The Devil's Art

Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany

Jason P. Coy

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944081
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In early modern Germany, soothsayers known as wise women and men roamed the countryside. Fixtures of village life, they identified thieves and witches, read palms, and cast horoscopes. German villagers regularly consulted these fortune-tellers and practiced divination in their everyday lives. Jason Phillip Coy brings their enchanted world to life by examining theological discourse alongside archival records of prosecution for popular divination in Thuringia, a diverse region in central Germany divided into a patchwork of princely territories, imperial cities, small towns, and rural villages. Popular divination faced centuries of elite condemnation, as the Lutheran clergy attempted to suppress these practices in the wake of the Reformation and learned elites sought to eradicate them during the Enlightenment. As Coy finds, both of these reform efforts failed, and divination remained a prominent feature of rural life in Thuringia until well into the nineteenth century.

The century after 1550 saw intense confessional conflict accompanied by widespread censure and disciplinary measures, with prominent Lutheran theologians and demonologists preaching that divination was a demonic threat to the Christian community and that soothsayers deserved the death penalty. Rulers, however, refused to treat divination as a capital crime, and the populace continued to embrace it alongside official Christianity in troubled times. The Devil's Art highlights the limits of Reformation-era disciplinary efforts and demonstrates the extent to which reformers' efforts to inculcate new cultural norms relied upon the support of secular authorities and the acquiescence of parishioners. Negotiation, accommodation, and local resistance blunted official reform efforts and ensured that occult activities persisted and even flourished in Germany into the modern era, surviving Reformation-era preaching and Enlightenment-era ridicule alike.

Studies in Early Modern German History

1

“Idolatry and Reprobate Infidelity”

Divination before the Reformation

The Hammer of Witches (1487)

The infamous Malleus maleficarum, written by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in 1487, helped fuel the earliest mass witch-hunts in Europe.1 In this notorious witch-hunters’ manual, Kramer instructed inquisitors on the dire threat posed by witches and how to use torture to elicit the confessions necessary to send them to the stake.2 Kramer’s lurid descriptions of the diabolical crimes of witches, and his rampant misogyny, are notorious. Less well known are the condemnations of divination that he included in his treatise.

In the Malleus, Kramer was unequivocal in his condemnation of divination and linked it explicitly with diabolism. Listing prominent forms of divination, he asserted that most were accomplished “through the explicit invocation of demons.”3 Well versed in scholastic philosophy, he sought to convince his readers of the evil inherent in divination by citing a wide array of biblical, classical, and medieval sources. Collecting centuries of elite condemnation of the occult practice, he reinforced the age-old link between divination and the demonic that drove Christian moralists’ efforts to suppress soothsaying.4

Kramer focused his ire at popular forms of divination, warning his readers that anyone who so much as conferred with a soothsayer would suffer eternal damnation. Invoking Augustine, he cautioned against consulting these ubiquitous magical practitioners, common in every medieval town and village: “None of you should seek the advice of diviners or fortune-tellers or consult them about any matter or situation or illness, because whoever does this evil act will immediately lose the sacrament of baptism and be rendered a sacrilegious pagan. Unless repentance comes to his aid, he will immediately be lost for eternity.”5 Thus, he asserted that those who practice divination or heed its advice were heathens who stood apart from the Christian community. As apostates, they faced eternal damnation. An eager inquisitor, Kramer also ominously warned that only the Church could bring these sinners back to the fold—through correction.

Heinrich Kramer was not alone in condemning popular forms of divination or associating them with the devil. Fortune-telling, condemned by ancient Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian moralists, had a sinister reputation by the late Middle Ages. Medieval theologians and demonologists, concerned with the spread of heresy and witchcraft in their dioceses, attacked divination in strident terms. While some medieval theologians expressed doubts about the reality of soothsaying and sorcery, portraying these magical activities as demonic illusions, religious authorities were united in accentuating their diabolical origins. Nonetheless, despite strict legal prohibition and intense clerical censure, divination was ubiquitous in medieval society.

The efforts of learned demonologists and god-fearing magistrates to eradicate such a popular medieval practice were based upon centuries of Christian condemnation. From its earliest origins, Christianity had formed its identity in part through its opposition to forms of magic prevalent among ancient polytheists. Divination figured prominently in the ancient magical practices of the Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and early Christians helped define their new faith by eschewing these rites. Much of the abhorrence that the Church Fathers felt for the magical practices of their polytheistic neighbors stemmed from traditional Judaic prohibitions against certain forms of magic expressed in the Hebrew Bible.6

By the time of the Malleus, medieval theologians and demonologists had buttressed their condemnations of popular forms of divination by citing a range of authoritative sources. These sources not only included biblical prohibitions of soothsaying, but also the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authorities, early Christian theologians, and medieval scholastic philosophers. In Kramer’s day, the Church prohibited divination and sought to suppress soothsaying among the laity through preaching, penitentials, and punishment. This centuries-old campaign to eradicate divination set the stage for Reformation-era efforts to suppress these popular occult practices.

The Malleus maleficarum, appearing a generation before the Reformation, distilled centuries of elite condemnations of divination. These traditional critiques of soothsaying deeply influenced Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers, and exploring these intellectual foundations helps shed light on the impetus behind Reformation-era efforts to prohibit these magical practices. The early Christian and medieval sources Kramer cited in his infamous work associated divination with diabolism, and Lutheran reformers followed suit. The ancient moralists Kramer quoted established a sharp distinction between learned, official, public forms of divination, which they sanctioned, and vernacular, profane, private forms, which they censured and sought to suppress. Lutheran reformers would adopt this attitude as well. As this chapter will show, on the eve of the Reformation the notion that divination was an inherently demonic activity was well established, as was the articulation of a fundamental division between licit kinds of elite divination and illicit popular forms. These ideas would shape efforts to root out soothsaying throughout the Reformation era.

Divination and the Ancients

The Hebrew scriptures are replete with explicit condemnations of divination, rooted in the Hebrews’ experience of exile and the gradual development of monotheism, which prompted them to take a harsher stance against magical practices like divination than their polytheistic neighbors. For the Hebrews, polytheistic religious rites, which often centered on the use of divination to ascertain the will of the gods, were an evil magic that God’s chosen people must eschew.7

The Hebrews sought to preserve their distinctive religious culture by rejecting the religious rites and magical practices of the polytheistic peoples they encountered in Canaan. Thus, the Hebrew Bible demonstrates this revulsion toward the magical and divinatory rites of the Canaanites. For example, in Deuteronomy, God commands the Hebrews to avoid imitating the “abominations” of the Canaanites, divination in particular. He warned that the Hebrews should not tolerate anyone among them “that consulteth soothsayers, or observeth dreams and omens,” nor “that consulteth pythonic spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeketh the truth from the dead.”8 This famous passage shows the Hebrews’ distaste for polytheistic magic and the prominence of divination among these forbidden arts. Leviticus even demands the death penalty for soothsayers.9 The Hebrews’ conflation of harmful black magic, sorcery, and various forms of fortune-telling exerted a powerful influence on later Christian attitudes toward divination.10

Despite the Hebrews’ revulsion at Canaanite magical rites and the severity of biblical prohibitions against divination, the Hebrew scriptures also reveal their ambiguous attitudes about its practice. Saul’s famous encounter with a medium, who came to be known as the “witch of Endor,” related in I Samuel 28, shows the continued importance of soothsaying in Hebrew culture.11 Really about a necromancer, rather than a witch, the account fascinated Christian demonologists, and it remained a mainstay in treatises about divination for centuries. The Endor story begins with an account of how the Israelite King Saul, following the Deuteronomic Code, had banished all soothsayers from his realm. Threatened by a mighty Philistine army, Saul prayed to God to send him a sign of his fate, but he did not receive an answer. In desperation, he ordered his attendants to find a seer he could consult about his future. Although Saul had driven all of the soothsayers from the land, they informed him straightaway that such a woman could be found at Endor.

Disguising himself, Saul visited the woman by night and asked her to raise a spirit for him. Wary of the royal prohibition against divination, the necromancer refused until Saul, still in disguise, promised her that she would not be punished. The king asked her to raise the dead prophet Samuel, and when the shade appeared before her, she immediately knew that her client was Saul. The king assured her that she was safe and asked her what she saw. She replied that she saw the ghostly visage of an old man rising from the earth. The shade of Samuel rebuked the king for disturbing him and asked what Saul wanted of him. Saul replied, “I am in great distress. The Philistines are fighting against me, and God has departed from me. He no longer answers me, either by prophets or by dreams. So I have called on you to tell me what to do.” The dire news that Samuel delivered did not relieve his distress. The ghostly prophet’s words filled the king with dread, as he told Saul that the Lord would “deliver both Israel and you into the hands of the Philistines,” and that “tomorrow you and your sons will be with me.”

Samuel’s words came to pass, and Saul fell in battle the next day, defeated by the invading Philistines. Although Saul had broken the divine prohibition against divination, the passage does not suggest that his fate came as a result of consulting the necromancer. In fact, Saul turned to necromancy only after God refused to answer his queries through prophecy or dreams. Furthermore, the story shows that divination, while illicit, did in fact work. Afraid of royal punishment, but not of God’s wrath, the woman at Endor managed to raise the spirit of Samuel, who correctly foretold Saul’s fate.

While Hebrew authorities generally condemned divination, other ancient societies embraced it as part of official religious practices. Magic and religion were integrated in ancient polytheism, and divinatory rites played a central role in both. Among many ancient peoples, including the Sumerians, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, divination was central to religious culture as priests sought to ascertain the will of the gods. Priests and commoners alike used it for more mundane reasons as well, telling private fortunes for money. These popular forms of divination, which turned sacred rites to profane purposes, alarmed Greek and Roman moralists.12

Many ancient Greek thinkers held in contempt divination performed outside of temples and oracle sites. By the classical period, educated Greeks had come to associate magic with sinister rites they believed had emerged in Persia among the magoi. Although surviving inscriptions prove that magical practices were common among the Greeks, many philosophers condemned these occult activities, presenting them as foreign and dangerous.13 The Greeks believed that the universe was filled with spirits they called daemones, who occupied the space between humans and the gods. The daemones could be benign or malignant, and magicians and soothsayers could enlist their aid for good or evil ends. A Hellenistic-era philosophical text, the Pythagorean Commentaries, describes these spirits and their role in divination. The work regarded it as axiomatic that “the whole air is full of souls. We call them daemones.” According to the author, it was these spirits who were the focus of divinatory rites, and he explained that “it is towards these daemones that we direct purification and apotropaic rites, all kinds of divination, and the art of reading chance utterances.”14 Throughout Greece itinerant magoi and rural wise women sought to contact these spirits in order to read omens and tell fortunes. For strict moralists, the secretive practices associated with such divinatory rites, directed at the daemones or the shadowy chthonic gods of the underworld, seemed sinister compared with the public, beneficial rites of the Greeks’ polytheistic religion and the prophecies of oracles at Delphi and Dodona it sanctioned.15

The distinction between private fortune-telling conducted by commoners and the official divination performed by priests was as important to Roman moralists as it had been to their Greek counterparts. Thus, upright Romans were repulsed by private divination, and leading figures like Pliny and Cicero drew a sharp distinction between the improper use of divination for selfish ends and its beneficial use as part of the Roman civic religion. For these Roman moralists, despite its popularity, the former was the very epitome of “superstitio,” the wrongful misappropriation of religious rites that threatened to upset Rome’s relationship with the gods. The Roman statesman Cicero, for example, deemed fortune-telling to be a morally corrupting force within society and recorded many examples of soothsayers’ faulty predictions.16 Thus, while the Twelve Tables, Rome’s earliest written law code, condemned harmful magic, opposition to divination remained largely moral, although instances of official repression began to appear in the imperial period.17

Amid the political turmoil of the first century of the Common Era, Tiberius launched sporadic efforts to rid Rome of “mathematici, diviners, and astrologers,” despite his own faith in the predictions of his personal astrologer, Thrasyllus. According to the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, these efforts were largely political, as Roman authorities blamed profane divination for stirring up rebellion. Cassius Dio also draws this link between fortune-telling and insurrection in his writings. The Roman historian admitted that “divination is of course necessary,” meaning the official rites of the Roman state cult, but he had no patience for private divinatory activities. Speaking of soothsayers, he warned that “such men, by speaking the truth sometimes, but generally falsehood, very often encourage numbers to stir up revolution.”18 Thus, Dio accentuates the moralists’ distinction between dangerous forms of divination employed for selfish, subversive ends and the necessary and beneficial augury and haruspicy Roman priests routinely performed to ascertain the will of the gods who protected the empire.19

Despite such discouragement, penal and moral, a range of magical operations including divination remained widespread in ancient Rome. Magical texts and divinatory practices had proliferated in the Hellenistic period as Greek, Persian, Babylonian, and Egyptian magical traditions fused. Itinerant seers and everyday people carried out all manner of divination, and these practices remained popular in the Roman Empire.20

Divination and the Early Church

With the spread of the new faith within the Roman world, a new sort of virulent opposition to divination emerged. Early Christian leaders condemned divination in all its forms more harshly than did their polytheis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Idolatry and Reprobate Infidelity”: Divination before the Reformation
• 2. “A Hellish Trap”: Divination in Early Reformation Theology
• 3. “Unchristian and Devilish Crimes”: Soothsaying and Early Lutheran Disciplinary Efforts
• 4. “Heathenish and Forbidden Abominations”: Condemnations of Fortune-Telling during the Wars of Religion
• 5. “Born under an Unlucky Sign”: Cunning Folk and Their Clients in an Age of Witch-Hunting
• 6. “Superstitious Activities”: Elite Skepticism and Folk Magic in Enlightenment-Era Germany
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index