our modern society still recalls the days of the benevolent, though misunderstood, ancient witch with her earth-based, nature worship. But in most cases the heritage is disguised or transformed. In ancient times, for instance, certain wells or springs with their flowing waters were considered to have almost magical powers for good luck or healing; today in Christianity this is called "Holy Water." The cauldron that is seen as a negative symbol of the witch today, in ancient Celtic times was considered to be a source of knowledge and sustenance; it was something positive relating to the improvement of life.

But the most significant remembrance of the days of the witch was perhaps an event known as "Samhain," a celebration of the end of autumn and the beginning of darkness, of winter and the New Year. Samhain was one of the four key parts of the Celtic seasonal calendar. "Imbolg" was the advent of springtime and signified birth. This was the season of the ancient pagan goddess Brigit. Christianity transformed this day, February 1, into St. Brigit's Day in honor of a 6th century Irish nun who was said to possess miraculous and holy powers. (It should be noted that the ancient Celts calculated a day based on sunrise and sunset and not at midnight as we do today, so the eve of the feast day was part of the celebration as well.)

The coming of summer was represented by the festival of "Beltane" on the first of May -- also called May Day in modern times.

"Lughnasad" on August 1 was another key day of the Celtic year relating to the Celtic god Lugh. This day was seen as the beginning of the harvest season and is associated with the baking of bread. In more modern times this pagan celebration transformed into the festival called "Lammas" and was celebrated in devoutly Christian Ireland even into the 20th century. (In a book by Jones and Pennick called A History of Pagan Europe, the authors indicate that a celebration for Lammas was often moved to a Sunday close to the actual festival date; the celebration included singing, dancing, and displays of garlands or flowers. Another name for this day was Garland Sunday.) Also, significantly enough, was the consumption of fresh clear water from a nearby well or perhaps a spring. Again, a possible connection to "holy" water.

Clearly all these four important days related to nature and the harvest, and the ties to a religion based on reverence for nature were obvious. The very lives of the people in those early days depended upon a successful harvest. There were also four other significant festival days that appeared in between the big four. These were the solstices and equinoxes relating to the year's four seasons. These eight celebration days were the most important times of the year for the ancient Druids, the priestly class among the Celts. The ancient European Celtic peoples lived throughout most of central Europe and their ancestors are found today among the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Breton in France, Manx, and Galician peoples in northern Spain. (Modern Druids are sometimes seen visiting Stonehenge in England.)

Samhain was the most awe-inspiring of the seasonal celebrations, however, because it foretold the coming of winter, the time of the year most feared by the ancient people because of the length of the cold and dark days and the scarcity of food. Not unexpectedly, Samhain was also the day to remember the souls of the departed. Samhain occurred on November 1st and its eve was, of course, October 31st when the festivities actually commenced. (October 31 was then considered New Year's Eve.) The pagan Celts believed that the two worlds, the physical world and the spirit world, drew closer on this date and that ghosts and apparitions of the dead could roam about the physical plane.

Samhain was a magical time, a time of the lighting of bonfires. Pagans customarily would put their fires out, then re-light them to represent the end of the year and the coming of the next.

With the coming of Christianity, which found it impossible to remove all the old beliefs from the populace, Samhain was transformed into All Saints' Day, or as it was also called, All Hallows' day (with hallow meaning holy or holy people). The day before All Hallows' Day was, of course, All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween. The origins of modern Halloween are therefore based in ancient pagan Irish or Celtic beliefs.

St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, and other missionaries peacefully converted the pagan Irish Celts to Christianity in the 5th century, and he is of course revered to this day for his great learning and kindness. This conversion was unlike many others throughout Europe and eventually in the New World, in which conversion by the sword was more common.

Emperor Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, then centered in Constantinople. After his death subsequent imperial decrees were aimed at stamping out Paganism. An edict in 340 AD outlawed pagan practices in the Eastern Empire and was imposed universally in 342. In 346 the practice of pagan worship became punishable by death. Following this, there were periods when paganism was decriminalized and openly practiced again, especially under the Roman ruler Julian, who himself became a pagan being inspired by the mysteries of ancient Greece. But eventually paganism lost favor to Christianity.

This is not to say that the pagans had no blood on their hands and were solely the victims of Christian intolerance. Early Christians were, of course, persecuted under the pagan rule of the Roman Empire. Many early Christians were martyred for their faith. The raids and land grabs of the Vikings were another example of pagan atrocities committed against Christians, especially in Ireland and Britain where the Norsemen sacked monasteries, killed monks, and seized slaves and booty.

Then there was pagan-on-pagan killing as well. In ancient pagan Greece there was the "pharmakos" or the "scapegoat," which involved killing a human being to alleviate some natural calamity such as a plague. Of special note was the "Wicker man" of the pagan Celts. As reported in accounts by Julius Caesar and other Romans, the Celts would build a huge, cage-like structure in the shape of a large man made from wood or wicker. Inside it were stuffed living human beings. In bonfire-like fashion the "wicker man" was set ablaze, sacrificing the people inside. Christians centuries later would burn pagans and alleged pagans as well, as "evil" witches or heretics, during the Burning Times.

But the facts about pagans practicing human sacrifice in ancient times remain a matter of debate. In his authoritative book The Druids, author Peter Berresford Ellis discussed at length the rituals of the ancient Celts and also presented arguments on whether human sacrifice was as widespread among the Celts as the Romans and others suggested. His evidence indicated that the allegations of massive human sacrifice among the Celts may be unfounded. It appears unclear to what extent human sacrifice actually occurred among the Celts, if at all.

One case of Celtic pagan human sacrifice that seems clear was the killing at a location called Mag Slecht in ancient Ireland. Here people were allegedly sacrificed to the god/idol named Cromm Cruach. Nigel Pennick, a well-known authority in the field of Celtic/pagan history and culture, discussed human sacrifice among the ancient Celts in his book The Sacred World of the Celts. At Mag Slecht, at least, it would appear that pagan human sacrifice may have occurred, possibly even at the season of Samhain. But this is not undisputed, as noted in the works of Ellis above. And it should be noted that the writing of the history of the pagan Celts, over the centuries, was ultimately in the hands of the enemies of the Celts -- be they Imperial Roman or Christian -- and that these writings were not necessarily objective.

Christian-on-Christian killings occurred as well; the pagans had no monopoly on the slaughter of one's own kind. One need only look to the various wars in Europe in which the combatants each claimed to have God on their side.

In modern times the practice of witchcraft has been decriminalized, ending centuries of suppression and allowing neo-pagan religions to reemerge in the Western world. These beliefs emphasize the importance of Nature and personal freedom. Again, these neo-pagan, earth-based religions have nothing to do with devil worship.

The witch has, therefore, come full cycle -- from being, once upon a time, a person of mystical wisdom and even natural beauty and a proponent of the polytheistic Old Religion, to being an oddity, an old hag, and a vile outcast; and then from being a victim of persecution and false accusations, to being once again the proponent of an earth/nature based religion.

The witch has traveled from an Old Religion into the New Age.

Origins of the Witch

According to the Dictionary of Word Origins by Joseph T. Shipley, the word "witch" has its origins in the ancient Anglo-Saxon word wicca, which could mean "witch" or "wizard." Our word "witch" is also related to the German word weihen, which means "to consecrate" or "to bless." The German word Weih actually means "holy"; and Weihwasser means "holy water." Oddly enough "witch" might also come from the Latin victima, which means a "sacrificial creature."

The witch, in one form or another, whether in a positive or negative sense, has been an important part of humanity for a long, long time. Some say the origins of the witch date back thousands of years to human pre-history, to the days when the Goddess was worshiped and humanity had great reverence for the powers of Nature and for women as creators of new life. In the New Age philosophy this relates to the concept of "Gaia" or Mother Earth which views planet earth as essentially a living being. Ancient drawings (circa 30,000 B.C.) of a horned god or magician have been found in caves across Europe and may be connected to the pagan belief in the stag as a magical creature. One of the leading, though controversial, advocates of the connection between the European witchcraft of more modern times and the pre-historic pagan past was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray.

Prior to the 14th century witchcraft was popular among the various European peoples, and it was more or less tolerated by the hierarchy of the Church. It is important here to remember that witchcraft did not mean demon-worship, as it was later branded. Rather, witchcraft came to mean a collection of beliefs and practices including healing through spells, mixing unguents (ointments or concoctions), dabbling in the supernatural (doing magic), divining or forecasting the future, and engaging in clairvoyance. The witch functioned more like a priestess than an evil sorceress.

Among the Norse or the Vikings, for example, a witch could tell the future supposedly though the use of "runes" -- small stones with runic letters or inscriptions on them believed to have magical powers. The witch was essentially a seeress (one who sees the future) or a shaman (one who has connections to the spirit world), functioning within the Norse pagan religion. Among the popular Norse gods were Odin (the leading Viking god of war and the dead), Freyja or Freya (the goddess of love, the equivalent of the Roman Venus), and Thor (the god of thunder and wind), etc. Today we recall the goddess Freya and her brother Frey with the name of a day of the week -- Friday. The Vikings were a good example of how Christianity and paganism co-existed for many years. The Norse eventually accepted Christianity, but they still clung to many of their pagan beliefs as well.

The ancient Greeks and Romans also had pagan beliefs with a pantheon of gods and goddesses -- Zeus, Venus, Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury, etc. The Romans, of course, borrowed many of their gods and goddesses from the Greeks. All of these gods have had an influence on modern society, including the naming of automobiles and rocket ships. The ancient priests and priestesses who performed the rituals of these ancient religions may be seen as the precursors of the witch, if not the witch in fact. Circe, found in the legends of Greek mythology, was a witch or sorceress who beguiled sailors lost at sea to approach her island where she could shape shift them into animals. She is recalled in The Odyssey where she was outwitted by Odysseus. Another ancient Greek witch was Medea, noted for her use of magic to aid the bold adventurer Jason in the quest for the Golden Fleece. Furthermore, Hecate was a Greek titan/witch whose name also appears in Macbeth.

Other ancient lands had witches or the equivalent, and they were held in high esteem. Druids were respected priests or witches among the ancient Celtic peoples. "Brichta ban" was an ancient Irish expression meaning "the spells of women," or the witchcraft of women -- a thing eventually seen as hostile to the authority of the hierarchy of the Church. Even St. Patrick had to compete with "the spells of women" in his quest for followers.

In Africa, where Voodoo had its origins in a spirit and nature-based religion, Vodu, the witch would eventually work its way to modern America to the Old New Orleans of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen. Marie Laveau, far from being persecuted as a witch, more or less dominated the city of New Orleans in the 19th century with her Voodoo magic. To this day she is a celebrated legend in New Orleans. This is in sharp contrast to the way witches and suspected witches were treated in most places in early America.

The Witch had a very strong connection to the concept of the ancient Goddess and the belief systems that developed from the Goddess. Some say that the adoration today of the Blessed Virgin Mary was an embellishment based on the pagan Goddess, an adoration that had already existed for centuries. The Blessed Mother Mary, of course, existed in her own right; but the adoration of her was an easy transition for a people who already accepted the Goddess.

The Goddess was worshiped by the Egyptians as Isis, who presided over the dead. Plutarch, the Greek historian, called Isis "the female principle of Nature... called many names... she turns herself into... and is receptive of all manner of shapes and forms."

The Goddess, who eventually became associated with the witch, could appear in three phases -- that of the virgin, the mother, and the crone. The author Shahrukh Husain in her book The Goddess discussed the many aspects of the goddess, and she traced the connection between the goddess and the phases of the Moon: new moon as virgin, full moon as mature woman, old moon as crone or old woman. This view of the three phases of the goddess, or multiples of three, appeared in many cultures; and even in our culture there is an obvious connection between the stereotypical witch and the crone.

In the present day revival of modern earth-based or nature religions, the other, younger phases of the witch/goddess may be seen. This is a distant reflection of ancient Greece, where, for example, Circe was a beautiful witch/goddess who beguiled Odysseus.

The Burning Times

From the late 14th century to the early 18th, the hierarchy of Christianity essentially turned its back on the peaceful and compassionate message of Jesus and substituted instead a fanatical rage of intolerance and paranoia aimed at anyone suspected of being a witch. The Sermon on the Mount and a Christian gospel of love towards humanity was replaced with the rack, the thumbscrew, the hangman's noose, and the burning stake. The House of God was, in effect, replaced with the torture chamber.

Almost anyone could be accused of being a witch and a devil worshiper during this reign of terror, often referred to as The Burning Times. In that time of extreme suspicion, women -- especially older women who had little influence in the community -- were the most vulnerable to these wild accusations of devil worship. Needless to say, a woman who was a midwife or who practiced herbal medicine or observed any remnants of the Old Religion (with the nature-based celebrations like Samhain) was in a severely precarious position. The once benign pagan celebration days of the seasons (Samhain, Imbolg, Baltane, etc.) were now seen by the inquisitors as evil, as witches' "sabbats" or sabbaths upon which witches worshipped the devil.

A societal contempt for the status of women eventually led to the belief on behalf of Church authorities that the devil could easily seduce women to join him. This explained why most of the accused witches were female. It was believed that witches would travel to sabbats where they would consort with the devil and even engage in sexual relations with Satan. How did they get to these meetings? Naturally, they flew there on broomsticks or used magic unguents or potions -- so it was said.

As late as the Middle Ages (circa 1300's), although the Church gave no credence to paganism, it had tolerated the pagan faith and its witches, for there were a multitude of pagans throughout Europe. By the late 14th century and certainly by the 15th, the persecution of witches began in earnest. The Church had gone from a somewhat tolerant disbelief in witches to a fanatical doctrine toward the existence of witches and their alleged alliance with Satan. The persecutions and the terror would eventually spread from the Catholic Church to the Protestant religions and from Europe to the New World in America. Accused witches were burned to death, hanged, drowned or crushed to death under heavy stones. Many would die under torture during the inquisitor's attempt to extract a confession of witchcraft.

The Inquisition, or Congregation of the Holy Office as it was known, had its roots in the time of Emperor Constantine where religion was integrated into official law. Heresy was considered a danger to both church and state. In the Middle Ages the Church opposed a group it considered heretical, the Albigenses. These deemed heretics were opposed to mainstream Church doctrine, and something was needed to deal with people like them. In 1229 the Dominicans were placed in charge of a tribunal to investigate heresy against the Church; this was essentially the start of the Inquisition which grew to have sweeping powers of life and death. In addition to stamping out heresy by force, the Inquisition was also anti-Semitic. By the time witches became an issue for the Church, the device to deal with them was already in place.

Oddly enough, one of the earlier victims of an absurd and vindictive witch trial was Saint Joan of Arc. The story of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, is a clear example of what motivated many accusations of witchcraft over the centuries. Joan of Arc had become a political threat to the established hierarchy of power; therefore, she had to go. And because she was a woman, the easiest way to get rid of her was to burn her as a witch. But the killing would come only after she was discredited in a circus-like trial.

Joan of Arc (or Jeanne d'Arc), the national hero of France who was later canonized a Catholic saint in 1920, had visions from God and led the army of the French against the English and their allies in the 15th century, successfully capturing the city of Orleans. However, she was eventually wounded in battle, captured by traitors, and turned over to the enemy. The English enemy, fearing her popularity with the French peasantry, tried Joan of Arc as a heretic and a witch after first brutalizing her in jail. All this was done under the power of an ecclesiastical court with the authority of the Church. Like thousands of other victims to come, she was burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1431. She died in Rouen as a sorceress and a heretic, but twenty-five years after her execution, Joan of Arc was pronounced innocent of the charges.

One of the most important works of the Inquisition against heresy and witches was the creation of the book called Malleus Maleficarum, which means "The Hammer Against Witches." (Malleus is Latin for hammer or mallet; Maleficarum refers to people who commit bad or evil acts.) Some of the material in the Malleus Maleficarum could be used not only to condemn witches but also other evil creatures which were in league with the devil like the vampire or the incubus. The Malleus Maleficarum was composed in 1486 by two fanatical Dominicans, Henricus Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, under the auspices of Pope Innocent VIII. That same Pope had in 1484 proclaimed a papal bull, "Summis Desiderantes Affectibus" which stated that both men and women could be witches and that they acquired powers from sexual contact with incubi and succubi (night demons, male and female respectively). This proclamation also took the position that the witches and demons spread disease and death.

The Malleus Maleficarum was used eventually by both Protestant and Catholic witch hunters. Even Martin Luther followed the principles of the Malleus, though he himself was seen as an enemy of the Church. It should be noted that some members of the clergy had been uncomfortable with the philosophy of the authors of the Malleus, but eventually the work became wildly popular -- perhaps a popularity rooted in fear? The Malleus Maleficarum basically claimed that women's sexual desires led them to consort with Satan and that burning a witch was a good thing -- that it was very cleansing.

The inquisitors condemned the alleged overt sexuality of witches, but over the centuries of the Burning Times witch hunters satisfied their own carnal lust by stripping naked the accused women and searching for a witch's mark -- a spot on the body indicating her allegiance to the devil. This could be a mole or other naturally made body mark which in the witch hunter's ridiculous theory would not feel pain if pricked with a pointed object. So, because of this idiotic and obscene belief, accused women in this puritanical age were stripped naked and essentially stabbed all over in search of this mark of evil. It has also been reported that accused witches confined in prisons were sometimes the victims of rape, as well as other tortures, by the authorities.

Even a brief look nowadays inside the Malleus Maleficarum reveals some astonishing topics; it is amazing that people actually considered such subject matter seriously. Some of the topics raised in the chapters of the Malleus Maleficarum include the following: whether failure to accept the existence of witches is heresy, whether incubi and succubi can produce children, "whether witches can sway the minds of men," whether witches can "obstruct the venereal act" (i.e. prevent sexual intercourse), whether witches can "change men into beasts," "how witches... prevent the power of procreation," the "three ways in which men and not women may be discovered to be addicted to witchcraft," etc. The book also discusses how to question the accused witch and discusses "remedies prescribed against hailstorms and for animals that are bewitched." Two more gruesome chapters deal with "of the continuing of the torture, and of the devices and signs by which the judge can recognize a witch; and how he ought to protect himself from their spells" and "the various degrees of overt suspicion which render the accused liable to be sentenced." (In modern times the Malleus Maleficarum was made available to the public by the translation of Montague Summers, a leading expert on the occult.)

In 1608 another book was written that was essentially a follow-up work to the Malleus Maleficarum; this was the Compendium Maleficarum by the monk Francesco Guazzo. It also described the work of witches (or the interpretations of the inquisitors) and dealt with such topics as "witches' pact with the devil," the "different diseases brought by demons," and "whether by witchcraft and devil's work the sexes can be interchanged." (These are topics from the chapter headings in the Compendium.) Topics such as these, though obviously foolish by today's standards, commanded the "thoughts" of "learned men" during the Burning Times.

Although there were many witch hunters over the centuries, one of the most notorious was a traveling lawyer called Matthew Hopkins from Protestant England. He was a fraudulent inquisitor who made a nice business for himself killing innocent people... in the name of God, of course. People in various towns paid him to purge their villages of witches. He, like many other witch hunters, possibly used a retractable bodkin or witch pricker (a sharp needle-like device) to stick at the "witches' mark" on the witch's body. One test to "prove" the accused was a witch was the lack of pain if the mark was stabbed slightly. Since a retractable blade would draw into the handle, the mark would not be actually hit, though it would appear to, to witnesses. The result was no show of great pain and therefore... a witch. Other equally imbecilic tests were done to prove a witch. Women bound were thrown into pools of water; if they sank, they were innocent. (Of course they would also drown in most cases unless someone quickly rescued them.) If they floated, they were presumed guilty of witchcraft and murdered. Incredibly, it was believed that as a witch was opposed to baptism, the waters would reject the witch.

One of the more memorable cases of persecution dealt with an accused man named Johannes Junius, a Bavarian Burgermeister. He was tortured and confessed to all kinds of weird things he never did, naming others as witches as he went along half out of his mind due to the agony of the brutal treatment and the psychological terror inflicted. He wrote a poignant letter to his daughter explaining his impending fate and proclaiming his innocence. He was burned to death in 1628.

By the 1700s witch trials were becoming a thing of the past, however. Louis XIV of France, for example, enacted an edict in 1682 that reduced the presence of witch trials.

How many people were murdered altogether in the Burning Times? No one knows for sure, but even the moderate Encyclopedia Britannica puts the number as estimated "from the hundreds of thousands to the millions."

The Burning Times was one of the foulest periods in the history of Western Civilization -- a time when reason and compassion gave way to prejudice and frenzy, when mere accusation or simply being "different" could result in the most sadistic and brutal tortures and eventually death.

Compounding the physical crimes was the insult to true Christianity, not by the witches or the accused but by the witch hunters and the inquisitors who perverted the faith they claimed to believe in and essentially committed blasphemy by torturing and murdering in the name of God.

Father Spee and the Voice of Reason

Few people in that age of utter madness known as The Burning Times dared to speak out against the witch hunts for fearof arrest and being labeled a witch themselves or of being killed as an alleged devotee of the devil.

There was, however, one noteworthy man who denounced the inquisition against witches. He was a Jesuit priest named Friedrich Spee. In particular he condemned the witch hunts and persecutions in W ürzburg (in today's Germany). Fr. Spee took the clearly enlightened position that those who confessed to be witches did so only as a result of sadistic tortures. This Roman Catholic priest had the courage to forcefully condemn the witch hunts, the tortures, and the killings and simultaneously expressed the truly Christian attitude of compassion for the persons accused of witchcraft. He also had the cleverness to protect himself against the fanatics who objected to his criticisms.

Fr. Spee's thoughts about the injustices of the witch hunts were eventually put anonymously into print as testimony to a time in history when true evil was like the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing -- near psychotic zealots and opportunists hiding behind the cloak of organized religion. Sadly, however, honorable people like Fr. Friedrich Spee were in the minority. (Fr. Spee's objections to the witch persecutions are mentioned in the book The Witch in History, edited by Venetia Newall.)

Fr. Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld is one of those persons all but forgotten by history, but who should be remembered. He had been rigorously trained as a disciplined Jesuit Father taking his vows in the year 1610, only to oppose authority when his intellect told him that the present-day authority was wrong. His dream in life was to preach the Gospel of Jesus as a missionary to the New World in America. His fate, however, was become a witness to a 17th century holocaust -- the witch killings in Würzburg, Germany. His official job was that of chaplain to those unfortunate souls who stood accused of witchcraft. It was Spee to whom the witch victims would turn in their final moments on this earth for spiritual aid or to hear confession before they were murdered by the inquisition.

Fr. Spee was said to have spiritually helped (as physical help was an impossibility) about 200 victims who were subsequently taken away and killed by the authorities.

Spee became an author of books (a rare thing in those days) which oddly enough were not published until well after his death. Could his opposition to the witch hunts have thwarted his publishing plans? The fact is that one book, published anonymously during Spee's lifetime, was no doubt the cause of his forced obscurity. Fr. Spee had written a work called Cautio Criminalis which Manfred Barthel in his book The Jesuits translates as "Circumspection in Criminal Cases." In this 1631 work, which was actually printed by a Protestant friend of Spee's, Spee revealed his strong objections to the procedures of the witch trials, the terror, the torture, and the slaughter.

Eventually the fact that Spee was the author of the anonymous Cautio Criminalis was revealed. Naturally, the authorities plotted the undoing of Spee and it appeared he would be at the very least cast out of the Society of Jesus (a.k.a. the Jesuits). But Spee stated that as this work had been published anonymously, there was no evidence that he intended to disclose the information in the book. As a result, Spee was spared from further punishment.

Spee deteriorated somewhat physically from his experiences as a witness to the horrors of the witch killings; his hair was said to have turned totally grey by the time he reached the age of forty because of the stress of his position as chaplain. But his physical and no doubt emotional sufferings did produce some benefits. It was said that the witch trials in Württemburg and Mainz in Germany stopped after Fr. Spee disclosed the truth of the horrors and injustices of the witch persecutions.

Fr. Spee died in 1635 of a fever. He had become a military chaplain during the Thirty Years War and became ill after working in the camp hospital, aiding the sick and wounded.

It should be noted there were other brave people who spoke out against the murderous lunacy of the witch hunts, although they were certainly few in number. Encyclopedia Britannica in its article on "Witchcraft" lists some of the more courageous dissidents as Giordano Bruno, a 16th century Italian philosopher who himself was burned alive for heresy, and St. Vincent de Paul, the renowned humanitarian who devoted his life to helping the poor and who objected to the inhumanity of his times.

Salem and the Legacy of the Witch

The term "witch hunt" has worked its way into American culture to mean any overly zealous or even fraudulent crusade, usually in the political or legal arena, which seeks to "get" an opponent while showing blatant disregard for justice or truth. One prime example was Sen. Joe McCarthy's paranoid search for communists during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s.

This term "witch hunt" can be traced to the Burning Times in Europe, of course; but a more recent witch hunt occurred on American shores in the late 1600s -- the notorious Salem Witch Trials.

The frenzy began after the daughter of the local Protestant minister in Salem Village, the Reverend Samuel Parris, and his niece became sick and went into convulsions. William Griggs, the local doctor, was called to assist the girls. When Griggs failed to find anything physically wrong with the children, the minister and the doctor concluded that it must be the work of witchcraft.

There had been some concerns about witchcraft in early Massachusetts, laying the groundwork for the brutality which lay ahead. There was the noteworthy case, for example, of Ann Hibbens in 1656 who was accused of witchcraft in Boston and subsequently put to death. Carol F. Karlsen points out in her book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman that prosecutions for witchcraft were not uncommon in 17th century New England, and that witch hunts there had their roots across the Atlantic in England. Soon the girls and zealous adults who believed them were accusing their neighbors of witchcraft.

Although it cannot conclusively proven, several theories today attempt to explain why the girls became ill. The Reverend Parris' African slave, Tituba, came from the Caribbean had a knowledge of voodoo. Tituba had previously amused the girls with stories of the paranormal. Some believe that these stories so influenced the girls that they became terrified and sick.

Another theory is that the girls simply wanted attention, and the more attention they got from their antics and their witch stories, the more they continued the deception until they themselves either believed their tale or were too afraid to recant. Yet another more modern theory suggests that "ergot" (a hallucinogenic fungus in the rye or cereal grains, similar in effects to LSD) caused the girls to convulse and see witches and specters (apparitions or spirits) of witches.

At first two innocent women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, were denounced as witches along with the Africa slave Tituba, who confessed to teaching the girls some of her voodoo. Eventually over 150 women and some men were jailed under the charge of being a witch.

Needless to say, these charges were false and unjust -- the result of irrational fear or even deliberate spite. The people of Salem began to see the Devil everywhere and in everything, and soon other girls in Salem Village joined the hysteria with fears that they, too, were being bewitched. They began to claim all sorts of ridiculous afflictions, from loss of speech and hearing to being mysteriously choked, apparently by specters or evil spirits.

In May of 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began and quickly degenerated into a circus. Among the charges against one alleged witch, Martha Cory, the girls claimed that the alleged witch could wring her own hands and thereby hurt the girls physically. The girls also went into convulsions and other dramatics while in the court room. One of the girls claimed to have "spectral evidence" -- in other words, a specter or evil spirit which only the girl perceived but which was invisible to the human eye. Incredibly enough, this was considered as legitimate evidence of witchcraft by the accused. Eventually, spectral evidence was not allowed as evidence by the Superior Court of Judicature, which came to replace the original court in the case (the Court of Oyer and Terminer, meaning "hearing and determination").

In all, thirteen female "witches" and six men were sent to their deaths. The main method of killing was hanging, but some alleged witches did not survive their experience in prison. One man who refused to plead at all in the case, thereby not recognizing the court's authority, was crushed to death under a large stone. Tituba was jailed then resold into slavery.


Home Page

Site Meter

Soon, however, the public and people in authority became alarmed that the trials were getting out of hand; anyone, it seemed, could be accused of witchcraft. In the end the Reverend Increase Mather, considered the most prominent minister in the colony, denounced the procedures of the trial and said it would have been better to let the guilty go free than to convict without legitimate evidence. The governor of the colony, Sir William Phips, stopped the arrests and ended the trials.

The only good to come out of this disgrace to the legal system was that eventually other people came to their senses and condemned the Salem Witch Trials (after the accused victims were already dead, of course). But the stain of the Witch Trials remained. The symbols of authority -- the reverend, the doctor, and the judge -- had all participated in this travesty of justice and abomination of morality.

The legacy of the witch has lingered on for centuries after the Witch Trials and the Burning Times. As the new Millennium approaches, the distorted image of the witch as an evil monster may well give way to the more realistic depiction of the witch, drawn once again from ancient times -- that of a healer, a nurturer, and a devotee of Nature and the Earth.


witch

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," it says in the book of Exodus (xxii, 18). This and other Biblical admonitions and commands both defined the witch and prescribed his or her fate. A witch is someone in consort with Satan, the Evil One, the spirit who rebelled against God but whom God suffered to live.

Today, the typical witch is generally portrayed as an old hag in a black robe, wearing a pointed black cap and flying on a broomstick across a full moon. Children dress up as witches on Halloween, much to the dismay of certain pious Christians. Hollywood, on the other hand, conjures up images of sexy women with paranormal powers such as psychokinesis, mind-control, hexing, and an array of other occult talents. "Pagan" or anti-Christian New Age religions are sometimes identified with witches because some pious Christians think they practice witchcraft or because those in the religions claim to practice "magick" or "the craft." Some of the members of these groups refer to themselves as "witches" and their groups as "covens." (Some male witches are very touchy about being called "warlocks".) Some of the members of these groups call themselves "sorcerers" and worship Satan, i.e., they believe in Satan and perform rituals which they think will get them a share of Satan's supernatural occult powers. (Some are very touchy about being called "sorcerers".) Most New Age witches do not worship Satan, however, and are very touchy about the subject. They would rather be associated either with the occult and magick or with attempts to re-establish a kind of nature religion which their members associate with ancient, pagan religions, such as the ancient Greek or the Celtic, especially Druidism. The neo-pagans also refer to both men and women witches as witches. One of the largest and most widespread of these nature religions is Wicca.

The witches of Christian mythology were known for their having sex with Satan and using their magical powers to do evil of all sorts. The culmination of the mythology of witchcraft came about from the 15th to the 18th centuries in the depiction of the witches' Sabbath. The Sabbath was a ritual mockery of the Mass. Witches were depicted as flying up chimneys at night on broomsticks or goats, heading for the Sabbath where the Devil (in the form of a feathered toad, a crow or raven, a black cat, or a he-goat) would perform a blasphemous version of the Mass. There would also be obscene dancing, a banquet and the brewing of potions in a huge cauldron. The banquet might include some tasty children, carrion, and other delicacies. The witches' brew was apparently to be used to hurt or kill people or to mutilate cattle. Those initiated into the satanic mysteries were all given some sort of physical mark, such as a claw mark under the left eye. The Devil was depicted as a goat or satyr or some sort of mythical beast with horns, claws, tail, and/or strange wings: a mockery of angel, man, and beast. One special feature of the Sabbath included the ritual kiss of the devil's ass, apparently a mockery of the traditional Christian act of submission of kneeling and kissing the hand or ring of a holy cleric. Numerous testimonials to having witnessed the witches' Sabbath are recorded. For example, a shepherdess, Anne Jacqueline Coste, reported in the middle of the 17th century that during the night of the feast of St. John the Baptist she and her companions heard a dreadful uproar and “looking on all sides to see whence could come these frightful howlings and these cries of all sorts of animals, they saw at the foot of the mountain the figures of cats, goats, serpents, dragons, and every kind of cruel, impure, and unclean animal, who were keeping their Sabbath and making horrible confusion, who were uttering words the most filthy and sacrilegious that can be imagined and filling the air with the most abominable blasphemies.

Such stories had been told for centuries and were accepted by pious Christians without a hint of skepticism as to their veracity. Such tales were not considered delusions, but accurate histories.

Pierre de l'Ancre, in his book on angels, demons and sorcerers published in 1610, claims he witnessed a Sabbath. Here is his description:

Here behold the guests of the Assembly, having each one a demon beside her, and know that at this banquet are served no other meats than carrion, and the flesh of those that have been hanged, and the hearts of children not baptized, and other unclean animals strange to the custom and usage of Christian people, the whole savourless and without salt.

The claims made in books such as de l'Ancre's and the depictions of Sabbath activities in works of art over several hundreds of years were not taken as humorous fictions or psychological manifestations of troubled spirits. These notions, as absurd and preposterous as they might seem to us, were taken as gospel truth by millions of pious Christians. What is even stranger is that there are many people today who believe similar stories about child-eating and ritual killing of animals, combined with sexual abuse and satanic influences.

I will leave it to the Freudians to interpret these persisting myths of satanic creatures with horns, big red tails, and huge sexual appetites; of kidnapping and sexually abusing, mutilating or killing children; of women who put long sticks between their legs and rub on a magic unguent and fly to a sexual liaison with a demonic he-goat; and of creatures with supernatural powers such as metamorphosis. My guess is that witchcraft and sorcery were for the most part brewed in the cauldron of sexual repression and served up as a justification for the public trading in art and literature, if not in life, of Church-created, sanctified, and glorified pornography.

To be sure, there was undoubtedly some persecution of those, especially in the countryside, who maintained a connection with their pagan past. But it is difficult to believe that the descriptions of witchcraft wrenched from tortured and mutilated victims century after century were not mostly created in the imaginations of their tormentors. The inquisitors' power was so great, their tortures so varied and exquisitely sadistic, that they had thousands of their victims deluded into believing they were possessed and wicked. The cruelties and delusions went on for centuries. Witch-hunting was not abolished in England until 1682. The hunt spread to America, of course, and in 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, nineteen witches were hanged. (In 1711, the Massachusetts State Legislature exonerated all but six of the accused witches. In 1957 the state legislature passed a resolution exonerating Ann Pudeator "and certain other persons," who were named in a bill exonerating them in 2001.)

The last judicial execution for witchcraft in Europe took place in Poland in 1793, when two old women were burned. A wizard, however, died as a result of an unofficial ordeal by water in England in 1865, and in 1900 two Irish peasants tried to roast a witch over her own fire .

Whatever the psychological basis for the creation of an anti-Church with witches and sorcerers joined with Satan to mock and desecrate the symbols and rituals of the Church, the practical result was a stronger, more powerful Church. No one knows how many witches, heretics, or sorcerers were tortured or burned at the stake by the pious, but the fear generated by the medieval and Spanish Inquisitions* must have affected nearly all in Christendom. Being accused of being a witch was as good as being convicted. To deny it was to prove your guilt: Of course a witch will say she is not a witch and that she does not believe in witchcraft. Throw her in the river! If she sinks and drowns that will prove she is not a witch; if she swims, we will know the devil is assisting her. Pull her out and burn her to death, for the Church does not like bloodshed! In truth, the Church ran a Reign of Terror the superior in many ways to those of Stalin or Hitler. Obviously, in terms of absolute numbers terrorized or killed, Stalin and Hitler far surpassed the Church. But their Terrors lasted only a few years and were restricted to limited territories; the Church's Terror lasted for several centuries and extended to all of Christendom.

The Church's Terror, while aimed at both men and women, has left a legacy that it was aimed mainly at women. This may be due to such things as the Salem witch trials, which, of course, had nothing to do with the Church's Terror. In any case, those religions today whose members call themselves witches or sorcerers are often anti-Christian, pagan, and woman-centered, or satanic. New Age religions often exalt whatever the Church condemned (such as egoism and healthy sexuality in adults whether homosexual or not) and condemn whatever the Church exalted (such as self-denial and the subservient role of women).

Witchcraft and sorcery are still practiced in many countries around the world. For example, in Malaysia a witch, her husband and assistant were recently hanged to death for a grisly murder. Before killing their victim, they had him lie on a floor and wait for money to fall from the sky. "He was then beheaded with an axe, skinned and chopped into 18 parts before being buried in a hole and covered over with cement" (Reuters news service). In Tanzania, an elderly man was beaten to death after he claimed to have used witchcraft to cause a road accident in which 32 people died. The man had been collecting heads and other body parts of victims at the crash scene (Reuters news story). In Saudi Arabia, Hassan bin Awad al-Zubair, a Sudanese national, was beheaded after he was convicted on charges of sorcery.

wicca

Wicca is a nature religion based upon beliefs and rites believed to be rooted in ancient practices. Wicca claims a direct connection to the ancient Celtic tradition, which is thought to be more in tune with natural forces than Christianity and other modern religions of the West. However, rather than see Wiccans as members of a religion, it might be more accurate to see them as sharing a spiritual basis in nature and natural phenomena. For Wiccans have no written creed which the orthodox must adhere to. Nor do they build stone temples or churches to worship in. They practice their rituals in the great outdoors: in parks, gardens, forests, yards or hillsides. According to the Wicca FAQ page,

"Wicca" is the name of a contemporary Neo-Pagan religion, largely promulgated and popularized by the efforts of a retired British civil servant named Gerald Gardner [late 1940's]. In the last few decades, Wicca has spread in part due to its popularity among feminists and others seeking a more woman-positive, earth-based religion. Like most Neo-Pagan spiritualities, Wicca worships the sacred as immanent in nature, drawing much of its inspiration from the non-Christian and pre-Christian religions of Europe. "Neo-Pagan" simply means "new pagan" (derived from the Latin paganus , "country-dweller") and hearkens back to times before the spread of today's major monotheistic (one god) religions. A good general rule is that most Wiccans are Neo-Pagans but not all Pagans are Wiccans.

A good general rule seems to be that there is no single set of beliefs or practices which constitutes Wicca, though one belief seems to recur: And it harm none, do what you will. Also, some rituals seem to recur.

Wiccans practice a number of rituals associated with such natural phenomena as the four seasons, the solstices and the equinoxes. Their symbols are based on the connectedness of Nature to human life. For example, they celebrate summer in a fertility rite known as Beltane. Rather than pray to some unnatural god beyond all experience, Wiccans seem more concerned with self-awakening, with arousing their connectedness to nature and nature gods, female as well as male. Their rituals seem to be metaphors for psychological processes. They sing, they dance, they chant. They burn candles and incense. They use herbs and charms. Often, Wiccans favor herbs to traditional medicines. In group rituals they express their desires to the community. They don't cast spells. They ask for blessings from north, south, east and west. They meditate. They don't cook weird poisonous stews in cauldrons. They don't fly off on brooms. They don't pray for harm to their enemies. Because Wiccans seem to worship nature and nature goddesses and gods, they can be called pantheists.

Wiccans do share one thing in common with Christians, however. Both believe that the indifferent destructiveness of Nature is essentially something good. We should be thankful for the blessings of Nature (or God), including the pumiced humans at Pompeii, the children swept away in flash floods, those sucked out of their homes by the tornado and thrown into the Guinness sky of the volcano, the millions who bake under an uncaring sun in parched lands, the innocent monsters deformed by uncaring biological laws, those devoured by great cracks in the earth, those drowned in hurricanes, the millions left homeless each year by indifferent forces ravaging an indifferent landscape. Only in their mythologies have Wiccan magick or Christian prayer stopped the flood, doused the lightning bolt, stilled the whirlwinds of tornado and hurricane, calmed the quaking earth, or put to sleep the tsunami.

The attractiveness of Wicca may be due to its friendliness towards women, its naturalistic view of sex and its promise of power through magick. It is very popular among women, and it is tempting to say that Wicca is women's revenge for the centuries of misogyny and "femicide" or "gynicide" practiced by established religions such as Christianity. Wicca, like the Celtic religion, allows women full participation in the practice. Women are equals, if not superiors, of men. Women in Celtic mythology are unusual, to say the least. They are intelligent, powerful warriors, ruthless, sexually aggressive, and leaders of nations.

Finally, it should be noted that Wicca is not related to Satan worship. That practice is related to the persecution of ‘witches” by Christians, especially during the medieval and Spanish Inquisitions, though not necessarily by the Inquisitors themselves. (See the Malleus Maleficarum, 1486, which describes "the three necessary concomitants of witchcraft," namely, "the Devil, a witch, and the permission of Almighty God.") The spirit of the witch hunters, however, lives on in the hearts of many devout Christians who continue to persecute Wiccans, among others, as devil worshippers. The modern witch hunters do not demand purgations. Rather, they try to abolish Halloween, school mascots, books which mention witches, and any sign, symbol or number the Christians associate with Satan.



Pseudo-History About Witchcraft

Craving ever-greater Victim Status, Andrea Dworkin and other feminists invented a pseudo-history of a 'Womens Holocaust' in the Middle Ages. Turning upside-down the tactics of the 'Holocaust Revisionists', who claim that a real genocide never occurred, the feminists claim to be the victims of a genocide that wasn't. This myth, complete with a fabricated pro-feminist Pre-Christian Age, is taught as if it were true in so-called "Womens Studies" classes.


~Jack Kapicka's debunking of The Burning Times, another pseudo-historical documentary often shown on PBS during 'pledge weeks':

Both women and men were accused of 'witchcraft,' and men make up the majority of those accused of 'heresy.' Both groups were brutally tortured by the Inquisition. Furthermore, most of the accusers of supposed witches were women. Feminist claims that witch-groups actually existed, and were "healers", are not supported by scholarship, nor is the claim that accused witches were actually the remnants of a gentle, female-centered pagan religion. Historian Norman Cohn debunks the pseudo-scholarship of Margaret Murray who is the principal source for those "neopagan" claims, noting that Murray selectively quoted from her sources, citing those passages tending to support her thesis, while ignoring or deleting intervening sentences that invalidate her claims. (Europe's Inner Demons). T.M. Luhrmann reached a similar conclusion after examining Murray's claims in Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, suggesting that "those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were very likely innocent of any practice."


In Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, Oxford professor Robin Briggs writes, "Historical European witchcraft is quite simply a fiction, in the sense that there is no evidence that witches existed, still less that they celebrated black masses or worshiped strange gods... On the wilder shores of the feminist and witch-cult movements a potent myth has become established, to the effect that 9 million women were burned as witches in Europe, gendercide rather than genocide. This is an overestimate by a factor of up to 200, for the most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20-25% were men."

The following article is copyright © 1992 by the Skeptics Society, P.O. Box 338, Altadena, CA 91001, (626) 794-3119. Permission has been granted for noncommercial electronic circulation of this article in its entirety, including this notice.

SPIRITS, WITCHES, & SCIENCE:
WHY THE RISE OF SCIENCE ENCOURAGED BELIEF IN THE SUPERNATURAL IN 17TH-CENTURY ENGLAND

By Richard Olson

When Michael Shermer reviewed the second volume of my Science Deified and Science Defied for the Summer, 1992 SKEPTIC, he began with an interesting passage from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) which I would like to use as an introduction to this essay on the status of beliefs in spirit phenomena and witchcraft during the second half of the 17th century. In this passage Pirsig's protagonist explains to his son why he does not believe in ghosts (1974, pp.38-39):

They are unscientific. They contain no matter and have no energy and therefore according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds. Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds...It's best to refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science.

The reason this passage jars us into thought is that it applies currently accepted criteria for what it means to be an object in the world, and uses those to reject the existence of ghosts; then it plays a mind game on us by somehow applying the same criteria to statements which everyone is presumed to assent to and arguing that if we shouldn't believe in ghosts, we shouldn't believe in science either.

The usual expectation among American intellectuals--certainly among those who view themselves as in the least bit skeptical--is that anyone who believes in "science" will not believe in such creatures of superstition as ghosts, spirit phenomena, or "witches." (For purposes of this paper, when I use the term "witch," I use it as it was defined by Joseph Glanvill in his Saducismus Trimphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (1681), which was probably the most widely read of all English language demonological treatises: "A witch is one, who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of ordinary art and ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits." (p. 269) Though some current scholars argue compellingly that this notion is a perversion of a vital and viable spiritual tradition, it nonetheless accurately reflects both the 17th-century perception among Christian apologists and the meaning presumed by Garvin and McCain below.) Indeed, the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first edition of Garvin McCain and Erwin Segal's immensely popular The Game of Science, begins with the claim that we no longer believe in witches precisely because we believe in science:

Why don't you believe in witches? That question may seem ridiculous but our ancestors, who were probably as bright as we are, did believe in them, and acted accordingly. Why are we so different and superior? The evidence for or against witches is no better than it was 400 years ago. For us, it is almost impossible to believe in witches; for our ancestors, it was equally difficult to deny their existence. Our new beliefs exist, in part, due to the development of "scientific attitudes" (McCain and Segal, 1969, p.3).

Though this statement certainly reflects what most American intellectuals believe, there is a strange historical irony contained in it and in Pirsig's intentionally perverse argument that if one doesn't believe in ghosts, one shouldn't believe in scientific laws either.

What I want to argue, is that beliefs in witches, ghosts, and demons were heavily under attack and on the wane in England at the very beginning of the 17th century before the rise of what we would usually identify as modern scientific attitudes. But witchcraft beliefs, and beliefs in other spirit phenomena underwent a remarkable revival among British intellectuals during the period after the Restoration of James II to the throne in 1660; and this revival of demonological beliefs was directly and self-consciously attached to the rise of modern scientific attitudes among the men who were members of the Royal Society of London. So at least for a time it may be true to say that men actually came to believe in witches as a result of the development of scientific attitudes. In this case, the reverse of Pirsig's argument was taken with deadly seriousness by Joseph Glanvill, who argued that if one believed in the methods of modern science, one should also believe in ghosts and witches. It is probably also true (though here the issue is more complicated) that certain arguments in favor of witchcraft made mid-17th-century intellectuals more favourably disposed to the new science than they would otherwise have been and that a general belief in spirit phenomena, for which witchcraft stood as a symbol (Schafer, 1969, pp. 55-85). In order to explain how and why the rise of modern science became tied to beliefs in spirit phenomena in mid-17th-century England, I think we need to discuss briefly a continental phenomenon at the end of the 16th century, and look at the impact it had on early 17th-century English religious developments.

Early Criticism of Belief in Demonic Procession

A serious and concerted attack on beliefs in witchcraft and demonic possession had been launched at the end of the 16th century in connection with a series of spectacular exorcisms that were quite literally staged before thousands of witnesses in France between 1566 and 1599. The goal of the Catholic priests who carried out these exorcisms was to promote the reconversion of French protestant Huguenots to Catholicism by demonstrating the power of the true Catholic religion; and they seem to have had substantial success.

Understandably, these Catholics' claims were widely challenged by Protestant propagandists; but ironically, they were also strongly challenged by the French Catholic Crown as well; for during the 1580's and 1590's, public exorcisms were stirring up religious passions just at a time when the French Crown, through the Edict of Nantes, was trying to calm religious hostilities and establish official tolerance for Protestantism. As a consequence, in 1598, Henry IV ordered the physician Michael Marescot and a group of medical colleagues to investigate the popular claims to demonic possession of one Marthe Brosier in the expectation that they could establish that her "possession" was either a mis-diagnosis of a natural disease such as epilepsy or hysteria, or that they could prove it to be a deliberate fraud. Marescot's Discourse veritable sur le faict de Marthe Brosier de Romorantin pretendue demoniaque appeared in 1599, to be translated immediately into English. The overall verdict of Marescot's investigation was stated in a memorable line: "Nothing from the devil, much counterfeit, a little from disease" (Walker, 1981, p. 35).

Without totally denying the possibility of demonic possession, Marescot and his colleagues were able to establish to their own satisfaction, that of the king, and that of many readers, that in one of the most celebrated cases of "possession," an initially deluded and psychologically unbalanced woman had been exploited by her family and by a group of Catholic clergy, for both financial gain and for the seditious purpose of stirring up anti-Huguenot sentiment. In the process, Marescot reviewed a series of experimental tests for legitimate possession which had become widely accepted by the late 16th century:

possessed persons were supposed to be able to understand and speak languages of which they had no prior knowledge;
possessed persons were supposed to be able to discern secrets and predict events of which they could have no natural knowledge--i.e., they had clairvoyance;
possessed persons had abnormal bodily strength and insensitivity to pain; and
possessed persons expressed revulsion at holy things, especially the reading of scripture or contact with holy water or other blessed objects
(Walker, p.12).

Under investigation by Marescot and four other physicians, it was shown that Marthe Brosier could understand neither Latin nor Greek, as her advocates had claimed; that she had no reaction to holy water that was passed off as ordinary water, but that she convulsed when she was given plain water that she was told was blessed; that she showed no special clairvoyant powers; and that when she was read passages from the Aeneid, expecting them to be biblical passages, she showed dramatic signs of disturbance. Finally, though during her fits Marthe could withstand the pain of the "deep pricking of long pins" in her hands and neck without showing discomfort, Marescot did find her responsive to normal sources of pain when not in convulsions; and he identified her reactions in this matter as typical of "melancholic" persons (Walker, pp. 34-35, 38).

Just a few years later, the English physician Edward Jordan, who was consulted in two cases of supposed demonic possession, published a treatise whose title discloses its major conclusions: A briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother. Written upon occasions which hath been of late taken thereby, to suspect possession of an evil spirit, or some such like supernatural power. Wherein it is declared that diverse strange actions and passions of the body of man, which in the common opinion are imputed to the Divell, have their true natural causes, and do accompany this disease (1603). In this work Jordan identified almost all of those symptoms that had been traditionally identified with demonic possession and witchcraft--especially insensibility, convulsions, and fits brought on by the presence of particular persons or artefacts with symptoms of hysteria. Thus, by the early years of the 17th-century there was a substantial medical literature which simultaneously denied the existence of possession and attacked virtually all of the traditional tests for its existence.

Anglicans Attack Demonology To Defend Their Religious Interests


Early 17th-century Anglican attitudes toward demonic possession and witchcraft were shaped primarily by the existence of this medical literature, in response to the Continental Catholic propaganda, and in response to a series of cases in which both an English Jesuit priest, William Weston, and a Puritan preacher, John Darrell, claimed to have cast demons out of a number of possessed children between 1585 and 1598, (Walker, pp. 43-73). Weston's activities were commenced in 1585, but it was not until 1602 that a formal inquiry was held regarding his exorcisms. Darrell's castings out of devils began in 1596; but in 1598, he was tried in London, condemned for fraudulent practices and both deposed from the ministry and sent to prison for at least a brief stay (Walker, p.64).

In fact, Darrell's case seems to have been part of a major anti-Puritan campaign by Archbishop John Whitgift, his Bishop in London, Richard Bancroft, and Bancroft's chaplain, Samuel Harsnett. Like the French Catholic exorcisms of the late 16th-century, Darrell's spectacular success casting out devils was drawing much favorable attention for his religion; but Darrell's demonics did most of the French examples one better by using their clairvoyance to name witches whom Darrell subsequently had arrested (Walker, p. 63). As a popular and visible Puritan, Darrell drew Whitgift and Bancroft's serious attention; and they apparently decided to discredit him by trying him for fraud. According to evidence given by William Sommers, the last of those he had dispossessed, Darrell taught several of his demonics how to simulate their symptoms, and at least in one case, i.e., that of Sommers, he even suggested the fraud to the victim (pp. 62-64). Sommers later recanted his evidence and there were apparently any number of irregularities in the trial, including a refusal to allow Darrell to speak; so the "trial" was continued in a series of publications for the next five years.

The major Anglican arguments were presented in Harsnett's A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of John Darrell (1599) and in John Deacon and John Walker's Dialogical Discourses of Spirits and Devils (1601-1602). In The Trial of Maist Darrell (1599), the Puritans responded by offering a largely scriptural defence of their claim that possession was possible and that it could be eliminated by appropriate prayers to God (Walker, pp. 67-68). But they also complained about the procedures used in Darrell's trial and they argued (quite rightly at the time) that the Anglican prosecutors of Darrell were more interested in destroying Puritanism than in eradicating Catholicism, otherwise they would have tried Weston the Jesuit. To this claim, Whitgift and Bancroft responded by ordering an investigation of Weston's claims and Harsnett responded by publishing A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostors, to withdraw the Harts of Her Majesty's Subjects from the Truth of Christian Religion Professed in England, Under the Pretense of Casting out Devils Practiced by Edmunds, Alias Weston, a Jesuit (1603). Circumstances had conspired to give middle-of-the-road Anglican apologists an opportunity to simultaneously discredit both the Catholic and Puritan opposition by attacking their claims of dispossession. But in order to do so, the Anglicans had to act incidentally to undermine belief in both demonic possession and in witchcraft by almost completely accepting the medical views of Marescot, Jordan, and their colleagues. One of their most important converts was James I, who had defended beliefs in possession and witchcraft in his famous Daemonology of 1597, but who had turned into a strong opponent of witch persecution by 1616 (Shapiro, 1983, p. 199). Technically, neither Harsnett nor Deacon and Walker denied the possibility of witchcraft or dispossession, although Harsnett probably doubted the existence of either. What they did do was offer an explanation of how melancholia and hysteria might cause persons to believe in both as well as a demonstration that in many cases, men like Weston and Darrell exploited those beliefs and used fraudulent techniques to delude people into believing in their power to exorcise or to dispossess persons who were possessed. The major concern which had held Harsnett and others back from taking an even stronger stance against belief in witchcraft and possession at the beginning of the 17th century was laid out in the dedication of The Trial of Mr. Darrell:

Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. Which error is confirmed by denying dispossession and both these errors confirm atheists mightily....If neither possession nor witchcraft (contrary to what has been so long generally and confidently affirmed), why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God. (Walker, pp. 71, 72).

Puritans thus warned the readers of Anglican tracts that demonology and witchcraft were proof against atheistic materialism.

Demonic Power becomes a Natural Phenomenon

In order to protect themselves from the claim that their attacks on possession and witchcraft were simultaneously denials of the fallen angel and of God, early 17-century Anglican apologists insisted that the devil might indeed involve himself in human affairs, but that if he did, it must be through the use of natural rather than supernatural powers (Shapiro, pp. 200 204). In John Cotta's words:

Though the divel indeed, as a spirit, may do, and doth many things above and beyond the course of some particular natures: yet doth he not, nor is able to rule or command over general Nature, or infringe or alter her inviolable decrees in the perpetual and never interrupted order of all generations; neither is he generally master of universal Nature, but Nature [is] master and commander of him. For Nature is nothing else but the ordinary power of God in all things created, among which, the divel being a creature, is contained, and therefore subject to that universal power (Clark, 1984, p. 360).

One critical consequence of the "naturalization" of presumed demonic powers was that it brought the study of demonic activities clearly within the realm of natural knowledge. Thus, Francis Bacon argued in De Argumentis Scientarium that well established "narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations, and the like" should be included as legitimate data in natural histories in order to establish "in which cases and how far effects attributed to superstition participate in natural causes. (cited in Clark, p. 355).


Atropa belladonna, commonly known as deadly nightshade, is a member of the Solanaceae, or potato family. Along with henbane and mandrake, also members of the same family, it has for centuries been considered one of Europe's most feared "witching herbs" or "hexing herbs."

The plant itself is only a foot or so high, with oblong leaves arranged in an alternating pattern along the stem. Small purple flowers--between 2-1/2 centimeters and five centimeters long--emerge from the joints where the leaves joined the stem. The flowers are tubular in shape, with the tip of each tube divided into five shallow lobes. Inside each flower are five stamens with bright yellow anthers and a single pistil with a yellow stigma.

Deadly nightshade was a standard ingredient in the famous "flying ointments" employed by witches in the Middle Ages. These ointments were rubbed all over the body, supposedly allowing witches to fly off to attend secret meetings called sabbats.

Traditional witch stories, of course, cannot always be interpreted literally. Many of the elements in these stories are based on confessions obtained at witch trials, often conducted under severe torture.

Witch-hunts began in the 14th century, and lasted through the 17th century. Over the years, a sort of standardized story line developed. Suspects were first seduced by the devil, they then flew to a Sabbath meeting, where they danced and orgied with devils and other witches before returning home to practice black magic against their neighbors.

To avoid torture, suspects accused of witchcraft were expected to confess to some version of this standardized story line Some social historians believe that the whole witch story line was nothing more than a construct invented by the Inquisition and other witch-hunters. They hold that witchcraft accusations were really just social sanctions used in tight village communities to settle disputes over land or inheritance, or to punish individuals that violated the strict codes of behavior and social obligations.

While much of the traditional witch story is clearly fantasy, there may be at least some basis of truth to the flying elements. Deadly nightshade contains several powerful chemicals, called tropane alkaloids, that can be absorbed directly through the skin. Two of these, scopolamine and hyoscyamine, also produce vivid hallucinations.

People who have ingested nightshade and other closely related members of the potato family frequently report sensations of flying. In Mexico, for example, to soar through the air and see distant lands, traditional sorcerers employ datura, another member of the potato family that includes similar tropane alkaloids. Hallucinations produced by tropane alkaloids are usually followed by long periods of deep sleep.

One can easily conceive how medieval witches, having rubbed their body with an ointment containing deadly nightshade, might imagine themselves flying through the air. The details of attending the sabbat and cavorting with the devil, of course, were supplied to conform to the expectations of the witch-hunters. This theory makes sense if, as some scholars reason, many of the accused witches were actually traditional healers and practitioners of the indigenous pagan religions.

These people would have been familiar with the qualities of various herbs, and may have even used deadly nightshade in some of their shamanistic healing ceremonies.

The scientific genus name Atropa comes from one of the three Fates in Greek mythology. Deadly nightshade is native to southern Europe, and was well known to the Greeks, who sometimes added it to their wine to amplify its intoxicating effects. Roman priests also used this plant to help communicate with the gods, and Roman troops spread it all over northern Europe.

Nightshade is a hardy perennial, and even today is common around the remains of Roman camps and villages. The species named belladonna means "beautiful lady" in Italian. Atropine, another alkaloid contained in deadly nightshade, dilates the pupils of the eye. Italian women once daubed their eyes with a rinse made from the sap of deadly nightshade, producing a dreamy effect that was considered the height of beauty.

Atropine was also used to dilate the pupils during eye examinations.

Even though he remained formally open-minded regarding .the existence of witches and demons, when Bacon chose to discuss particular issues, he, like other Anglicans, explained beliefs in witchcraft as arising out of the misinterpretation of natural phenomena. Thus, for example, in the Sylva sylvarum, he argued that the hallucinogenic effects of some ointments produced a mistaken belief in real transvection (human flight) and metamorphoses; so that when women charged as witches confessed to being transformed into animals and transported to witches Sabbaths, they were mistakenly reporting their hallucinations as reality.

For most of the first half of the 17th century, while the twin threats of Puritanism and Catholicism seemed more immediate and critical to the Anglican cause than philosophically-based atheism, Anglican intellectuals continued to express strong skepticism regarding specific claims of spirit phenomena and to insist that what had traditionally been attributed to supernatural influences was actually accomplished through natural ones. This was particularly true because as Puritanism and dissent became ever stronger, popular attempts at witch persecution intensified, and established authorities became ever more fearful of the religious enthusiasm which underlay them.

Atheism Reverses Attitudes About Spirit Phenomena

The problem faced by Anglican religious figures changed dramatically with the publication of a series of frightening works by Thomas Hobbes. Philosophical materialism and atheism had been a minor, though growing, problem in early 17th-century England. But the publication of Hobbes's Leviathan in 1651, De Corpore in 1655, and A Physical Dialog, or a Conjecture about the Nature of the Air in 1661, deflected attention from Catholicism and Sectarianism alike, and made Hobbesian Atheism the new chief target of moderate Anglican apologetic literature.

Whether Hobbes was really an atheist is a topic on which scholars might differ--though just for the record, I believe he was--but no one can doubt that he was a bitter enemy of what he called priestcraft--or the authority of religious persons. Hobbes believed that priests had usurped power that rightly belonged to the secular sovereign. In order to justify his attacks on priestcraft he turned to a set of arguments that had been used by materialist philosophers, such as the atomist, Epicuros, in antiquity. According to the ancient materialists and Hobbes, priests exploit a natural human fear of the unknown to convince people that invisible powers and agents are at work in the world and that they (the priests) alone have the power to intercede on people's behalf to control these "spirits." "Who," wrote Hobbes, "that is in fear of ghosts, will not bear great respect to those who can make the holy water that drives them from him" (cited in Shapin and Schaffer, 1985, p. 96). Similarly, he wrote: "By their demonology, and the use of exorcism, and other things appertaining thereto, the priests keep, or think they keep, the people in awe of their power and lessen the dependence of subjects on the sovereign power of their country." Since it was the false belief in spirits, made possible by ignorance about the causes of events, that gave the clergy its power, according to Hobbes, the most effective way to fight the power of the clergy was first, to demonstrate that spirits, or "incorporeal substances" do not exist; and second, to demonstrate that all phenomena can and indeed, must be explicable solely in terms of matter in motion.

To undermine belief in immaterial spirits, Hobbes developed a logical argument that depended very heavily on ideas which owe their existence to Aristotelian philosophy. The meaning of the term substance, he argues, is derived from our experiences of physical bodies or "corps." The term "incorporeal substance," or "immaterial substance" is thus self-contradictory. To accomplish the second part of his goal, Hobbes purported to be able to give a completely materialist account of all natural philosophy. But in doing so he departed from ancient atomism in a way that turns out to play a major role in linking witchcraft and the experimental philosophy of the royal society.

The ancient atomists had posited the existence of atoms and void space, claiming that atoms move freely through the void. Descartes, however, defined Matter as that which has dimensions; and from this definition--which Hobbes accepted--it followed that there can be no void; because any space, no matter how small, has dimensions and therefore must contain matter.

Note here for future reference, Hobbes uses precisely the same kind of argument to deny the possibility of spirits and to deny the possibility of empty space. The question of whether empty space exists, like the question of whether immaterial spirits exist is not to be answered empirically. Both questions are to be answered by a purely rational analysis of definitions.

Hobbes's claim regarding spirits was, quite rightly, seen as an attack on almost all fundamental Christian beliefs, for it denied not only the existence of demons and witches, but also the immateriality and hence the immortality of the human soul. And if this weren't enough, Hobbesian Materialism took on an additional troubling aspect during the later civil war period when it was adopted by Richard Overton, a notorious political radical and one of the founders of the Levellers sect.

Joseph Glanvill and the scientific defence of witches

This now brings me to the central events of my story--events connected with a moderate Anglican apologist who became both a defender and a member of the Royal Society of London in 1662--a man by the name of Joseph Glanvill.

Although Glanvill had a longstanding interest in spirit phenomena stemming from his commitment to the Cambridge Platonist doctrine of pre-existent souls, and though he had begun his investigations into the appearances of apparitions as early as 1662, it was not until 1666 that he published the first version of his often improved and expanded treatise on witchcraft, Some Philosophical Considerations touching on Witches and Wwitchcraft. A friend, Justice of the Peace Robert Hunt, had tried to prosecute a coven of witches during 1664 in Somersetshire; but the local gentry were so skeptical that they mocked his efforts. In response, Hunt, who knew of Glanvill's interests, sent the depositions from the accused witches along with a description of the gentry's repose to Glanvill, and Glanvill responded with a refutation of the most common reasons for disbelief (Jobe, 1981, pp. 346-347).

Glanvill begins by explaining what is at stake if the belief in witches should be abandoned. Borrowing his theme from the earlier anti-Anglican defenders of Robert Darrell, he writes:

He that thinks there is no witch, believes a devil gratis, or at least upon inducements which he is likely to find himself disposed to deny when he pleases. And when men are arrived at this degree of dissidence and infidelity, we are beholden to them if they believe either Angel or Spirit, Resurrection of the Body or Immortality of Souls. These things hang together in a chain of connection, at least in these men's hypotheses; and it is but a happy chance if he that has lost one link, holds another. (Glanvill, 1676, p. 2).

The central doctrines of religion are thus being endangered by those who do not believe in witches.

Secondly, Glanvill immediately seeks to identify the disbelief in witches with the Hobbesian attack on experimental philosophy. The question of whether witches exist or not, he argues, is a question of fact; and as such it can only be settled by appeal to authority or sensory evidence. There are thousands of eye- and ear-witnesses who have attested to "things done by persons of despicable power and knowledge, beyond the reach of art and ordinary nature," and these include not only "vulgar" persons, but "wise and grave discerners...when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common lie." Unfortunately, he argues, no amount of empirical evidence could convince those who do not believe in witches, "since those that deny the being of witches, do it not out of ignorance of these heads of argument...but from an apprehension that such a belief is absurd, and the things, impossible....Upon these presumptions they condemn all demonstrations of this nature, and are hardened against conviction" (Glanvill, 1676, p. 3).

For Glanvill, then, the key issue was whether one placed greater confidence in well attested experiences or in metaphysical claims regarding the possibility of the existence of certain kinds of entities. It is not reasonable, he insists, "first to presume the thing impossible, and thence to conclude that the fact cannot be proved: On the contrary, we should judge of the action by the evidence, and not the evidence by our fancies about the action. This is proudly to exalt our own opinions above the clearest testimonies and most sensible demonstrations of fact: and so to give the lie to all mankind, rather than distrust the conceits of our bold imaginations" (Glanvill, pp. 5-6). Given his belief in the limitations of human reason and the inability of humans to possess more than probable knowledge of any causal account of any phenomenon, Glanvill says that humans have no right to insist upon the impossibility of anything. The most they can legitimately claim is that they cannot conceive or imagine how the actions in question take place, and this inability to conceive, "only argues the weakness and imperfection of our knowledge and apprehensions; not the impossibility of those performances" (Glanvill, p. 7).

Precisely the same kind of argument was being carried on simultaneously between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes regarding the evacuated space created by Boyle in his air pumps. Hobbes denied that the space could be empty because he was committed to a conception of space derived from Descartes. According to this conception, matter, or body, is defined by extension, so that any extended region must contain matter, and a vacuum is literally impossible. Boyle, whose notion of matter and space were derived from atomist notions, was unwilling to fight on Hobbesian ground. Whether or not extension could exist without a material substance underlying, it was technically an undecidable question and therefore beyond the bounds of natural philosophy for Boyle. The key question was whether well attested experiments justified the claim that the evacuated region was empty of ordinary corpuscles of air; and he and his allies were convinced that they did. (A full account of the conflict between Boyle and Hobbes is given in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).)

The resolution of the problem of how to decide whether witches exist and how to decide whether the receiver of an air pump could be evacuated were understood by all parties to the 17th-century debates to be clearly linked with one another. No one, least of all Glanvill and Boyle, doubted that every reader convinced by Glanvill's arguments about witches would also be driven to toward acceptance of Boyle's arguments about the phenomena of the air pump, and vice versa.

Neither Glanvill and his allies, nor Boyle and his allies, wanted to encourage credulity and a lack of critical analysis of experience or experiments. To have argued that any individual's factual claims should be blindly accepted would have been, in their common view, to play into the hand of religious enthusiasts and philosophical charlatans. Instead, both sought to encourage "diffidence and backwardness of assent" to any such claims and to encourage the careful empirical investigation of all (Boyle, 1772, vol.1, pp. ccxx-ccxxii).

As early as January 19, 1663, Glanvill had begun to investigate claims of spirit phenomena when he and a gentleman friend traveled to Tedworth in Wilshire, where a "drumming" spirit was said to haunt the house of a Mr. Mompesson. The two men first interviewed the servants and several neighbors, including two local ministers of impeccable reputation, all of whom had been present when the spirit made noises or threw objects about the house. Then they themselves experienced the noises that the spirit produced and tried to discover, "if there were any trick, contrivance, or common sense of it," but they could find nothing; so Glanvill was persuaded that, "the noise was made by some Daemon or Spirit" (Glanvill, 1689, p. 329). Glanvill delayed publication of his account of the "Drummer of Tedworth" at Mr. Mompesson's request until the strange phenomena ceased. (He was concerned that the spirit would become angered by the books!) In 1668, however, it became the first of 28 different detailed accounts of spirits and witches which Glanvill published as appendices to his philosophical treatments of witchcraft and demons in order to reliably establish the evidence for their existence. Summarizing his account of the drummer, Glanvill lays out a litany of criteria which such an account ought to have in order to be credible support for the belief in spirits:

[The phenomena] are strange enough to prove themselves effects of some invisible extraordinary Agent, and so demonstrate that there are spirits, who sometimes sensibly intermeddle in our affairs. And I think they do it with clearness of evidence. For these things were not done long ago or at a far distance, in an ignorant age, or among a barbarous people. They were not seen by two or three only of the Melancholic or superstitious, and reported by those that made them [to] serve the advantage and interest of a party. They were not the passages of a day or night, nor the vanishing glances of an apparition; but these transactions were near and are public, frequent, and of diverse years continuance, witnessed by multitudes of competent and unbiased attestors, and acted in a searching and incredulous age: Arguments enough, one would think, to convince any modest and capable reason (Glanvill, 1689, p. 338).

From the comments of Samuel Pepys, who had found the earlier versions of Glanvill's Witchcraft essay "unconvincing," it is fairly clear that the accounts of actual spirit events increased the impact of his arguments, making them in Pepys' view, "worth reading indeed" (Cope, 1956, p. 14). Whatever other impact they had, these "ghost stories" certainly made best sellers out of numerous editions of Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphantus and stimulated a whole tradition of dramatic and fictional treatments of spirit phenomena.

In the 1668 A Blow at Modern Saducism, which saw the first appearance of Glanvill's account of the drummer of Tedworth, Glanvill also attempted to recruit the Royal Society to help in investigations of spirits and thus in support for the true religion:

Did the Society direct some of its wary and luciferous enquiries towards the world of spirits, believe we should have another kind of Metaphysics, than those [that] are taught by men that love to write great volumes and to be subtle about nothing? For we know not anything of the world we live in, but by experiment and the phenomena; and there is the same way of speculating immaterial nature, by extraordinary events and apparitions, which possibly might be improved to notices not contemptible, were there a cautious and faithful history made of those certain and uncommon appearances. At least it would be standing evidence against SADDUCISM, to which the present age is so unhappily disposed, and a sensible argument of our Immortality (cited in Prior, 1932, p. 182).

While the Royal Society offered no official response to Glanvill's request, many members contributed directly to Glanvill's collection of Spirit relations. Boyle sent a report of an Irish Witch, who he had investigated and confirmed his first-hand support of an earlier account of a demonic possession at Mascon in France, for example. And John Beale sent him letters on the possible effects of witchcraft on butter production. Perhaps more importantly, many Royal Society members began to incorporate spirits into their laboratory world (Schaffer, 1987, pp. 55-85).

It is not clear to me which group benefited more from the mutually supportive arguments of Anglican demonologists and experimental natural philosophers after 1666. On the one hand, Glanvill and his Anglican colleagues, such as Henry More, reached a far wider audience; and many persons who welcomed Glanvill's "defence" of traditional Christian beliefs in the immortality of the soul, were probably swayed toward a sympathy for experimental philosophy. On the other hand, experimental philosophers, as a group, probably had a more profound impact in legitimizing Glanvill's views among intellectuals. In any event, for at least a couple of decades after the Restoration, the belief in ghosts and witches--which had begun to decline in the late 16th and early 17th century--returned as a serious and popular topic for polemical discussions; and those who argued in favor of beliefs in spirit phenomena simultaneously drew arguments from and promoted experimental science (Jobe, 1981, pp. 343-356).

Secondly, Glanvill immediately seeks to identify the disbelief in witches with the Hobbesian attack on experimental philosophy. The question of whether witches exist or not, he argues, is a question of fact; and as such it can only be settled by appeal to authority or sensory evidence. There are thousands of eye- and ear-witnesses who have attested to "things done by persons of despicable power and knowledge, beyond the reach of art and ordinary nature," and these include not only "vulgar" persons, but "wise and grave discerners...when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common lie." Unfortunately, he argues, no amount of empirical evidence could convince those who do not believe in witches, "since those that deny the being of witches, do it not out of ignorance of these heads of argument...but from an apprehension that such a belief is absurd, and the things, impossible....Upon these presumptions they condemn all demonstrations of this nature, and are hardened against conviction" (Glanvill, 1676, p. 3).

For Glanvill, then, the key issue was whether one placed greater confidence in well attested experiences or in metaphysical claims regarding the possibility of the existence of certain kinds of entities. It is not reasonable, he insists, "first to presume the thing impossible, and thence to conclude that the fact cannot be proved: On the contrary, we should judge of the action by the evidence, and not the evidence by our fancies about the action. This is proudly to exalt our own opinions above the clearest testimonies and most sensible demonstrations of fact: and so to give the lie to all mankind, rather than distrust the conceits of our bold imaginations" (Glanvill, pp. 5-6). Given his belief in the limitations of human reason and the inability of humans to possess more than probable knowledge of any causal account of any phenomenon, Glanvill says that humans have no right to insist upon the impossibility of anything. The most they can legitimately claim is that they cannot conceive or imagine how the actions in question take place, and this inability to conceive, "only argues the weakness and imperfection of our knowledge and apprehensions; not the impossibility of those performances" (Glanvill, p. 7).

Precisely the same kind of argument was being carried on simultaneously between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes regarding the evacuated space created by Boyle in his air pumps. Hobbes denied that the space could be empty because he was committed to a conception of space derived from Descartes. According to this conception, matter, or body, is defined by extension, so that any extended region must contain matter, and a vacuum is literally impossible. Boyle, whose notion of matter and space were derived from atomist notions, was unwilling to fight on Hobbesian ground. Whether or not extension could exist without a material substance underlying, it was technically an undecidable question and therefore beyond the bounds of natural philosophy for Boyle. The key question was whether well attested experiments justified the claim that the evacuated region was empty of ordinary corpuscles of air; and he and his allies were convinced that they did. (A full account of the conflict between Boyle and Hobbes is given in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).)

The resolution of the problem of how to decide whether witches exist and how to decide whether the receiver of an air pump could be evacuated were understood by all parties to the 17th-century debates to be clearly linked with one another. No one, least of all Glanvill and Boyle, doubted that every reader convinced by Glanvill's arguments about witches would also be driven to toward acceptance of Boyle's arguments about the phenomena of the air pump, and vice versa.

Neither Glanvill and his allies, nor Boyle and his allies, wanted to encourage credulity and a lack of critical analysis of experience or experiments. To have argued that any individual's factual claims should be blindly accepted would have been, in their common view, to play into the hand of religious enthusiasts and philosophical charlatans. Instead, both sought to encourage "diffidence and backwardness of assent" to any such claims and to encourage the careful empirical investigation of all (Boyle, 1772, vol.1, pp. ccxx-ccxxii).

As early as January 19, 1663, Glanvill had begun to investigate claims of spirit phenomena when he and a gentleman friend traveled to Tedworth in Wilshire, where a "drumming" spirit was said to haunt the house of a Mr. Mompesson. The two men first interviewed the servants and several neighbors, including two local ministers of impeccable reputation, all of whom had been present when the spirit made noises or threw objects about the house. Then they themselves experienced the noises that the spirit produced and tried to discover, "if there were any trick, contrivance, or common sense of it," but they could find nothing; so Glanvill was persuaded that, "the noise was made by some Daemon or Spirit" (Glanvill, 1689, p. 329). Glanvill delayed publication of his account of the "Drummer of Tedworth" at Mr. Mompesson's request until the strange phenomena ceased. (He was concerned that the spirit would become angered by the books!) In 1668, however, it became the first of 28 different detailed accounts of spirits and witches which Glanvill published as appendices to his philosophical treatments of witchcraft and demons in order to reliably establish the evidence for their existence. Summarizing his account of the drummer, Glanvill lays out a litany of criteria which such an account ought to have in order to be credible support for the belief in spirits:

[The phenomena] are strange enough to prove themselves effects of some invisible extraordinary Agent, and so demonstrate that there are spirits, who sometimes sensibly intermeddle in our affairs. And I think they do it with clearness of evidence. For these things were not done long ago or at a far distance, in an ignorant age, or among a barbarous people. They were not seen by two or three only of the Melancholic or superstitious, and reported by those that made them [to] serve the advantage and interest of a party. They were not the passages of a day or night, nor the vanishing glances of an apparition; but these transactions were near and are public, frequent, and of diverse years continuance, witnessed by multitudes of competent and unbiased attestors, and acted in a searching and incredulous age: Arguments enough, one would think, to convince any modest and capable reason (Glanvill, 1689, p. 338).


From the comments of Samuel Pepys, who had found the earlier versions of Glanvill's Witchcraft essay "unconvincing," it is fairly clear that the accounts of actual spirit events increased the impact of his arguments, making them in Pepys' view, "worth reading indeed" (Cope, 1956, p. 14). Whatever other impact they had, these "ghost stories" certainly made best sellers out of numerous editions of Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphantus and stimulated a whole tradition of dramatic and fictional treatments of spirit phenomena.


In the 1668 A Blow at Modern Saducism, which saw the first appearance of Glanvill's account of the drummer of Tedworth, Glanvill also attempted to recruit the Royal Society to help in investigations of spirits and thus in support for the true religion:


Did the Society direct some of its wary and luciferous enquiries towards the world of spirits, believe we should have another kind of Metaphysics, than those [that] are taught by men that love to write great volumes and to be subtle about nothing? For we know not anything of the world we live in, but by experiment and the phenomena; and there is the same way of speculating immaterial nature, by extraordinary events and apparitions, which possibly might be improved to notices not contemptible, were there a cautious and faithful history made of those certain and uncommon appearances. At least it would be standing evidence against SADDUCISM, to which the present age is so unhappily disposed, and a sensible argument of our Immortality (cited in Prior, 1932, p. 182).


While the Royal Society offered no official response to Glanvill's request, many members contributed directly to Glanvill's collection of Spirit relations. Boyle sent a report of an Irish Witch, who he had investigated and confirmed his first-hand support of an earlier account of a demonic possession at Mascon in France, for example. And John Beale sent him letters on the possible effects of witchcraft on butter production. Perhaps more importantly, many Royal Society members began to incorporate spirits into their laboratory world (Schaffer, 1987, pp. 55-85).


It is not clear to me which group benefited more from the mutually supportive arguments of Anglican demonologists and experimental natural philosophers after 1666. On the one hand, Glanvill and his Anglican colleagues, such as Henry More, reached a far wider audience; and many persons who welcomed Glanvill's "defence" of traditional Christian beliefs in the immortality of the soul, were probably swayed toward a sympathy for experimental philosophy. On the other hand, experimental philosophers, as a group, probably had a more profound impact in legitimizing Glanvill's views among intellectuals. In any event, for at least a couple of decades after the Restoration, the belief in ghosts and witches--which had begun to decline in the late 16th and early 17th century--returned as a serious and popular topic for polemical discussions; and those who argued in favor of beliefs in spirit phenomena simultaneously drew arguments from and promoted experimental science (Jobe, 1981, pp. 343-356).

Bibliography

Boyle, Robert, 1772. The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed., Thomas Birch. Six Volumes, 2nd ed., London, J. & F. Rivington.

Clark, Stuart, 1984. "The Scientific Status of Demonology," in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Cope, Jackson I., 1956. Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist. St. Louis, Washington University Studies.

Glanvill, Joseph, 1676. Essays on Several Important Subjects. London, S. Lownds.

Glanvill, Joseph, 1689. Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. London, S. Lownds.

Jobe, Thomas Harmon, 1981. "The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-Webster Witchcraft Debate," Isis, 72, 343-356.

McCain, Garvin, and Segal, Erwin M., 1969. The Game of Science. Belmont, Brooks/Cole.

Pirsig, Robert M., 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York, William Morrow and Company.

Prior, Moody E., 1932. "Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft, and Seventeenth Century Science," Modern Philology, 30, 167-193.

Shapin, Steven, and Shaffer, Simon, 1985. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Shapiro, Barbara, 1983. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Walker, D.P., 1981. Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.


Boyle, Robert, 1772. The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed., Thomas Birch. Six Volumes, 2nd ed., London, J. & F. Rivington.

Clark, Stuart, 1984. "The Scientific Status of Demonology," in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Cope, Jackson I., 1956. Joseph Glanvill: Anglican Apologist. St. Louis, Washington University Studies.

Glanvill, Joseph, 1676. Essays on Several Important Subjects. London, S. Lownds.

Glanvill, Joseph, 1689. Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions. London, S. Lownds.

Jobe, Thomas Harmon, 1981. "The Devil in Restoration Science: The Glanvill-Webster Witchcraft Debate," Isis, 72, 343-356.

McCain, Garvin, and Segal, Erwin M., 1969. The Game of Science. Belmont, Brooks/Cole.

Pirsig, Robert M., 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York, William Morrow and Company.

Prior, Moody E., 1932. "Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft, and Seventeenth Century Science," Modern Philology, 30, 167-193.

Shapin, Steven, and Shaffer, Simon, 1985. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Shapiro, Barbara, 1983. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Walker, D.P., 1981. Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

What's the deal with witches and broomsticks?

The easy take on the witch's broomstick is that it's a burlesque of female domesticity. But you needn't have an especially dirty mind to realize that a woman riding a pole has sexual connotations--and not merely as a metaphor for intercourse. Before we get into that, though, we should talk about drugs and religion. A lot of people who did drugs in the 60s thought, Wow, man, I can see God! This gave rise to the following line of thought: (a) We're not the first people who ever did drugs. (b) Many leading religious figures have been mystics, and mystical experiences have been a primary source of religious revelation. (c) A good way to have a mystical experience is to do drugs. (Forty days of fasting in the desert will do in a pinch.) (d) Ergo, many of the world's major religions owe their origins to drugs! I'm oversimplifying, but not much. See for example Weston La Barre, "Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion," in Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens (1972).

If drugs work for religious types, they'll work for pagans, too. That brings us back to witches. Today many scholars assume there never were any actual witches, just a bunch of old crones, simpleminded adolescents, and other unfortunates who became targets of religious paranoia. But a few writers have asked: What if there really were witches? Not, I hasten to say, people who were genuinely in league with the devil, flew on broomsticks, turned into beasts, etc., but rather people who believed they were or did? Moreover, what if the agency of this belief was a drug-induced hallucination?

There, in a nutshell, is the working hypothesis of Michael J. Harner's "The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft" in Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973). Harner notes that since antiquity many hallucinogenic plants have been known throughout the world, including some species of the potato family (family Solanaceae, genus Datura) such as jimsonweed, devil's-weed, mad apple, etc., as well as potato cousins like mandrake, henbane, and belladonna (deadly nightshade).

Trolling through the works of medieval and Renaissance writers, Harner finds a number of instances in which witchy hallucinations follow a potent hit of drugs. How were these drugs administered? Typically in the form of an ointment. Where was this ointment applied? To the skin, of course, but more effectively to the mucous membranes. Where can one find mucous membranes? In the vagina, among other places. How would one apply ointment to one's vagina? Well, one can always count on one's fingers, I suppose. But you could also use, uh, a pole. And where might one find a pole in the average peasant household? A broomstick. Bingo.

Harner buttresses his thesis with some choice quotes. From a witchcraft investigation in 1324: "In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a Pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon the which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin." Also this from around 1470: "But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places."

Scant underpinning for a mighty far-fetched theory, you may say, and I won't deny it. Still, gives you something to think about next time you're dressing your daughter for Halloween.


SAUCERS AND BROOMSTICKS

PETER ROGERSON

Ufology belongs in a rather special facet of folklore, that of participative folklore. People actually have UFO experiences, they do not just read about them or hear of them from "friend of a friend" or "whale tumour" stories. Instead of merely listening to a tale the witness becomes an actor in a drama, scripted by the influence of the tales, and made manifest in outer reality by the "perceptual gap" of radical misperception.

History affords other examples - the witchcraft craze is an excellent example. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century large numbers of people believed that they or their cattle had been bewitched, that they had been visited by the spectres of neighbourhood witches, or that they themselves had participated in pacts with the Devil or attended supernatural orgies. This hallucinatory "spectral" evidence has caused great problems for historians, who have produced widely disparate interpretations.

The Murrayite school interpreted these stories as exaggerations of real events - the rituals of a pre-Christian religion which survived amongst certain sub-cultures until the Renaissance and even later times. Another group of historians have argued that the testimonies of alleged participants were entirely imaginary, the result of "confessions" extracted by torture. But neither of these explanations seems to be truly viable, and the perspective of "participative folklore" looks attractive.

Parallels with modern beliefs are obvious. The person visited by a witch is not much different from the person visited by a space being, whilst the nocturnal flying witch finds a pale echo in today's abductee.

At the core of the "spectral evidence" of both witch and victim there are, although strongly modified by contemporary beliefs, many of the cross-cultural features discovered by anthropologists.


The image of the night witch who preys on the living and makes pacts with the enemies of society appears to be truly universal. (1) The classic accounts of spectral visitations by witches (2) are obviously the same experiences as those described as "hags" by Hufford. (3) Similarly, accounts of nocturnal journeys can be compared with out-of-the-body experiences and hypnagogic imagery. (4, 5)

Within Europe (and no doubt in other societies) witchcraft "victims" were not only recruited from those who felt they had genuine reason to be afraid - those who for instance turned away the local old dame begging for food - but also those who saw a means of getting control over others by becoming a centre of attention and sympathy; others may have just had grudges to work off. However, we should not assume that the claimed experiences of the latter two groups were any less authentically "participative" than the first set.

The role of participative folklore in the generation of witchcraft confessions is of continued topicality, for the circumstances of pressure, torture, guilt, etc., were exactly calculated to induce fantasies of responding with terrible vengeance on one's persecutors. So in a society where witchcraft beliefs were prevalent such fantasies - "If I were a witch I would do such-and-such to so-and-so" - would be very difficult to resist. No one could be sure they weren't a witch!

One might hope that such situations were of only historical or anthropological interest. However, the regular parade of people who make hoax confessions after sensational crimes shows otherwise. When such fantasy-producing devices as hypnotic regression, polygraphs, "truth serums", etc. are introduced; (6) when persons are subjected to interrogation by those skilled in asking tricky and (mis?)leading questions, anything is possible. The sinister nature of such proceedings seems to be lost on some ufologists, in Britain and elsewhere, who are really too naive for their own good.

The hypnotically regressed abductee or the suspected criminal under interrogation has just as much access to a culturally determined pool of appropriate responses and perceptions as any confessing witch. Nor can the role of radical misperception be safely relegated to the paranormal or other marginal situations. Studies have shown that the police will misperceive neutral situations as suspicious or menacing; (7) other studies have demonstrated that white people presented with images of a white man threatening a black man with a knife will transmogrify them into images of black attacking white. (7, 8). Perceptions of highly charged situations such as recent confrontations between miners and police in British coalfields are heavily dependent on the political prejudices of the perceiver. Perception can be a political as well as a psychological process.

It would be nice to draw limits to all this, and in private correspondence one critic argued that "while we might disagree about who threw the first punch, no one saw police trampled by elephants, or decapitated pickets". True, but the limits of misperception are themselves probably determined by cultural expectations. It is possible to imagine an Indian villager presented with pictures from Cokely or Orgreave, and interpreting them in terms of his experience with elephant stampedes. Similarly, a Bolivian miner, told that these were scenes of a clash between miners and police, might well find evidence for the numerous bodies such a "violent mining strike" would convey to him.

It would take a far less radical misperception of a radar track to launch the missiles, and lest it be thought that this is purely idle (and alarmist) speculation, there is no doubt that misperceptions of stars and planets as airships in 1909 and 1913 helped to build up the atmosphere of war hysteria which broke in 1914.

References

1. The following provide excellent discussions of various facets of witchcraft:


Douglas, Mary. "Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations", Tavistock, 1970;

Kluckhoon, Clyde. "Navaho Witchcraft", Beacon Press, 1967;

Peters, Edward. "The Magician, the Witch and the Law", Harvester, 1978;

Parrinder, Geoffrey. "Witchcraft: European and African", Faber, 1963;
Mair, Lucy. "Witchcraft", Weidenfeld, 1969;
Cohn, Norman. "Europe's Inner Demons", Paladin, 1976; Thomas, Keith. "Religion and the Decline of Magic", Weidenfeld, 1971

2. Hansen, Chadwick. "Witchcraft at Salem", Hutchinson, 1970, for discussion of "spectral evidence"

3. Hufford, David. "The Terror that comes in the Night", University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972

4. Blackmore, Susan. "Beyond the Body", Heinemann, 1982

5. McKellar, Peter. "Mindsplit", Dent, 1979

6. Yarmey, A. Daniel. "The Psychology of Eyewitness Testimony", Free Press, 1979

7. Alport, Gordon W. and Postman, Leo. "The Psychology of Rumour", new ed., Russell and Russell, 1965; Bartlett, F.C. "Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology", Cambridge University Press, 1932.



the Salem Witchcraft Trials

The trouble in Salem began during the cold dark Massachusetts winter, January, 1692. Eight young girls began to take ill, begining with 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris, the daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, as well as his niece, 11-year-old Abigail Williams. But theirs was a strange sickness: the girls suffered from delirium, violent convulsions, incomprehensible speech, trance-like states, and odd skin sensations. The worried villagers searched desperately for an explanation. Their conclusion: the girls were under a spell, bewitched — and, worse yet, by members of their own pious community.

And then the finger pointing began. The first to be accused were Tituba, Parris's Caribbean-born slave, along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, two elderly women considered of ill repute. All three were arrested on February 29. Ultimately, more than 150 "witches" were taken into custody; by late September 1692, 20 men and women had been put to death, and five more accused had died in jail. None of the executed confessed to witchcraft. Such a confession would have surely spared their lives, but, they believed, condemned their souls.

On October 29, by order of Massachusetts Governor Sir William Phips, the Salem witch trials officially ended. When the dust cleared, the townsfolk and the accusers were at a loss to explain their own actions. In the centuries since, scholars and historians have struggled as well to explain the madness that overtook Salem. Was it sexual repression, dietary deficiency, mass hysteria? Or, could a simple fungus have been to blame?

Ergot is caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea, which affects rye, wheat and other cereal grasses. When first infected, the flowering head of a grain will spew out sweet, yellow-colored mucus, called "honey dew," which contains fungal spores that can spread the disease. Eventually, the fungus invades the developing kernels of grain, taking them over with a network of filaments that turn the grains into purplish-black sclerotia. Sclerotia can be mistaken for large, discolored grains of rye. Within them are potent chemicals, ergot alkaloids, including lysergic acid (from which LSD is made) and ergotamine (now used to treat migraine headaches). The alkaloids affect the central nervous system and cause the contraction of smooth muscle — the muscles that make up the walls of veins and arteries, as well as the internal organs.

Toxicologists now know that eating ergot-contaminated food can lead to a convulsive disorder characterized by violent muscle spasms, vomiting, delusions, hallucinations, crawling sensations on the skin, and a host of other symptoms — all of which, Linnda Caporael noted, are present in the records of the Salem witchcraft trials. Ergot thrives in warm, damp, rainy springs and summers. When Caporael examined the diaries of Salem residents, she found that those exact conditions had been present in 1691. Nearly all of the accusers lived in the western section of Salem village, a region of swampy meadows that would have been prime breeding ground for the fungus. At that time, rye was the staple grain of Salem. The rye crop consumed in the winter of 1691-1692 — when the first usual symptoms began to be reported — could easily have been contaminated by large quantities of ergot. The summer of 1692, however, was dry, which could explain the abrupt end of the 'bewitchments.' These and other clues built up into a circumstantial case against ergot.


Were the witches of Salem a result of poisoning with ergot fungus?


Not likely. While it's rarely possible to prove or disprove these things conclusively, evidence for the ergotism-made-them-do-it theory is unpersuasive. The whole project, in fact, smacks of a refusal to face unpleasant truths about human nature. Who needs an organic cause to explain murder in the name of righteousness? Ignorance and superstition aren't enough.

Let's start with the facts. During the winter of 1691-'92, several girls in Salem Village, a county-size jurisdiction surrounding what's now the city of Salem, Massachusetts, came down with a strange illness, experiencing pain, fever, and convulsions and behaving oddly. After a doctor suggested that the girls might be under supernatural influence, someone proposed baking a "witch cake" containing urine from the girls, which was then fed to a dog as a test for witchcraft. That set the pot boiling. More girls began having seizures and claiming they'd been approached by specters of their neighbors with wicked intent. Soon a witch hunt was underway. The first three accused were a Caribbean Indian servant named Tituba; Sarah Good, a beggar; and Sarah Osborn, a quarrelsome older woman. The frightened Tituba cracked, confessing that she was a witch and that she and the other accused women had flown on "poles."

With the jails filling with suspected witches (one was four years old), the colonial governor convened a special court to hear the cases. The girls' satanic manifestations became highly stylized on the witness stand--when confronted with an accused, they immediately began to convulse or, in later stages, were struck dumb. Neighbors chimed in with stories of ominous coincidences. The court admitted two unusual (and to us, stupid) kinds of evidence: "spectral evidence," consisting of tales of supernatural encounters, and a touch test--if an accuser's convulsions ceased when you touched her, you were guilty. As many as 200 people were jailed; about 50 confessed to witchcraft. From June through September of 1692, 19 accused witches were hanged and one was pressed to death with stones. Several other defendants died in prison.

By fall the frenzy had begun to subside. After the governor disallowed the use of spectral evidence, most trials ended in acquittal. Eventually the proceedings were halted, the imprisoned released, and damages paid to the estates of the dead. Embarrassed colonists began asking themselves a question that historians have debated ever since: What the hell was that all about?

In 1976 psychology grad student Linnda R. Caporael proposed the ergotism hypothesis, and history professor Mary Matossian elaborated on it in 1982. The core contentions: A cold winter followed by a moist spring and summer prior to the witchcraft hysteria favored the growth of ergot fungus in rye that the colonists were obliged to eat due to crop failure. Ergot contains toxins known to cause convulsions, hallucinations, and other symptoms similar to those reported by the accusers.

Doubters were quick to raise objections: Evidence of a cold winter and crop failure is dubious, and none of the accusers displayed the full array of symptoms needed to support a diagnosis of convulsive ergotism. More importantly, the symptoms appeared only at opportune moments during the trials, strongly suggesting a psychosomatic origin if not fraud. The counterarguments seem to have persuaded most historians, but a credulous 2001 PBS documentary has helped keep conjecture about ergotism alive.

What really happened? Space won't permit a thorough analysis, but it seems clear a concatenation of circumstances was at work, the most obvious being a bedrock belief in the reality of witches held by a theocratic society having only a superficial acquaintance with the rule of law. We'll probably never know what was up with the first girls to act strangely, but the simplest explanation for the remainder is that they were dramatic types who enjoyed the attention and were egged on by overzealous judges. Their wild testimony might have been discounted had it not been for the confessions of defendants hoping to elude the noose--in Salem, in a departure from traditional witch-hunt practice, admitted witches were spared while those insisting on their innocence courted a death sentence. In the hysterical atmosphere of the trials few skeptics had the nerve to speak out initially lest they too wind up in the dock. Local rivalries and such may have played a part; it's been suggested that the more energetic partisans hoped to divert attention from their failures during the Indian wars of the era. Be that as it may, history abounds with examples of the madness of crowds; to suggest that grain fungus is necessary to precipitate such episodes borders on the bizarre.