Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland

Andrew Sneddon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349580712, 9780230302723
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319173
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: British History

This is the first academic overview of witchcraft and popular magic in Ireland and spans the medieval to the modern period. Based on a wide range of un-used and under-used primary source material, and taking account of denominational difference between Catholic and Protestant, it provides a detailed account of witchcraft trials and accusation.

1

Witchcraft Belief in Early Modern Ireland

Witchcraft belief in early modern Europe

Before examining in succeeding chapters witchcraft accusations and trials in early modern Ireland, it is essential to explore the belief systems that underpinned them, for as Robin Briggs has argued, witchcraft beliefs ‘were the one absolute prior necessity if there were to be trials at all’.¹ The precise relationship between intensity of belief and prosecution rates in early modern Europe, however, is more disputed historical territory: some historians suggest that intensity of witchcraft belief directly affected prosecution rates,² while others argue that there is little evidence of such a relationship.³ This chapter will in some way contribute to this debate and offer a culturally nuanced picture of witchcraft belief in early modern Ireland.

As Brian Levack has pointed out, it was not until ‘the middle of the fifteenth century [that] the cumulative concept of witchcraft had acquired all of its basic elements’.⁴ By the close of the sixteenth century, in almost everywhere in Protestant and Catholic Europe, belief in witches who destroyed property, person, and livestock using magical means, sometimes in combination with diabolism or Satanically inspired ritual or practices, was deeply embedded at all levels of society.⁵ Early modern witchcraft belief has traditionally been divided by historians into elite and popular models. In educated culture, as reflected in works of learned demonology written by lawyers, theologians, and philosophers, witches were worshippers of Satan, men and women who had made an explicit pact with Satan in person at a witches’ Sabbath attended by the Devil and fellow witches. They gathered, sometimes in great numbers, to dance, drink, eat (sometimes cannibalistically), and debauch, as well as to engage in the more bizarre aspects of what witches did: night-flying, the sacrifice of children and sexual intercourse with demons. New recruits also renounced their Christian faith, paid homage to the Devil and were given an indelible Devil’s mark as a sign of their new allegiance. All of a witch’s magical power and knowledge of the dark arts came from Satan, and their attacks on Christendom were inspired or facilitated by him. Witches were thus pawns in an eternal, cosmic war between good and evil, dark and light, God and the Devil. It was, however, considered unorthodox by the learned to regard Satan as equal to God: the Devil, unlike God, was not an eternal being, therefore able to overturn the natural laws of the universe at will using miracles, miracula, but only capable of lesser wonders or illusions, mira. The Devil was only able to act with God’s permission. God used Satan and witchcraft to punish individual sinners, warn mankind of the wages of sin, and test the faith of the Godly. Protestant demonologists tended to place importance on the demonic pact, and in contrast to their Catholic counterparts downplayed the witches’ Sabbath. Popular culture of the masses, on the other hand, centred on its effects, or in early modern language, maleficium. In short, they were more concerned about the consequences of what witches did than how they did it or where their power came from. They also worried about how to best prevent, detect, and counter witchcraft attacks, and how to punish those responsible, not only to break a witch’s spell, but to obtain closure, revenge or retribution. Harmful magic was, for most people, personal, and local, far removed from the idea of an international threat of a Satanic cult.⁶

The dichotomies of popular/elite culture, demonic/malefic witchcraft have challenged in recent years.⁷ In England, witchcraft belief has been shown to have varied between individuals of the same social group.⁸ James Sharpe for example has suggested that ‘there was no single hegemonic attitude to witchcraft among educated men and women in England but rather a plurality of possible positions’.⁹ Furthermore, both elite and lay cultures showed signs of cross-fertilisation.¹⁰ Learned, European demonology not only drew some elements from literary traditions stretching back to classical times some aspects of it had roots in popular magical traditions, such as night-flight and the witches’ Sabbath.¹¹ During the course of the seventeenth century, due to the influence of popular witchcraft pamphlets, sermons, and the impact of the trials themselves, popular conceptions in England increasingly afforded a greater role to the demonic, with Satan appearing to witches, taking their souls and, albeit infrequently, having sexual intercourse with them. The cannibalistic orgies described in continental trial records are absent in their English counterparts. However, something resembling a witches’ Sabbath appears in English trials from the early seventeenth century onwards, in particular that of the Lancashire witches in 1612. One of the central motifs of English witchcraft belief from the late sixteenth century onwards, the familiar (a personal demon which took human or animal form, or occasionally shape-shifted from one to the other, and was given to a witch by Satan to perform harmful magic on their behalf), had its origin in elite concern over sorcerers and elite magicians in the middle ages. English witches named their familiars and fed them milk and bread, and they sucked on the witch’s blood at the site of the Devil’s mark, which was believed to take myriad forms, such as a flea bite or a mole.¹² Established as a method of detecting witches on the continent in the fifteenth century, searching for the Devil’s mark appeared in England’s first witchcraft pamphlet published in 1566. Thereafter, searching for, and the pricking of, the Devil’s mark became a common procedure in trials, albeit one that could provoke fierce, socially and culturally contextualised debates concerning its worth as physical evidence of witchcraft.¹³

The late Christina Larner suggested that diabolism, in particular the demonic pact, was a central part of witchcraft belief in Scotland, and one of the driving forces in Scottish witch-hunting.¹⁴ More recent studies have, however, downgraded the importance of these elements, suggesting that popular belief was a blend of demonological influences and maleficium-based notions, often rooted in community, familial or interpersonal rivalries and conflict, and that elite belief showed signs of cultural influence from below.¹⁵ The importance of the demonic pact in most surviving documents between the passing of the Scottish Witchcraft Act (see next chapter) and its repeal in 1736 remains incontrovertible.¹⁶

Regional variation

Regional variation has also been highlighted as an important factor in determining what witchcraft meant for Scottish people. Ronald Hutton has argued that in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, a Gaelic-speaking region with its own distinct traditions and culture, belief in malefic/demonic witchcraft was a weakened form of that current in England and other parts of Scotland, becoming weaker the farther north one travelled. In these Gàidhealtachd regions witches were less ferocious and physically repugnant than their lowland counterparts. Nor was witchcraft or magic viewed in these areas as an inherently evil force, with their main malefic activity focusing on magical pilfering of dairy produce, either directly or by transferring its abundance or goodness elsewhere. Along with the fact that these butter-stealing witches were easily countered by a range of counter magic, including a variety of rites, rituals, and amulets, Gaelic-Scottish witches were less feared than other purveyors of supernatural misfortune, namely those who unintentionally harmed by means of innate power located in the eyes (the evil-eye) and malevolent fairies.¹⁷ This presence of a relatively weak witch-figure, and attendant attribution of uncanny misfortune to the ‘evil-eye’ and fairy attack, has been linked to a relative lack of witch-hunting not only in Highland Scotland but in other parts of Celtic Britain, Wales, Ireland, and the Isle of Man.¹⁸ Lizanne Henderson offers a slightly different reading of Scottish-Gaelic witchcraft by suggesting that in the Gàidhealtachd regions witchcraft belief was essentially that of lowland Scotland, if rather less demonic and more concerned with the evil-eye, fairies, and charming cattle or stealing milk.¹⁹

This more benign, butter-stealing witch has also been found in early modern Isle of Man, where on May-Eve and May-Day they were believed to destroy or, more importantly, transfer elsewhere the productiveness (‘the tarra’ or ‘increase’) from household crops and cattle.²⁰ Along with newer ideas of malefic (if not necessarily demonic) witchcraft, which were imported into the country in the seventeenth century from England, the butter-stealing witch was also a common feature of popular culture in rural Wales up until the nineteenth century. They were thought to be particularly active in early May and to be able to transform themselves into hares and cats.²¹ Butter- and milk-stealing witches were also found in Scandinavian territories from the middle ages onwards.²² Nevertheless, shape-shifting witches, if not butter-stealing witches per se, who changed variously into (and back again from) horses, apes, cats, dogs, wolves, and even bees, can occasionally be found in parts of Europe which saw heavy witch-hunting, and may have even formed part of popular early modern witchcraft belief, despite being rarely mentioned in court cases. Rooted in folk traditions of classical and medieval times, the concept of shape-shifting did not sit well with learned, elite writers of witchcraft, largely because it implied the theologically unorthodox position that the Devil performed miracula rather than mira.²³

Witchcraft in Catholic Ireland: popular culture

Using modern, folklore sources, Ronald Hutton argues that a weakened, non-demonic, butter-stealing witch figure was also present in Catholic Gaelic Ireland, and that its presence was felt most in areas geographically closest to those ‘affected by British settlement’.²⁴ In other words, the butter-stealing witch represented the partial and ultimately unsuccessful ‘intrusion of foreign concepts’ of early modern witchcraft into Gaelic Ireland;²⁵ a country that ‘managed to absorb fervent Counter-Reformation Catholicism without also importing the stereotype of demonic witchcraft that commonly accompanied it’.²⁶ Hutton’s departure from earlier treatments of witchcraft belief in Ireland thus should not be over-estimated, as both Raymond Gillespie and Elwyn Lapoint have argued that Catholic natives and Protestant settlers shared the malefic/demonic witchcraft beliefs characteristic of other early modern European cultures.²⁷

In this chapter, I offer a different reading of Irish witchcraft beliefs to those provided by Gillespie, Lapoint, and, to a lesser extent, Hutton. I argue that belief in potentially harmful magic, in particular love magic, had a longer lineage in Ireland, stretching back before Anglo-Norman colonisation in the twelfth century polarised the country religiously, politically and socially along Anglo-Irish and Gaelic lines.²⁸ Furthermore, it is suggested that belief in butter-stealing witches was a distinct, resilient part of Gaelic-Irish culture.²⁹ Higher status and better educated Irish Catholics, both in the medieval and early modern periods, were, however, more likely to be influenced by European, elite views of sorcery and demonic witchcraft.

Sources for the study of medieval Ireland are rare,³⁰ but they demonstrate that the universe was viewed in supernatural and, more specifically, magical terms. People who used magic to harm were often feared and prohibited in Irish Penitential and legal codes, especially female sorcerers and male clerics who used love magic to control fertility or arouse or destroy amorous feelings in others.³¹ The sixteenth canon of the First Synod of St. Patrick, a circular letter to Irish clergy written in the mid-fifth century by bishops Isernius, Patricius and Auxilius, censured older, pagan belief in witches (in this period, through the use of the feminine forms, ‘lamia’ and ‘striga’, harmful magic was associated with women), as well as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Spelling, Dates and Irish Names
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Witchcraft Belief in Early Modern Ireland
• 2 Witchcraft Legislation and Legal Administration in Early Modern Ireland
• 3 Cunning-folk in Early Modern Ireland
• 4 Witchcraft Accusations in Early Modern Ireland
• 5 Witchcraft Trials and Demonic Possession in Early Modern Ireland
• 6 Witchcraft in Modern Ireland: After the Trials
• 7 Cunning-folk in Modern Ireland
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index