 Reaching Undergraduates in a New
Way
Witchcraft
By Professor Derek Collins
It is not often that Classics
faculty have the chance to integrate the entire armory of the
Humanities and Social Sciences into one course, but that is what
my Classical Civilization/Religion 381 course aims to do. The
course is divided into three parts, which treat respectively
ancient, medieval, and early modern conceptions of magic and
witchcraft. Because the ultimate focus of the class is on witchcraft
proper, it traces the development of the educated and popular
stereotype of the witch, the former of which culminates, for
all intents and purposes, in the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum
in 1487. It is that stereotype, with minor local variations,
that underlies the mass prosecution of women and men in the 16th
and 17th centuries in the period of the major European witch
trials. By the time we reach Salem in the autumn of 1692, the
witch trial with which most students are familiar and the last
major case that we examine, students are prepared to contextualize
it for the minor witch scare that it actually was. But the antecedents
for this and all of the other cases stretch back at least as
far as archaic Greece and the Near East, and this history can
be documented.
By a Classicist’s standards this course
spans an unreasonably long period. But there are several reasons
for this. In the last ten years, some of the best research to
date on ancient magic has appeared. During the same period, however,
equally important research has appeared by medievalists and specialists
in early modern history, and in the case of witchcraft (as opposed
to magic), all three periods have to be linked. This is because
the problem of demons in magic—many of whom we find invoked
repeatedly in the Greek magical papyri—is at the core of
late medieval witchcraft. If demons are operative in magic, and
all witches employ magic, then they cannot do so without the
authorization of the daemonum princeps himself, which in turn
makes witches his vehicle for spreading corruption in the world.
That is the position of Augustine, who read
so closely Plato and the Neoplatonists for his ideas about magic.
His spiritual heir Aquinas, an Aristotelian, came to the same
conclusion that demons were the only way nature could be overcome
by witches, to effect weather magic or spoil crops or injure
the innocent. Ecclesiastical authority offered the theories for
how witchcraft happened, but it was the civil authority, overhauled
by the rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest in the 11th century,
that outlined the specific crimes to be outlawed as well as the
punishment of witches by burning. Witchcraft was a spiritual
crime, but wherever it caused injury, it was charged also as
a criminal offense (except in England where it remained a civil
offense, which is why witches there were hanged). By the late
14th and early 15th centuries, canon lawyers and inquisitors
had begun to put these ideas into practice, and heretics became
confused with witches because witchcraft depended upon demonic
aid, which ipso facto was heresy. It would not be until roughly
1580-1650 that witches were routinely sought out for, at times,
mass persecution by civil and religious authorities, which had
now united to rid society of this menace.
There is something for everyone in this course
because it touches on literature, law, history, anthropology,
sociology, psychology, and economics. Students interested in
antiquity get a full dose of Greek and Roman conceptions of witches
and magic, both literary and historical; students interested
in the middle ages learn how indebted medieval conceptions of
witchcraft were to antiquity, as well as what new advances were
made; while students interested in later periods have a much
larger context, again rooted in antiquity, in which to interpret
later phenomena like the famous French possession cases of the
17th century or the Swedish witchcraft scare at Mora in 1669.
One of the most important critics of the entire witch craze,
in fact, Johannes Weyer, begins his famous De Praestigiis Daemonum
(1564) with nothing other than the critique of magic in the Hippocratic
text On the Sacred Disease. I cannot imagine a more vivid example
than this to convey to students the penetrating and enduring
nature of ancient thought. |