Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (III)

Welcome to the third part of a four-part trilogy examining Keith Thomas' Religion And The Decline of Magic. In part one I looked at how magic and religion are intertwined but distinct, and the radical changes in how the religious movements viewed magic throughout the early modern period. I also covered some of the psychological benefits of magic beliefs. Part two developed this to help understand how magical thinking persisted in the face of changing philosophies and evidence, as well as looking at how astrology played a key role in the development of modern science.

As mentioned last time, these ideas developed and changed stochastically and unequally. Most of the devoutly religious were all bark and no bite, and indeed plenty of those with more extreme religious viewpoints shared ideas which were nominally those of their opponents. While religious persecution in terms of physical violence remained in general extremely rare, vitriolic rhetoric and other forms of oppression were common. And just occasionally this could spiral out of control into full-blown atrocities. Nowhere was this more apparent than with one of the most iconic figures of the era : the witch.

5) There were wicked witches

In all the books on witches I've read until now, one theme which has been ubiquitous was that the accused were innocent. That's been a disappointment to me – I want my cackling hags throwing babies into cauldrons, dammit ! – but Thomas has got me covered. He's very clear that yes, there were indeed people attempting to harm others by magical means. This simple point seems to have been lost in all of the more recent books, who forget that pretty well everyone did actually believe that magic worked : and once that premise is accepted, that some would try to use it malevolently becomes inescapable. Some of the people executed were in fact guilty, by any reasonable definition, of attempted murder. That their methods were ineffective didn't mean they didn't sincerely believe they were trying to murder their neighbours.

This already somewhat undermines the classical notion of a "witch hunt" in the modern sense of an unfair trial. Such things, says Thomas, absolutely did happen, but only under specific and extraordinary conditions. Matthew Hopkins is by far the most notorious example, but as every author agrees, his reign of terror was the exception that proves the rule : he flourished under the peculiarly weak enforcement of the judicial process during the Civil War. Such men were rare in the extreme. Of professional witchfinders Thomas reckons there to have been perhaps five in total. And their influence, though it could be locally devastating, was hardly unlimited. Even Hopkins backed off when challenged, and there are instances of the accused witch counter-suing for libel and winning. 

Under normal conditions, a witch trial was hardly a guarantee of any punishment at all, let alone a harsh one or death. It's perhaps similar to gladiatorial combat in how it's come to be perceived. Yes, it was dangerous – extremely dangerous, a chance of death at the few percent level is not an experience most people would volunteer for ! But just as it was hardly true that every fight ended up with a dead gladiator, it simply wasn't the case that anyone accused of being a witch was doomed. And it definitely isn't true, though there certainly were some rather extreme extenuating circumstances, that all those women were innocent victims who we unjustly persecuted.

In fact the legal status of witchcraft seems to have been ambiguous. The simplest definition, according to Thomas, is using magic to cause harm by magical means. Merely using magic wasn't ever really a crime... although even that's not quite clear. Intellectual theologians took a very hardline stance, but while it may have been a serious ecclesiastical crime, it wasn't ever much of a secular one. State infrastructure was extraordinarily weak compared to the modern era, so it depended almost entirely on local conditions. That is, it was a popularity contest. The vast majority of people simply doing magic were never brought to any kind of trial because nobody wanted to (why would they, as valued members of the community ?), and even those who were usually got away scot free. 

As we saw in part one, an awful lot of people hated the Church; they went to the ceremonies out of a sense of community and cohesion, but paid very little attention to what the priests instructed. We should remember that the modern view of the medieval Church owes a lot to its propaganda success if only for its record-keeping : after all, medieval farmers didn't tend to write a lot down, whereas for monks it was one of their major occupations. It was important and powerful (Thomas says we shouldn't go too far the other direction and assumed it played no role at all – hardly !), just not as much as we usually assume. The Church hated witchcraft, but it had nothing like absolute control over people's behaviour, let alone the law of the land.

In short, religion played a huge part in the fear of witches and the need for witch trials, but it was only a contributing factor. Nobody would have convicted a witch if they hadn't believed in witches, but, as we'll see, nobody would have brought a witch to trial without other, very powerful societal forces.

Thomas sticks pretty strictly to his remit of examining British history because enlarging the discussion would make the whole project unfeasible. But he's careful to point out that the circumstances behind the proliferation of witchcraft trials in Britain and continental Europe in this period were markedly different, so drawing any general conclusions is difficult – even the notion of what witches did were quite distinct, with the use of imps and familiars being largely a British thing, while on the continent witches would murder you and mess up your sex life. Different social factors (especially economic on the Continent) led to similar outcomes, though manifested differently and at different times. 

With this in mind, there are some interesting extenuating circumstances behind even those witches who were full-on guilty. One is that they were almost always people who had a legitimate grievance with the accused. Witches weren't accused just for funzies but because people had a genuine fear of them, because they knew they'd been wronged and retaliation would be only natural. The accusers were, Thomas says, projecting their own guilt for having harmed the supposed witch. But this wasn't a crazy claim borne of nothing but paranoia. With few avenues of legal redress, turning to magic was all but the only option for the downtrodden, short of direct physical action. And that wasn't really possible because they were also almost always poor women*, with the fraction of male witches being no more than 10% and probably closer to 1%. So, as soon as the "victim" of the witch suffered any misfortune, they'd blame someone who everyone knew was ill-disposed towards them and wasn't in a position to fight back. They may have been guilty, but ultimately it was society that was to blame.

* Their only other real outlet being arson. But that was dangerous as it would amount to full-on murder, risking far more damage than intended.

There was also a self-fulfilling nature of malignant witches. Extrajudicial punishments were so harsh that they couldn't very help but bear the whole community ill will. It was a vicious circle, and a busybody sort of society in which the slightest hint of nonconformity wasn't tolerated (Thomas contrasts it with cosmopolitan Venice and other cities, where people could largely live their own dang lives without their neighbours molesting them over the slightest thing). It was community spirit but of the very worse sort, perpetual and petty judgement for irrelevancies masquerading as morality.

And that, dear readers, is why I don't care to know my neighbours. They can live their lives however they choose and the same for me, thankyouverymuch.

But these are the general factors. What, specifically, led to such a steep rise in witchcraft trials toward the end of the period, and what brought the brief enthusiasm to an end ?

It wasn't due to a change in legal procedures, says Thomas, but an increased desire to prosecute. The change in religious beliefs brought with it different social perspectives. By reducing the Catholic hierarchy of spirits to essentially two elements – God and the Devil – the Protestant faith had simplified complex moral positions to a binary. There was now just one supreme evil for people to believe in, and the consequences could be ironic in the extreme. Satan, people said, would grant you freedom from hellfire in exchange for your soul, thus an increased fear of the Devil is precisely what led to people believing they'd made pacts with him ! They would even sell their souls to Satan in exchange, bizarrely, for becoming more virtuous, or perhaps most ironically of all, so that they could become better priests.

I mean, you just can't win against logic like that. Then as now...

While witchcraft generally might be thought of as using magic for harm, in this period it took on a more specific meaning : a union with the Devil, the use of demonic and heretical forces rather than mere ritualistic magic (equally, the lack of nuance in the beliefs increasingly made any magical practitioners seen as evil). The other great irony is the sheer repression of the society : the insistence on conformity itself prompted nonconformity, which drove them – if very seldom into actual devil-worship* – then at least into using him as an excuse. Dancing on a Sunday ? The devil made me do it, I swear !

* Thomas says the evidence for this is thin in the extreme. There may very well have been a few individuals who did indeed worship the devil, but this was only out of delusion. Devil-worship as a cult or alternative religion, with shared beliefs in a community, essentially never happened.

Another major problem with Protestantism is that it gave little way for the ordinary people to fight back, with its change of beliefs and permitted behaviour being woefully asymmetrical. That is, in the medieval era ordinary people would simply have employed their own counter-magic against their supposed assailant, but as the early modern era advanced, this became more difficult. The priests strongly discouraged it and legally it was always a grey area. People demanded tangible results; spiritual salvation might be a fine thing but it was useless if your crops had failed (the extreme natural disasters of fire, famine, floods and plague also playing no small role here). So just as they persisted in using magic, so they also reverted to using Catholic exorcisms, even though Protestants officially didn't believe they worked.

But for those who subscribed to the new way of thinking, there was only one outlet. They knew the witches were harming them but had now only one option : harming the witch herself. Changing the social order was scarcely conceivable, but something had to be done. And while people did accept other explanations for misfortune (natural disasters were seldom ascribed to witches, being viewed as either purely physical processes or the judgement of God), witches gave them a convenient way to avoid blaming themselves for their own misdeeds. Sure, I stole here milk jug, but she murdered my cow by magic ! That sort of thing.

Witchcraft trials began to fail partly under their own weight. So many accusations were brought that the whole thing eventually became suspicious; once a few cases collapsed, attendees were likely to be more more skeptical of others. Not immediately, to be sure. Initially the shift was really only towards thinking that proving witchcraft was well-nigh impossible; the standards of evidence that were previously accepted began to be seen as inadequate – especially considering that other magical explanations were still accepted. But a wider shift in thinking was happening in which the idea of the Devil and hell were becoming less and less literal, just as was happening for God. Much, much more gradually, the idea of witches as having actual magical powers became untenable.

There was also a change, as usual slow and uneven, away from relying on charity for relief of the poor to a more reliable, state-wide system of assistance. This in turn led to a diminished sense of communal solidarity and with it the insistence on absolute conformity. Villages, says Thomas, are another exception that proves the rule. Being relatively isolated, the old ways and witchcraft accusations persisted there for much longer (successful trials rapidly dwindled to naught, but extrajudicial lynchings persisted). It's interesting to note that the skeptical counterarguments against witchcraft didn't really change much over time : they won out in the end not on their own persuasive strength, but because of much broader and deeper societal changes which made them more believable. More on which in the final section.

6) The (provisional) persistence of paganism

Before tackling the possible underlying causes of all this, I want to briefly mention one final implicit theme : the persistence of distinctly non-Christian beliefs. Hutton dismissed many claims for paganism though by no means all. My impression from Thomas, though, is quite different. His view of religion is of a system that could control behaviour quite strongly (but never absolutely) but actual belief only weakly (though not negligibly). Even as it shifted in scope and degree, magical thinking was ubiquitous throughout the period, despite the increasingly hostile views of the Church.

It's true that, as Hutton says, any claims that there was some sort of long-lived pagan "religion proper" that survived the arrival of Christianity should be viewed with extreme skepticism. There is little or no evidence that anyone carried on worshiping the old Celtic or Roman deities with a shared set of doctrines and religious rites. As mentioned, evidence for devil-worship is thin almost to the point of non-existence. While it's entirely possible, even likely, that individual people did believe in and worship alternative deities in their own way, evidence of communal beliefs and practises (the hallmark of a cult or religion) is next to nothing. The single exception appears to be astrology, but even here, nobody seems to have seriously thought they were setting up a rival Church or even a pseudo-church. In the most extreme cases, they might have considered the stars and planets to be deities, but they wouldn't have excluded God or Jesus : it would have been more like the old Catholic system of saints and angels, rather than a reversion to believing in Mars and Jupiter instead.

But if pagan religion was dead and buried, the fundamentals behind its way of its thinking were not. What Hutton didn't really emphasise enough was that magical thinking was such an important part of everyday life. It was used for solving crimes, finding treasure, divining the future, murdering people, preventing murders, curing illness and ensuring good health... there were few if any areas of life that weren't touched by this most ancient way of thinking. Beliefs in magical beings like giants, dragons and fairies also persisted. The latter were distinctly non-Christian, with Thomas saying (in direct, unresolvable contradiction to Hutton) that the Church took a very dim view of them : they were used as a means of social control (e.g. clean your room or the fairies will get you !) quite outside Christian teachings. 

People demanded tangible results. Magic seemed to offer them that, even while the Church came to have a totally different, more philosophical view of the supernatural. And even Christian doctrine hardly seems a full-throated monotheism, with its angels and demons, devils and saints, monsters and wonders... never mind the holy trinity. In one sense, one kind of paganism just gave way to another. 

---

It's time to try and synthesise all of this into some conclusions.  As with the different forces that gave similar results regarding witches in Britain and Europe, it's important not to over-generalise. Even so, with the world apparently determined to do things which are utterly inexplicable and as irrational as any medieval magical rites, we have to try. Stay tuned for part four.