So it was in ancient days, and when Christianity arrived things didn’t change all that much, at least not for the worse, because Christianity was opposed to believing in the power of evil. Christ had defeated the devil, he had descended into hell and his followers had nothing to fear from evil powers. At least that was the old Christian belief. People back then certainly knew of disreputable women, but these were mostly priestesses and pagan goddesses and their magical powers were seldom taken seriously. Instead they were to be pitied, because the devil had fooled them into believing that they possessed supernatural powers. Over the course of a few decades, roughly around the year 1300 A.D., all of this completely yet imperceptibly changed. And no one can explain to you with any certainty how. But there is no doubt that it did indeed change: after belief in witches had coexisted alongside all other superstitions for centuries, while causing no less but no more harm than the others, around the middle of the fourteenth century people began seeing witches and sorcery left and right and soon enough they were carrying out witch-hunts everywhere. All of a sudden there was a formal doctrine on the doings of witches. Suddenly everyone wanted to know exactly what they did in their gatherings, what sort of witchcraft they were practicing, and whom they were out to get. As mentioned before, we’ll probably never fully understand how it all came about. But the little we do know is all the more astounding.
Nowadays superstition is mostly found among the simpler folk, where it takes root most firmly. The history of believing in witches shows us, however, that this was not always the case. The fourteenth century, when this belief displayed its most rigid and threatening face, was a time of great scientific progress. The Crusades had begun, which brought to Europe the latest scientific theories, above all those concerning the natural sciences, a realm in which Arabia was far ahead of other countries. Improbable as it sounds, these new natural sciences strongly promoted the belief in witchcraft, and here’s how: in the Middle Ages the purely speculative and descriptive natural sciences, which we now call theoretical science, were not yet distinct from applied sciences, such as technology. For their part, applied sciences in those days were the same as, or at least very closely associated with, magic. People knew very little about nature. Investigating and using its secret forces was considered sorcery. But sorcery was permitted, if it were not put to evil purposes; to differentiate from the Black Arts, it was simply called the White, or White Magic. Thus new discoveries about nature contributed directly, or in a roundabout way, to beliefs in sorcery, the influence of the stars, the art of making gold, and other such notions. However, alongside the proliferation and popularity of White Magic came interest in the Black.
But the study of nature was not alone among the sciences encouraging the terrifying belief in witchcraft. Belief in and the practice of Black Magic gave rise to a great number of questions for the philosophers of the time — who were all clergymen in those days — questions we no longer understand so easily today; and if we do grasp them, it makes our hair stand on end. People wanted to distinguish, in no uncertain terms, the sorcery practiced by witches from other forms of evil magic. It had long been understood that all evil sorcerers were heretics, that is, they did not believe in God, or did so in the wrong way; the popes had often preached exactly that. But now people wanted to know how to distinguish witches and warlocks from other practitioners of the Black Arts. To this end scholars deliberated at length, which would perhaps have been more absurd and curious than horrific if, 100 years later, when the witch trials had reached their high point, two men had not, in all seriousness, taken these vagaries and compiled them, compared them, and drawn conclusions from them, formulating meticulous instructions for determining precisely which acts of sorcery would be incriminated. This book is the so-called Witches’ Hammer;1 I dare say that nothing else ever printed has brought more harm to people than these three thick volumes. So, according to these scholars, how could witches be identified? Above all, they had made a formal pact with the devil. They had renounced God and promised the devil to do his bidding. In exchange the devil promised them all things good — for their earthly life, of course — but since he is the father of lies, he almost never kept this promise, at least not in the end. There was an interminable list of witches’ deeds accomplished by the power of the devil, with explanations of how they were done and the practices they were forced to observe. Those of you who have seen the Witches’ Dance Floor and Walpurgis Hall near Thale, or have held a volume of Harz legends in your hands, will know a bit about it. But I won’t tell you now about Blocksberg, where witches allegedly assembled every May 1, or about riding on broomsticks from chimney to chimney.2 Instead I want to tell you a few strange things you’ve maybe not read about, even in your books of legends. Strange for us, that is.
Three hundred years ago it went without saying that if a witch walked into a field and raised her hand to the sky, hailstones would shower down on the crops. With a glance she could bewitch a cow, so that blood instead of milk would come from her udder. She could bore into a willow tree in such a way that milk or wine would flow from its bark. She could transform herself into a cat, a wolf, or a raven. Once suspected of witchcraft, people could go about their lives as they wished, but there was nothing they could do that wouldn’t strengthen the suspicion they were under. So, at home or in the fields, in word or deed, at church or at play, there was nothing back then that malicious or stupid or crazy people couldn’t somehow link to witchcraft. And still today certain terms remind us of how the most innocent and naturally occurring things were associated with this belief: witches’ butter (frogspawn), witches’ ring (the circular formation of mushrooms), witches’ mushroom, witchweed, and so on. But if you would like to read a very short summary, a sort of guide to the life of witches, ask for the play Macbeth by Shakespeare. There you will also see how people thought of the devil as a severe master, to whom every witch had to answer, and in whose honor they committed their evil tricks and misdeeds. Even the simplest of men knew as much about witches as you will after reading Macbeth, while philosophers knew a good deal more. They advanced evidence for the existence of witches that was so illogical, a ninth-grader today would not get away with it in an essay for school. In 1660 one of them wrote: “He who denies the existence of witches also denies the existence of spirits, because witches are spirits. But he who denies the existence of spirits also denies the existence of God, because God is a spirit. Therefore, he who denies witches denies God.”
Fallacy and nonsense are bad enough. But they become very dangerous when order and logic are added to the brew. Such was the case with those who believed in witchcraft; the stubbornness of the scholars caused much greater misery than superstition had. We have already mentioned the scientists and philosophers. But there were worse culprits: the jurists. Which brings us to the witch trials — save for the plague, the most horrible scourge of its time. They spread like an epidemic, jumped from one land to the next, reached their apogee only to diminish temporarily, and seized on young and old, rich and poor, jurists and mayors, doctors and naturalists. Church elders, ministers, and clergymen were burnt at the stake alongside snake charmers and carnival actors, to say nothing of the women of all ages and social standing who suffered in even far greater numbers. We can no longer count how many people in Europe perished as witches and warlocks, but it’s certain to have been at least 100,000, perhaps many times more. I have already mentioned that frightful book, The Witches’ Hammer, published in 1487 and reprinted countless times. Written in Latin, it was a handbook for inquisitors. Inquisitors, interrogators really, were monks who had been invested, directly by the pope, with special powers to combat heresy. Since witches were always seen as heretics, they were targeted by the inquisitors. While one might think that no one would covet such a wretched task, there were still other jurisdictions burning to join in the fight against witches. There were both the regular ecclesiastical court of bishops and the regular secular court, the latter being harsher.