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This transcript is incomplete. It does not contain material from my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins of Dig: A History Podcast. Listen to the episode for more.

Last October I explored the origins of the legend of werewolves, and during the course of that exploration, I was obliged to speak about accusations of witchcraft, as the two were intimately connected. Among all the iconic monsters that appear this time of year on dollar-store decorations, the vampire, the werewolf, and witches, it is the witch that people generally know has some basis in history and truth, as it is common knowledge that large numbers of accused witches were put to death, both here in America in New England and across Europe in the early modern period. But what do we really know about the women, and men, accused of witchcraft and what led to their trials? Is there any historical evidence to suggest that these people had actually done anything we might today think of as witchy? Or was it a moral panic that claimed the lives of many who were completely innocent? If so, what touched off this panic? Who and what were these accused witches, really, and why did they end up burned and hanged? You probably think you know the answers to these questions, but you may be surprised. For example, belief in witches may go all the way back to antiquity, when those believed to practice sorcery, incantations, and poisoning were punished under the law in many lands. However, it seems lesser known that during the Middle Ages, with the Christianization of Europe, authorities both divine and secular passed laws against persecuting others for witchcraft and even denied its existence. Medieval canon law declared that any who believed they did such things as witches were commonly accused of doing, such as riding on beasts by night in the train of the pagan goddess Diana, had simply been deluded by the devil to believe their dreams were real. A number of Catholic Popes expressly forbade the torturing and executing of those accused of witchcraft, such as Pope Nicholas I and Pope Gregory VII. However, by the 13th century, the Catholic Church’s Holy Inquisition was involved in crusades against heretics in France, the Cathars and Waldensians, and the accusations of devil worship leveled against them as well as their brutal extirpation hearkened back to witch purges of the past and presaged the witch-hunts to come. Even so, as late as 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared a bull that prohibited Inquisitors from investigating sorcery. A couple hundred years later, though, the Catholic Church essentially invented the idea of the witch as we know it today, not as a simple sorcerer or diviner or a pagan worshipper but as a servant of Satan, when they combined witchcraft accusations with accusations of heresy. Many see its beginnings in the late 15th century, when Pope Innocent VIII issued an infamous bull that acknowledged the existence of real witchcraft—not just dreams or visions but real sorcery—and empowered the Inquisition to prosecute its practitioners. We don’t know for certain the exact number of people tried and executed for witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, but surviving records indicate that around 40,000 were killed. Who were the accused? And what led to the accusations made against them?

I have always covered something a bit spooky around Halloween. In 2018, I spoke about Spring-Heeled Jack and the Devil’s Footprints in Devon, but most of my other Halloween episodes have really focused on moral panics having to do with accusations of monstrous behavior, and these episodes really culminate, I feel, with this series. At the end of my first year of podcasting, I did a 2-part series on the history of false accusations of devil worship, and last year, I did another 2-part series on werewolf trials. I’m proud of both of those and encourage you to listen to them this October if you’ve never heard them. The topic also flows well from episodes I’ve done this year. Starting with the patron exclusive I did on the suppression of the Knights Templar, and through my discussion of the supposed origin of magic and my look at heresy and heterodoxy in the Apocrypha, I can see a thread. My discussion of anti-Semitism through the ages certainly serves as a parallel to the witch-hunts I will be discussing, and even my series on Mary, Queen of Scots connects, for her son, James, as king, wrote his own book on witchcraft justifying the prosecution of witches under canon law. I even see a direct connection to my last episode, in which I drew a connection between Qanon conspiracy theories and longstanding conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. To clarify, the accusations made by Qanon believers owe a lot to witchcraft accusations, for they claim that the deep state is run by devil-worshipers who torture and kill children in order to harvest from them adrenochrome, a drug they enjoy, or simply to eat them. Anyone who has studied witchcraft accusations recognizes these claims. Witches were also accused of being devil-worshipers who ate children or sacrificed them or harvested fat from them to make their hallucinogenic flying ointment. One could argue in fact that Qanon is just another witch-hunt. But despite the progression from topics I’ve covered this year and throughout the lifetime of the show, I have found the witch-hunts of early modern Europe very difficult to parse and wrap my mind around. First of all, it feels wrong, somehow, to question what these women’s lives were like, what they might have done, for neighbors or authorities to target them for prosecution as witches, as if I’m engaging in victim-blaming, yet the more I look into this topic, the more a cut-and-dry claim that all accusations had sprung from the fevered imaginations of Inquisitors seems untenable. Yet neither can I entertain the notion that witch-hunters were justified in their prosecutions. So we must consider all sides… what did the Inquisitors believe of the accused, and what different views of them have historians taken, and what theories are there for why the witch purges of early modern Europe happened.

The 1669 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum. Public Domain image, via Wikimedia Commons.

To understand how witches were defined in early modern Europe and made into the perennial horror icons we know today, we must look to the writings of one true believer, Dominican monk and Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Early in his career, this Inquisitor undertook a witch-hunt at Innsbruck, where a certain woman suspected of witchcraft challenged his authority, spitting on him in the street, calling him a “bad monk,” refusing to attend his sermons and suggesting that, because of his own rabid belief in literal witchcraft, he was the one in league with Satan. This set Kramer off on a rampage of a witch purge, putting this woman and others on trial not so much for practicing sorcery, although there were rumors of this, but rather for their sexual behavior, which he asserted proved that they worshipped and engaged in sexual contact with the devil. The local Bishop, however, disagreed, finding that Kramer asked leading questions, “presumed much that had not been proved,” and “clearly demonstrated his foolishness.” After the trial had been vacated, Kramer went home and stewed over it, and ended up, as a defense of his actions and a rebuttal to his critics, writing what turned out to be the most infamous witch-hunting manual of the era, the Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of the Witches.” Kramer’s was not the only witch-hunting manual used during the early modern witch-hunts, but it was the most influential in German-speaking regions, and this was the heart of the witch purges that followed, with a majority of the prosecutions taking place within 300 miles of the Rhineland city of Strasbourg (Leeson and Russ 2067). The Malleus Maleficarum serves as the perfect source for understanding the conception of witchcraft that became dominant during the ensuing witch craze. Although witchcraft had long been thought of as a practice of both men and women, and indeed, during the early modern panic, men too were accused and executed for it, for Kramer, witches were women. As at Innsbruck, Kramer blamed what he perceived as their lustful nature, as well as their supposed intellectual weakness, for their susceptibility to the devil’s charms. A witch, he argued, was not simply a woman who performs magic. To be considered a witch, they have to “deny the Catholic faith in whole or in part through verbal sacrilege, to devote themselves body and soul [to the devil], to offer up to the Evil One himself infants not yet baptized, and to persist in diabolic filthiness through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons.” So we see these motifs, of sex with demons and the sacrifice of babies, not entering the discourse for the first time, but here cemented in a definition with criteria. And since, according to this definition, they were essentially heretics, he recommended torture in their prosecution and encouraged that they be burned at the stake, both standard Inquisitorial practices for rooting out heresy.

To think of Kramer’s understanding of witches as an artifact of a dark age of ignorance that disappeared with the Enlightenment would be erroneous, though, for even in the 20th century, at least one erudite and scholarly writer was giving them credence. The first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1928 by Montague Summers, a Catholic writer who perpetuated the witch-hunting manual’s notions as legitimate and true. In his books on witches, werewolves, and vampires, he presented the accusations of Inquisitors as completely reliable, even the supernatural parts. But more than this, he painted the picture of witchcraft practitioners as a vast conspiracy like unto the Illuminati, describing the witch as

an evil liver; a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes; a bawd; an abortionist; the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants; a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.

Also like believers in an Illuminati conspiracy, he saw the Bolsheviks as a parallel, and even suggested that the actions of Inquisitors against such a conspiracy were justified, writing, “who can be surprised if, when faced with so vast a conspiracy, the methods employed by the Holy Office may not seem – if the terrible conditions are conveniently forgotten – a little drastic, a little severe?” And while acknowledging the misogyny of Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, he makes the loathsome suggestion that such persecution might be just what was needed for the women of his own day, stating, “I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appears to be the chief object of many females to ape the man, an indecorum by which they…divest themselves of such charm as they might boast.”

Photo of Montague Summers, attributed to DiscipulusMundi on WIkimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Regardless of his politics or misogyny, what is so striking about Montague Summers is that, as an Oxford educated man about town and fixture of the London literary scene, he actually believed the irrational things he claimed to believe. One might blame this on his religious background, but his religiosity may have been an affectation. He was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church, but after a scandal in which he was accused of sexually assaulting boys, his career in the church came to an end. He converted to Catholicism after that and appears to have pursued ordination as a priest so single-mindedly that he travelled to Italy in search of a Cardinal who would be willing to ordain him in an unorthodox ceremony. So it seemed the pretension of being a clergyman was more important to him than any doctrine or faith. He was known to go about town in a cape and the black felt shovel hat typical of clergymen, presenting himself like an 18th-century Inquisitor. In fact, his interest in witchcraft too may have been an affectation. Originally, he had made a name for himself as a scholar of Restoration theater. After being approached by a publisher who requested he write a volume on the occult, Summers wrote the first work in what would end up being a large body of work on the topic, and after his first, more academic treatments of the topic, he pivoted into works on the occult aimed at popular audiences, and even into writing Gothic horror fiction. Montague Summers was a contemporary and acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, and it may be that he was influenced by Crowley’s own cultivation of a public image as an occultist and warlock. Some contemporaries believed Summers was himself an occultist and that he wrote of such things from experience, but based on Summers’s surviving letters and his work, it is much more likely that he had been attempting to cultivate an image of himself as a counterpart to Crowley, a modern witch-hunter to Crowley’s modern witch. On Montague Summers’s gravestone, the epitaph reads “Tell me strange stories,” and this suggests that, rather than being a true believer, perhaps he simply enjoyed a good dark tale, as do so many of us.

Bust of Margaret Murray housed at UCL Institute of Archaeology. Photo attributed to Midnightblueowl on Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The case of Montague Summers mirrors in some ways the case of another academic, a contemporary of his, who spread a different, more rational view of the nature of witches, but whose view was no less problematic, whose methods were flawed in some of the same ways, and whose career followed a comparable trajectory. Her name was Margaret Murray. Essentially, Margaret Murray too believed that the women accused of witchcraft in early modern witch trials were part of a kind of vast conspiracy in that she asserted they were actually secretly practitioners of an ancient pagan fertility cult that operated like a secret society in Christian Europe. Yet her theory stands in opposition to Montague Summers’s, for she approached the subject of witches with a more skeptical and rational perspective. She claimed that everything witch-trial records spoke of witches doing had really been done, but had been misunderstood or misrepresented by prosecutors. Her theory evolved from her first book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, to her follow-up, The God of the Witches. At first, working from reports of witches being deluded by the devil into the worship of a goddess named Diana, she suggested this Diana was actually the ancient Roman two-faced male deity, Janus. In her later work, though, influenced by the comparative mythology work of James Frazer in The Golden Bough, she identified their deity with the “Horned God,” who had been mistaken for the devil by witch-hunters, but was really a representation of a syncretistic deity that could be found in many cultures, stretching back to the Ancient Greek Pan. Murray believed that a male priest or authority figure wore some headdress to act as a stand-in for their Horned God, and performed these sexual acts on the female adherents of the cult, using a prosthetic phallus when the physical demands were too much. And again drawing on James Frazer’s work, which identified the figure of the sacred king who must atone for his people as a sacrifice, she suggested this male figure was ritualistically or at least symbolically burned , which could be discerned in witch confessions that spoke of the devil disappearing in flames, and in the ultimate reversal of what is generally believed about early modern witch-hunts, she claimed that these pagan cultists actually provoked Christians into burning them alive in order to imitate their Dying God and effect the human sacrifice their cult required.

At first, the theory seemed promising in its rational view and even believable, and it spread widely when in 1929, Murray was invited to write Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on witchcraft and took the opportunity to present her theory as if it were historical consensus or fact. But it was not, for there were real problems with her ideas and her methods. For example, Murray cited witch trial records that recorded confessions describing intercourse with the devil as being cold as her only evidence that her cult’s priests used prosthetic phalluses for their ceremonies… and her insistence that descriptions of the devil disappearing in flames were proof of their burning sacrifice of their Horned God effigy seems a bit ridiculous since the association of the devil with the flames of hell seems a clearer origin for such details. So ironically, her supposedly rationalist view of witchcraft suffered from the one of very same problems as Montague Summers’ work. She presumed that the acts confessed to under duress had actually taken place. She may have sought a different, more naturalistic interpretation of the lurid descriptions than witch persecutors and Summers had taken, but she never stopped to ask whether the accused may have just been telling the witch-hunters what they demanded to hear.

A photo of the Dorset Ooser, a wooden head or mask of uncertain origin used in folk traditions in Dorset. This is one of many unconnected examples cited by Murray as support for her theory of a cult to a Horned God. Public Domain in the U.S., via Wi… — A photo of the Dorset Ooser, a wooden head or mask of uncertain origin used in folk traditions in Dorset. This is one of many unconnected examples cited by Murray as support for her theory of a cult to a Horned God. Public Domain in the U.S., via Wikipedia.

Among the many criticisms of her work were doubts expressed about her “dubious etymology” in suggesting that the name Diana was derived from Janus, or that the word “sabbath,” used by witch-hunters and in the confessions of the accused to refer to their gatherings and rituals, was not used in mockery of Jewish customs, as was commonly believed, but must have been derived from a word for “frolic,” even though elsewhere in her own work she takes no issue with the Jewish term “synagogue” being used to refer to witches’ gatherings. Her principal historiological sins are that she was supremely selective in her use of primary sources, quoting only that which supported her claims and omitting all else, and she presents even her wildest assertions as if they were so clear and obvious as to be unquestionable. This quote from Jacqueline Simpson’s article on Murray in Folklore paints a clearer picture of her scholarship, criticizing the

…inclusion of many chunks of miscellaneous material from a huge variety of periods and cultures, flung together in a hotchpotch where a paleolithic cave painting, an Egyptian mask and the Dorset Ooser all are said to represent the same Horned God, and where Robin Hood, fairies, scrying, Merlin, Norse seers and Celtic saints are all swept up into the discussion. Precisely because the material is so diverse, the links so tenuous and the tone so dogmatic, untrained readers are naturally mystified, and assume that their own limited knowledge is at fault; overawed, they feel themselves to be in the presence of great scholarship which they dare not query. Her books, alas, are not alone in profiting from this effect.

This method and the reliance on dubious etymology reminds me of the style of another writer who argued that pagan traditions had secretly survived in modern times: the anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist Alexander Hislop, who in his book The Two Babylons argued that Catholicism was just a collection of pagan traditions from antiquity. Have a listen to my episode on him and his work, A Tale of Two Babylons, and I’m sure you’ll recognize the similarity.

It seems to me that, much like Montague Summers, Margaret Murray may have been bewitched, if you’ll excuse the pun, by the popularity of her work on witches and the prospect of further success among general audiences. Certainly, when academic historians and folklorists are generous enough to afford her any praise, it’s usually for her early work and not for her later books, which are generally considered to have gone entirely off the rails. Yet her work has had a major impact among feminists. And beyond the spread of her peculiar myth of a pagan cult in Western Europe persecuted as devil-worshippers by Christians, her work also contributed to other historical myths related to the nature of witches. We’ll discuss these further developments next time, in part two of A Rediscovery of Witches, and we’ll get down to brass tacks in discussing whether witches really were practicing some kind of magic, and what other reasons may have led to accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

A Rediscovery of Witches, Part One: The Hammer and the Horned God

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