Drawing Down the Moon (10 page)

One of the problems with Cohn's argument was his limited conception of the possible. For example, he considered all reports of orgies to be fantasy. He stated, “Orgies where one mates with one's neighbour in the dark, without troubling to establish whether that neighbour is male or female, a stranger or, on the contrary, one's own father or mother, son or daughter, belong to the world of fantasy.” Here he is surprisingly ignorant of the history of sex and ritual. Orgiastic practices were a part of religious rites in many cultures of the ancient world. And while most modern group sexual encounters lack a religious dimension, one has only to read reports about modern sex clubs to know that orgiastic experiences are not merely a product of fantasy.

In 1976, the historian Mircea Eliade wrote an essay, “Some Observations on European Witchcraft,” that noted that although Murray's work was filled with errors and unproven assumptions, more recent studies of Indian and Tibetan documents “will convince an unprejudiced reader that European witchcraft cannot be the creation of religious or political persecution or be a demonic sect devoted to Satan and the promotion of evil.”

Eliade pointed to the cult of the
benandanti
, unearthed by Carlo Ginzburg. On the four great agricultural festivals of the year these Italian wizards fought a battle (in trance) against a group of evil wizards, the
stregoni
. They went to their assemblies
in spiritu,
while they slept, and their central rite was a ceremonial battle against the
stregoni
to assure the harvest. “It is probable,” wrote Eliade, “that this combat between
benandanti
and
stregoni
prolonged an archaic ritual scenario of competitions and contests between two opposing groups, designed to stimulate the creative forces of nature and regenerate human society as well.” The persecution of the
benandanti
took place in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in most of the trials the accused were charged with adhering to a cult of Diana. The Inquisitional model pressed upon the accused had an effect and “after fifty years of Inquisitorial trials, the
benandanti
acknowledged their identity with the witches (
strighe
and
stregoni
).” They began to speak of the sabbat and pacts with the devil. Eliade argued that though this example gives no evidence for Murray's horned god or for her organized system of covens, it was nevertheless, “a well-documented case of the
processus
through which a popular and archaic secret cult of fertility is transformed into a merely magical, or even black-magical, practice under pressure of the Inquisition.” Incidently, Norman Cohn dismissed the
benandanti
because their experiences were all under trance and therefore, to him, illusory.

Eliade also described parallels in Romanian studies, significant because there was no systematic persecution of witches in Romania, no institution analagous to the Inquisition, and the “archaic popular culture” was therefore under “less rigid ecclesiastical control.” Romanian witches were reported to change their shape, to ride on brooms, and to fight all night at specific festival times until they became reconciled. The Romanian Diana was connected with the fairies, and the Queen of the Fairies came to be associated in name with Diana, Irodiada, and Aradia—“names,” Eliade wrote, “famous among western European witches.”

Eliade concluded that “What medieval authors designated as witchcraft, and what became the witch crazes of the fourteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, had its roots in some archaic mythico-ritual scenarios comparable with those surviving among the Italian
benandanti
and in Romanian folk culture.”
¹²

 

Modern Wicca, while retaining the use of such terms as
esbat, sabbat,
and
coven,
bears no resemblance to the European witchcraft that the scholars have discussed. There are no beliefs in Satan, no pacts, no sacrifices, no infanticide, no cannibalism, and often not even any sex. Still, the theories of Margaret Murray were strongly influential in stimulating the revival of Wicca, and it can be argued that her work alone generated a number of British covens.

In the last twenty years, the entire landscape of scholarship has changed. Scholars have made meticulous studies of trial records in scores of European communities. A good summary of current scholarship is
Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe
by Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow (2nd edition). Most scholars now put the number of people killed for the crime of witchcraft from the late fifteenth century through the seventeenth century at between forty and fifty thousand, not millions or even the one million figure I used in the first edition of
Drawing Down the Moon.
With an unknown number of others who “received a more random form of justice at the hands of their neighbors, through common assaults, lynchings and social ostracism.”
¹³
Scarre and Callow argue that it will never be possible to know with complete certainty how many people in Europe were prosecuted for witchcraft and how many suffered death, since records were not always kept, and even where they were, some were lost. But they still say a reasonable figure for executions between 1428 and 1782 is forty thousand. Other scholars put the figure at fifty thousand. The worst persecutions were in the 1590s, and during the period between 1630 and the 1660s. Some of the worst persecutions took place in Germany, with far fewer trials in Italy and Spain, “the heartlands of the Inquisition.”
¹⁴

About 80 percent of the victims were women, although in some places (Moscow, for example) male victims predominated. Often the women were poor, and a large number were over fifty. Murray's theory is given short shrift here, as is Jules Michelet's thesis that witchcraft was a protest against repressive social conditions. Scarre and Callow also believe there is little evidence for the 1976 groundbreaking feminist work by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English,
Witches, Midwives and Nurses,
that argued that the suppression of witchcraft was the suppression of midwives and healers by the emerging male medical establishment. The authors argue that while clearly misogyny played a role, this theory cannot explain why some of the most vociferous voices for persecution came from the peasantry.

Scarre and Callow also say there is little evidence for the thesis of H. R. Trevor-Roper, who argued that the Catholic Church used the stereotype of the witch in local struggles against groups it would not or could not assimilate. Trevor-Roper wrote that the stereotype of the witch might have died had it not been revived in the century of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War, and had it not received new strength from the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which “revived the dying witch-craze just as it had revived so many other obsolescent habits of thought: biblical fundamentalism, theological history, scholastic Aristotelianism.” He asserted that every major outbreak of the witch persecutions in the 1560s and after took place in the frontier areas between Catholics and Protestants. For example, persecution in England was fiercest in Essex and Lancashire, where Catholicism was strong. In Catholic France most of the witches were Protestant and often came from “Protestant islands” like Orléans and Normandy.
¹⁵
Scholars like Scarre and Callow counter this position and argue that witchcraft trials happened in many places where there was little or no interdenominational strife. And in a few cases, Catholic and Protestant lands exchanged information on witchcraft activities.
¹⁶
In addition, many prosecutions were spurred on by popular demands not by secular or religious authorities. In fact, many scholars today argue that the persecutions were strongest where the church was weakest, and those accused of witchcraft had a better chance of acquittal in ecclesiastical courts.

Historians who emphasize class, like the English historian Christopher Hill, theorized that witchcraft persecution was used for social control, and for control of the peasantry by the monied classes. Starhawk develops this idea further in her beautiful essay “The Burning Times” in which she argues that “the persecution of Witches undermined the unity of the peasant community.”
¹⁷
By destroying village healers, one could fragment community and make it easier to enclose the common lands. But Ronald Hutton argues that Hill has been pretty much discredited today, since he often relied on literary works that provided a distorted view of reality. Most scholars today do not believe there was a mass dispossession of common people by enclosure. Hutton writes:

Many of those most responsible for the revival of Witchcraft were influenced by many authors other than Murray and Frazer. They were knowledgeable about classical sources, such as Lucius Apuleius's classical witchcraft romance,
The Golden Ass
¹⁹
(in which Apuleius becomes a priest of Isis after the goddess appears in a beautiful vision), and Charles G. Leland's
Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches,
published in 1899.
²⁰

If scholars have contested Murray's thesis, they have totally dismissed Leland by saying either that he was the victim of a bad joke or, since he had written satire in the past, he could not be taken seriously. Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of
Witchcraft in the Middle Ages,
has said that
Aradia
does not contain useful evidence.
²¹
Elliot Rose has called it a product of art rather than a folk product. One interesting discussion of C. G. Leland can be found in Leo Martello's
Witchcraft: The Old Religion;
another is in Ronald Hutton's
The Triumph of the Moon.
²²

Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) was an American writer and folklorist who, according to the accounts of his niece and biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, was a political rebel, an abolitionist, an artist, an occultist, and a folklorist. He lived with native American tribes; he studied with gypsies; he compiled gypsy lore, learned Romany, founded the
Gypsy Lore Journal;
he learned the Celtic tinkers' language, Shelta; he became president of the first European folklore congress in 1899; he went to Italy and wrote a series of remarkable books that traced the persistence of Pagan religious beliefs. One of these books,
Etruscan Roman Remains
(1892), is a gem. In it Leland traces the names of Etruscan deities as they degenerated through time into lesser sprites and spirit beings who persisted in chants, rhymes, and incantations.
²³
He achieved a measure of fame for writing a series of satiric verses about German-American immigrants, the
Hans Breitman Ballads
(1872), but few scholars have taken him seriously as a folklorist.

The controversy that surrounds Leland concerns his meeting with a woman named Maddalena who claimed descent from an old Witch family. She brought Leland what she said was the local Witches' book, a mixture of myths and spells. Leland called it a translation of an early or late Latin work. The myths tell of Diana (or Tana), Queen of the Witches, and two different versions of her union with Lucifer, the sun. From this union was born a daughter, Aradia, who was to go to earth as the messiah of Witches and teach the arts of Witchcraft to oppressed humanity. Leland wrote that this was a sacred gospel of the Old Religion
(la Vecchia Religione)
. He said this religion still prevailed in entire villages in the Romagna in Italy.

Elliot Rose dismissed the book and wrote that “The whole work reads much more as if one of its authors was consciously seeking to establish that the witch-cult was a cult of this particular nature, and grafted material calculated to prove it onto an existing straightforward book of incantations.”
²⁴
To this day no one has established whether Maddalena made up the story, or Leland did, or whether there are elements of truth mixed with exaggeration—whatever the case, Aradia was used by Gardner and others and several beautiful stanzas from
Aradia
appear little changed in the rite known as “The Charge of the Goddess.” In
Aradia
this appears as follows:

 

Now when Aradia had been taught, taught to work all witchcraft, how to destroy the evil race (of oppressors), she (imparted it to her pupils) and said unto them: