Witchcraft and demonic temptation

By the fifteenth century the Devil was seen as the embodiment of evil, and witches were clearly associated with him. Extensive literature was in existence which stressed the reality of demons, accepted that they had regular contacts with humans. In Formicarius (written in the late 1430s), theologian Johannes Nider gave a vivid impression of peasant witches who caused harm in a number of ways: causing infertility, causing illness, destroying crops, killing children by maleficium (evildoing).

The ability to do this harm was obtained through demonic assistance granted after the witches had renounced their faith and decided to worship the Devil. These witches worshipped the Devil in large numbers at nocturnal meetings where they desecrated the cross, ate the bodies of babies, and indulged in promiscuous sexual orgies. Nider, in the course of a discussion of Joan of Arc, established another important point: women were more prone to demonic temptation than men, and hence more prone to witchcraft and perfectly capable of using demonic powers.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-06618. Please do not use without permission.

Witchcraft and sacred relics

Natural objects with occult properties were ubiquitous in medieval culture. They were incorporated into personal jewelry for daily protection, kept for specific purposes such as childbirth or a long journey, and even placed with the dead to protect them in the afterlife. In the later Middle Ages the relationship between sacred and natural powers became less distinct. The number and complexity of personal prophylactic objects increased, and these often combined sacred sources of power— Christian relics, formulae, and images—with the natural virtues of precious stones and other materials.

St Albans Abbey, for example, possessed a large late Roman imperial cameo called Kaadmau (drawn above), which was part of a collection of gems catalogued by the monk Matthew Paris in 1250–4. The cameo was used to induce overdue childbirths; slowly lowering it on its chain down the woman’s cleavage while saying a prayer to St Alban was believed to cause the infant to flee downwards. This gem derived its power from its exotic imagery, precious materials, and the sacred invocation of the saint. It was also thought to be empowered by its sacred residence: although it might be lent by the abbey to favored lay women, it would lose its power if taken by violence or fraud.

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Witchcraft and ritualistic herbs

The root of the mandrake, which sometimes had a humanoid form, and was carved to enhance such a resemblance, accrued a huge amount of magical lore. It was kept for good luck, bestowed divinatory powers, was used in love magic rituals, enhanced one’s chance of winning lawsuits, as well as having numerous uses in herbal medicine.

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Witchcraft and spiritual beliefs

Saducismus triumphatus (1681) compiled first-hand accounts of witches, poltergeists, and other occult phenomena as a way to counter the increasingly fashionable skeptical attitudes to witches and the spirit world—attitudes which threatened to encourage atheism. Author Joseph Glanvill a member of the Royal Society and a man fully abreast with current scientific thinking, sought to harness this thinking and the experimental method to demonstrate the proof of the spirit world.

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Witchcraft and power

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat represented a very complex view of witches and their power. The print drew on a combination of classical and Italian models, on humanist ideas, and on the popular iconography of carnival. While Aphrodite Pandemos, the earthly Venus and goddess of lust, may have been the model for the woman riding a goat, the winged putti (naked, chubby male children) referenced the cults of Priapus and Dionysius found in fifteenth-century Italian works, and the Capricornian goat alluded to the association of witches and the god Saturn in much late medieval planetary literature and illustration. Dürer’s overt reference to a backward ride on a goat, represented in the reversal of his monogram signature, drew on cultural motifs and practices associated with the vices, carnival culture, and cuckoldry, to represent a wild and powerful woman who appropriates male power and reverses the proper gender order.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG cph 3c23495u. Please do not use without permission.

Witchcraft and crime

Young children, teenagers, adults, the elderly, men and women, simple folk and members of the elite, magistrates, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, were all accused, charged, and executed as witches. Usually, a witch was imagined as the enemy within a community, although witches could also be the enemy from outside (a vagrant, beggar, or gypsy). Self-interest, insubordination, revenge, hatred, envy, greed, belligerence, and fornication were thought to drive these “witches’”—literally into the arms of Satan, from a demonologist’s point of view.

Depending on the political, religious, social, and particularly the juridical context, the relevant indictments listed an assortment of suspected evil doings. These included such atrocities as committing malevolent witchcraft against people and livestock, suckling a demon in the shape of a pet, creating tempests and hailstorms by evil spells, shape shifting, night riding through the air, and gathering at sabbats to feast on human flesh and copulate with devils. Michael Heer and Matthäus Merian’s copper engraving Zauberey (above) depicts the witches’ sabbat and witches’ crimes.

Image credit: “Zauberey 1626” by Michael Herr. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.