Europe's Inner Demons

[rfmcdonald]

Right now, I'm reading Europe's Inner Demons. Written by Norman Cohn, who also wrote (among other texts) the excellent The Pursuit of the Millennium (an examination of millennial religious belief in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the great Anabaptist commune in Münster in the 1530's), it examines the origins of the great witch hunts of the 15th through 17th centuries. He traces the genesis of the modern concept of the witch--as a woman who, by virtue of deals with demons or even Satan often involving some form of seduction, acquires occult powers--as product of a fusion of two separate factors:

• At the level of grand state politics, the cynical maneneuverings of authorities who drew from Classical lore to produce charges against their political enemies (the Knights Templar, for instance) which would set them beyond the pale of humanity and incidentally allow their wealth to be confiscated.


• At the level of the village and traditional folk culture, a belief only imperfectly recorded in the presence of witch-craft, whether in the form of the night-witch or in the more common form of maleficium, the age-old practice of folk magics relating to fertility (human and agricultural) and health, for good and for ill.

The impetus behind the early modern period's campaigns of witchcraft, then, in Cohn's view, came about when the two cultures--the Great and Little Traditions of European civilization--ended up fusing, the result being campaigns against village witches (self-identified and otherwise) because of their anti-Christian and anti-human conspiracies.

It's interesting.