The origins of witchcraft

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Death and misery
The Witch Craze is a consequence of the great social and economic trouble of the times. Epidemics, wars, hunger that brought death, pain and misery to the population had to be explained one way or the other. For the Church and the countrypeople, it was the Devil and its disciples who were responsible for such events. The Crusade of the Pastoureaux in France brought thousands of children to Bourges where most have been executed. The Black Plague in 1348 triggers an outburst of witchcraft in Provence and especially in the Queyras. Then we found other examples as the religion wars in the XVIth, the Jacquerie of the “va-nus-pieds” (barefoot from the nickname of the leader, Jacques va-nus-pieds) in Normandy in 1639.

Transfiguration of pagan cults into evil practices
The origins of witchcraft date back to the apparition of man as a thinking animal. Paintings and carvings found in caves and sepultures reveal that from the beginning man has associated magic rituals with death, birth, hunting, … . Magic was and remains a way to explain phenomenon that goes beyond the understanding of man. Each tribe or community had its sorcecer or wizard whose function was to assist the tribe or the village in such situations as disease, bad weather, war, death and birth. The practices involved complex rituals associated with objects and plants that were carefully transmitted from one generation to another through a secret initiation reserved to a handful of chosen individuals.

But such practices have been tolerated as long as there was no given alternative. Once science and medecine begin to explain some of the mysteries of this world, magic was suspected.

The Romans themselves put the darkest interpretations on the secret gatherings of the Christians; they were said to indulge in sensual orgies, to worship a god with an ass's head and to kill babies for sacramental purposes. Later we hear of similar examinations on Manichaean women and confessions of intercourse with "the devil". The Empress Theodora put to death no less than one hundred thousand members of the sect. After the Dianists of the sixth and seventh centuries had gone, we find only a few isolated executions of witches for practicing black magic until the twelfth century.

Witchcraft began to be regarded as evil when the Church becomes the official cult in Europe. Monotheism does not tolerate other gods and divinities than the one they prey and soon Christian priests and monks tried to eradicate religious beliefs that were not part of the Church. Witches and wizards were soon considered by Christian priests as dangerous rivals. But if magic meant collusion with the devil, it was precisely the elaboration of this devil-doctrine by the great theologians of the Middle Ages, which caused the appalling witch-massacres of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

The popular image of the goat-hooved, pointy-horned devil is a deliberate corruption by the early missionary church of the European Pagan Horned God, who has been depicted in Greece as Pan, in the Nordics as Thor or Woden and in ancient Gaul as Cernunnos. The several heads that the Devil sometime carries is probably coming from Janus, the two-faces pagan god. The kiss on the buttocks is a demonization of the “peace kiss” of the pagan rites. In the same way, the sabbaths are probably a perverted image of the antique Priapées, ludi compitales, Bacchanales that were celebrated in Greece and Rome. Making indigenous gods into evil beings was the early church's most reliable method of gaining converts.

Jewish and muslims were also official opponents to the Church and were considered as heretics and demons. Even the new territories discovered in the XVIth centuries were considered as the kingdom of the Devil. Local pre-christian cults in South America and India were condemned by missionaries who replaced it by the Christian religion.

Christianity was imposed by force upon a reluctant world. It is only by the bloody use of force on a colossal scale that the Church maintained its dominion for so many centuries.

Political executions
The Church and the legal power as the main charge against other religious or political groups have used witchcraft. The Church used witchcraft as major accusation against many sects that were following a different course. The Albigensians (1209-1324) of the south of France were considered heretics and were drowned in their own blood by the Pope Innocent III. The Waldensians, the Cathari, the Patarenes were inspired by the Bogomiles and had the same tincture of Manichaean ideas. They were also accused and executed.

When King Philip le Bel of France sought to own the vast Knights Templar wealth and dispose of too powerful allies, he along with his puppet Pope Clement had the Templars captured and tortured. During these tortures they made many confessions, among these, the disclosure that they had worshipped an idol named Baphomet, which is said to have taken the form of a goat or sometimes a Black Cat. Jacques de Molay, who had earlier confessed his and the Templars guilt slowly burned at the stake insisting the order was innocent of all but one offence, that of allowing torture to cause them to lie and confess untruths

The story of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, is a clear example of what motivated many accusations of witchcraft over the centuries.
Joan of Arc (or Jeanne d'Arc), the national hero of France who was later canonized a Catholic saint in 1920, had visions from God and led the army of the French against the English and their allies in the 15th century, successfully capturing the city of Orleans. However, she was eventually wounded in battle, captured by traitors, and turned over to the enemy. The English enemy, fearing her popularity with the French peasantry, tried Joan of Arc as a heretic and a witch after first brutalizing her in jail. All this was done under the power of an ecclesiastical court with the authority of the Church. Like thousands of other victims to come, she was burned at the stake for witchcraft in 1431. She died in Rouen as a sorceress and a heretic, but twenty-five years after her execution, Joan of Arc was pronounced innocent of the charges.

Joan of Arc had become a political threat to the established hierarchy of power. And because she was a woman, the easiest way to get rid of her was to burn her as a witch. But the killing would come only after she was discredited in a circus-like trial.

Persecution of elderly women
The study of the witch-hunt reveals that 90% of the victims were women. Among the accused women, most of them were elderly women aged more than 60. The Renaissance Christian myth of the witch is complex and grotesque. Most witches were women, the Malleus Maleficarum stated, because "All witchcraft arises from lust, which in women is insatiable." Their lust was supposedly for the Devil, who initiated the witch at the Sabbat and copulated with her. A societal contempt for the status of women eventually led to the belief on behalf of Church authorities that the devil could easily seduce women to join him. This explained why most of the accused witches were female. During the 16th century the physician Johann Weyer was strongly reprimanded for even suggesting that "...executed witches were really harmless old women who confessed to impossible crimes only because they were driven mad by unendurable tortures."

In 1711 Joseph Addison reported, "that when an old woman became dependent on the charity of the parish she was 'generally turned into a witch' and legally terminated."

Priests were naturally against women as part of the “original sin” myth. Eve was the first woman that drove man out of Eden and she is held responsible for the curse of death and suffering.

Women have also strange powers men do not: the power to bear children and feed them from their own bodies, to bleed without being hurt or sick, and to provoke erections in heterosexual men. Such powers were not explainable at the time and it was then easy to turn woman into an evil being.

Little wonder then that by the 1550s, most European witch trials focused upon witches as the sexual slaves of Satan. Although obscene acts were usually not offered as evidence in the initial accusations of a witch, by the time the accused was indicted, the prosecutors were "predisposed to see the witch as a sex offender ". Sex crimes became integral to witchcraft and were soon incorporated into the very definition of a witch. The witch hunts in Europe were accompanied by other measures to eliminate knowledge of birth control and sexual knowledge, and since the late sixteenth century any sexual topic was so much of a taboo nature that in the 19th century the earliest historians researching on the European witch hunts did not even see the connection between witch hunts and sexual matters.

The witch hunt is also sometimes held partly responsible for the so called European population explosion (1470-1900) as women who knew and induced abortions or contraception through the use of herbs and roots were either killed or obliged to hide their knowledge.

Witch-hunt as a bloody business
A careful study of the victims of witch trials shows that not only poor people were accused and executed but also rich and respected townpeople. It was easy to accuse and destroy somebody reputation as no material and tangible proofs were claimed for the evidence of witchcraft. Jealousy, rivalry and cupidity were often the prime movers for such accusations.

Considerable enthusiasm for witch-hunting was also built up among local officials, since they were empowered to confiscate the entire estate of any person condemned for witchcraft. Expenses were kept down by forcing the witch's family to pay the bill for the services of the torturers and the executioners. The family was also billed for the cost of the fagots and for the banquet, which the judges held after the burning. If the debt was so large, more than the person's estate value, or more than one generation of relatives could pay off, then it was carried over to the next generation. The money was collected by three parties in the time of the Inquisition: the Church, the Inquisitors, and the civil authorities and shared between the clergy, the Inquisitors, and the informers (who were never named in court). Thousands of victims of the Inquisition had only one heresy: a good bank account. Here might be added two interesting details, which helps to explain the popularity and the terminus of the Inquisition. The Church did not favor the Spanish Inquisition because the Royalty did not give a proportion of the property of the condemned to the church, and when the Papacy said such property could no longer be confiscated the Inquisition abruptly ended.

Possession and other psychiatric disorders
The cases of possession that made the headlines at the end of the Witchcraze (Loudun, Louviers, …) cast a new light on the origins of witchcraft. Nuns and monks that led a life made of solitude, deprivation and isolation were particularly the victims of possession by the Devil. Priests were also tempted and sometimes became the servant of the devil.

The secret cult of the Devil
It is usually said that there was no organization of witches until the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, numerous documents have been written about an organized anti-Christian religion supported by consistent testimonies made by the witches as to the main features of the cult. Local variations are given, but there is agreement on broad lines, that gives us a fair knowledge of the secret religion. Imaginary or not, let’s go further into details and follow the descriptions of writers of their time.

In substance this cult is monotheistic and has nothing to do with ancient paganism. Lucifer, the brilliant archangel of the Old Testament God was the object of the cult. The writers, Christian clerks or judges, invariably state, that the witches insist that this being is "the true god." He is their lord, master and prince.

At all events, the witches everywhere and unanimously speak of some living person who is to them "the devil", their master or his representative in the flesh. To most of them the chief seems a semi-supernatural person, though in some cases they frankly speak of him as a quite well known man of their own district, the secret organizer of the sect.

The chief had an assistant who helped to give notice of meetings. This man seems to have succeeded to the mastership when the chief died. There were no elections, so that the succession must have been by nomination. Heads of the local groups or "covens" were appointed. The local unit of the cult was a group of thirteen men and women (or twelve and a leader) called a "coven," which seems to be a corruption of "convene." Possibly the idea was founded on the story of Christ and his twelve disciples.

The great assemblies or Sabbaths were, naturally, at the primitive festival times of the race, spring and autumn. The first, the Walpurgis Night of the German witches, was held on the eve of May 1st, and the second on the eve of November 1st. Later a midsummer Sabbath and one at Christmas were added, and in places there were other festivals on the Christian feast-days. There were lesser meetings, called Esbats, for business purposes and to report and deliberate on their magical practices, and in the end these seem generally to have been held on Fridays, possibly in derision of the Christian veneration of Friday, the supposed day of Christ's death.

The ritual of the Sabbath is so consistently given by the witches everywhere that we can confidently describe it. A few women under torture might "confess" that they had ridden on broomsticks and made ointment of babies' fat, but the reliable witnesses tell a quite plausible story. Some quiet spot in the neighborhood, a hill, a wood, or an ancient stone monument, was appointed for the meeting, and in the dead of night the witches found their way to it; generally on foot, as it was not usually far away, but often on horse or ass. The hour of assembly was midnight, and the festival usually lasted until near dawn.

Paying homage to the chief was the first item. The living representative of Lucifer was on these occasions always disguised, and the women vaguely imagined that they were in the presence of their "god." They speak of him as having the form of a bull, a goat, an ape, a cat, a dog, or some other animal, and it seems clear that at least the lower part of his body was clad in the skin of a sheep or goat, the tail hanging behind. In some cases he seems to have worn a mask at the back of his head or above his tail.

Homage meant kissing some part of his anatomy, and there cannot be the slightest doubt, so numerous and consistent are the testimonies of the reliable witnesses, that kissing his buttocks was practically a universal custom. Old members might kiss his face, and even neophytes might be directed to kiss his cheek, arm, or thigh.

And an important part of this ceremony was that mothers presented their children, particularly baby girls, to the "devil." The formula given by several witnesses is: "Great Lord, whom I worship, I bring you this new servant who desires to be your slave forever." The girls, it seems, returned at about the age of nine and repeated the homage in their own names, and the "grand mistress or "queen of the Sabbath", some lady who was closely allied with the chief, then directed them to renounce the Christian God, Jesus, the Church, the sacraments, the clergy and monks, and everything connected with the prevailing religion. In places, at least, they had to trample or spit on a cross-marked in the ground. They then kissed the usual sacred part and received what was known throughout the Middle Ages as "the witch's mark." In England, especially, much stress was laid on this mark.

A weird chapter could be written on the marks that were reported in court. In point of fact, there seems to have been a general practice of marking those who were initiated to witchcraft at the Sabbaths. The mark was, however, a simple puncture made with an awl or sharpened bone. Whether anything was smeared on the instrument we cannot say, but the "insensible area" for which the witch-finders looked is simply a figment.

After the entire assembly had paid homage the chief received reports from local officers, and the dance, which seems to have been the most important part of the solemnity, took place. Dancing and feasting, in fact, occupied the remaining hours of the night. The witches brought food with them, and we may confidently suppose that the dance and the feast alternated. The women often visibly light up with joy as they describe to the judge the wild dance across the country, the "devil" often playing pipes, leading the way, his tail wagging before the crowd, and the long stream of witches, at the highest pitch of excitement, following in a line. The flute, drum, and other instruments also were used.

As far as the sexual practices are concerned, we have here a somewhat confused experience. Quite commonly the witches, the untortured English witches as well as the continental, confess that they copulated with the devil, at any period after the age of twelve. Miss Murray calls this part of the solemnity "the fertility rites," and no doubt it was in a sense a continuation of the genuine fertility rites of the old religions.

In some places, either at the Sabbath or elsewhere, the "devil" celebrated a black mass. Animals were commonly sacrificed, and there is only too good ground to believe that children were occasionally sacrificed, especially to provide the blood at the black mass. The wafer was generally stolen from the Church, the man or woman going to communion and keeping the wafer dry in his mouth until he was out of sight.

The secret dark cult was clearly a reaction about the official Church and it has tried to mimic the various aspects of its ceremonies. The mass started from the end, the priest wears a black robe, the body of a nude woman replaces the altar, ….

IIt is in the late XVIIth, XVIIIth and early XIXth centuries that the black mass became popular and better known to the general public. Jean Bodin claimed that he attended the first Black Mass organized by the witchy Catherine de Medicis for the dying Charles IX. The devil was supposed to speak through the mouth of a child decapited previously.

There are two reasons to explain this black surge, first it was less risky to adore Satan and recognize it as persecution have stopped at this time; second it was “fashionable» and “original” to indulge in something different than the Christian religion; third, Lucifer began to be recognized as a positive symbol of revolt and modernism.

The famous “Poisons” affair under the reign of Louis XIV was probably the beginning of modern satanism. Several people were involved in the plot that mainly consisted in black masses, sacrifices of babies and murders. La Voisin, a notorious “witch” and several priests (Gérard, Guibourg, Lemaignan, ….) used to sell charms, potions and celebrate black masses. They even sold shirts and beverages full of arsenic to help rich ladies to get rid of their lovers or husbands. The marquise of Montespan was accused to have offered her nude body as an autel for the black masses of the Abbé Guibourg. The trial lasted three years and culminated with the Great Ordonnance of 1682, which made a clear distinction between witches and people that are using poisons and plants with evil purposes. 36 persons were condemned to death. Other witchcraft stories in the XVIII and XIXth centuries were linked with criminal affairs.

Eventually in the XXth century, we have seen the return of the satanic sects with major icons: Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Antonin Lavey.