The Enemy Within (7 page)

But if social structure does not help very much to explain the woman-witch equivalence (again, equivalence
on the whole
and
in practice
), ideation gets somewhat closer. From time out of mind, European cultural tradition had affirmed a broad-gauge principle of masculine superiority. Men were, according to this tradition, simply stronger and better than women: in physique, in powers of “reason,” in moral instinct. The difference was a matter of degree rather than kind; men had
more
of the key attributes that defined and elevated humans above the animal world. This was the essential point in speaking, as pre-modern folk endlessly did speak, of women's inherent “weakness,” of their being “the weaker sex.” And, for certain, it had much to do with witchcraft. Women's weakness made them vulnerable to the Devil's attentions; in effect, they lacked the mental and moral strength to resist him. In this connection the biblical story of Eve, tempted by the serpent and thus made “first in sin,” was seen throughout European Christendom as paradigmatic.

However, the explanatory power of European cultural tradition carries only so far. For witch-hunting was, and is, a
cross
-cultural,
trans
historical phenomenon—an attacker, a killer, of women almost everywhere. In present-day Africa as well as the Far East, among pre-modern Native Americans no less than pre-modern Europeans, witches have been “found” mainly among women—sometimes overwhelmingly so. There must be a reason that goes beyond the cultural and the historical.

And there is: enter the psychological. Witchcraft embodies, in each and every one of its otherwise disparate settings, a basic impulse of misogyny—a fear, and a hatred, of women so generalized that it crosses virtually all boundaries. This includes the boundaries of gender itself, for women are misogynous, too. According to current developmental theory, the roots of such feeling lie buried deep in our psychic bedrock; they reach back, indeed, to our first experiences of life. Because in every known society women are primary caregivers to infants, those first experiences and the unconscious traces they leave behind put female presence squarely at the center. A mother—a woman—is the primal Other, the nonself from which self is progressively distinguished; further, she disposes a kind of absolute power to meet, or reject, infantile need. As such, she retains forever afterward an “aura” of what a discerning psychologist has called “magically formidable” qualities. Moreover, much of this weighs inevitably on the downside: the Bad Mother, who denies and displeases, alongside the Good Mother, who nourishes. The link to misogyny, and from there to witchcraft, is obvious; what more apt modifier for a witch than “magically formidable”?

At the same time, another part of these inner-life foundations seems clearly sex-defined. Male anxieties about woman-power—as expressed in sexuality, menstruation, and, most especially, childbearing—are patent through much of the old demonological writing. The evident disconnect between such power, on the one hand, and the formal structures that affirmed male dominance, on the other, might readily generate worry and tension, and a sense of weakness—specifically in men.

This tableau is perhaps too brief to be more than suggestive—and needs, in any case, a few modifiers. First, the woman-accusing-woman aspect of witch trials is worth underscoring; for this, more than anything else, undercuts arguments centered on simple patriarchy. Second, the woman-witch equivalence was very clear in the small, fully localized cases, but had some tendency to break down whenever “panic” attitudes took over; then the trendline of accusation might shift somewhat to encompass increasing numbers of men. Third, those men who did find themselves accused, in whatever context, were often linked to women who had previously fallen under suspicion. They were the husbands or sons of supposed witches, and thus could be seen as contaminated by close contact. Indeed, they were subject to a quite literal process of guilt by association.

From sex we turn to age. There is, of course, a hoary stereotype to reckon with here: the figure of the
elderly
witch, the “old hag.” The stereotype is accurate only in part. True, a disproportionate number of convicted witches were on the “old” side; quite a few were age 60, 70, or more. Still, many others belonged to what we would call the midlife cohort. Moreover, when the focus is shifted from court trials and convictions to suspicions and accusations, the age median drops substantially. Most of the accused seem to have acquired a reputation for witchcraft—an important benchmark—as early as their 40s and 50s. From such beginnings a chain of events might then unwind, until time and accumulated suspicion brought official charges—and a summons to trial.

The pattern here reflected deep discontinuities in the life-cycle experience of early modern European women. A good many would be widowed during or after the middle years, and thus left in an impoverished situation; henceforth they would constitute a burden on their families and communities. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, a smaller subgroup—the widows of well-to-do men—might suddenly assume independent control of property, in direct contrast to prevailing norms. Either way, such women might become targets of resentment and suspicion. And either way, they lacked the protective influence afforded by male next-of-kin. In fact, the extant records do suggest that widows were disproportionately represented among accused witches. But even without being widowed, women in midlife were obliged to absorb a profound loss of status, as menopause brought an end to their childbearing years. The same cultural traditions that had hitherto affirmed—even celebrated—their role in “replenishing the earth” (the biblical phrasing) would now declare them “barren.” As such, they could be presumed to harbor feelings of dispossession, not to say raw envy.

Other attributes of the accused can be presented more simply and categorically. Most were poor, many quite wretchedly so. And most were drawn from well below the “middling ranks” in the traditional social hierarchy. (There were also, as previously noted, important exceptions.) Finally, many, if not most, were regarded as being of unpleasant, abrasive character: too self-centered, too quick to anger, too “meddling,” too “covetous,” and so on. These descriptors proved especially telling when applied—as they were applied, again and again—to women. To be sure, they came largely from the testimony of accusers; but where there was so much shared opinion, there may also have been some reality behind it. Clearly, the wisest course in early modern community life—especially for a woman—was to blend in and
not
to seem too openly self-assertive. To be, or to behave, otherwise was to open oneself to suspicion of witchcraft.

In a sense, almost anyone was potentially an accuser of witches. For belief in, and fear of, witchcraft was virtually universal in pre-modern Europe. Given so many different venues, spanning such a long period, individuals of every stripe would somewhere, sometime, be cast as accusers.

Most conspicuous of all were those who led the way in full-fledged “panic” witch-hunts. They could be clerics, including popes (such as John XXII), bishops, and priests of lesser rank (or ministers, in the case of the Protestants). They could also be secular authorities, ranging from crowned monarchs ( James I of Scotland, Philip the Fair of France) to zealous bureaucrats (Nicholas Remy, a publisher and prosecutor in French Lorraine, and Wolfgang Kolb, a frequent “interrogator” in southern Germany, among many others). Some were self-appointed “witch-finders”; two such, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, orchestrated virtually by themselves the biggest single panic outbreak ever to occur in England (during the early years of the Puritan
interregnum,
roughly 1645-47).

Behind the leaders in the process of accusation marched many followers, ordinary folk whose interest and anxiety was easily mobilized. They were the ones to provide personal testimony on particular suspects and the details of
maleficium.
For the most part, they seem an indistinct mass of frightened, beleaguered souls, revealed to us now through a screen of heavily doctored legal and ecclesiastical writings. Generalizations about them can only be suggestive, nothing more. Still, the special importance of female accusers is, as previously noted, quite beyond doubt; to repeat here, a women-against-women dynamic was fundamental to many witchcraft cases, especially those playing out at the village level. However, men were also everywhere involved, and not just as leaders but also as part of an accusing chorus. Strikingly, in certain contexts children might play the critical role. A Swedish witch panic of the 1670s that claimed some 200 lives featured accusers as young as seven or eight. And lesser panics in the Basque country, in Poland, and in some parts of southern Germany also appear to have included children at, or near, the center of things.

It goes almost without saying that many accusers were also victims of witchcraft (or so they believed), and vice versa. Yet the match was less than total. Some victims were not in a position to speak for themselves: infants and the very youngest children especially. In such cases a parent, or another adult, would have to bring charges on their behalf. (Of course, parents might well feel personally attacked by the witch-induced “affliction” of a beloved child.) Other supposed victims included some who had already died, some who were too sick or injured to come forward, and some who were perhaps too frightened. Conversely, certain groups of accusers were not usually victims themselves: for example, many of the official prosecutors, inquisitors, and “witch-finders.”

Victimhood invariably spanned a broad range of experience, and its emphasis might differ greatly from one setting to the next. Yet the importance nearly everywhere of youthful victims is impossible to miss. Injury, illness, and death among the young appeared again and again, along with moments of interference in the care of such victims (difficulties in breast-feeding, for instance). Add to this the matter of reproductive failure—an inability to conceive, miscarriage, still-birth—which might be, and often was, attributed to witchcraft. Add, furthermore, another kind of productive (not reproductive) mischance: crops that withered on the vine, cows that wouldn't give milk, fields that didn't yield as expected. Roll them together, and the common denominator throughout was nothing less than human, and environmental, fertility. Witches were thought to target fertility above all else.

Today we can mostly take fertility for granted. We use our knowledge of reproductive biology and the mechanics of contraception to control procreation. And we manage environmental productivity through a parallel combination of science and technology. How different the lives of our pre-modern forebears! For them procreation was always a matter of deep randomness and mystery—the work of “providence,” nothing less. The connection between sex and pregnancy was but partially understood, if not
mis
understood; for example, widely prevalent opinion rated the menses as the most likely time for a woman to conceive. Individual families and whole communities struggled constantly to maintain a delicate reproductive balance. A dearth of newborn children, or an epidemic that struck at the young with particular force, could threaten group survival into the future. And so could an excess—by creating too many mouths to feed, from too-scarce resources. On the environmental side, much depended on the success of the annual harvest. In some years there was plenty, in others want; and whatever made for the difference was largely beyond the reach of human contrivance.

Thus, in one life sector after another, fertility was all—with uncertainty, anxiety, a fear of failure, as its regular accompaniments. No wonder the links from fertility to witchcraft ran so deep and spread so wide. And no wonder the witch-craze years coincided with the climatic period of the so-called Little Ice Age and with what historians of northern Europe now describe as both a severe demographic squeeze and a widespread “crisis of subsistence.”

The most common venue for European witchcraft was a rural village of perhaps 100 households, covering a territorial expanse of a dozen square miles—with a traditional peasant economy and largely self-sustaining, but also in some regular contact with its nearby surroundings. The single, most striking aspect of everyday experience in such a place was sheer social density. All families and all individuals were directly known to one another; life proceeded at every point on an up-close, face-to-face basis. Witchcraft, too, was up close and face-to-face. Accusations were almost never directed toward strangers; instead, the culprit would likely be a neighbor, would certainly be an acquaintance, and might even be an erstwhile friend. Where so much else was personal, suffering and victimhood would logically have a personal cause:
she
did it,
he
made it happen—not fate, or environmental mischance, or vast social and economic forces.

“Panic” outbreaks, in attaining a much larger scale, followed a different pattern. The setting for many of these was not a peasant village, but rather a town or a small city. Such was true during the craze period in southern and central Germany, where most of the major witch-hunting centers were places of considerable size (perhaps 1,000 households, plus or minus) and at least partially urban character (including some involvement with commerce as well as agriculture). There accusations would begin to spiral by outgrowing the level of personal animosity. Strangers were often accused; indeed, this was key to the spiraling. Whereas the social density of village life might breed an initial round of suspicions but then limit their spread, the somewhat looser structures of the town could actually encourage panic episodes. Accusations would multiply where, and because, the element of personal connection was less likely to serve (sooner or later) as a source of restraint.