Mapeo del Proceso

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The social characteristics of individuals accused of witchcraft is actually one area in which there is considerable consensus. The traditional image and historical studies agree that the great majority were female, a ‘solid majority’

were over fifty, they ‘were often described as sharp-tongued, bad-tempered, and quarrelsome’, and they tended to be from the lower levels of the settled community. Female healers were particularly vulnerable to accusations ‘of using their magical arts for maleficent purposes’.

However, since this composite image is based on general tendencies, the existence of minorities within each category—men, young people, nice people, well-to-do people, and destitute vagrants—has made generalizations seeking to explain the characteristics of the majority vulnerable to counter-examples drawn from the minority and criticisms that the explanations fail to account sufficiently for the minorities. Thus, the fact that some suspects were not quarrelsome or reputed magicians has been used to call into question explanations involving typical suspects’

personalities or behaviours. In the case of socio-economic status, the existence of minorities above and below the level of most suspects has led to some overly narrow explanatory schemes that obscure more than they illuminate. Investigations into the important minority of child suspects, in contrast, has yielded insights into how children absorbed witchcraft beliefs and used them to express their feelings about their lives and to exert power in the adult world. (p. 63) Male witches have also become the object of specialized study, with some dispute about the extent to which they were caught up because they were related to female suspects (and thus were incidental to a female-centred process); because they engaged in male-oriented occupations that made them suspect (particularly ‘cunning men’, but also blacksmiths, executioners, and vagrants); or because the witch stereotype detached gender roles from biology, essentially feminizing males suspected of witchcraft.

A more pointed debate has taken place recently on the question of age. Earlier discussions of witchcraft that focused on this factor have been challenged not only on the basis of the existence of younger suspects, but also because of the typical lag of years, or even decades, between first suspicions and formal accusations, leading to the contention that age has been strongly overemphasized. One of the historians thus criticized, however, has renewed and expanded her original thesis that old women aroused particular hostility because of their physical signs of infertility, arguing that it was at the time of arrest that the role of ‘witch’ crystallized. Another, who related witch-like behaviours to the climacteric, countered that since many suspects were considerably older than fifty at the time of arrest, the problematic behaviours actually date back to that age, while in other cases, the behaviour patterns in question may have begun earlier in life, but became critically problematic during that transition.

While the association of women and witchcraft has not been challenged in as pointed a way, historical

understanding of its relationship to popular culture has changed significantly in the last generation. The traditional rationalist view was that misogynist demonologists originated the focus on women, and more recently feminists have interpreted the trials as part of the imposition of patriarchy. However, research has shown that the earliest trials involved more men than women, and studies of later trials have shown that many accusations against women came from other women. Furthermore, women had been associated with witchcraft in popular culture since antiquity, and demonologists generally did not express particularly strong levels of misogyny. The gendering of the early modern witch stereotype was not imposed from above, but reflected popular beliefs. The trials did effectively punish women who exhibited aggressiveness and promiscuity that men disapproved of, but so, too, did many other women. The key players were not high officials, but ordinary people, and they brought the charges as a way of dealing with a magical threat that they felt came especially, though not exclusively, from women.

(p. 64)

3.2.3 The Sources of Popular Witch Beliefs and Accusations

Historians have developed four main lines of analysis to explain the sources of popular witch beliefs and accusations: social–psychological, structural–functionalist, cultural–linguistic, and realist.

The social–psychological approach treats witch beliefs as some sort of collective psychopathology or cognitive malfunction. The original ‘rationalist’ tradition considered witch beliefs to be a mixture of the peasantry’s age-old susceptibility to ‘primitive’ magical thinking and the more recent absorption of diabolism into melancholic women’s fantasies. Later interpretations went beyond these crude class and gender prejudices to explain belief in the power of malefic magic as a way of accounting for otherwise inexplicable misfortune, as a form of projection in which people who felt guilty about an offence they had committed projected the guilt onto the person who made them feel that way, or as a result of hostility the ‘witch’ aroused for some less direct but common psychological reason: that old women embodied infertility and decay, or that they evoked people’s childish anger towards their mothers, who

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could never satisfy all of their infantile desires.

Structural–functionalist interpretations generally incorporate one or more of the social psychological explanations above into a theory of social scapegoating in which other, ‘real’ social tensions were sublimated into witchcraft suspicions. Beyond providing satisfying explanations for misfortune and relief from various psychological tensions related to the suspect, accusations in this view both manifested lines of social strain and set boundaries for acceptable behaviours. Originally developed by anthropologists, this approach was introduced by Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas in the 1970s into the historical discussion. It won rapid acceptance partly because it related the witch trials to the larger contemporary movement to study history ‘from below’, and partly because it related the trials to larger socio-economic developments in early modern Europe. Specifically, Macfarlane and Thomas pointed to the breakdown of traditional communal society under the pressure of rising individualistic capitalism as the reason the kinds of situations that typically led to accusations increased. Their archetypal ‘charity-denial model’

involved a villager who accused a poor old woman of witchcraft after he denied her request for charity, she went away muttering angrily, and shortly thereafter some misfortune befell his household. While the historians

recognized that many other conflicts led to accusations, their approach highlighted accusations’ roots in the dynamics of local communities, and explained both the rise of prosecutions and their decline as functions of economic developments that first sundered communities and then alleviated distress through innovations like poor relief and insurance. This approach was weakened by Macfarlane’s own conclusion in a later work—that English individualism developed long before the early modern period—undercutting both the guilt-reversal mechanism posited to be the psychological process (p. 65) behind accusations, and the link between village tensions and sweeping historical change. Nevertheless, the ‘charity-denial’ scenario remains a powerful exemplar of the circumstances in which witchcraft accusations might arise.

Cultural–linguistic explanations seek to account for witch beliefs in terms of their place in the total matrix of beliefs that made up the culture and the structural imperatives of language and narrative that shape thought. While this approach is rooted in the intellectual history of the demonology, it has been applied to popular culture as well. It is characterized by two radically different methodologies from previous approaches. First, it adopts anthropology’s stance of cultural relativism, in this case a neutrality about the objective reality not only of magical powers (which structural–functionalists and post-rationalist social–psychological interpreters also do), but also of the behaviour and practices ascribed to witches. It neither affirms nor denies if anyone actually did, or experienced, the things contained in the beliefs, but instead asserts that the only historical ‘reality’ that can be legitimately investigated is the beliefs themselves. Second, since there is no ‘reality’ beyond the historical record to be discerned or explained, this approach concentrates on ‘exploring patterns of meaning rather than causal relationships’ by deconstructing not only the documents as texts, but also the beliefs and actions they describe ‘as expressions of beliefs, values, and fantasies…ideological and cultural’ resources, and symbols and metaphors. Thus, for example, witch cases have been used to analyse ‘the workings of sex, gender, and honour in the daily

experiences of women’. To the extent that explanations are advanced, they are made in terms of the workings of language, in particular narrative, so that trial records are examined not as windows into some separate reality, but as the place where reality was constructed, with the governing principal the ‘story-types…formally required for judicial procedures…to work’. Witchcraft was a discourse, in other words, a way of talking about, and thus organizing, relationships and experiences. ‘The truth about witchcraft—its reality,’ according to Stuart Clark, the most notable advocate of this approach, ‘was created rather than reflected by the judicial process’, demonological treatises, legal tracts, pamphlet reports, sermons, gossip and rumour, and even interior mentation. By this logic, the source of witch beliefs—the popular beliefs during the early modern period as well as the learned demonology—

was simply the contingent development of European culture over the centuries, the shifting pattern of intertextual references that gave and revised their meanings, while the source of specific accusations was their power to provide an acceptable narrative structure for important issues in people’s lives.

The fourth, ‘realist’ approach starts from historians’ traditional assumption that there was an objective reality in the past, independent of what was said and written (p. 66) about it, that can be partially reconstructed from the record; this view sees determining the extent to which the beliefs and accusations in the historical record reflected things people actually did and experienced as critical to a full understanding of early modern witchcraft. This approach includes what have traditionally been called romantic interpretations, from the nineteenth-century folkloric ones through to Murray’s (a tradition that can be termed ‘romantic realism’), more recent studies that have examined archival evidence of actual practices in popular culture that suggest the continuance of pre-Christian

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shamanistic traditions connected to the idea of the sabbath (‘cultural realism’), and, most recently, attempts to assess the reality of both malefic and diabolic elements in light of what has been termed the ‘cognitive revolution’

in the human sciences (‘cognitive realism’). The various strands of this tradition point to the evidence that a variety of beliefs about witchcraft referenced actual practices, behaviours, and experiences. First of all, the undisputed activities of beneficent magical practitioners were explicitly diabolized and prosecuted, sometimes as outright witchcraft and more often as lesser offences that nonetheless served the devil’s purpose by drawing people into magic. Second, there is ample evidence that some people did employ magic rituals and substances in order to inflict harm on their personal enemies, while others habitually manifested spontaneous aggressive

behaviours associated with witchcraft in interpersonal confrontations. Third, there is also substantial evidence that some people experienced contact with spirits as disembodied voices or fully formed, three-dimensional figures, which they understood to be angels, traditional non-Christian spirits like fairies or familiars, or the devil himself.

Similarly, some people experienced magical flight while in trance states, in which they flew to gatherings with other magical people and spirits, and made merry or did battle.

The idea that these latter spiritual experiences represent survivals of pre-Christian shamanism is currently in dispute. Advocates point to: 1) shamanic cultures on the northern and eastern edges of the European cultural area, 2) clearly shamanic practitioners in parts of Eastern Europe, 3) experiences reminiscent of shamanism in other parts of Europe, and 4) shamanic elements in folklore scattered throughout the region. In response, critics point out the thinness of the evidence in the last case, the substantial differences from shamanism in the third, the fragmentary correspondences in the second, and the location of the practitioners mentioned in the first point outside the European cultural zone. A way out of this impasse is suggested by cognitive realism, which defines shamanism not in anthropological but in neurocognitive terms: as the exploitation of human neurobiological potentials rather than a cultural tradition. In this view, experiences of contact with spirits and magical flight are perceptual manifestations of altered cognitive processing that can happen spontaneously, or can be deliberately induced. Thus, manipulating the nervous system and altering consciousness (p. 67) enables access to

knowledge and abilities that are not available in normal waking consciousness. And since a substantial proportion of magic involves activities that manipulate the practitioner’s own or other people’s nervous systems to help or to harm via the connections between emotional states, bodily functions, and interpersonal relations, this definition of shamanism suggests a new way of understanding magic and witchcraft as well.

The realist interpretation does not suggest that the demonology’s diabolic conspiracy existed or that the victims of the witch-hunts deserved their fate. What it does suggest is that while witch-hunts may best be understood in terms of some socio-cultural-psychological pathology, witch beliefs can only be fully understood in light of their reference to reality.