IA Delusion, Then a Crime
For most of the Middle Ages the Church's official position on witches was that they did not exist. The Canon Episcopi, a text recorded by Regino of Prüm around 906 and incorporated into canon law, condemned as deluded those women who believed they rode at night on beasts with the goddess Diana; the belief itself, not the ride, was the sin. Harmful magic, maleficium, was a crime under Roman and Germanic law, but it was an individual crime, prosecuted when a neighbour accused a neighbour of blighting a cow.
What changed in the fifteenth century was theology. Inquisitors and demonologists, working in the Alps and Savoy in the 1420s and 1430s, assembled out of heresy trials, folk belief and scholastic demonology a new idea: that witches were members of an organised sect of devil-worshippers who made a pact with Satan, flew to nocturnal sabbats, feasted on children and worked harm by his power. Once witchcraft was a conspiracy, every accused witch had accomplices, and torture could produce their names.
IIThe Hammer of Witches
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus at the request of the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who had been obstructed by local clergy in the Tyrol. Two or three years later Kramer published the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, printing the bull at its front as though it endorsed the book. The book was not endorsed by the Church, and the theologians of Cologne whose approval Kramer claimed appear to have given it only partially. The co-authorship of Jacob Sprenger, printed on the title page, is now widely doubted. The Malleus argued that witchcraft was real and heretical, that women were more prone to it through carnal lust and weakness of faith, and that secular courts should try it using torture. It went through some thirty editions by 1669, and it became the handbook of a catastrophe.
IIIThe Burning Times: The Numbers
The great European witch-hunt ran from about 1450 to about 1750, with its peak between roughly 1560 and 1630. It was most intense in the fragmented territories of the Holy Roman Empire, where small prince-bishoprics such as Würzburg and Bamberg burned hundreds in the late 1620s, and in Switzerland, Lorraine and Scotland; it was comparatively mild in Spain and Italy, where the Inquisitions were sceptical and procedurally careful, and in England, which forbade torture and hanged rather than burned.
Popular accounts once claimed nine million victims, a figure that goes back to an eighteenth-century extrapolation and has no basis. Modern historians working from the surviving records estimate roughly forty to sixty thousand executions across Europe, and perhaps twice that number of trials. Around three-quarters of the executed were women, though the proportion varied enormously by region: in Iceland, Estonia and Normandy most of the accused were men.
In Scotland the North Berwick trials of 1590, in which James VI personally interrogated accused witches said to have raised storms against his ship, led to his treatise Daemonologie of 1597. In England the self-styled Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and his associate John Stearne, in the disorder of the Civil War between 1644 and 1647, caused the hanging of perhaps a hundred people in East Anglia. In Massachusetts in 1692 the Salem trials hanged nineteen people and pressed Giles Corey to death with stones; within five years jurors and a judge publicly repented, and compensation was paid in 1711. The last generally cited legal execution for witchcraft in western Europe was that of Anna Göldi at Glarus in Switzerland in 1782. She was formally exonerated in 2008.
IVThe Act of 1735 and the Cunning Folk
Great Britain ended the crime of witchcraft with the Witchcraft Act of 1735, which did not punish witchcraft but punished pretending to it: anyone claiming magical powers to deceive could be imprisoned for a year. The Act was used against fortune-tellers and mediums for two centuries, most notoriously against Helen Duncan in 1944, and was repealed only in 1951, when the Fraudulent Mediums Act replaced it. That too was repealed, in 2008.
Throughout the period of the trials and long after, most villages in England had a cunning man or cunning woman, a local practitioner who found stolen goods, cured cattle, told fortunes, and above all identified and countered witches, often using charms copied from grimoires and astrological manuals. Historians including Owen Davies have shown that they were numerous, often literate, sometimes prosperous, and rarely prosecuted as witches themselves. They are the real ancestors of the village witch of the modern imagination.
VThe Myth of the Witch-Cult
In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, arguing that the witches of the trials were members of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion, organised in covens of thirteen, worshipping a horned god. The idea was not new; Jules Michelet and Charles Leland had suggested versions of it. But Murray gave it the apparatus of scholarship, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica printed her article on witchcraft for decades.
Her thesis was demolished by later historians, above all by Norman Cohn in Europe's Inner Demons of 1975 and Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic of 1971, who showed that she had quoted her trial sources selectively, omitting the impossible details that did not fit a real cult, and that there is no evidence of any organised pagan religion surviving into early modern Europe. The victims of the trials were not witches of any religion. They were, overwhelmingly, poor, old, quarrelsome and unlucky neighbours.
VIThe Revival
In 1954, three years after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, a retired colonial customs officer named Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today. He claimed that in 1939 he had been initiated into a surviving coven in the New Forest, the very religion Murray had described, and he presented its rites and beliefs. Most historians now think Gardner assembled the religion himself, from Murray, Crowley, the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry, Leland's Aradia and his own folklore, perhaps with the help of an existing occult group of the 1930s; the question of how much, if anything, predated him is debated. Doreen Valiente, his high priestess from 1953, rewrote much of the ritual material, including the Charge of the Goddess, into its classic form and removed most of the Crowley.
Wicca, as it came to be called, spread through Britain in the 1950s and 60s, was carried to America by Raymond Buckland in 1964, divided into Gardnerian, Alexandrian and many other traditions, and, in its eclectic and feminist forms after Starhawk's The Spiral Dance of 1979, became one of the fastest-growing religions of the late twentieth century. The historian Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon of 1999 is the definitive history: a new religion, not an old one, and none the worse for that.