Wicca: A comprehensive guide to the Old Religion in the modern world. Vivianne Crowley

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      The European Pagan religions already condemned the practice of magic for evil social intent; but beneficial magic was widely accepted. Christianity condemned all magic – spells, incantations, herbalism, divination, weather lore – the whole gamut of activities by which human beings sought to control their environment. The Christian attitude was that these activities were not the prerogative of ordinary men and women, but the prerogative of the Church with its monopoly on the line to God.

      Christianity was a missionary religion and over a period of a thousand years it became the dominant religion of Europe. Far to the north-east in the Baltic States, Paganism remained the predominant religion, but various political manoeuvres meant that by the fifteenth century, the last Pagan country in Europe, Lithuania, had succumbed to Christianity. The conversion of kings and nobles to the new faith did not, however, mean an instant conversion of their peoples. Enforcement of Christianity was difficult and frequently followed the pattern of its younger brother in masculine monotheism, Islam, of conversion by the sword. The Scandinavian king St Olaf made his subjects choose between baptism or death. Such forced allegiance can have been nothing but nominal. In Germany, the Emperor Charlemagne conducted mass baptisms of Saxons by driving them at sword point through rivers blessed further upstream by his bishops. Others such as Redwald, King of the East Saxons, whilst adhering to Christianity, had not quite grasped the principles of monotheism. Redwald kept two altars, one for the new God and one for the Gods of his fathers. Many felt that in such tricky matters as Gods, it was best to play safe.

      What the Church later lumped together as Witchcraft had two elements – Pagan worship and magic. Pagan worship included man-worshipping (i.e. invoking the Gods into a priest or priestess) and the worship of the Divine in Nature, especially in evocative objects such as wells, trees and standing stones. Magic involved spell-making, divination, and healing. The concept of there being two types of religion: intellectual, solar-oriented, Apollonian religion which appeals to the conscious mind, and lunar, intuitive, ecstatic Dionysian religion which appeals to the unconscious, is important for understanding why Paganism continued to appeal. While Christianity could accommodate the Apollonian side of religion, a religion which emphasized the control of the unconscious by the conscious mind and the suppression of sexuality could not accommodate the joy to be gained through the celebration of Dionysian-type rites.

      In Britain, the old Pagan ways died hard. Following the conversion of the Saxon kings, bishops produced a steady flow of books of penances condemning those who practised Paganism. In the middle of the eighth century, Archbishop Ecgbert of York⁵ wrote condemning making offerings to devils, i.e. the Old Gods; Witchcraft; divination; swearing vows at wells, trees and stones; and gathering herbs using non-Christian incantations. The penances imposed for disobeying were not very severe and do not seem to have discouraged the errant Pagans. Little had changed by the eleventh century when King Canute issued laws against Heathenism or Paganism.

       We earnestly forbid every Heathenism: Heathenism is, that men worship idols; that is, that they worship Heathen Gods, and the Sun or the Moon, fire or rivers, water-wells or stones, or forest trees of any kind; or love Witchcraft.⁶

      In other parts of Europe, it was the Goddess who proved hard to suppress. To satisfy those who leaned towards the female aspect of the Divine, in the fifth century the Christian Church authorized the veneration of the Virgin Mary. She was neither Goddess nor entirely human, but something in between, the Panagia Theotokus or Mother of God. This did not satisfy those of a more Pagan outlook. Bishops complained that the Goddess continued to be worshipped under the names of Diana and Herodias. In the tenth century the Bishop of Verona in Italy complained that many people were claiming Herodias as their Queen or Goddess and declaring that a third of the world worshipped her.⁷

       Church and Devil

      Initially, the penalties for Witchcraft were relatively mild. The picture began to change in the thirteenth century when the Church formally declared Witchcraft to be a heresy. As all good Christians knew, the heretics were worshippers of the Devil. All the religious and magical practices on which the Catholic Church did not bestow its blessings – other Christian sects, Paganism and magic – were now lumped together. Whatever their aims and virtues, they were declared to be Devil worship. The Christian Church was Devil-obsessed. Despite some setbacks, the first 1,000 years of the Church’s history had been a story of success and increasing power. Now, with the rise of Islam in the East and growing intellectual scepticism in the West, the Christian Church was losing its grip. If the Church’s power was being challenged, there could only be one challenger, for the Church was the Church of God.

      All rural communities had their wise women and cunning men who would act as doctors and midwives, who would cure a sick cow, solve the love problems of young men and women, advise those in distress and perform weather magic. Until officialdom espoused the cause of Witch-hunting, any actions against Witches tended to be local activities of the spontaneous, lynch-mob sort which occur when times are hard or when things go wrong in people’s lives and they want someone to blame. Psychologists talk about locus of control. Locus is Latin for place. People with an external locus of control will tend to attribute the causes of their good and bad fortune to people or things outside themselves. Those with an internal locus of control tend to think that they make their own destiny. If things go wrong, it is their own fault and if things go well, it is because they have talent or have worked hard.

      Simple peoples tend to have an external locus of control. They ascribe the good and bad things that happen to them, not to their own actions, but to the actions of outside forces – spirits, angels, saints, Gods, demons, ghosts. Medieval Christians tended to ascribe good events in their lives to the work of God and bad events to the work of the Devil. The Devil was believed to need human servants to effect his unscrupulous desires. When something went wrong in people’s life, they looked for someone who could be acting as the Devil’s agent – a practitioner of maleficium, a Witch.

      In the main, the accusations made against Witches are those which express the fears of a largely agricultural society – blighting crops; causing animals to die or miscarry; causing illness, miscarriage and death in human beings; and raising storms. These are the negative uses of the powers of the Witch that on the other hand could be used beneficially to produce good harvests, cure sick animals and people, increase fertility of animals and humans, and produce rain in drought. From the fifteenth century on, however, there were also political accusations. Witches were accused of undermining Church and state.

      Despite fierce attempts to persecute those Christians whose views did not accord with Catholicism, the heretical sects which later transmuted into the Protestant movement flourished and grew strong. Nowhere was Protestantism stronger than in Germany. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther, an ex-monk, nailed to his church door a list of accusations against the corruption of a Church which took money from people to buy time off from Hell in a form of after-death insurance. It was in strife-ridden Germany that the evil madness of the Witch-hunts began. In 1484, eight years before Christopher Columbus sailed westward to find America, Pope Innocent III issued a Papal Bull⁸ denouncing Witchcraft and declaring that Witches were blighting fertility by associating with demons. The Bull authorised the Dominican priests Heinrich Kramer and James Sprengler to prosecute Witches throughout Northern Germany. This was followed in 1486 by the publication by Kramer and Sprengler of what became the bible of the inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witchcraft. This was an evil-minded diatribe against women, who were seen as more likely to be Witches, and was full of the sadistic pornographic fantasies of two celibates. It ends with recommendations on how to conduct judicial proceedings against Witches which are nothing less than an official blueprint for torture and murder. These were the opening moves which led to the insanity of the persecutions which swept Europe and later America. The Malleus Maleficarum was translated from Latin into a number of European languages and was an immediate best-seller across Europe. There were nine reprints before 1500, a further five by 1520, and a further 16 editions by 1669.

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