The Penguin Book of Witches (26 page)

4
.
Gifford is less concerned with whether witches exist or not than with what witches mean. He recognizes that the witch as an idea serves an important cultural role, either by offering a scapegoat for misfortune, or (in the role of the cunning person) by offering occult defense against misfortune. Gifford seems sympathetic to the fear and uncertainty that marked early modern English village life. He doesn’t necessarily condemn belief in witchcraft as ignorant in the way that Scot does. Instead, Gifford wishes to channel that fear and hopelessness, leading believers in witchcraft to strengthen their belief in God.

5
.
Excerpted from George Gifford,
A dialogue concerning witches and witchcraftes In which is laide open how craftely the Diuell deceiueth not onely the witches but many other and so leadeth them awrie into many great errours.
Originally published in London. Printed by John Windet for Tobie Cooke and Mihil Hart, 1593. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.pro quest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft _id=xri:eebo:image:5997. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/adialogueconcer00giffgoog. The physical document is located at Huntington Library, San Marino, California, call number 59292.

6
.
2 Corinthians 7:10, “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.”

7
.
A person who rails, or rants, OED, June 2008.

8
.
A gambler, or someone addicted to gambling with dice, OED, 1895.

9
.
English folk magic belief held that bewitchment established a sympathetic relationship between the witch and the bewitched animal. As such, a common method of unbewitching consisted of burning the afflicted animal alive. It was thought that burning the animal would convey the burning onto the witch responsible. See James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(New York: Macmillan, 1955), 308.

10
.
“Showing in a glass” is another way of saying “scrying,” or looking for images in a highly reflective surface, such as a mirror, a dish of oil, or a polished ball of crystal. Scrying could be used to either see spirits or reveal the location of unknown information, such as the identity of people or objects. Scrying persists in popular culture today in the form of the crystal ball still seen in the windows of ostensible psychics in American cities—as recognizable a professional symbol as three gold balls for a pawn shop or a striped barber pole.

11
.
For “puckerel,” meaning demon or imp; OED
,
2007. This word is rare enough that one of the two OED examples is actually this usage of Gifford’s.

12
.
The wearing of the first few words of the gospel of St. John on the body was considered to be a good luck charm. See Cora Linn Daniels and C. M. Stevans, eds.,
Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences, vol. III
(Chicago: JH Thewdale and Sons, 1903), 1635.

13
.
“Between two stools” is a proverbial expression from “between two stools the ass hits the ground,” that is, stuck between two choices. See Bartlett J. Whiting,
Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 417–418.

14
.
This is the crux of Gifford’s argument: not that maleficium is impossible, but that belief in witches and witchcraft is an error of faith, transferring confidence to the Devil that rightly belongs to God.

15
.
At the risk of subjecting Gifford to unfairly presentist criticisms, one cannot help but express amusement at the sharply circumscribed role of the nameless “wife.” Other than serving as another untutored mouthpiece for common English folk magic beliefs, the wife serves no purpose whatsoever. Gifford’s indifference underscores the paradoxical gender politics of witch fear during this period. Women are effectively invisible in Gifford’s discourse, and yet pose the gravest threat when tempted by the Devil into witchery. Gifford will go on to worry about witches’ being tempted into “whoredom” and “uncleanness,” anxieties that allude to the sexual undertones of much anti-witch sentiment. The “wife” here fades into invisibility, yet the theoretical witches described by Daniel, Samuel, and M. B. stalk the narrative like avaricious devils.

16
.
Gifford has chosen accurate examples of the complaints that early modern English villagers often lodged against witches. To a modern reader, the sudden unexplained death of a healthy hen, or the failure of butter to come from churning, might seem meager in the grand scheme of things. But for subsistence farmers, the quotidian struggles of everyday life would have loomed very large indeed.

17
.
Gifford is likely alluding to Scot’s skepticism. Puritan theologians like Gifford would have thought it irreligious to doubt the existence of witches, for to do so would go against the Bible’s truth. Gifford doesn’t wish to argue that witches do not exist. He only wishes to persuade his readers that their power is misunderstood, and is a delusion of Satan.

18
.
For “cavillers,” defined as “one who cavils; a captious or frivolous objector, a quibbling disputant.” OED, 1889.

19
.
Gifford is intrigued by the problem of self-confessed witches. How can spirit familiars be said not to exist when confessed witches like Ursula Kemp have confirmed that they do?

20
.
Possibly an archaic word for the plural of cow, though this incidence is much earlier than the OED examples. See OED, 1901.

21
.
Gifford’s fictional dialogue also offers a reliable representation of witches’ gender. In general, witches were thought to be women, but not always.

KING JAMES I,
DAEMONOLOGIE
, 1597

1
.
Stuart Clark, “King James’s
Daemonologie
: Witchcraft and Kingship,” in
The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 156.

2
.
Clark, “King James’s
Daemonologie
,” 165.

3
.
Clark, “King James’s
Daemonologie
,” 168.

4
.
Excerpted from King James I,
Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three bookes.
Originally published in Edinburgh. Printed by Robert Walde-graue, printer to the King’s Majestie, 1597. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003& res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:7990. An alternate site is https://archive.org/details/daemonologie25929gut.

5
.
Melancholia, or an excess of black bile, according to the Hippocratic principles of humorism. Here James addresses whether supposed effects of witchcraft are really caused by a physical or mental imbalance.

6
.
The Bible is at pains to distinguish between magicians, necromancers, sorcerers, and witches. Necromancy is the conjuring of the spirit of the dead to divine the future. Magicians are soothsayers using occult means, as in Genesis 41:8, “And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.” A biblical sorcerer is similar to a magician, as in Daniel 2:2, “Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the king his dreams.” Witches consist of the slipperiest category of magic user in the Bible, defined principally by their negative qualities and their association with the Devil.

7
.
James takes on here the skeptical writers against witchcraft, most notably Reginald Scot, who doubt witchcraft’s existence, rather than the writers of a more theological bent, like Gifford, who believe that witchcraft exists but who argue that its meaning and function are errors of faith.

8
.
The “Pythonisse,” or Pythoness, is the witch of Endor, who conjures the image of Samuel for Saul. The OED defines “pythoness” as “a woman believed to be possessed by a spirit and to be able to foresee the future; a female soothsayer; a witch,” and indicates that the word refers most often to either the biblical witch of Endor, or to the Delphic oracle.

9
.
James’s account makes so much of the risks of feeble-mindedness or insanity that it almost seems to be overkill—he wishes to be taken for an intellect and an authority so intently that he sets up straw men to bat down.

10
.
An antique term for medicine.

11
.
Referring to Acts 16:16–19, in which the apostle Paul meets a young woman “possessed with a spirit of divination,” who follows him for several days before Paul commands the spirit to leave the woman in the name of Jesus Christ. The passage is commonly interpreted as an exorcism, but James here sees the soothsayer as an example of a “sorcerer or witch,” and so further biblical proof of the reality of witchcraft.

12
.
“Terrene” is an archaic word for “earthy.” See OED, 1911.

13
.
James suggests that skeptical writers have argued that the unfortunates who have admitted to being witches are suffering from an excess of melancholic humor, or black bile. However, James dismisses this objection on the grounds that many confessed witches do not conform to the agreed-upon traits of melancholics, who are thin and solitary. James sees confessed witches who are corpulent and loving of company and pleasures of the flesh. For this reason, James is convinced that confessed witches are not unfortunates suffering from mental disease but are instead engaged with the invisible world.

14
.
In response to Philopathes’ question as to why, if witches really do command the power that we ascribe to them, they have not completely decimated the rest of the human population, Epistemon retorts that that is a ridiculous question, both because God has set limits on what the Devil is able to do, and also because the sobriety and vigilance of the faithful can keep the Devil’s power at bay.

15
.
An acute gendering occurs in James’s account of the difference between magicians and witches. Magicians have a greater sense of agency, for though they serve the same master as witches, they use the Devil to amass their own power and “popular honor and estimation.” Witches, on the other hand, have been seduced to serve the Devil out of their own moral weakness, through their thwarted desire for revenge or out of greed. The difference between greed and the desire for “estimation” might appear academic, though one detects a certain nobility in the language James uses to describe magicians and contempt in the language reserved for witches. Both are evil; the only difference is the gender of the practitioner.

16
.
James here characterizes magicians as “scholars” of the Devil.

17
.
An archaic word synonymous with “next” or “afterward.” See OED, 1919.

18
.
James refers to the “Devil’s mark,” or the “witches’ teat,” which was thought by early modern witch-hunters to be the only physical evidence of a witch’s guilt.

19
.
An archaic word meaning elegant or tidy. See OED, 1891.

20
.
James repeats accounts found in other witch-hunting manuals that witches will convene in Sabbaths, which serve the dual purpose of exchanging diabolical knowledge while also perverting in their structure the worship of God.

21
.
“Urim and thummim” is an Old Testament Hebraic collocation, with “urim” signifying a reflective item worn on the breastplate of Jewish priests and used for divining God’s will, and “thummim” signifying “perfection.” OED, 2004. Essentially, the phrase can be taken to mean oracles or divination tools that are legitimate and God-sanctioned, in contrast to the entrails of beasts and other divination techniques associated with witchcraft and the Devil.

22
.
As the Christian might kiss the ring of a spiritual leader or a monarch, witches were often represented as sealing their covenant with Satan by kissing his rear end, thereby continuing the tangling of religious imagery with sexual imagery.

23
.
Likely a reference to Calcutta, and to the appearance and representation of Hindu gods in the form of animals. James underscores the idea that there are no alternatives to Christian faith; anything that does not adhere to the form and structure of the church of which he is the head is necessarily diabolical.

24
.
Exodus 33:22–23, “And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.” This passage refers to the favor being shown Moses by God, in which Moses will be permitted to see a portion of his divine shape, but cannot be allowed to see God’s face. James is suggesting that Satan, out of a desire to contort God’s gestures in the structure of his Sabbaths, perverts the intent of this passage from Exodus by requiring all his minions to—quite literally—kiss his ass.