Mediæval Heresy & the Inquisition

by Arthur Stanley Turberville

(ii) Witchcraft

The great witchcraft craze did not seize upon Europe until the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is true that for hundreds of years before this crimes, which became associated with the name of witchcraft, had been known and punished, but until the twelfth century we do not find the precise well-defined conception of the witch as a woman who has entered into an unholy compact with Satan, is in possession of certain miraculous powers and in particular that of transporting herself through the air to the so-called Sabbath, or rather Sabbat, where she and her kind meet together to renew their allegiance to the Prince of Darkness. It is very likely that the idea of the omnipresence of the powerful and maleficent force of Satan took greater hold of western Europe than ever before in the twelfth century, that marvellous period of the earlier Renaissance, when men’s minds were quickened to a new realization of the splendour and beauty of things of the earth, when heresy took a firm root, and doubt and hesitation sometimes usurped the place of a faith which had been childlike and unquestioning, a period of clashing between intellectual aspiration and the inflexibility of dogma, such that the timid and the ignorant were assailed by a vivid consciousness of the dangers pressing around the Ark of the Lord upon every side, of the sinister might of the dark powers arrayed against the Redeemer. In such circumstances more insistent, more clearly defined became the conception of those evil beings going about in the world, who had sold themselves to the Devil and were assisting him in his fell purposes.[201]

At first the Church refused its sanction to the popular tales about witches, more especially to the tale of the Sabbat and the transportation of witches through the air, often over immense distances. The canonists, Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, dismiss this as a fiction: which to believe is pagan, an error in the faith—in short heresy. But popular credence triumphed over the canonists. The reports of the activities of witches became so numerous, so determined and so circumstantial that it was wellnigh impossible to disbelieve. It became simply a question of how to reconcile well-authenticated facts with the canonists. A way out of the dilemma was discovered in the fifteenth century, at a time when the craze had almost reached its height. The witches meant by the canonists must have been a different order of being from those referred to by a later generation when they spoke of witches. It was merely a matter of nomenclature after all. Those responsible not only for guarding the purity of the faith but also for protecting the faithful from the assaults of the Evil One as delivered by witches could no longer allow their freedom of action to be curtailed, the powers of the Devil actually aggrandized by the misinterpreted ruling that belief in witches was error. Accordingly, when a certain eminent lawyer named Ponzinibio dared to maintain the accuracy of the canonists and to assert that all belief in witchcraft and sorcery was a delusion, the master of the Sacred Palace, Bartholomew de Spina, wrote a vehement and momentous reply, in which he turned the vials of a righteous indignation against Ponzinibio and called upon the Inquisition to proceed against the lawyer as himself a fautor of heretics.[202] The attitude of the Church had indeed made a complete reversal. What previously it had been heresy to assert it now became heresy to deny. The divine law was now discovered clearly to prove the existence of witches, and the Scriptures were reinforced by the civil code.[203] There no longer remained any room for doubt or equivocation.

Before the end of the century there appeared Sprenger’s celebrated ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ the most authoritative work in existence on witchcraft from the standpoint of credulity.[204] Sprenger was an inquisitor, so that in his compendium, as in other similar treatises, we have the conclusions regarding the nature and the practices of witches, as ascertained by the examination of supposedly authentic cases. We learn in the first place the fundamental fact which explains the existence of witches—the inherent inferiority of the female sex to the male. Women are discontented, impatient creatures, who have a natural proclivity to evil. Woman is at the best a necessary evil. St. Chrysostom is quoted with approval on the subject of marriage. ‘Quid est mulier nisi amicitiae inimica, ineffugabilis poena, necessarium malum, naturalis tentatio, desirabilis calamitas, domesticum periculum, delectabile detrimentum?...’[205] Everything considered, it was not at all strange that women should be particularly prone to yielding to the corrupt wiles and solicitations of the Devil. Once bought by him, they received the sustenance for their infamous activities in the Sabbat, the great nocturnal assembly of the powers of darkness, held sometimes in the Brocken, sometimes in some unidentified spot east of Jordan, or indeed it might be in any spot chosen by Satan. To the trysting-place, however distant it might be, the witches flew through the air. This aërial transportation to the Sabbat was in the opinion of Sprenger and other first-rate authorities certainly no illusion, it was a reality—only, according to Sprenger, the witch travelled in an aërial body, a vaporous part of herself, which issued out of her mouth and by the existence of which she was enabled to be in two places at one and the same time.[206] At the nocturnal assemblage there took place the offering of unqualified allegiance to the Devil, feasting, dancing and sexual intercourse, either with Satan himself or some of his demons.[207] Foul details occur in plenty in all the fifteenth-century treatises on witchcraft concerning the sexual abominations practised by ‘incubi’ and ‘succubi’ at the Sabbat. From such horrid intercourse, we are informed by our authors, proceed giants and wizards, such as Merlin, but never an ordinary human being.[208]

Bartholomew de Spina gives us a variety of circumstantial stories about women who had taken part in the witches’ gathering. One or two may be taken as samples of a large class. A respected burgomaster studied in his youth at Parma. Returning to his lodgings one night late, he knocked in vain at the door. He therefore let himself in by the window and went upstairs, where he found the maid-servant lying prone on the floor, naked and so inert as to appear dead. When she at last came to herself, she acknowledged that she had been to the Sabbat. This case, comments Spina, proves that in the transportation to the Sabbat no corporal transference is involved. The body of the girl had lain all the time on the floor, only her aërial spirit had been absent.[209] Again, a man one day finds his wife lying in an outhouse insensible, and on recovery she confesses to having been to the concourse. He is horrified, and, determined to rid himself of his atrocious spouse, gives information against her to the Inquisition, so that she may be burnt. The woman apparently escaped this fate by drowning herself.[210] One suspects a somewhat simpler explanation than witchcraft of this tale of conjugal infelicity. Another similar account is of a citizen of Ferrara, whose wife was in the habit of attending the Sabbat. One night he, pretending to be asleep, saw his wife rise, anoint herself and fly out of the window. As soon as she was gone he got up, and apparently succeeded in tracking her to the wine-cellar of a noble of the town, where he found her together with a number of witches. Directly he was seen, they all disappeared. The unfortunate husband, however, could not get away and was there discovered by the servants of the house, who very naturally took him for a burglar. Happily he succeeded in giving satisfactory explanations to the owner of the house. At the earliest possible opportunity he gave information against his wife, whom he handed over to the punishment she had deserved.[211] Here again we get the hint that the charge of witchcraft might be a useful weapon in the armoury of a husband, should he desire for one reason or another to separate from his wife—for good. Another tale is of a girl who saw her mother rise out of bed, anoint herself and fly out of the window. The girl did likewise, acquiring apparently the power of flight on the instant, and she found herself transported into her mother’s presence. Then, being frightened, she called upon the names of Jesus and the Virgin, and thereupon found herself back in her bed.[212]

The witches, who entered into their unholy compact with Satan at the Sabbat, were there invested with various tremendous and abominable powers. Unlike sorcerers and magicians, who occasionally used their black art to good purposes, witches could work nothing else but evil. They were particularly fond of interfering with procreation, where both men and women, because of the connection with original sin, were most vulnerable. They produced sterility in the one sex, impotence in the other.[213] Indeed it could be taken practically for certain that these two evils were invariably due to witchcraft. Witches also produced abortion and interfered with the flow of the mother’s milk.[214] They sometimes offered up infants at their birth to demons; were vampires and sustained themselves by sucking children’s blood.[215] They were able to transform men and women into beasts, to create tempests and thunder-storms.[216] Indeed they went about the world doing all manner of noxious damage, ranging in seriousness from the breaking of crucifixes to the destruction of human life. In their peregrinations they were much assisted by their being able to transform themselves into the likeness of animals, particularly of cats, so that it was very difficult to keep them out of any dwelling-house they cared to visit.[217] Indeed so powerful and versatile were witches supposed to be, not only by vulgar report, but according to authoritative statement, that it may seem difficult to understand how it could be imagined that any human agency could ever get the better of them.

But something had to be done. The evil tended to grow so disastrously, in this helped as a matter of fact—as in the case of sorcery—by the Church’s decision that the magic arts were no mere delusion but reality, and that while the practiser of them was a heretic, to believe that he or she was no charlatan but genuinely in league with the Devil was sound doctrine. In this way were men and women encouraged, whenever ill-fortune befell them, to find a facile explanation for unmerited calamity in such an intrinsically innocent incident, for example, as that of a sinister-looking old woman with a hooked nose having peered in at their cottage window. The simple fact of being found wandering alone in fields or woods after nightfall constituted legitimate evidence before the Inquisition. Or again, if an old woman said to someone who had injured her, ‘You will repent of this,’ and some misfortune subsequently occurred to the latter, the old woman might easily on such trivial grounds be suspect.[218]

One of the most interesting and remarkable phenomena of the history of witchcraft is that of the self-confessed witch, the woman who deliberately and of her own accord gave herself out to be possessed of supernatural powers in spite of the terrible peril incurred by such an announcement. The explanation of this is partly economic—the law of supply and demand operating in the case of the occult arts as a marketable commodity, just as in any other—partly psychological. Particularly when there was such unimpeachable authority for the reality and potency of the black arts, there were always people quite anxious to avail themselves of the means of fore-knowledge of, or avenging an injury, or discomfiting a rival, and to pay handsomely for the privilege. The demand existing, there were not wanting those willing to satisfy it, to accept the risk in view of the generosity of the remuneration. Sometimes the reputed witch succeeded in persuading herself that she was one in very deed. Some curious coincidence, the desired object actually occurring after the utterance of spells and incantations, persuaded the superstitious mind, arguing ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc,’ that the spells and incantations held in them a miraculous power. The wretched woman would then with a vain pride or a trembling apprehensive awe perceive in herself a being supernatural.[219] But clearly the greater proportion of witchcraft lore is founded upon confessions wrung by means of the rack from the supposed culprit when brought before a civil or inquisitorial tribunal.

We do not know definitely when the Inquisition was first employed against witchcraft; but certainly in 1374 it was determined by the papacy that the Holy Office was competent to try such cases.[220] In 1437 Eugenius IV called upon inquisitors everywhere to exert themselves against the evil.[221] And there is no question that throughout the fifteenth century the tribunal carried on a crusade against witchcraft with great assiduity. Although Sprenger was moved to confess that the extirpation of the pest seemed an impossibility, being inclined to lay the blame on the carelessness and inactivity of the secular authority,[222] nevertheless the number of executions was terrible. We are told that in a single year the Bishop of Bamberg destroyed six hundred witches, the Bishop of Würzburg nine hundred.[223] A thousand perished in the same space of time in the diocese of Como.[224] The execution of witches, then, both in this century and the next, assumed great proportions, largely owing to the thoroughness of inquisitorial proceedings, though it must be added—despite Sprenger’s animadversions upon its slackness—that actually the civil authority was responsible for many. The Inquisition, therefore, must bear much of the blame for the spread of witchcraft, or rather—for it amounted to the same thing—for the witchcraft craze. Largely in its records were collected the great stores of indisputable evidence of the reality of that heresy which it had become one of the functions of the tribunal to eradicate. By reason of its constitution and its methods of procedure the Inquisition was always a very effective court; but it was especially so in the case of witches, because in dealing with them the inquisitor felt that he was engaged in a personal combat with Satan himself, and that he had to exert all his powers in order to withstand, still more to overcome, so formidable an adversary. Indeed it was very fortunate that he was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was impervious to the attacks of witchcraft. Nevertheless it was felt necessary to take special precautions.[225]