The witch trials

The teaching

As the record of the witch trials from the demonologists to their critics teaches it.

The witch as the demonologists defined her

The witch of the trials was a figure put together by learned men, and the doctrine had five parts. The witch, they taught, had made a pact with the devil, spoken or tacit, renouncing God and her baptism. She bore his mark, a spot on the body without feeling that would not bleed. She flew by night, on a staff or a beast, to the sabbath, a gathering where the devil was worshipped. She kept a familiar, in England an imp in the shape of a cat, a dog or a toad, which she fed. And through all of this she did maleficium, harm by magic: sickness and death to people and beasts, failed crops, storms, impotence and stillbirth.

Every part of this was a claim, and none of it was true. No one ever saw a flight or a sabbath; they exist only in confessions and in the tales of accusers. The doctrine's names for the witches' meeting, the synagogue and the sabbath, were taken from the slanders of the time against Jews, and are as false here as there. The accused were neighbours, most of them poor women, named in quarrels and under torture.

Two fears that met

Two different fears met in the courtroom. The villagers feared maleficium: the neighbour whose muttered curse was followed by a sick child or a dead cow. They wanted the harm stopped and the harmer named, and cared little about the devil. The learned feared heresy: the pact, the worship of the devil and the sabbath, a hidden army of his servants. In the trials the two were joined, the judges asking about the devil and the villagers telling of harms, until a quarrel between neighbours became a charge of devil worship.

Where the doctrine came from

The pieces are older than the trials. The Canon Episcopi, a church rule known from the early tenth century, had said that women who believe they ride by night with the goddess Diana are deluded by the devil, and that to believe such flights real is itself a falling from the faith. The demonologists of the fifteenth century reversed it and taught that the flights were real. The Malleus Maleficarum added a hatred of women, explaining by a false etymology that femina, woman, meant one of lesser faith, and that women were more given to witchcraft through weakness and lust.

The tests the courts used were part of the doctrine. The accused was searched for the devil's mark, and professional prickers drove needles into the body to find the spot without feeling; some were later shown to be frauds. The accused was swum, bound and thrown into water, on the teaching, which King James approved, that the water of baptism rejects the witch, so that floating proved guilt. She was watched and kept from sleep for days and nights to see whether her familiar came. A witch, it was said, could not weep or say the Lord's Prayer without stumbling.

The answer of the critics

The doctrine was answered from within the same world. The physician Johann Weyer argued that the women accused were old, poor and melancholy, deluded by the devil if by anyone, and needed a physician and not a fire. Reginald Scot, an English gentleman, wrote that their confessions were dreams, sickness, fear or the court's own questions given back, and that the tricks of the conjurors were frauds.

The Jesuit Friedrich Spee, who heard the last confessions of the condemned, made the sharpest case. Torture, he wrote, will make anyone confess anything, and the questions put the answers in the mouths of the accused. A woman who confessed was guilty and a woman who held out was hardened by the devil, so that no one could ever be found innocent; and if churchmen were put to the same torture, they too would confess to being witches.

The Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, sent to examine the confessions of a great panic in the Basque country, found that none of them held up when tested, and reported that there were neither witches nor bewitched until people began to talk and write about them. The Roman Inquisition, for its part, ordered that no one be condemned without proof that a crime had happened at all, and that physicians examine any illness blamed on witchcraft.

How a neighbour became a witch

The records show the common shape of an accusation. In the English cases the story often runs the same way: a poor woman comes to a door to beg or borrow and is turned away; she mutters as she goes; a child falls sick or a cow dies, and the household remembers her. Old quarrels, a cunning man's naming, a sick child's cries and a magistrate's questions do the rest, and once one name had been given under torture, more followed.