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A Journey Into Witchcraft Beliefs

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A JOURNEY INTO
WITCHCRAFT BELIEFS
The history of witchcraft is complex,
and often raises more questions than
it answers. Where did witches come
from? And did they always arrive on
broomsticks? We asked Professor
Diane Purkiss to take us inside the
minds of ordinary people and
intellectuals in medieval and early
modern England to reveal how the
figure of the witch was born.

Travel with us from the pre-Christian

world to the burial mounds of the
English landscape, where an
underworld of elves, demons and
familiars came alive in the popular
imagination. Out of these murky
beginnings, we discover how the
witch became the subject of the
chilling persecutions of the 16th and
17th centuries.

A scene from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ in a 1550 painting by

Pellegrino Tibaldi, showing Circe transforming men
into animals
© DeAgostini/Getty Images

Diane, you’re an expert in witchcraft

beliefs and their representation in
popular culture. How far back does
the belief in witches go?

Most people think that witches are a

Christian invention. But the idea of
the witch who flies in the night and
draws power from dark cosmic forces
to work her ill will on others pre-
dates Christianity, probably by many
centuries.

In Homer’s Odyssey (c.800 BC), Circe

– who turns men into animals – is
described as a witch, and Plutarch
refers to witchcraft in his treatise On
Superstition (c.AD 100). Illicit magic
features heavily in Roman law
statutes, some of which are passed
down to the Christian world.
However, many of those early laws
were really laws against sorcery, which
unlike witchcraft can be beneficial, and
which requires special skills, tools and
words.

Archaeologists have found hundreds

of ancient Greek curse tablets, which
the Greeks called katares, ‘curses that
bind tight’, and they appear to have
invented them, with a great number
focused on sporting competitions or
legal contests. The inscribed tablets
were left in graves, wells or fountains,
where the dead could better work
their magic.

A woodcut depicting Frau Perchta, based on a 1486

manuscript of ‘Flowers of Virtue’ by the Austrian poet
Hans Vintler

How did the figure of the witch

emerge?

In later centuries, constant attempts

to defeat heresy brought to light a
number of figures who were difficult
to reconcile with Christianity. Such
figures were typically created without
reference to witchcraft at all, but led
to the creation of the figure of the
heretic witch.

One such figure was peculiar to the

western Alps. She was the female
embodiment of winter, a female figure
often called Bertha or Perchta or
Befuna. She punished social
disobedience and rewarded
‘goodness’. She was always portrayed
as an old hag, because she
represented cold and winter. It did
not take long for intellectuals to note
her resemblance to the witches with
whom they were familiar from
classical literature.

Slowly, and in bits and pieces, the idea

of the witch emerged. Very broadly
speaking, a witch is a person who
employs magical entities, which may
include powers she carries within her
body, to harm other people. She
doesn’t have to be female. She
certainly doesn’t have to have a hat
and a broomstick. She has to be
marred, lopsided. She has to be like
the dead: hard, infertile – and she has
to hate. The dead hate the living and
the witch hates as they do. There is
no particular moment when this
popular idea is formulated.

Ancient burial places such Ballowall Barrow in

Cornwall were once cloaked in superstition. These
Bronze Age tombs were thought to be home to
dwarf mining spirits known as the knockers, whom
witches might offer as good luck charms to unhappy
clients

What did witchcraft mean to early

Christians in Britain?

To understand this, we’ll have to go

on a journey.

Imagine you’re standing on a hillside.

You look at the lumps in the grass.
You are probably wondering what
they are, or what they used to be. A
panel nearby says that they are
prehistoric burial mounds.

Now I’m going to put you in a time

machine and take you back 400 years.

You are still standing on the hillside

above the site, looking at the lumps in
the grass and wondering. But now,
you are a member of the society that
flourished in this area for centuries.
You have heard many stories about
these lumps in the grass. You have
seen some members of your village
community coming here often, and
you have wondered why: are they
searching for herbs to augment their
porridge, or are they here for other,
more sinister reasons?

Among the girls in the village, it’s

whispered that if you come to this
place at midnight on All Hallows Eve,
you can see the dead rise and ride
along the road to the market cross.
They can’t pass the cross, and they
stop there. It’s unlucky to see them,
but if you catch the eye of one of the
riders, you might be able to win
supernatural powers of healing and
prophecy that will make your fortune.

The interior of West Kennet Long Barrow in

Wiltshire, a Neolithic grave that was used for almost
1,000 years

What’s in the earth below the humps

of stone? Do you imagine a realm of
the dead?

The vicar in the village tells you that

the dead that remain in the earth are
those condemned to hell. Some
people say that the dead riders are
wreathed in flames, and their saddles
are red-hot iron. Those people say
that if you do get any power from the
riders, it’s the power of hell and devils.

But other, older people think

differently. They think that the dead
that remain in the earth are not
demons but elves. Under the lumps
of rock is a beautiful if sunless land
where the elves banquet and dance
and entertain their favourite mortals.
However, the elves are still dangerous,
especially if crossed.

The dead yearn for the lives they

enjoyed, which means they may want
to take back from the living. They
remain where they were buried.
Separation of self and body, or soul
and body, may take months or years,
and may never happen at all to those
who are destined to damnation. So
the places where pagans buried their
dead are especially fraught. The pagan
dead are like nuclear waste. You can
bury them, but that doesn’t mean
they’re gone. Anyone willing to feed
them – on blood – can hope to put
them to work in a series of worrying
deals. This is where the familiar of the
witch begins to take shape: like the
dead, fed on blood, and like the dead,
malevolent.

A woodcut from a 1579 pamphlet showing a witch

feeding her familiars
© Courtesy of the British Library

Familiars are a really persistent

image even today, especially black
cats. How did this idea develop?

The witch’s familiar was usually a

small animal, sometimes as tiny as a
housefly. The witch fed the familiar
and in return, it might grudgingly act
out her commands. It was, in fact, a
kind of fairy known as the household
brownie or hob. These creatures
favour cream and have to be
appeased by constant offerings of it
or they can start to behave like
poltergeists. It was therefore assumed
that they could be put to work
ruining the work of other
householders.

Familiars may also be related to the

Norse fylgia, or fetch – a person’s
double, which can also shapeshift to
animal form. The fylgia is associated
with a person’s luck or fortune. To
the learned in the 17th century,
however, the familiar was simply a
devil. Familiars are mentioned in the
1566 Chelmsford witchcraft trial
where the familiar in question
resembles a human being. The idea
that you can separate out part of
yourself, a part that may look exactly
like you, and send it to work your will
on the bodies of others, is central to
the idea of witchcraft.

Whatever their origin, familiars come

from that popular underworld of
ideas and tales. In places in England,
you can almost feel it underneath the
soil – the weight of the past and the
freight of its dead. Our ancestors
could feel it too.

A witch’s mark at Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire

If you were a person living at that

time, how would you try and defend
yourself from witches?

You’ll want to defend the thresholds

of your body and your house.

You have to keep to the rules. If you

suspect one of your neighbours is a
witch, do not ever let her have the
last word in a conversation. Anything
she says must be thrown back at her,
before it infects you. And don’t let her
give you anything, especially anything
connected with food, and extra-
especially food itself.

Don’t ever let her across your

threshold.

Use witch marks to stop her from

crossing into your house or from
allowing her familiars to cross into
your house. Witch marks are ancient
boundary spells. One of the most
common is the interwoven initial M,
for the Virgin Mary, which persists
long after Catholicism has been
forbidden. Another is a spiral in which
the roaming entity will get lost.

The ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, or ‘The Hammer of

Witches’, was a treatise that promoted the execution
of witches based on theological theories of
demonology. Written by Heinrich Kramer, it was
published in Germany in 1497
© Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection (Public
Domain)

We’ve looked at the beliefs of

ordinary people. How did the
medieval church view witchcraft?

The 11th century saw the arrival of

Scholasticism. Scholastic philosophy
meant that all of created nature
became an object of scrutiny from
which scholastics could create a
model that applied to everything. The
inquisitorial eye began to fix itself on
aspects of folklore that had been
smiled away or incorporated into
Christian worship in earlier periods.

Large monasteries over the 12th to

14th centuries became preoccupied
with the moral problem of wet
dreams. Was it sinful to have a wet
dream? Monks reported that their
nocturnal emissions were often the
result of being pressed or sat on by a
human female figure. Since no women
were allowed into monastic
dormitories, somebody suggested
that the female figures might be devils
capable of transforming themselves
into the appearance of females in
order to tempt monks into sexual sin.

Further leaps of logic concluded that

demons wanted to produce offspring.
So they haunted monastic
dormitories to steal human seed in
order to impregnate women with
demon children. But who could such
women be? This is when the Roman
idea of the witch and her
manifestation as the embodiment of
winter in Alpine regions
catastrophically came together to
allow the first generation of
demonologists to formulate an exact
identity for the recipients of the seed.

Old, outcast, ugly, eccentric – the

witch of the Witches’ Sabbath was
born.

A 1650 drawing depicting the ceremony believed to

be held by witches, later referred to as the Witches’
Sabbath
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Most people are aware of the witch

trials that reached their height in the