witch hunt

witch hunt, a series of investigations and persecutions of “witches” that occurred in Europe and the European colonies in the Americas between the 14th and 18th centuries. The term witch hunt has entered common political parlance to describe such campaigns as that of Sen. Joseph McCarthy to root out “communists” in the United States in the 1950s.

The origins of witch hunts

In premodern Western society the mixture of irrational fear and a persecuting mentality led to the emergence of the witch hunts. In the 11th century, attitudes toward witchcraft and sorcery began to change, a process that would radically transform the Western perception of witchcraft and associate it with heresy and the Devil. By the 14th century, fear of heresy and of Satan had added charges of diabolism to the usual indictment of witches, maleficium (malevolent sorcery). It was this combination of sorcery and its association with the Devil that made Western witchcraft unique.

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witchcraft: The witch hunts

From the 14th through the 18th century, witches were believed to repudiate Jesus Christ, to worship the Devil and make pacts with him (selling one’s soul in exchange for Satan’s assistance), to employ demons to accomplish magical deeds, and to desecrate the crucifix and the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist (Holy Communion). It was also believed that they rode through the air at night to “sabbats” (secret meetings), where they engaged in sexual orgies and even had sex with Satan; that they changed shapes (from human to animal or from one human form to another); that they often had “familiar spirits” in the form of animals; and that they kidnapped and murdered children for the purpose of eating them or rendering their fat for magical ointments. This fabric of ideas was a fantasy. Although some people undoubtedly practiced sorcery with the intent to harm, and some may actually have worshipped the Devil, in reality no one ever fit the concept of the “witch.” Nonetheless, the witch’s crimes were defined in law. The witch hunts varied enormously in place and in time, but they were united by a common and coherent theological and legal worldview. Local priests and judges, though seldom experts in either theology or law, were nonetheless part of a culture that believed in the reality of witches as much as modern society believes in the reality of molecules.

Since the late 20th century careful research has elucidated law codes and theological treatises from the era of the witch hunts and uncovered much information about how fear, accusations, and prosecutions actually occurred in villages, local law courts, and courts of appeal in Roman Catholic and Protestant cultures in western Europe. Charges of maleficium were prompted by a wide array of suspicions. It might have been as simple as one person blaming a perceived slight or misfortune on another. For example, if something bad happened to John that could not be readily explained, and if John felt that Richard disliked him, John may have suspected Richard of harming him by occult means. The most common suspicions concerned livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents, sibling rivalries, and local politics. Maleficium was a threat not only to individuals but also to public order, for a community wracked by suspicions about witches could split asunder.

Another accusation that often accompanied maleficium was trafficking with evil spirits. In the Near East—in ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and Palestine—belief in the existence of evil spirits was universal, so that both religion and magic were thought to be needed to appease, offer protection from, or manipulate these spirits. In Greco-Roman civilization, Dionysiac worship included meeting underground at night, sacrificing animals, practicing orgies, feasting, and drinking. Classical authors such as Aeschylus, Horace, and Virgil described sorceresses, ghosts, furies, and harpies with hideous pale faces and crazed hair; clothed in rotting garments, they met at night and sacrificed both animals and humans. A bizarre set of accusations, including the sacrifice of children, was made by the Syrians against the Jews in Hellenistic Syria in the 2nd century bce. These accusations would also be made by the Romans against the Christians, by early Christians against heretics (dissenters from the core Christianity of the period) and Jews, by later Christians against witches, and, as late as the 20th century, by Protestants against Catholics.

The first witch hunts

Along with this older tradition, attitudes toward witches and the witch hunts of the 14th–18th centuries stemmed from a long history of the church’s theological and legal attacks on heretics. Accusations similar to those expressed by the ancient Syrians and early Christians appeared again in the Middle Ages. In France in 1022 a group of heretics in Orléans was accused of orgy, infanticide, invocations of demons, and use of the dead children’s ashes in a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist. These allegations would have important implications for the future because they were part of a broader pattern of hostility toward and persecution of marginalized groups. This pattern took shape in 1050–1300, which was also an era of enormous reform, reorganization, and centralization in both the ecclesiastical and secular aspects of society, an important aspect of which was suppressing dissent. The visible role played by women in some heresies during this period may have contributed to the stereotype of the witch as female.

The Devil, whose central role in witchcraft beliefs made the Western tradition unique, was an absolute reality in both elite and popular culture, and failure to understand the prevailing terror of Satan has misled some modern researchers to regard witchcraft and the campaign against it as a “cover” for political or gender conspiracies. The Devil was deeply and widely feared as the greatest enemy of Christ, keenly intent on destroying soul, life, family, community, church, and state. Witches were considered Satan’s followers, members of an antichurch and an antistate, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a “counter-state” in the early modern period. If witchcraft existed, as people believed it did, then it was an absolute necessity to extirpate it before it destroyed the world.

Because of the continuity of witch trials with those for heresy, it is impossible to say when the first witch trial occurred. Even though the clergy and judges in the Middle Ages were skeptical of accusations of witchcraft, the period 1300–30 can be seen as the beginning of witch trials. In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with the aid of demons and thus was open to prosecution for heresy. Witch trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries but with great inconsistency according to time and place. By 1435–50 the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and, toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIII’s publication in 1484 of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (“Desiring with the Greatest Ardour”) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in 1487 of Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women. Widely influential, it was reprinted numerous times. The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. The number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than 40,000 to 60,000 executed. Although these figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly exaggerated claims of some 20th- and 21st-century writers.

The “hunts” were not pursuits of individuals already identified as witches but efforts to identify those who were witches. The process began with suspicions and, occasionally, continued through rumours and accusations to convictions. The overwhelming majority of processes, however, went no further than the rumour stage, for actually accusing someone of witchcraft was a dangerous and expensive business. Accusations originated with the ill will of the accusers, or, more often, the accusers’ fear of someone having ill will toward them. The accusations were usually made by the alleged victims themselves, rather than by priests, lords, judges, or other “elites.” Successful prosecution of one witch sometimes led to a local hunt for others, but larger hunts and regional panics were confined (with some exceptions) to the years from the 1590s to 1640s. Very few accusations went beyond the village level.

Three-fourths of all European witch hunts occurred in western Germany, the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland—areas where prosecutions for heresy had been plentiful and charges of diabolism were prominent. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. Ironically, the well-established bureaucratic structure of the Inquisition would help insulate Spain from the worst effects of ad hoc witch hunts. There were additional hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations continued even though differences between the folklore of Europeans and that of Native Americans introduced some minor variations into the accusations. In Mexico the Franciscan friars linked Indigenous religion and magic with the Devil. Prosecutions for witchcraft there began in the 1530s, and by the 1600s Indigenous peasants were reporting stereotypical pacts with the Devil.

Like the Spanish colonies, the English colonies repeated the European stereotype with a few minor differences. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in 1647, after the witch hunts had already abated in Europe, though a peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 1668–76 bore some similarity to that in New England. Although the lurid trials at Salem (now in Massachusetts) continue to draw much attention from American authors, they were only a swirl in the backwater of the witch hunts. The outbreak at Salem, where 19 people were executed, was the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all in a vacuum of political authority. Prosecutions of witches in Austria, Poland, and Hungary took place as late as the 18th century.

The responsibility for the witch hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. The theological worldview—derived from the early Christian fear of Satan and reinforced by the great effort to reform and conform that began in 1050—was intensified again by the fears and animosities engendered by the Reformation of the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation and Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation heightened the fear of witchcraft by promoting the idea of personal piety (individuals alone with their Bible and God), which enhanced individualism while downplaying community. The emphasis on personal piety exacerbated the rigid characterization of people as either “good” or “bad.” It also aggravated feelings of guilt and the psychological tendency to project negative intentions onto others. Moreover, just as the growth of literacy and of reading the Bible helped spread dissent, so did they provoke resistance and fear. Sermons and didactic treatises, including “devil books” warning of Satan’s power, spread both the terror of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him. Both Protestants and Roman Catholics were involved in the prosecutions, as the theology of the Protestant Reformers on the Devil and witchcraft was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Roman Catholics. More differences existed among Protestants and among Roman Catholics than between the two religious groups, and regions in which Protestant–Roman Catholic tensions were high did not produce significantly more trials than other regions.

Because accusations and trials of witches took place in both ecclesiastical and secular courts, the law played at least as important a role as religion in the witch hunts. Local courts were more credulous and therefore more likely to be strict and even violent in their treatment of supposed witches than were regional or superior courts. Crude practices such as pricking witches to see whether the Devil had desensitized them to pain; searching for the “devil’s mark,” an oddly shaped mole or wart; or “swimming” (throwing the accused into a pond; if she sank, she was innocent because the water accepted her) occurred on the local level. Where central authority—e.g., bishops, kings, or the Inquisition—was strong, convictions were fewer and sentences milder. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities usually tried to restrain witch trials and rarely manipulated witch hunts to obtain money or power.

The witch executions occurred in the early modern period, the time in Western history when capital punishment and torture were most widespread. Judicial torture, happily in abeyance since the end of the Roman period, was revived in the 12th and 13th centuries; other brutal and sadistic tortures occurred but were usually against the law. Torture was not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. The latter was the greatest evil of the system, for a victim might be forced to name acquaintances, who were in turn coerced into naming others, creating a long chain of accusations. Witch trials were equally common in ecclesiastical and secular courts before 1550, and then, as the power of the state increased, they took place more often in secular ones.

Among the main effects of the papal judicial institution known as the Inquisition was in fact the restraint and reduction of witch trials that resulted from the strictness of its rules. It investigated whether the charges resulted from personal animosity toward the accused; it obtained physicians’ statements; it did not allow the naming of accomplices either with or without torture; it required the review of every sentence; and it provided for whipping, banishment, or even house arrest instead of death for first offenders. Like the Inquisition, the Parlement of Paris (the supreme court of northern France) severely restrained the witch hunts. After an outbreak of hunts in France in 1587–88, increasingly skeptical judges began a series of restraining reforms marked by the requirement of “obligatory appeal” to the Parlement in cases of witchcraft, making accusations even more expensive and dangerous.

The decline and legacy of the witch hunts

The decline of witch hunts, like their rise, was gradual. By the late 16th century many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were being accused, so the leaders of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. The legal use of torture declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was a general retreat from religious intensity following the wars of religion (from the 1560s to the 1640s). The gradual demise during the late 17th and early 18th centuries of the previous religious, philosophical, and legal worldview encouraged the ascendancy of an existent but often suppressed skepticism. Increasing literacy, mobility, and means of communication set the stage for social acceptance of this changing outlook.

Nevertheless, the reasons for the decline in the witch hunts are as difficult to discern as the reasons for their origins. The theory best supported by the evidence is that the increasing power of the centralized courts, such as the Inquisition and the Parlement, acted to begin a process of “decriminalization” of witchcraft. These courts reduced the number of witch trials significantly by 1600, half a century before legal theory, legislation, and theology began to dismiss the notion of witchcraft in France and other countries.

Explanations of the witch hunts continue to vary, but recent research has shown some of these theories to be improbable or of negligible value. Most scholars agree that the prosecutions were not driven by political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local tensions; they were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family structure or in the role of women in society; and they were not an effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace. Moreover, the evidence does not indicate a close correlation between socioeconomic tension and witchcraft, though agrarian crises seem to have had some effect.

One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. No satisfactory explanation for the preponderance of women among the accused has appeared. Although the proportions varied according to region and time, on the whole, about three-fourths of convicted witches were female. Women were certainly more likely than men to be economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where witchcraft is absent. The malevolent sorcery more often associated with men, such as harming crops and livestock, was rarer than that ascribed to women. Young women were sometimes accused of infanticide, but midwives and nurses were not particularly at risk. Older women were more frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women, because they had had more time to establish a bad reputation, and the process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced. Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus maleficarum. Resentment and fear of the power of the “hag,” a woman released from the constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. Folklore and accounts of trials indicate that a woman who was not protected by a male family member might have been the most likely candidate for an accusation, but the evidence is inconclusive. Children were often accusers (as they were at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. Most accused children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft.

In the long run, it may be better simply to describe the witch hunts than to try to explain them, since the explanations are so diverse and complicated. Yet one general explanation is valid: the unique character of the witch hunts was consistent with the prevailing worldview of intelligent, educated, experienced people for more than three centuries.