Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations

Mary Douglas, Mary Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Historians as well as anthropologists have contributed to this volume of studies on aspects of witchcraft in a variety of cultures and periods from Tudor England to twentieth-century Africa and New Guinea.
Contributors include: Mary Douglas, Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, Alison Redmayne, R.G. Willis, Edwin Ardener, Robert Brain, Julian Pitt-Rivers, Esther Goody, Peter Rivière, Anthony Forge, Godfrey Lienhardt, I.M. Lewis, Brian Spooner, G.I. Jones, Malcolm Ruel and T.O. Beidelman.
First published in 1970.

PART I

The Context of Witchcraft in Europe

1

Norman Cohn

The Myth of Satan and his Human Servants

This paper is concerned with a fantasy and the part it has played in European history. The fantasy is that there exists a category of human beings that is pledged to the service of Satan; a sect that worships Satan in secret conventicles and, on Satan's behalf, wages relentless war against Christendom and against individual Christians. At one time in the Middle Ages this fantasy became attached to certain heretical sects, and helped to legitimate and intensify their persecution. A couple of centuries later it gave the traditional witchcraft beliefs of Europe a twist which turned them into something new and strange – something quite different from, and vastly more lethal than, the witchcraft beliefs that anthropologists find and study in primitive societies today. And the fantasy has also frequently been attached to the Jews – and not only in far-off times but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it helped to prepare the way for the secular demonology of the Nazis. It is a long story but a perfectly coherent one, and it is excellently documented.

At the heart of the fantasy is the figure of Satan himself; and the history of this figure is established. As the great opponent of God and the supreme symbol of evil, Satan is less ancient than might be supposed. In the Old Testament he does not appear at all in that capacity. For the early Hebrews Yahveh was a tribal god; they thought of the gods of the neighbouring peoples as antagonistic to them and to Yahveh, and they felt no need for any more grandiose embodiment of evil. Later, of course, the tribal religion developed into a monotheism; but then the monotheism is so absolute, the omnipotence and omnipresence of God are so constantly affirmed, that the powers of evil seem insignificant by comparison. In all the books of the Old Testament these powers are in fact only hinted at in a few uncoordinated references. We are accustomed to regard the serpent, who deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden, as being Satan in disguise; but there is no warrant for this in the text, where the serpent is shown as being one of God's creatures, and therefore good, and is cursed only after, and because of, its disastrous intervention. Nor is there anything in the Old Testament or in the Gospels to warrant such an identification. Indeed, the first clear indication that the tempter in Paradise was Satan comes in non-canonical works from the first century after Christ.

For every monotheism the existence of evil constitutes, potentially, a problem: why, after all, should an omnipotent god tolerate suffering and evil-doing in his creation? But not every monotheism gives equal attention to the problem, and the religion of the ancient Hebrews seems to have given very little. Almost throughout the Old Testament, God is shown as responsible for all happenings, good and evil: ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things’ (Isaiah 45:7). Misfortunes are simply punishments for those who transgress God's commandments; and for the fact that men do so transgress, no metaphysical explanation is offered. The Satan who appears in the prologue to the Book of Job has none of the functions that were later to be attributed to the Devil; on the contrary, he is shown as a courtier in the court of God, and his achievement is that he induces God himself to inflict suffering on a blameless man. To find any hint of a power systematically working against God one has to turn to the story of the numbering of Israel and Judah: 2 Samuel 24 tells how the Lord tempted David to carry out a census of the people, and then punished him for doing so by sending a plague to reduce their numbers; after which the Lord himself ‘repented him of the evil’. The same story is told in 1 Chronicles 21, and in exactly the same words – except that here the responsibility for tempting David is transferred from God to Satan. This seems to be the one instance in the whole of the Old Testament that in any way suggests that Satan exists as a principle of evil, a power that tempts men to sin against God.

The Book of Chronicles is probably no older than the third century BC. And when one turns to the body of non-canonical apocalyptic literature which was produced by Jews between thesecond century before and the first century after Christ, one finds a fully developed demonology. Here, in some of the so-called Apocrypha and in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we learn for the first time how some of the angels rebelled against God and were cast out of heaven. To support this belief it was customary to invoke an obscure passage in Genesis 6, which tells how the sons of God took the daughters of men as wives, and produced a progeny of mighty men. Originally this passage probably reflected a popular legend about giants; and the apocryphal work known as 1 Enoch tells how the giants, in turn, bred evil spirits or demons who are still on earth, invisible and incorporeal, yet always at work to harm and destroy and kill. Moreover, these spirits are under the command of the chief of the fallen angels, who is sometimes called Mastema, sometimes Belial or Beliar, and sometimes Satan. This figure is imagined as a true adversary of God, and history and time will end when God finally defeats him.

Was the emergence of this complicated demonology due to Iranian influence? There certainly is a striking resemblance between these Jewish ideas and the tenets of Iranian religion, with which the Jews had been in contact ever since the Babylonian exile. For whatever may have been taught by Zoroaster himself (probably in the fifth century BC), the later Mazdean religion shows the universe as a battlefield between two spirits, Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), who is good, and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), who is evil. Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman, commands a host of demons who spread sin, death, disease, and every kind of affliction among the human inhabitants of this earth. These beings are thought of almost as persons: they are marshalled in a hierarchical order, and their leader is a personification of aggressive evil; together they are incessantly at work to ruin the ordered universe which Ormazd struggles to uphold. But at the end of time Ormazd and the forces of good will triumph, and Ahriman will be cast out of the transfigured creation and will never be able to enter it again. Although it cannot be proved that these Mazdean teachings were responsible for the dramatic ‘promotion of Satan’ within Judaism, it seems unlikely that they had no part in it at all.

However that may be, Judaism at the time of Jesus had an elaborate demonology; and much of this was taken over by the new religion which was to become Christianity. In the Gospels it is taken for granted not only that Satan and his hosts of demons exist, but that they are more active than ever before, as though the presence of Jesus were stimulating them to a desperate counter-attack. We are told that Satan was the ‘Lord of this world’ until the coming of Jesus; now doomed to defeat, he will be finally cast down at the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. Meanwhile he is engaged in a desperate struggle to hinder the spread of the new religion. According to St Paul, Satan and the demonic hosts occupy the dark spaces of the heavens, and thence wage war upon the Christians. This is, in fact, the original meaning of the famous phrase 'spiritual wickedness in high places’ (Ephesians 6:11, 2:2).

But it is one thing to speak of Satan and his demons and to point to the evil they are bringing about in this world, and it is quite another thing to argue that they have human allies. This idea – that Satan has his servants among living men and women – has never had any place in the central tradition of Judaism, but it is to be found in some of the apocryphal books, in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in certain passages of the New Testament. Already in the second century BC the Testament of Levi says: ‘Choose for yourselves either the light or the darkness, either the law of the Lord or the works of Beliar'¹ – that is, of Satan. About the time of Jesus, the Dead Sea sect were looking forward to a forty years’ war in which they, ‘the sons of light’, would, with the aid of the celestial hosts, exterminate the heathen, whom they call ‘the sons of darkness’ or ‘the sons of Belial’. In the Gospels those who plot against Jesus are called 'sons of the Devil’ (John 8:44). The historical background of these utterances is known. In all these cases we find a small sect of intensely religious Jews, living in expectation of the end of this imperfect world and the beginning of the messianic age. In their eyes the sons of Satan, or Belial, or the Devil are those who deny that great consummation – the Romans, or the heathen in general, or the Jews of traditionalist outlook, or indeed all those who do not share their own apocalyptic faith. But in later centuries the idea of Satan's servants was to undergo a spectacular development and to serve very different purposes.

For the Fathers of the early Church the deities of the pagan world were demons, and those who worshipped them were really serving the purposes of Satan. Thus Tertullian writes: ‘All the operations of the demons tend to the ruination of man. … Demons … so blind the souls of men that they themselves come to be worshipped, and that sacrifices are offered to their statues …² Moreover, if a Christian ventured to criticize new practices or beliefs, after they had received the official sanction of the Church, this, too, must have been instigated by a pagan diety, operating as a demon. When a monk called Vigilantius wrote against the growing cult of the bones of the martyrs, St Jerome retorted:

‘The unclean spirit who makes you write these things has often been tormented by this humble dust [of the bones of the martyrs]. …. Here is my advice to you. Go into the basilicas of the martyrs, and you will be cured. … Then you will confess, what you now deny, that it is Mercury who speaks through the mouth of Vigilantius.’³

At the same time, the attitude to magical practices changed radically. In the pagan world such practices had been judged according to the intention behind them: for instance, divination, or the foretelling of future events, was no offence, but harmful sorcery was a crime under civil law. But the Fathers, while convinced that magicians and sorcerers could indeed do supernatural things, were also convinced that these powers came from the old pagan gods. Any practice of magic – even beneficent magic – was therefore regarded as a form of demon-worship and a grave religious transgression, irrespective of whether or not it was a civil crime. In these ways the teachings of the early Church prepared the way for the great ‘demoniza-tion’ of human beings that was to take place, many centuries later, in Western Europe.

Yet this does not mean that the Church that gradually christianized the Germanic and Celtic peoples was a fanatical institution. The conversion of Europe was only rarely pursued by means of fire and sword; in the main it was achieved by preaching missionaries. Pagan observances were not always ruthlessly suppressed; many were even incorporated, with only the most superficial modification, into the practice of the Church. In such matters the leaders of the Church often gave evidence of much tolerance and common sense. This was true even of their attitude to sorcery. Like everybody else they believed in the possibility and reality of sorcery...