The History of Witchcraft in Europe and America

by Read Listen Learn

In Würzburg, a small town in southern Germany, in 1628, a ten-year-old boy called Hoel was forced to sit on a horse outside the church and watch while his mother’s breasts were cut off and pushed in the faces of his elder brothers as they had their skin torn off with red-hot pincers. A man of religion had to watch the youngster’s reaction as his father had a metal spike pushed through his body from his rectum and, finally, while his whole family was burnt alive. Hoel evidently failed the test because, less than a month later, he too suffered the same fate. The crime that he and his family had been accused of was witchcraft.

All across southern Germany in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, similar stories can be told usually of women (but also of men and children) who were murdered for no good reason. Katherine Kepler, mother of the famous astronomer and scientist, only escaped death because of her son’s reputation. A century later, just across the border in Salzburg, Austria, 139 people died, of whom 91 were boys aged between ten and twenty-one. They were all homeless beggars who were supposed to be followers of Magic Jackl, the twenty-two year old son of a witch, who confessed that her son could make himself invisible and was responsible for the bad weather in the city.

Jackl was clever enough to see what was coming and to escape the city before he could be caught. Sadly, an old lady in Stockholm around the same time (1676), whose name was Malin Matsdotter, was not so fortunate. She denied she was a witch when her daughters – who, by the way, volunteered the information about their own mother – accused her of abducting their children. Because she would not confess even under torture, she was burnt alive (rather than beheaded.)

Across the English Channel from mainland Europe, King James I published a book on the ‘science’ of demonology (or devils). He became convinced that witches were trying to kill him when his ship was caught in a storm on the way from Denmark to England. Among the methods for interrogating witches that he recommended was making women sit on red-hot stools so that they could no longer have sexual intercourse with Satan. Thousands of deaths in Scotland and England followed.

All in all, although no exact figures are available, roughly fifty thousand people were executed from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries for witchcraft – about three quarters of them women. The last such case was in Britain in 1863 when a deaf mute had to undergo ‘trial by water’. This meant she was held under water for a long period. If she then sank (meaning that she drowned), she was innocent. If she rose to the surface, she was guilty – a situation that it would seem difficult for her to win.

Witchcraft is usually seen as an example of the irrationality and cruelty of the Christian Church. It might, therefore, come as a surprise to learn that until the year 1000, witchcraft was considered a superstition by that same Church. The belief, however, continued among uneducated people who relied on charms to protect them from evil, fortune tellers and astrology – all of which were condemned by the Church, although not very strongly.

By the year 1000, though, demons were said to wander the earth tricking human beings into having sexual relations with them. By 1400, ideas had changed. Rather than being innocent victims of the Devil, witches were seen as his willing followers. For instance, in 1324, a rich widow and money-lender called Alice Kyteler from Kilkenny in Ireland, who’d had four husbands and survived them all (becoming very wealthy in the process), was accused of poisoning them and sacrificing animals in Devil worship to make sure that they died. Alice was no fool and fled to England before she could be arrested, but her servant – who confessed under torture to helping Alice – was burnt alive.

By 1500, demons were so common in Christian mythology that their faces and figures can still be seen cut into the stone of church walls from that period. Pope John XXII added witchcraft to the list of crimes against the Church and Pope Innocent VIII named witchcraft as the main reason why some women could not become pregnant.

How did these strange beliefs take so many lives? Why were witches accused and burnt in some cities while, in others, no serious attention was paid to the idea that they were walking the streets causing mischief? Let’s turn now to the most famous witch trial in history that took place in 1692 and ‘93 in Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.A., and see how it began and why it resulted in twenty-five deaths in a community of only a couple of hundred.

The first thing to say was that the world was a very different place in the late seventeenth century in Massachusetts than it is today. To the inhabitants of Salem, Satan was walking the earth looking for followers every single day. Put another way, the supernatural was a very real fear for these people, most of whom had had no other education than in reading, writing, counting and the Bible. Their religion was a very strict one: dancing, music, singing, toys and dolls were all forbidden even for the very young. There were no parties for birthdays, and Christmas, the major festival in the Christian calendar, was spent exactly the same as any other day, with no special food and, very definitely, no presents.

The minister of the local church was an unusually severe man even for this rather colourless environment. Mr. Samuel Parris insisted on public penance for very minor examples of rule breaking, no matter how respectable the member of the community, so that everyone knew everybody else’s business. Needless to say, all this added to social pressure and increased tension between neighbours. To make matters worse, the minister of the neighbouring town, Mr. Cotton Mather, was a local expert on witchcraft and had written several religious pamphlets on the subject.

Although the population had known each other all their lives, this did not, of course, mean that there was perfect harmony between them. In Salem, like anywhere else, there were disputes over ownership of land, for example. Another longstanding issue was that the community had shown reluctance to pay the present minister his agreed salary and there was some bad feeling between him and certain families who spoke out against these payments.

But if the history of bad relations among various members of the community and their dislike of some of their neighbours suggest that the trials to come were not altogether motivated by religious feelings, this did not seem to affect the villagers or the judges. The first suspicion of witchcraft was when Ann Putnam, twelve, Betty Parris, the daughter of the minister and aged only nine, and her cousin, Abigail Williams, who was a couple of years older, started having fits, screaming and throwing things about their home. They complained that the Devil was making them uncomfortable. Of course, in those days, the minister from the neighbouring village – not a doctor – was called in to manage the matter.

In the end, the girls said that they were being visited by several of the women in the neighbourhood in their dreams and named names. Sarah Osborne, an old lady who did not attend church regularly in this very religious community and who was not on friendly terms with the minister; and Sarah Good, who was a homeless beggar, were accused. As the story went round the community, more young girls began experiencing the upsetting symptoms and strengthened the accusations. A girl as young as four gave testimony against Sarah Good, for instance.

What’s more, as other girls became involved in making accusations, so more members of the community were named: Martha and Giles Corey, an elderly couple, for example. Martha had set no store by the girls’ accusations against her neighbours and had made her opinion known, but now found herself implicated. Giles, her husband, was so disgusted by the trials that he felt it beneath him to plead. In a bid to make him say whether he was guilty or not, he was pressed to death by having heavy rocks put on his body. He had been a good neighbour to his accusers and their families all his life, but that did not save him.

Neither did the well-known enmity between the Putnam and the Proctor families cause the community to reflect that the symptoms shown by the girls might be because of something as mundane as settling scores, rather than, say, the more exotic charge of witchcraft against John Proctor and his pregnant wife.

Not everyone was so unfortunate as the Proctor family though. The little girls were asked to stand outside the church doors and to point to members of the community who had the mark of the Devil on them. When one girl indicated the minister, Samuel Parris’, wife, she got a slap round the face and apologised. The sun, she said, had been shining in her eyes and she had not recognised the lady.

As well as the evidence given by the girls, the court conducted touch tests. This meant that when the witch responsible for a girl having fits touched her, the fits would stop. Clearly, if a girl was only pretending to have a fit in order to show that the woman was guilty, this was not likely to help the accused. People suspected of being witches often also confessed under torture.

All in all, twenty-five members of the community were hanged before the Governor stepped in and demanded that others awaiting trial should be found not guilty. Some years later, the Governor announced that some of the women who were hanged were innocent and paid small sums of money to their families. However, it was not until 2001, more than three hundred years after the executions took place that the Governor of Massachusetts apologised for the verdicts and declared all the hanged women and men guiltless.

That was a long time to wait since Ann Putnam, when trying to join a different church in 1706, thirteen years after the executions ended, asked forgiveness for her evidence, which she said was untrue and the Devil’s work. She was allowed to join.