With a special focus on the document the Malleus maleficarum, first composed in the Renaissance era, but hardly typical of that era’s growing humanism
[This is being presented separately because, as a part of a movie review, it seems to go on a big detour from the review in which it was originally to figure. But it is interesting in its own right (at least it should be to some), and in seeing it ahead of the full review, you can deal with it, or not, as a sort of hair shirt; and when the full review comes, it should be a breath of fresh air by comparison.]
1. Preliminary assumptions
Witchcraft in modern Western or American culture, for purposes of casual discussion, can be divided into three different types, some of which overlap:
(1) the religion practiced today that derives some or all of its content from paganism, today called Wicca (Encyclopaedia Britannica [“EB”], 1972 edition, states “The earliest evidence of witchcraft [an older name for what became called Wicca] in Europe survives from the prehistoric past. … According to [an] Egyptologist…, witchcraft as practi[c]ed in Western Christendom was a survival of pagan religion. … The witch cult religion survived in England until the 18th century, 1,200 years after the introduction of Christianity,” vol. 23, p. 604);
(2) the set of ideas alleged by churchmen and others in authority during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, in prosecuting various (lay) individuals, accusing them of straying from religious doctrine and practice, and penalizing them for it (sometimes with execution); these ideas included various facets of what the accused were alleged to have done (falling under the heading of maleficia, to be described more below), as became a basis to prosecute them—including their characteristic practices (such as gatherings of an illicit sort) and the tools for them (such as what was called a “Hand of Glory”); and
(3) the dopey folk ideas associated with such banal things as the American celebration of Halloween, characters in the movie The Wizard of Oz (1939), and so on. In this latter category fall old crones wearing a black outfit, including a pointed hat, who do nasty things and speak in a cackle, unless they are (as in The Wizard of Oz) Glinda, the Witch of the North, in which case she’s attractive, wears a white dress, and does good.
My category 3 can be said to derive in good part from allegations by authorities within category 2, which comprise a more historically rooted set of concepts; I believe ideas in Harry Potter such as flying on a stick also seem to have something in common with category 3 but more likely derive from category 2.
Of course, alleged witchcraft of the type focused on in serious manner for centuries by the Church, represented in category 2, concerned a belief about conduct and ideas of the accused that in part amounted to, or derived from, pagan, or allegedly pagan, ideology. Wicca as practiced today (of my category 1) would seem to exemplify, or derive from, pagan ideology, but this would be related to a genuinely pursued religion, not to a set of deviant or subversive practices that the churchmen were concerned with. By and large, and as far as I understand, Wiccans are considered to have a religion that they are respected enough in the U.S. (via the freedom of religion clause in the U.S. Constitution) to be let to practice in their own lives; we don’t conduct inquisitions to send these people to execution. Whatever Wicca’s historical source, and however its current practitioners root its beliefs—whether in teachings, an authoritative book, or whatever—it can be considered apart from categories 2 and 3, in terms of what validity it has. That is, while some religious Christians (and others) may have wariness, contempt, or the like for Wicca, it is not merely defined today (as it was in the 15th through 17th centuries) as heresy whose perpetrators are to be almost automatically sent to execution by any established Western church.
Lastly, category 2 above is the main one of categories 2 and 3, as reflecting an area of Western cultural activity and belief that not only led to the deaths of many thousands if not millions over centuries, but still stands for a certain mentality we have seen in more recent years. This mentality, on a more innocuous level, is called that behind a colloquially named “witch hunt,” whose most notorious aspect is causing some kind of punishment or loss of status to devolve on someone in a process that involves a kind of prosecution without proper legal protections, and in which, most notoriously, an accusation is taken to be, all in one, pleading, trial, and verdict: rules of evidence, and a chance for both sides to be heard, are not followed. In the most lethal form, the mentality such as was behind the Renaissance era witch hunts are, or can be equivalent to, genocidal activities.
Following I will give a rough account of what witchcraft, as conceived of as a target of Church-based prosecutions, was. For myself, I don’t believe in witchcraft as conceived in this way—as a matter of rank-and-file people being led into service to the Devil (I capitalize the name merely to distinguish the alleged personage from, within the same suppositional context, lesser devils, imps, and so on), with the result that the Church has to hold these people to account and purge itself of them. But it certainly was a strong belief during a period in European history in which, probably not coincidentally, society was in transition from a medieval, highly Church-influenced mode to a more scientifically oriented mode, coming into effect during the Renaissance (ca. 1485 to ca. 1600), and leading to the more explicitly science-embracing (and human-rights-recognizing) period of the Enlightenment (ca. 1720 to about 1800).
The Malleus maleficarum. The most convenient way for me to focus what witchcraft and witch hunts were about is to look at the Malleus maleficarum, a sort of Church-sanctioned guidebook that has fascinated me since 1979, when I first learned about it. Various discussions of witchcraft as a concern of European society can place its start before 1100 (“The witch-hunting mania obsessed Europe from about 1050 to the end of the 17th century…,” FW, 1972, vol. 25, p. 189) or shortly after (“Once witchcraft was believed to involve demonic possession, heresy, and the rejection of God, it came within the scope of the Inquisition…. Witch trials had been in progress for nearly a century by the time of the Inquisition at Toulouse (1335),” EB, 1972, vol. 23, p. 604).
It would seem the most rigorous codification of Church teachings about witchcraft came with the Malleus maleficarum, which is Latin for “Hammer of evildoers,” or “Hammer of witches.” What helped it become a widespread tool was, of course, the printing press, which was invented in the early 1400s. First written in 1486 and apparently published a year later, the book was originally written by the Dominican priests Heinrich Kramer (also known as Henricus Institoris) and Jacob Sprenger (spellings of the names have varied across sources; EB, 1972, vol. 23, p. 604; FW, 1972, pp. 188-89; Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition [Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart Inc., 1939], pp. 129 ff.). (See end note on the issue of the German ethnic background of Kramer and Sprenger.)
EB calls the Malleus a “detailed legal and theological document that was regarded by Catholics and Protestants alike as a textbook on witches. … It asserted that the origin of witchcraft was ‘carnal lust,’ said to be ‘insatiable’ in women…” (EB, vol. 23, p. 604). Michelet notes, “[Jacob] Sprenger’s sole merit is to have compiled a work more complete than any of his predecessors, the compendium of a vast and elaborate system…” and this work, the Malleus, was “for the detection and punishment of Witches [sic] and Sorceresses [sic]” (Michelet, p. 129). This book was no flash in the pan. “The doctrines of the Malleus continued to have substantial influence in Europe well into the 18th century; they were, for example, accepted by Martin Luther [who flourished in the early 1500s]” (EB, 1972, vol. 23, p. 605). It would run through many editions (a Wikipedia article on the Malleus says 20 editions) until the late 1600s, about when (in 1692) the Salem witch trials, the focus of The Crucible, took place.
For those who believed in it, the Malleus outlined how to identify a witch, and what to do about her (in ways that scream out from the many sources, the accused were usually women). Michelet doesn’t disguise his scorn: “Here lies Sprenger’s real merit, which is beyond dispute. He is a fool, but an intrepid fool; boldly and unflinchingly he lays down the least acceptable doctrines. … Beginning on the first page, he sets down openly and displays one by one the natural, self-evident reasons there are for disbelieving the satanic miracles” (Michelet, p. 133). EB says, not encouragingly to modern eyes, “The work assumed major importance in the history of psychiatry since it specifies that sudden loss of reason in a person is a symptom of demonic possession” (EB, 1972, vol. 23, p. 605). Of course, as gets often mentioned in encyclopedic accounts of witch hunting and inquisitions, the idea to root out witches was long based on a Biblical passage, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18; King James version).
When the character Reverend Hale—who later seems sympathetic—turns up in The Crucible as a sort of consultant minister, bearing weighty books by which he will rigorously try to diagnose the young women who are considered by the locals to be oddly sick, his books, though it is never revealed, may well have included the Malleus.
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Witchcraft in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance era wasn’t frivolous parlor-game nonsense; the numbers of the executed seem mainly to have been in the hundreds of thousands over several centuries. FW says, “Estimates of the total number of persons executed in Europe for witchcraft from the 11th to the 18th centuries range from 300,000 to 9,000,000” (FW, 1972, vol. 25, p. 189). EB: “…[T]he victims of the witchcraft trials have been variously estimated to number from the hundreds of thousands to the millions” (EB, 1972, vol. 23, p. 605). Opponents of the inquisitions have made names for themselves, sometimes tragically, through the ages; Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian philosopher who was burned at the stake for alleged heresy, “openly said that many so-called witches were simply psychologically disturbed old women…” (Ibid.).
What “witch hunts” mean today. Some aspects of the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe may be familiar to readers. Women did certain things others didn’t understand; they were accused of being witches, or being in league with the Devil (almost the exact same thing), and they were either summarily prosecuted (and executed) or interrogated in order to confess, or to reveal who else was in league with the Devil. If you understand this much about what went on, you then have some preliminary cultural knowledge to understand what The Crucible is looking at: similar behavior going on in an American colony—the most “Establishmentarian,” so to speak—Massachusetts, about 70 years after it was first settled.
If all this sounds arcane—stories about historical business that couldn’t seem more removed from today’s American concerns—remember that The Crucible, first published in 1953, came toward the end of the McCarthy Red-baiting phenomena (see my blog entry on of The Front). More familiarly, whenever there is reference today to something going on as a “witch hunt,” it is this sort of business. As philosopher, novelist, and critic William H. Gass writes in a preface to The Public Burning, Robert Coover’s novel of Richard Nixon and the Rosenberg executions, “Before Watergate and Whitewater and all the other gates that have open and shut in recent decades, the United States has had many a witch-hunt, political trial, congressional investigation, retaliatory leakage of private papers, as well as periodic waves of general harassment, with their associated villains and victims….” (The Public Burning [New York: Grove Press, 1977/1997], p. xi).
What we are left with as perhaps the most relevant philosophical point made by the fairly well crafted film of The Crucible is this: when people are accused, stigmatized, (almost literally) demonized by mere claims, and such bare accusations are taken as grounds to act against the person’s rights, freedom, and even life in absence of any independent evidence, what have we got going on? Evil under the guise of a “righteous” inquisition? Societal sickness? And who can protect the innocent against those accusing them of being witches?
Communist and anti-Communist insanity. A last preliminary note has to do with much more modern “witch-hunting.” It would be almost foolish to say that The Crucible, which was published in 1953 (about the last year of the McCarthyist denunciations), was not about McCarthyism. The 1972 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I use for reference on things on which there shouldn’t be too much scholarly advance (due to how old a topic is, or the like), is strange in its brief article on Arthur Miller, when referring to The Crucible: it says the play “was originally misinterpreted by critics as an allegorical version of the investigations that Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was conducting at the time” (vol. 15, p. 465). Is that so? Well, the play could have been meant to be about a more general array of witch hunts over the centuries. But there was another historically apropos a phenomenon, this one not long before, in the 1930s, that fits the play’s theme well: the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, from 1936 to 1939, wherein a mere denunciation was enough to get someone hauled off as an enemy of the state. Millions died in this “program” (see my blog entry of April 16).
One particular person in the 1930s Soviet purge period is particularly interesting: a layperson in the Ukraine New York
Let’s get away from the heavy preliminary talk and look at the movie. (Later, I will describe again what witchcraft was, but in a less labored scholarly, reference-anchored way; I’ll be more informal, and this should bring some aspects of the movie into “friendlier” focus.)
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End note
