Witches and Witch Hunts Through the Ages

By Phil Carradice

Witchcraft! Just the mention of the name is enough to cause fear, even terror, in the minds and hearts of many people. But that is not the full story. Yes, there have always been proponents of the 'dark arts,' witches and warlocks willing to use their powers for evil, but the wise men and women of the ancient and medieval world - men and women eager to use their spells and potions for good - have often been overlooked.

This book looks at witchcraft from the early days, tracing its development as a pseudo-religious cult, the good and the bad, from the wild plains of Babylon to the present day. It highlights witch scares and individuals, particularly the witch hunts of the medieval period when 100,000 women were accused of witchcraft and nearly 80,000 executed. It examines the concept of witch hunting, detailing the activities of men like Matthew Hopkins, the famous Witchfinder General.

The book does not just focus on medieval and ancient witches, it takes in modern witch hunting - with people like Senator Joe McCarthy during his Communist witch hunts of the 1950s - and the continued modern persecution of women and men accused of witchcraft in African, Indian and Caribbean states.

This is a detailed account of witches and witchcraft, in many ways a tribute to the thousands of men and women accused and executed without full evidence or proof of evil doing. It is a broad historical sweep that includes fictional characters like Morgan le Fey and Merlin, the magician of King Arthur's court. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in the social and political history of the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: May 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399071826

Phil Carradice

Phil Carradice is a well-known poet, story teller, and historian with over 60 books to his credit. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and TV, presents the BBC Wales History program The Past Master and is widely regarded as one of the finest creative writing tutors in Wales.

Book preview

Chapter One

The Terror

If there is one word that sums up the general view of witchcraft and our relationship with the perpetrators of that art, it has to be terror.

The emotion goes beyond our understanding, beyond our acceptance of the fact that there are two poles, two elements to the business of witchcraft. We tend to forget that there are good and bad versions of the art. Perhaps inevitably, for the majority of people, it is bad which rules. Terror reigns supreme, as it has done for thousands of years.

That is an easy statement to make, one that sidesteps the causes of the anxiety and the fear. To understand that we need to look at ourselves and examine our motives in any form of interaction, real or imaginary, and see those motives as part and parcel of the whole problem.

Perhaps Shakespeare had it best when he put words of wisdom into the mouth of Cassius, co-conspirator in the assassination of Julius Caesar – ‘The fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.’¹

And yet, in order to fully appreciate the terror, we also need to examine the historical relationship between humans and witches. It is not always a comfortable investigation.

For those who believe in it, witchcraft is real. It is alive and breathing, perhaps an embodiment of evil, perhaps a force for good. Even those who are non-believers, individuals who scoff, sneer and deride, may well subscribe, in their more generous moments, to the idea of ‘Well, I suppose there might be something in it.’ They might even acknowledge a frisson of tension that appears at certain times of the day or night and on certain unexpected occasions.

The problem is that witchcraft is a nebulous concept, with little concrete proof of its existence, one way or the other. You either believe or you don’t! That, of course, makes it something that is both fascinating and captivating on whichever side of the fence you sit.

Witchcraft has undoubtedly played a significant part in mankind’s history. Since human beings took their first steps across the plains and deserts of this planet, it has been the subject of countless legends and stories. The activities of those immersed in black magic, as it has usually been labelled, along with their counterparts for good, the wise women and the cunning folk with their white or harmless magic, have long enthralled writers, historians and the general public.

The lives and deaths of witches and of followers of the occult, along with the threats and promises they held, have been pictured on ancient paintings in caves across the world. Notable examples such as the wall paintings of Lascaux in southern France, which date to 15,000 BCE, maybe even earlier, are now regarded as wonders of the Ancient World.

Witch! It is doubtful if the name or term was applied to all of the demonic shapes, both good and evil, either on the famous wall paintings or in the stories which litter our later history. And yet the intent and practices of the creatures portrayed in the paintings certainly were. Their stories have appeared on pyramid and temple walls along the Nile and on similar structures in the Mexican jungles. Examples have been discovered in many ancient burial chambers across Europe.

The haunting and terrifying escapades of witches and witch hunters have long been commemorated through the telling of fireside tales. The stories, best and most effective when related on dark winter nights, are never less than chilling, no matter how many times they are told.

Perhaps the ghost or witch tale has, since the eruption of industrial development at the start of the nineteenth century, ceased to be quite as common or less essential than it was in the days of rural living. As men, women and children migrated from the countryside and squeezed into unhygienic tenements and houses in the industrial slums of Birmingham or Merthyr Tydfil, Rotterdam or Hamburg, different forms of entertainment took hold.

As a consequence, the ghost and witch tales that helped keep the legends of witchcraft alive have now been relegated to distant memory. They hung on for some time but it was, eventually, a losing battle, one that was doomed to failure.

Apart from the small band of storytellers who perform at arts festivals and the like, witch and ghost tales are now no longer regarded as an essential part of social care, entertainment or leisure. For most people, they have devolved into what many regard as no more than a disappearing but interesting element of folklore. The TV set and computer terminal have become more interesting.

However, that is not the case everywhere. In several cultures and communities, fireside tales of witchery and black magic continue to exist and flourish. In Eastern Europe and in distant parts of India and Africa where central control is weak and nights are long, they remain a living art form that has been passed down from family member to family member.

The Russian tales about Baba Yaga, said to eat children as she flies around the universe, is one. Baba flies, not on a broomstick but sitting in a huge mortar, using her pestle like as rudder. Baba Yaga is just one example of stories that are told time and time again and never seem to lose their appeal.

In this modern age of immediate gratification, Hollywood movies, television programmes and books have all attempted, with greater and lesser degrees of success, to identify and then portray the motivations and activities of witches and wizards. Whether they are serious and spine chilling, funny or satirical, the public has eagerly seized on the offerings from film makers.

Despite the popularity of lightweight or humorous television programmes like The Worst Witch, Sabrina: The Teenage Witch and Bewitched, it is clear, from group and from individual responses to specific films or books, that it is the negative aspects of witchcraft which appear to have made the greatest or most significant impact with the public.

People love to be scared and the film makers have duly obliged. This perpetual need to be frightened encompasses all sections of society and as long as safety and rescue arrive with the end of the film, horror movies involving witches and demonic curses remain a profitable business.

From multi-million selling books of fiction like Salem’s Lot to movies such as The Omen and even light pieces like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the impact of such offerings on Twentieth Century culture has been immense.

The creation of movies, silent at first but soon evolving into what were euphemistically called talkies, provided the public with the first examples of instant gratification. With the coming of movies, you no longer needed to wade through pages of type-script, you could simply sit there in a darkened cinema and watch the stories unfold before your eyes.

Almost as soon as they first appeared, the realism of the flickering image presented to the audience on the screen far outweighed mere actors playing their parts on stage or the written words of novelists like Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Machen. This was immediate, this could almost be real.

Instant reality was the name of the game. It has continued so that, now, as far as writers and film makers are concerned fear has become an industry on its own. If you say the word ‘witch’, then nine times out of ten you are also saying ‘profit’.

Comedy or drama, epic adventure or tongue in cheek satire, witchcraft has provided a ready source of material for all manner of writers. It is something to which most creative artists will admit, turning the material to their own needs and styles:

It was warm and, to begin with, comforting. After the hosing, the water and the cold, she welcomed its embrace.

It was only as the flames began to lick at the hem of her dress and the agony started to scorch and seer at her legs, that she realised what it meant.

Desperate now, she closed her eyes and screamed. And the crowd began to chant, low and sibilant at first but slowly gaining in strength and power – ‘Witch, witch, witch!’²

Witch! A simple word but one with the power to freeze the listener, to send a tremor of fear down the spine of even the most sceptical of individuals.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of years after they were first used, the simple terms witch and witchcraft still resonate. Even now the phrases and all they suggest retain the power to terrify the perceptive listener or reader. It is a fear that goes deep into the human psyche.

Forget the dictionary definitions of witches and witchcraft; ignore the innate concept of white and black magic, for the moment at least; put aside the image of the green-skinned, broom-flying comedic character from The Wizard of Oz. Perhaps more than anything, shelve the countless children’s cartoons that probably dominated your youth. These are not the things of menace. We laugh at them, even admit to enjoying them, but they do not scare us and rarely tap into the dark well of terror that lies waiting for so many of us.

When we whisper the word witch, perhaps to ourselves, perhaps under our breath and most probably in the dead of night when all is silent and still, then it is the distant and almost tangible links with the forces of darkness, forces which we do not know and cannot understand, that still manage to haunt so many of us. Witch! Somehow the very word retains its connotation with the most basic and elemental piece of our nature as human beings.

The word has many different interpretations. That is one more reason for the fear that the name inspires. Is it a good thing or a bad one, does the name inspire love or hate? Different responses, perhaps, from different people!

Witch can mean simply a general description of someone who uses magic or ritual processes for a particular or set purpose. But it can also relate to curses and to magic that is set with the deliberate intention of hurting others. A feminist interpretation might say that a witch is merely a woman of independent spirit who is hunted and persecuted by men of power. And there are those who believe that witchcraft is very far from harmful and nothing more than one of the few surviving remnants of pagan religion.³

* * *

There is a word, although it is rarely used, for the fear or terror caused by the very thought of witches and witchcraft. That word is wiccaphobia.

The term has three distinct sources. In part it derives from the Old English word wicca, meaning a male witch; it also comes partly from another Old English word wicee (a female witch); and, lastly, from the Greek word Phobos. This last one gets to the heart of the matter. It means, quite simply, a deep aversion or fear and is a term that we have procured and brought into the English language as phobia. We use it glibly, perhaps too glibly.⁴

Witch is a relatively modern description, certainly when put alongside the lengthy history of witchcraft, and was probably not in common use until eight hundred or so years before the birth of Christ. The first time the word appears in printed form is in the Old Testament, in The Book of Samuel when King Saul makes a journey to consult the Witch of Endor.

Contact with witches was prohibited in Jewish and Hebrew culture but Saul is adamant in his decision to use spectral powers. The Witch of Endor duly summons the spectre of the dead prophet Samuel in order to answer the King’s questions about the war he is waging. Saul is cursed for his use of spells and his belief in witchcraft and is killed in battle the day after his visit.

The Book of Samuel is believed to have been first written in 931 BCE and adapted or improved in the years immediately following. This dates the term ‘witch’ to some form of usage between five to eight hundred years before the birth, death and resurrection of Christ. According to the New Testament, Jesus, as an adult, went on to challenge witchcraft in all its many guises. The Hebrew Bible, The Tanakh, makes many references to witches while in the Old Testament the patriarch Moses declares that:

There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or daughter to pass through fire or that useth divination … or an enhancer or a witch or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard or a necromancer.⁵

By the time of Medieval Europe, the name was in common use and witch hunting was about to become something that infected nearly every country on the continent. Yet long before that point, witches were recognised as demons or spirits, often of the evil variety. While the fear they created was both real and widespread, the word witch, however you intended it, was simply a word or a title that was not in common usage.

The root of the anxiety or phobia – and it is a phobia, no matter how strongly or lightly we feel or suffer from it – lies in anxiety about the unknown. If we could see witchcraft, pinpoint it as a tangible operation rather than the looming spectral threat it now holds, perhaps the whole concept might be better understood. Then the fear might just gather and disappear.

However, when the mind cannot understand what it is experiencing, whatever emotions are conjured up, it turns quickly to soul-tearing anxiety and, ultimately, to terror. Add in a large dose of human prejudice, people’s selfish expectation of personal gain, along with cultural or social anxiety – and there you have the root causes of humanity’s fear of witches. Fear of the unknown, of what cannot be seen or understood, will always be more dangerous than any looming physical force, one of the reasons that fear of the dark, closely connected to fear of witches, remains powerful.

Understanding, or lack of understanding, was central to the daily life of ancient people. Mystery was something that appalled the ancients, terrified them, and set off all manner of unproven concepts. Limited as it might be, imagination literally ran riot.

As BCE changed to CE, the only escape from such trauma came in the shape of the newly established Christian Church. But when even that succour depended on ritual and superstition for its power, ordinary people, uneducated and mostly unable to read and write, were left holding a real cleft stick.

Incense and burning candles, Latin chants that no one could understand? The message from the Mass told everyone that the bread and wine used in the service had been transformed into the body and blood of Christ, not that it represented them but that an actual transformation had taken place. For people who feared ghosts, demons and witches and saw them as real manifestations, that was all powerful stuff. It was, effectively, magic.

In a world that was afflicted and, arguably, even controlled by the natural elements, it was important to find a cause for the wide range of disasters which regularly struck at the villages and settlements of these early people. Amongst other visitations, there were storms, droughts, earthquakes, even volcanic eruptions, all of which were capable of destroying years of work in the blink of an eye. Along the sea coasts of ancient civilisations, tsunamis and typhoons were a regular hazard. At sea, the strange phenomena of rogue waves, rising out of nowhere and overwhelming flimsy coracles and fishing craft in moments, were a terrifying threat.

Ancient humans could hardly be expected to understand the nature of such disasters and so they were forced to look beyond the events themselves for the causes. The answer was simple. The fault, contrary to Cassius’s words, did not lie in the people themselves but in the stars, in sorcery and in the powers of evil. In particular it rested with the immediate messengers of evil, the witches. Such an explanation did not cure the problem. Indeed, a lack of ability to wipe out witches probably caused more fear and anguish than the disasters they were supposed to have caused in the first place. But it was an answer of sorts.

Perhaps Arthur Miller caught the emotion most succinctly in his play The Crucible which centres, in part at least, on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

During the first series of arrests which sweep through the Puritan village of Salem in Massachusetts, John Proctor argues that finding evidence of witchcraft is about as likely as coming across a five-legged dragon which might or might not be hiding in his house. He is howled down and met by the dismissive comments of his fellow citizens. Such a possibility, the Reverend Samuel Parris tells Judge Danforth, the chief investigator, lies at the centre of the village’s problems:

We are here, Your Honour, precisely to discover what no one has ever seen.⁶

The point will not be lost upon a perceptive audience. If a judge or magistrate cannot see or prove an allegation or a belief then he has to rely on the honesty and the veracity of the witness or dismiss the case altogether. Faced by the possibility of real evil existing and prowling across the world, very few judges were willing to dismiss anything.

Although he does not know it, when confronted by the implacable accusations of the Salem ‘witches’, John Proctor is already condemned, a dead man walking. Once Judge Danforth has decreed the validity and acceptance of spectral evidence, Proctor and the other victims have simply no way of proving the existence of something as intangible as the gathering of the forces of evil. The manifestation of black magic in the words and actions of teenage and pre-pubescent girls is simply too much to ignore.

As far as the prosecution of those accused of demonic arts was concerned, the allowing of spectral evidence to support accusations of witchcraft was essential, not just in fiction but also in reality. Yet such evidence remained something that could be neither proved nor unproved and judges were confronted with a major dilemma – approve the use of spectral evidence or face the possibility of destroying faith. In almost any primitive or newly established society, there was always the prospect of wiping out the established order and overseeing the distinct probability of undermining still fragile and developing, embryonic cultures.

The problems which face John Proctor and the whole community of Salem are difficult, arguably even impossible, to fight. That is exactly the same as the problems, the threats and accusations that were later to prove so damaging for those individuals facing the anti-communist wrath of Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.

The infamous anti-communist hearings and witch hunts, as they were labelled, ran from 1950 to 1954. It was a terrifying time for anyone in the USA who held or had held in the past left-wing beliefs. ‘Are you or were you at any time in the past a member of the communist party?’ was a phrase that came to haunt many an innocent man and woman. Worse was still to come when those called to give evidence were required to name names, to tell the senators who else had been members of the communist party. Like John Proctor, who was asked to name people he had seen with the Devil, most refused but it did not stop the terror. The questions continued to be asked.

The Senate hearings had a distinct similarity to the historic witch trials across America and Europe while protest marches against communists paraded through New York and other cities under banner slogans like ‘A communist is just a Russian spy’. Nobody was safe, particularly if they had once had contact with the communist party.

McCarthy’s witch hunt was something The Crucible was always meant to mirror. The play is really an allegory but, like all good literature it is also a metaphor for evil which can be read on various levels. And the story of Proctor and the residents of Salem, at the mercy of Abigail Williams and her cohort of supporters, is compelling. It would have been too easy, too dramatic, to use the word coven when describing Abigail’s posse of accusing avengers but it can be argued that is exactly what she and the other girls actually were, a coven of destructive witches.

For those who are viewing the play for the first time, what is unravelling before your eyes, on stage and on film, is a horror story come alive. In real life, as in the fictional world of Arthur Miller, there was a lack of hard evidence in so many of the witch trials and persecutions that haunted the world from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Arguably, that was also the case many hundreds of years before.

Judges, desperate for convictions, were forced to fall back on the power of belief rather than actual evidence. It resulted, in the three hundred years that cover the Middle Ages or late Medieval Period as it is usually known, in more than 100,000 women from every country in Europe being hauled before the courts and charged with witchcraft. After trial and public torture, over half of them were executed.

Long before the Medieval Period of history, witch hunts across the ancient world had already spread terror on a truly massive scale:

They (the Romans) were large-scale witch hunters, conducting searches for practitioners of destructive magic … A single wave of these hunts in the 180s CBC claimed 3000 victims.⁷

As Miller’s play unfolds, it is not just the fear of what a witch might do or the power that she holds over the residents of Salem. There is more, much more. The word ‘she’ is deliberately used here. In The Crucible, just as it was in real life, most of the accused were, inevitably, a she rather than a he.

The real terror comes in the shape of the gathering and growing party of hunters and persecutors of witches. The terror of men and women who had been neighbours, friends, even relatives of the accused lingers long after the play has been viewed or the book read.

Witch hunts! We have seen them portrayed many times on our television and film screens. We have read about them in books and plays. Arguably, in the shape of Senator McCarthy and his minions, we have even seen them in action. Modern day witch hunts, while being less blood thirsty, less specific but still directed at the perceived forces of evil or simply at opposition to the general view, remain very real and just as damaging as their medieval counterparts.

For most of us, however, it is the horrific depiction of the witch hunts in plays and films like The Crucible or Witch Finder General that remain lodged in our memories. Witch hunts are invariably three-dimensional examples of terror and fear, creating feelings which lift us out of our cinema seats or arm chairs and deposit us, no matter how logical and rational we think ourselves, into the heart of a deadly medieval or ancient crowd on the edge of riot.

Although we accept, without thinking, the film maker’s version of hunting for witches and the dispensing of ‘justice’ as pieces of fiction, their offerings