This was not how the rest of Europe saw it. Before the end of the century, Isaac Newton’s Principia had demonstrated beyond all shadow of doubt that Copernicus was right, and did so with such a tremendous apparatus of mathematical calculation that few people dared to raise doubts. Newton, of course, had discovered the missing piece of Galileo’s jigsaw puzzle: gravity. He had done what Galileo was unable to do: proved the Copernican theory, which is exactly what Pope Urban VIII had asked Galileo to do; he should have received the credit for being an open-minded man of science. Instead, the Church was once again left looking discredited. The spirit of Christopher Marlowe must have chuckled sarcastically.
The century of Galileo and Newton saw the disappearance of another piece of medieval superstition: the witchcraft craze. Witches have been known since ancient times; the evidence suggests that they were people who happened to be possessed of what we would now call ‘paranormal powers’, the most common being the ability to heal. But it is worth noting that witches themselves have always, in all times, claimed that their abilities are somehow involved with the control of spirits. The so-called spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century was, in the most precise sense, a revival of witchcraft. And the parallel of the spiritualist movement – and some of the extraordinary effects produced by the ‘spirits’ during seances – should warn us against making the simplistic assumption that witchcraft was pure superstition and self-delusion. (I have discussed these questions at length elsewhere, notably in Mysteries., Part 1, chapter 3, and Poltergeist, chapter 6.)
In ancient Greece, Rome, China, India, Egypt, Japan and Sumeria, witches (or magicians) were regarded with fear; yet it would probably be true to say that in most rural communities, the witch or ‘seer’ was taken for granted and regarded as a useful member of the community.
When Pope Innocent III ordered the massacre of Cathars in the thirteenth century, the survivors took refuge in remote valleys in the Alps and Pyrenees, where they could worship in peace. But in 1320 the paranoid Pope John XXII, who was convinced that his enemies were plotting to take his life by magic, authorised a cardinal in Carcassone (the original centre of the Cathar heresy) to take action against magicians, sorcerers and heretics. The Dominican inquisitors had the muddled idea that, because the Cathars thought the world of matter was created by the devil, they must be devil worshippers. And witches were supposed to owe their supernatural powers to a compact with demons. So the inquisitors began trying Cathars on charges of witchcraft and heresy. The first witch trial had already taken place in Toulouse in 1275, when an old woman named Angele de la Barthe was accused of having sexual intercourse with a demon and giving birth to a monster – a confession wrung from her by torture. But it was not until 1390 that the first secular trial for witchcraft – quite unconnected with heresy – took place in Paris: a woman named Jehanne de Brigue was accused by a man of saving his life by witchcraft when he was on the point of death; Jehanne confessed under threat of torture and implicated the man’s wife, claiming she caused the illness by putting a spell on her husband. Both women were burned.
Witch persecutions continued sporadically for the next century, then they were given a new impetus by a book called Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of Witches) by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. By that time, common-sense was beginning to prevail, and the Parlement of Paris had declared that witchcraft was a delusion; Sprenger and Kramer passionately opposed this view, insisting that witchcraft is performed with the aid of demons. Printing – which had been invented four decades earlier – gave this book an enormous circulation; it became one of the most widely read books of its time – its popularity undoubtedly due to its description of the ‘foul venereal acts’ committed by demons on witches. This piquant combination of sex and demonology went into many editions in many languages.
By the late sixteenth century, the witch craze had begun to move to a climax all over Europe. In Toulouse, forty witches were burned in 1557, and in 1582, eighteen witches were burned in Avignon; between 1581 and 1591, nine hundred witches were sentenced in Lorraine, and in 1609, four hundred witches were burned in four months. In Germany it was the same story: in 1572, five witches burnt at Treves; between 1587 and 1594, more than three hundred people tried for witchcraft; then, in the early seventeenth century, there were literally thousands of burnings. One ‘witch-finder’, Franz Buirmann, burned half the population of one village of three hundred inhabitants between 1631 and 1636; in Bamberg, sixteen hundred people were burned; in Wiirzburg, seven hundred and fifty-seven – these included children whose ages ranged from three to fifteen. But the Thirty Years War called a temporary halt to the persecutions. By the end of the century, revulsion at all the torture had caused the trials to slow down to a trickle again; in 1714, King Frederick William of Prussia ordered an end to all such trials.
In England, the same revulsion was caused by the career of Matthew Hopkins, the ‘witchfinder general’, a lawyer who became convinced that his village – Manningtree, in Essex – was infested with witches. An old woman was stripped and searched for devil’s marks, and when they found that she had a kind of extra teat, they tortured her until she confessed that she used it for suckling her ‘familiars’ – a spaniel, a rabbit, a greyhound and a polecat. Thirty-two women were arrested, and nineteen of them hanged.
Hopkins suddenly found himself in great demand as an expert in sniffing out witches; at an average of £6 per witch, he found it a profitable occupation. During the next year, he made over £1,000; in Bury St Edmunds alone, sixty-eight people were hanged. His method was to strip the victim and prick her all over for ‘devil’s marks’ – spots that were supposed to be insensitive to pain after being touched by the devil, or to toss the suspected witch into a pond and see whether she floated – if not, she was condemned.
But after only a year of this, commonsense reasserted itself. A clergyman named Gaule attacked Hopkins from the pulpit and published a pamphlet pointing out that it was still illegal in England to torture witches. Hopkins suddenly became unpopular, and when an angry crowd tossed him into a pond, he decided it was time to retire on his profits. Later the same year, he died of tuberculosis. And in England, the witchcraft craze was at an end.
In America, it reached its climax in Salem in 1692. A neurotic and unpopular clergyman named Samuel Parris became convinced that the black maid Tituba (from Barbados) was teaching the children to practise voodoo – which was probably true. The children, aged nine, eleven and twelve, began having strange convulsions and declaring that spirits were pinching them. Tituba was beaten, and confessed to being a witch. She implicated various other old women, who were arrested and tortured. The whole area was suddenly possessed by witchcraft hysteria, believing that the witches turned themselves into birds and animals at night. In a few months, twenty people were tried and executed, including a sceptical farmer named Proctor, who denounced the trials as nonsense, and a man named Corey, who was pressed to death under heavy weights; his wife was also hanged.
Like Matthew Hopkins, the children who had started the whole thing were now regarded as experts on witchcraft, and were called to the neighbouring town to identify witches. Forty arrests were made in Andover, and the magistrate himself had to flee when he refused to order more.
At this point, the girls overreached themselves, naming the wife of the governor as a witch. When the governor, Sir William Phips, returned from fighting Indians, he dismissed the court and released most of the accused. The witch hysteria ended as abruptly as it began. The Rev. Samuel Parris had to leave Salem with his family.
In France, as in England and America, the witchcraft craze blew itself out in a storm of extraordinary violence: the Chambre Ardente affair. And in this case, there is evidence that it was not entirely a matter of smoke without fire. In 1673 – in the reign of Louis XIV – two priests informed the authorities that many of their penitents had asked absolution for murdering their spouses by poison. What was happening, it seemed, was that a ring of fortune tellers and witches were supplying poisons – euphemistically known as ‘succession powders’ – to men and women who wanted to get rid of their current spouses in favour of lovers or mistresses. The chief of police, Nicholas de la Reynie, asked his agents to begin making cautious enquiries. A fortune teller named Marie Bosse was reported to have said that she would be able to retire when she had arranged three more poisonings; Reynie sent a disguised policewoman to consult her on how to get rid of her husband. The fortune teller sold her poison, and was arrested.