A few weeks ago I described an ugly case study in modern scapegoating (cancelation, “witch hunts,” boycotts, whatever you want to call the age-old human drive to shun and blame).
Like others, I’ve been tracking the online version of this phenomenon for years (since sometime after the Like and Retweet buttons were introduced). More recently, I’ve noticed several parallels between the historical conditions behind actual witch hunts in Europe and the colonies (exploding in the sixteenth century, but beginning much earlier) and the anxieties fueling our modern equivalents.
These include climate change (the “Little Ice Age”), a pandemic that restructured society and politics (the Black Plague), a new form of religion protesting the entrenched power structure of the time (Protestantism), and the most powerful medium for disseminating that new faith, and its accompanying hysteria around “witchcraft”— new technologies for copying and sharing (the printing press).
Perhaps some of that sounds familiar.
While scapegoating and human sacrifice are as old as culture itself (as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, theorists from Freud to René Girard have portrayed it as one of the founding acts of society), witch hunts really became a mass craze with the rise of the printing press and Protestantism—and accusations of witchcraft were mostly leveled by Protestants against other Protestants.
In similar fashion, twenty-first-century cancelation campaigns are most often waged by one or another political faction against their own tribe. While defining themselves against the status quo (the Roman Catholic Church) Protestants were also swept up in a fever of oneupmanship and holier-than-thou-ism, defining themselves against members of their own politico-spiritual community.
Of course, many of the most prodigious witch hunters were simply out to make a quick buck, or like their Catholic predecessors, wield a little power and influence.
“It was a crime imputed with so much ease, and repelled with so much difficulty, that the powerful, whenever they wanted to ruin the weak, and could fix no other imputation upon them, had only to accuse them of witchcraft […] this crime was made the pretext for the most violent persecution, both of individuals and communities, whose real offences were purely political or religious […] ”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds (1841)
The “protestors” against the old Church—Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al—had a point. The Catholic Church was, in many respects, oppressive and corrupt. The selling of indulgences, the Inquisition, even papal orgies, were just a few of the Vatican’s hypocritical sins, in addition to sponsoring the first witch trials in Christendom. (The oldest witch trial recorded in Europe, which I’ll reference next time, was pagan, and took place in Athens sometime before 323 BC).
With new access to Bibles printed in vernacular languages, anyone (comparatively speaking—anyone wealthy enough to afford literacy and texts) gained access to information that was previously manipulated by a clerical few. By challenging the once-unquestionable authority of the Catholic church, in a roundabout way, the Protestant Reformation led to the Enlightenment, according to traditional histories.
The philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century produced ideals that have been considered, until very recently, some of the most indisputably liberal products of modern thought (rights of the individual, freedom of expression, the social contract, rational inquiry, etc). While the Reformation wasn’t exactly characterized by scientific inquiry so much as a Protestant challenge to authority, by contesting established ways of thinking, it paved the way for free thought and empirical facts based on rational observation.
However it probably didn’t feel that way to someone in Salem, even as late as 1692.
This is all worth keeping in mind when clocking modern “protest-ant” movements that challenge the powers that be, movements which—whether or not you agree—have been described as new, secular forms of “religion,” and may or may not pave the way for an enlightened future… with some inevitably weird bumps along the road.
The causes of “Witch Mania,” as Charles Mackay called the height of the Early- Modern hysteria, are various. Momentous historical developments like Protestantism and plague overlap with mundane local flair-ups—the petty vindictiveness of neighbors arguing over failed crops or sour milk coinciding with the ego of the King of Scotland, who fancied himself witchcraft’s greatest nemesis.
But if there is a connective tissue between the rise of Protestantism, which became a proxy for some of the deadliest political and religious conflicts in Europe during the sixteenth century, and Witch Mania, it is the invention of moveable type for the printing press in Germany, which allowed for the cheap replication and wide distribution of texts and ideas. The Northern Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, and humanism were all ushered in on Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type, introduced sometime around 1440.
In 1486, a handbook on witchcraft, which would be widely referenced for the next three hundred years, was also introduced in Germany. Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was the product of a dean at the University of Cologne, and a professor of theology at the University of Salzburg (insert joke about modern universities, here).
Essentially, this scholarly work was a compendium of Alpine folk beliefs, combined with unbelievable descriptions of demonic behavior. While the authors, Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger, were both Dominicans, Malleus Maleficarum was soon cherished by Protestants and Catholics alike—after 1517, when, according to legend, a theologian named Martin Luther nailed a copy of his Ninety-five Theses bemoaning Catholic corruption to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, kickstarting the Protestant Reformation.
Earlier “Proto-Reformers” like John Wycliffe (l. 1330-1384) had already made arguments similar to Luther’s, and translated the Bible from Latin or Greek into vernacular languages like English. But Luther was the first to harness the power of mass publication. His Ninety-five Theses, which previously would have only reached the scholars of Wittenberg, quickly became a bestseller. In 1522, he published his own translation of the Bible into German. By 1525 his works had sold over half a million copies, making him the first bestseller of the Early Modern era.
The handbook to sorcery that preceded Martin Luther’s best-sellers, Malleus Maleficarum, marked a turning point in the perception of witchcraft. Since the Christianization of Europe, practicing magic or “witchcraft” was common, if furtive, on the continent. (Musicologist Ted Gioia recently published a history of Early Modern witches as secretive practitioners of pagan musical rituals, here.) Before the late-fifteenth century, sorcery was seen as something to be tolerated, perhaps resorted to in times of desperation (years of magical thinking), or dismissed, even by Catholic officials—as evidenced by an edict from the first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, who ordered the death penalty for anyone who killed a suspected witch.
The Malleus inverted this attitude, arguing for the punishment of witchcraft, which it declared heretical to Christianity, encouraging the discovery of all “witches.” Eventually, it was suspected witches themselves, not their homicidal persecutors, who were executed en masse.
This shift in attitude can’t be entirely attributed to a single book, but the Malleus registered a social mood, and spread it far-and-wide. Other factors, such as the political and economic realignment of Europe following the bubonic plagues, and the devastating psychological impact such a calamity had on Christian faith, contributed to the perception that there was hidden evil lurking behind such a widespread, indiscriminate form of death.
There was also climate change, a period of intense cooling, especially in Northern Europe, variously explained by volcanic eruptions, the tilting of the earth’s axis, population decline during the Black Death, or some other cause. In the words of one historian:
The Little Ice Age was a period of climate change characterized by severe weather, famine, sequential epidemics, and chaos. Where previously it was believed no mortal could control the weather, European Christians gradually came to believe that witches could. The drastic effects of the Little Ice Age reached a height between 1560 and 1650, which happened to be the same period in which the number of European witch hunts reached their height. Through works of literature such as the Malleus, witches were broadly blamed for the effects of the Little Ice Age, thus becoming a scapegoat across the Western world.
(Jewish populations were also scapegoated across the Western world—for climate change, as well as the Black Death.)
James VI of Scotland (who would become James I of England, after the death of Elizabeth I) also blamed witches for the weather. The king, “who is fairly entitled to […] the glory or the odium of being at the same time a chief enemy and chief encourager of witchcraft,” in Charles Mackay’s words, published his own treatise on witchcraft, Daemonologie, in 1597.
He was convinced a group of witches had conjured a storm to sink his ships on a voyage to Denmark, which led to one of the most notorious witch trials in history. The North Berwick trials claimed the lives of seventy people, and are thought to have inspired the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, which Shakespeare penned during James’ reign.
James I also commissioned the King James Bible, which influenced the heightened language of Shakespeare and many others… and inadvertently undermined the king’s own authority, leading to the regicide of James’ son, Charles I, during the English Civil War. For the first time, the masses could read passages from the Bible in English—including those which questioned a sovereign’s absolute power on earth—thanks to James I and Johannes Gutenberg.
The printing press and King James Bible also abetted the rise of Puritanism, a Protestant challenge to Protestant authority (that of the Anglican Church) that drove settlement in New England. The Puritans became fodder for fictional American scapegoating classics, based on historical events, such as The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Crucible (1953).
I’ll let the reader decide to what extent these events—the invention of the printing press, a deadly pandemic, Protestantism, and climate change—do, or don’t, mirror some of our own. But the human-nature side of these foibles, to my mind, is even more familiar to the Internet Age.
What many of these accounts boil down to is a desire for power, based on fear (or money, or moral superiority, or attention). Originally, it was the power of the Catholic church against Protestant uprisings. In Mackay’s words:
As the fear of witchcraft increased, the Catholic clergy strove to fix the imputation of it upon those religious sects, the pioneers of the Reformation, who began about this time to be formidable to the church of Rome.
In places where Catholicism was thoroughly ensconced, such as Spain, the focus was less on witchcraft, and more on the greater perceived threat to Catholicism in the region — recently-converted Muslims and Jews, during the Inquisition. In countries that were divided along Christian lines however, like Germany, caught between the Holy Roman Empire and the musings of Martin Luther, witch hunting was rife. “Indeed,” as Katy Brown, a PhD of Classics and Religion at Trinity College Dublin notes, “Germany, one of the central countries of the Protestant Reformation, is often referred to as the focal point of the European witch hunts” …
It would, however, be incorrect to suggest that witch-hunting was something wielded against one’s opponents during the many cases of civil unrest ignited by the Reformation. When they did accuse witches, Calvinists generally hunted fellow Calvinists, whereas Roman Catholics largely hunted other Roman Catholics. They simply used accusations of witchcraft and magic to prove their moral and doctrinal superiority over the other side.
As Charles Mackay put it, almost two centuries earlier:
Strange to say, that although in the first instance chiefly directed against heretics, [Protestants] were as firm believers in the crime as even the Catholics themselves. In after times we find also that the Lutherans and Calvinists became greater witch-burners than ever the Romanists had been […] Every other point of belief was in dispute, but that was considered by every sect to be as well established as the authenticity of the Scriptures or the existence of God.
Readers can probably conjure examples of the new political “religions,” as wags from both sides have referred, variously, to Trump messianism or the so-called great “Awokening,” and agree that if our two political extremes agree on anything, it’s the use of canceling or boycotting to prove their doctrinal superiority over the other side.
Before the Witch Mania proper, the period fueled by Protestantism and the printing press, accusations of witchcraft were mostly used by the powerful to control the weak, or those perceived as a threat to power. The earliest accusations of witchcraft chronicled in Mackay’s Popular Delusions occurred in Norway, directed at the Frieslanders, a people known for their “attachment to freedom,” who “managed their own affairs without the control of the clergy and ambitious nobles” and “already had true notions of representative government,” attaining “a degree of civil and religious liberty very uncommon in that age”—as early as 1204. When their would-be overlords applied to Pope Gregory IX, who declared them heretics and witches, a “large body of thieves and fanatics broke into their country in the year 1233, killing and burning wherever they went,” until the Frieslanders were brought under the yoke of the Holy Roman Empire.
In later times, accusations of witchcraft became pettier and more profitable, carried out by opportunistic individuals more than organized religion. One infamous case, that of the “Lancashire witches,” was incited by a father who urged his son to concoct extraordinary stories about his neighbors, to gain “considerable sums by threatening persons who were rich enough to buy off exposure.” Those who couldn’t were thrown into prison or condemned to death.
The stereotypical image of a witch trial, the trial of “swimming,” was proposed in the Daemonologie of James I and practiced lucratively by Matthew Hopkins, among the most insatiable “witch finders” of his day. Tied and wrapped in a cloth, if a suspected witch drowned, “their friends and relatives had the poor consolation of knowing they were innocent; but there was an end of them; if they floated, which, when laid carefully on the water, was generally the case, there was also an end of them; for they were deemed guilty of witchcraft, and burned accordingly.” If convicted, Hopkins received a bonus: “His charges were twenty shillings a town, his expenses of living while there, and his carriage thither and back. This he claimed whether he found witches or not. If he found any, he claimed twenty shillings a head in addition when they were brought to execution.” Happily, in the end Mr. Hopkins was ensnared by his own designs, after years of profitable trade. He was accosted by an outraged mob, accused of being a wizard himself, wrapped in a blanket, and cast into a pond.
Hopkins published a book on his profession, The Discovery of Witches (1647).
Elsewhere, also, “witch hunting became a trade.”
Where it was not carried out for money, it was carried out for revenge. Local squabbles often ended in charges of sorcery, in most cases leveled by fathers with neurasthenic daughters—young girls prone to fainting fits, epilepsy, or pretension. The most commonly accused were outcasts—the ugly, disabled, unmarried, or infirm—most of all, old women. Perhaps the most baffling trend, in Mackay’s collected accounts, is the willingness of the accused to embrace their condemnation and confess to the charge. “What tended to keep up the delusion […] all over Europe, was the number of hypochondriacs and diseased persons who came voluntarily forward and made confession of witchcraft.” Others simply relished the power of attention: “So dear is power to the human heart, that [one] old woman actually encouraged the popular superstition.”
Likewise, it was hypochondriacs or those with nervous ailments who tended to cast the first stone. Along with fainting and epilepsy, Extraordinary Popular Delusions is brimming with anecdotes of young women, supposedly afflicted by magic spells, vomiting up sewing needles and pins, or even secreting them through their skin. At first glance, this seems to be merely another bout of outrageous fancy, but, according to Mackay, from his vantage point in the nineteenth century:
Modern physicians have often had cases of a similar description under their care, where girls have swallowed needles, which have been voided on the arms, legs, and other parts of the body. But the science of the day could not account for these phenomena otherwise than by the power of the devil; and every needle swallowed by a servant-maid cost an old woman her life.
With the aid of books like Malleus Maleficarum, Daemonologie, and The Discovery of Witches, a sort of meme language developed around stories of demonic possession, and was widely imitated. (It’s worth noting that Mackay’s ubiquitous descriptions of needles and pins are closely related to another form of imitation chronicled in Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and works of fiction like The Crucible, sympathetic magic—sticking pins into a copy of the victim, or so-called “voodoo doll,” to inflict harm). As the cases of witchcraft multiplied, young people cottoned on to the memes of popular delusion—needles and pins, symptoms of possession, or in the case of those imitating witches instead of victims, nonsense spells and incantations.
This nonsensical jargon soon became known to all the idle and foolish boys of Germany. Many an unhappy urchin, who in youthful frolic had repeated it, paid for his folly with his life […] Of course every boy in the city became still more convinced of the power of the charm.
It is not hard to find examples of online communities imitating the symptoms of mental or physical illness, swallowing foreign objects, self-harming, making or confessing to accusations of impurity, or professing impossible beliefs. To say nothing of mimicking outrageous behavior, or scapegoating. And it tends to be the same demographics reflected in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds—attention-seeking adults, and impressionable youth—especially those prone to earlier social contagions like cutting and anorexia, female adolescents.
The lying whimsies of a few sick children, encouraged by foolish parents, and drawn out by superstitious neighbors, were sufficient to set a country in a flame.
In once case, in France, it was not foolish parents but a foolish schoolteacher, a “pious but not very sane lady,” who convinced her pupils she had seen the devil among them.
Some other little girls in the school went into fits at this announcement, and, on their recovery, confessed that they were also witches. At last the whole of them, to the number of fifty, worked upon each other’s imaginations to such a degree that they also confessed …
Young men, meanwhile, such as the urchins described in Germany above, seem to have had motivations similar to the followers of Andrew Tate, if you substitute fast cars and champagne for horses and cake—“One boy confessed that he would willingly have sold himself to the devil, if he could have raised him, for a good dinner and cakes every day of his life, and a pony to ride upon.”
The Protestant Reformation was really about political and economic freedom as much as religion: freedom from Catholic indulgences, and the right to read, and believe—for better or worse—what one wanted from the Bible for themselves. But paired with the scapegoating impulse, witch hunting trickled down to every level of society, even (especially) young people with little agency. It lasted as long as it did, in part, because of a desire for power among those who had little.
That, and fear.
“The truth is that pity was dangerous, for it was thought that no one could have compassion for the sufferings of a witch who was not a dabbler in sorcery,” and thus guilty by association. “So deep was the thralldom of the human mind, that the friends and relatives of the accused looked on and approved.” Anyone who didn’t was deceived by the devil, and “their own senses.” “In all cases of witchcraft, the evidence of the child ought to be taken against its parent; and persons of notoriously bad character, although not to believed […] on ordinary occasions of dispute […] were to be believed.” In New England, even as the witch fever was finally breaking in Europe in the late 1680s, “Every man who was in danger of losing his wife, his child, or his sister, embraced this doctrine,” and consented to the punishment of the innocent to spare his own.
Only gradually did the mania die down, and not all at once. “By degrees, the educated classes”—the class of theology professors from Cologne, Salzburg and, in New England, Harvard, who adjudicated this mess—“openly expressed their unbelief of modern witchcraft, although they were not bold enough to deny its existence altogether.” From the year 1652 to 1682, in Europe, the “trials diminished annually in number, and acquittals were by no means so rare as they had been. To doubt in witchcraft was no longer dangerous.”
Yet in New England, among isolated Puritans, the height of the craze was still to come.
It is “consoling to think,” Mackay said in 1841, that we can count by single digits the believers “of a superstition which in former ages numbered its victims by tens of thousands, and its votaries by millions.” That by our modern equivalents, even with the immediate gratification of internet communication, we inflict extrajudicial physical harm on our enemies only rarely. That, “the delirium has passed away; that the madness has given place to a milder folly.” But as the cancelations described in my previous post suggest, the impulse to accuse and ruin remains.
For the final installment, I’ll look at the primitive origins of the “witch,” or pharmakeus—as the defendant in Greece’s oldest witch trial was called—and one of the last crucibles, in Salem.