Demonology, Religion, and Witchcraft

New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology

Brian P. Levack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136537998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Witchcraft and magical beliefs have captivated historians and artists for millennia, and stimulated an extraordinary amount of research among scholars in a wide range of disciplines. This new collection, from the editor of the highly acclaimed 1992 set, Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, extends the earlier volumes by bringing together the most important articles of the past twenty years and covering the profound changes in scholarly perspective over the past two decades. Featuring thematically organized papers from a broad spectrum of publications, the volumes in this set encompass the key issues and approaches to witchcraft research in fields such as gender studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, history, psychology, and law. This new collection provides students and researchers with an invaluable resource, comprising the most important and influential discussions on this topic. A useful introductory essay written by the editor precedes each volume.

THE DEVIL'S HOODWINK: SEEING AND BELIEVING IN THE WORLD OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY WITCHCRAFT

Charles Zika

I've been outside long enough. Absent long enough. Long enough out of the world. Let me enter the history of the world, if only to hold an apple! Look, those feathers. Look, there on the water already vanished. Look, the tyre marks on the asphalt, and the cigarette butt rolling, the primeval river has dried up and only today's raindrops still quiver. Down with the world behind the world!

— The angel Damiel to the angel Cassiel, in Wings of Desire (Himmel über Berlin), 1987. Directed by Wim Wenders, screenplay by Wim Wenders and Peter Handke.

You believe because you can see me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe. — Jesus to Thomas, in The Gospel According to Saint John, ch. 20, v. 29.

The history of Christianity and of Western culture in general, is fraught with tension between visible and invisible worlds. The sensible world is regarded as a shadow or reflection of the invisible reality; the ignorant are described as those blinded to the reality which underlies the apparent; as pilgrims in this world we see as though through a glass darkly; whereas some may come to see the truth, that truth may be no more than mirage or illusion. Such common metaphors are heavily dependent on images of seeing, blindness and light, metaphors which have become deeply embedded in the history of Christian culture. The eyes and the act of seeing are most representative of the senses and that which is seen or visible is representative of the sensible world as a whole.

It is not surprising therefore that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when theologians and intellectuals were engaged in a large-scale reformulation of the relationship between the sensible world of human experience and the eternal realms of the divine, a religious discourse would develop around the status of material sacred objects and also around the nature of visual perception. Late medieval religiosity was fundamentally a religion of seeing. The cult was organised around sacred images and relics to which the gaze as well as the entreaties of suppliants were directed. Religious devotion was increasingly expressed through a ritual of group spectacle, and was affirmed either through direct visions of the divine and saints or through visible manifestations of their active presence through miracles. Religious knowledge was communicated as much through the visual representations of the sacred lives of Christ, Mary or the saints, as through the audible word of preachers' sermons.¹

For many sixteenth-century Protestants these images and the cults they spawned were perceived as idols and idolatry.² The mass in particular, which had been restructured during the later medieval period into a ritual which reached its climax with the visible presentation of the Christian God in the elevation of the host, before the host-god was eaten, was nothing short of blasphemous sacrilege for the reformers.³ As Protestants stressed the separation between spirit and flesh, soul and body, man and God, material objects such as images or the physical relics of the saints could no longer be regarded as suitable sites for sacred power and divine energy. They were now ridiculed as nothing but wood and stone, of no more worth than animal bones. But for Catholics too, the scope of a visible and sensible religious experience was being more diligently circumscribed and supervised. Religious visions were increasingly met with scepticism and rituals involving sacred objects were carefully scrutinised for their orthodoxy and kept firmly within clerical control.⁴ Lay intellectuals like Erasmus, on the other hand, sought to turn the religiosity of the pious gaze inward.

If anyone displays the tunic of Christ, to what corner of the earth shall we not hasten so that we may kiss it? Yet were you to bring forth His entire wardrobe, it would not manifest Christ more clearly and truly than the Gospel writings. We embellish a wooden or stone statue with gems and gold for the love of Christ. Why not, rather, mark with gold and gems and with ornaments of greater value than these, if such there be, these writings which bring Christ to us so much more effectively than any paltry image? The latter represents only the form of the body — if indeed it represents anything of Him — but these writings bring you the living image of His holy mind and the speaking, healing, dying, rising Christ himself, and thus they render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon Him with your very eyes.⁵

While Erasmus urges his readers to move beyond the religion of the bodily image and focus with spiritual eyes upon the mind of Christ as manifested in the gospels, his language does not escape the visual metaphors within which late medieval Christianity has been framed. Yet his effort is emblematic of that major shift in European religion in this period, that reshaping of religiosity from one which centred overwhelmingly on visual experience to one which slowly began to express its identity in terms of belief. Believing could no longer be identified with seeing.

The religious discourse about eyes, vision and images, the relationship between visible and invisible worlds, is also carried through in the increasingly systematised literature of witchcraft and demonology of the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But while this discourse served to widen the gap between the human and divine, partly in an attempt by clerical and lay experts to ensure control over religious practices, it also served to narrow the gap between the human and the demonic. The theological and legal phenomenon of witchcraft, which had been gradually constituted through the theoretical systematisations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century theorists and the legal decisions of the courts, needs to be carefully differentiated from the sorcery practices which had been an integral part of European culture for centuries beforehand. Witchcraft was premised on the belief in a special relationship between the person accused of witchcraft and the devil. It was argued that the witch acquired special powers from the devil, which would enable her or him to do evil (maleficium, malefice) in society. This was the result of a pact between witch and devil, consummated through sexual intercourse and other forms of exchange. Through witchcraft, humans and devils were joined physically, psychologically and strategically, sexual partners and active collaborators in a program of evil destruction on earth.

One of the main concerns of witchcraft theorists, therefore, was to explain the basis for the behaviour of those men and women traditionally called sorcerers, witches, cunning folk, diviners and so on. Their power could not be easily reconciled with the normal workings of nature, nor did it depend on rituals which lay within the control of the church. Nor could these theorists accept that the individuals themselves possessed marvellous powers. Any wonders which they could perform, argued the theorists, such as harm done to fellow villagers, animals or crops, or claims of night-flying or shape-shifting, were to be attributed either to an imagination influenced by the devil or to the direct operation of diabolical power. The evil power certainly did not rest with the women or men themselves. Their power was a diabolical power. They were puppets, decoys and conduits for the world behind the world.

While this theologisation of the powers attributed to traditional sorcery ensured a heightened sense of the operations of the demonic in the world, it also emphasised that those operations were invisible. For explaining the social power of those who acted as healers, diviners and matchmakers, those who wreaked vengeance and harm on the community, or who removed the charms and curses which stemmed from others, allowed theologians entry into broad realms of personal and social experience, over which they previously had little control. Defining a wide range of social practicesas ‘witchcraft’, as ‘superstition’ or as ‘magic’, located these actions within the realms of God and devil, realms in which the theologian could justifiably claim expertise and thereby exercise control.

This transformation of local sorcery practices constitutes an important part of that broader reform of popular culture, which historians of the last two decades have recognised as fundamental to the change which characterises sixteenth-century society, and have variously described as an acculturation of local practice, the colonising of minds, the christianising and civilising of society or the establishment of social discipline and control.⁶ The sixteenth century marked the beginnings of European hegemony not only over the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the new European worlds, but also over the local cultures of the old. It was a hegemony which sought to encompass those worlds geographically, politically and also culturally, to carefully inscribe those cultures within the parameters and definitions of the European past and present. Within Europe, just as outside it, the processes of collecting local and regional folklores and customs, setting them in print and disseminating them to a European-wide audience had begun. And hand in hand with this early interest in local cultures and their ethnographies came the theologisation of those cultures through the literature of witchcraft and superstition. The emphasis on religiously and morally purified communities in the sixteenth-century Reformations could not help but give weight to this cause. Gradually the power of rituals and words was subsumed under the strategems of the devil, and the folklores of sacred places, propitious times and sympathetic action were subverted by a religious economy of temptation, faith and apostasy.

All these issues are raised in a short and quite remarkable treatise which is the subject of this paper. The work is entitled Dess Teuffels Nebelkappen or The Devil's Hoodwink. It was written by a certain Paulus Frisius and published in Frankfurt in 1583. Quite surprisingly the work has received virtually no attention from modern scholarship.⁷ Yet it warrants close examination and analysis for the way it appropriates an image from traditional folklore, the Nebelkappe, in order to present a theologised and diabolical understanding of the operations of witchcraft. The added attraction of this guiding image and metaphor would seem to have been the possibility of integrating witchcraft with the traditional Christian discourse concerning visible and invisible worlds as well as with more recent discourses concerning sexual seduction. In this way, not only is the world of folklore incorporated into a theological framework of divine and diabolical struggle by Frisius, but the discourse of witchcraft is presented in terms which can expect a broader social recognition and acceptance.

The devil's hoodwink and folklore

Titles of witchcraft treati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Content
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Witchcraft and Catholic Theology
• The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft, and Magic in Late Medieval Europe
• The SpecificRationality of Medieval Magic
• The Devil's Hoodwink: Seeingand Believingin the World of Sixteenth-Century Witchcraft
• Bernardino of Siena, Popular Preacher and Witch-Hunter: A 1426 Witch Trial in Rome
• Institors of Innsbruck: Heinrich Institoris, the Summis Desiderantes, and the Brixen Witch Trial of 1485
• Protestant Demonology: Sin, Superstition, and Society {c.1520-c.1630)
• Martin Luther on Witchcraft: a True Reformer?
• The Devil as Doctor: Witchcraft, Wodrow, and the Wider World
• The Devil's Encounter with America
• Witches, Sinners, and the Underside of Covenant Theology
• Visions of evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism and the Massachusetts Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
• Magic and the Theology of the Body: Exorcism in Sixteenth-Century Augsburg
• A Woman and the Devil: Possessionand Exorcism in Sixteenth-Century France
• The Devils of Queretaro: Scepticism and Credulity in Late Seventeenth-Century Mexico
• Balthasar Bekker and the Decline of the Witch-Craze: The Old Demonology and the New Philosophy
• ‘Man is a Devil to Himself’: David Joris and the Rise of a ScepticalTradition towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands
• Witchcraft and Tolerance: The Dutch case
• “Saints or Sorcerers”: Quakerism, Demonology, and the Decline of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century England
• Acknowledgments