May 20, 2025 • 49 mins
We have a special treat for our listeners this week - not one but two new episodes dropping simultaneously! Today marks the return of Professor Richard Raiswell of the University of Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us for our fascinating "Speak of the Devil" episode where we explored Satan as one of history's most enduring and complex figures.
In this two-part special The Evolution of Diabolical Witchcraft Belief Professor Raiswell takes us deeper into the dark intersection where demonology meets witch persecution. We'll explore the critical relationship that developed between demons and witchcraft specifically in the 15th century - a connection that would become the driving force behind the witch hunts.
If you enjoyed our previous exploration of devil lore, these episodes are essential listening, as Professor Raiswell helps us understand how theological concepts about Satan evolved into specific accusations and persecution mechanisms.
Both Part 1 and Part 2 are available now wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to Witch Hunt Podcast.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack, we have a
special treat for you this week.Not one, but two new episodes
dropping simultaneously. That's right, today marks the
return of Professor Richard Raiswell of the University of
Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us for a
(00:21):
fascinating Speak of the Devil episode.
He's an expert in medieval lore,bringing years of scholarly
research to our discussion, including his work on the new
book The Rutledge History of theDevil in the Western Tradition.
That's a good looking book. It is.
Don't you love this nice picture?
Here? I do.
(00:44):
For those of you who might have missed it, Speaking of the
devil, what's the episode where we explored Satan as one of
history's most enduring and complex figures throughout
medieval thought? In today's two-part special,
Professor Raiswell takes us deeper into the dark
intersection where demonology meets witch persecution.
(01:04):
What was the critical relationship that developed
between demons and witchcraft, specifically in the 15th
century? A connection that would become
the driving force behind the witch hunts.
If you enjoyed our previous exploration of Devil lore, these
episodes are essential continuedlistening.
Professor Raiswell helps us understand how theological
(01:25):
concepts about Satan evolved into specific accusations and
persecution mechanisms that devastated real communities.
Both Part 1 and Part 2 are available right now wherever you
get your podcasts. So settle in for a fascinating
and chilling exploration of demonic beliefs times 2.
(01:47):
Welcome back to Witch Hunt podcast, Doctor Raceball.
Can you refresh our listeners with a little background on your
expertise and work and tell us what we're going to be talking
about today? Well, thanks very much for
having me back and to tell more about the devil.
Obviously, it's one of my favorite things, but to talk
today about the relationship that develops, in particular in
(02:08):
the 15th century between demonism and witchcraft, the
kind of witchcraft that animate the witch hunts, that's the
focus of this podcast. I'm Richard Reyes.
I'm professor of history at the University of Prince Edward
Island in eastern Canada. I published lots of stuff on
aspects of the history of the devil, in particular in the
(02:30):
Middle Ages and in the early modern period.
Amongst the highlights are a collection of translations which
I did with a colleague, David Winter from Brandon University
in Canada called The Medieval Devil a Reader.
And I've also got coming out a big 600 page Routledge History
(02:50):
of the Devil, which is coming out in May.
And that's with David Winter again and the Michelle Brock
from Washington Lee University in the US.
So what's the connection betweenthe devil and witches?
Yeah, this is a really importantand interesting question.
And I think it goes back to early Christianity and the
(03:13):
process by which Christianity comes to define itself, because
one of the problems Christianityfinds itself in in the early
days is it's in a marketplace ofsupernatural wonder workers.
There are lots of people in the ancient world who offer some
(03:33):
sort of supernatural remedy for things.
All sorts of people offering, well, hurls, they're offering
love magic, they're offering allsorts of things.
Some of the things that you talked about when you talked to
Tabitha Stanmore about service magic.
The ancient world is full of these sorts of people.
And of course, when Jesus shows up, his principal activity is
(03:57):
wonder working. He's performing miracles all
over the place. He's healing people, he's
casting out demons, he brings the dead back to life.
So Christianity finds itself in this sort of strange space where
it's got to sort of define itself against this magical
tradition. So what is it we do which is
(04:17):
different from some of these other people?
In fact, some of the early Christian critics actually think
that Christianity is just another form of magic.
I mean, the classic example of that comes from the book of Acts
where you've got the figure of Simon Magus, Simon the magician
who approaches the apostles and asks to buy the secrets of the
(04:41):
magic that they're producing of the biblical story is that no,
this is not on. It doesn't work that way.
But Simon's point, if you think about it from Simon's
perspective, hey, these Christians are doing some very
powerful magic, how do I do the same sort of thing?
Well, I will behave just like they did elsewhere and I will
(05:02):
purchase these secrets. So Christians need quite early
on to differentiate themselves from magic.
But them, their wonder working isn't something that you buy in
the marketplace. It's proof of Christ's divinity
and it's proof of the power of their God.
(05:24):
The problem is Christians can't just say this other stuff is
rubbish. These people like Simon Magus
are frauds. That's just not on.
They can't say that because of astrange story.
What one of several, but this isthe classic one in the book of
Exodus. Exodus 7 and 8, where which
(05:46):
describes what can only really be characterized as a wonder
working contest between Moses and his brother on one side and
Pharaoh and his magicians on theother.
I mean, the story goes on for a bit, but the key elements of
that, that's Pharaoh's magiciansturn the Staffs that they're
(06:08):
holding into snakes. And in response to that, Moses
and his brother do the same thing.
Exactly the same thing. I mean, in the story, the snakes
that Moses and his brother conjure up go around and eat the
ones Pharaoh's magicians have conjured up.
(06:28):
And that's meant to signify thatthe magic of Moses is more
powerful than the magic of Pharaoh.
But what the story makes clear is that this magic works, right?
Nobody's saying that this is a fraud, that Pharaoh's magicians
have somehow sort of done some slight of hand shake and pulled
(06:50):
some snakes out and then managedto hide their Staffs.
Now it actually happened. It actually worked.
Something was going on there. So when early Christians turn to
this story, they've got to sort of account for it.
And what the argument comes to be is that Pharaoh's magicians,
(07:13):
what they did was they conjured up demons.
And as we talked about last timeround when we were chatting,
demons are natural creatures, but they've got certain powers
which are beyond people. One of them is they can move
incredibly quickly. So the argument is that when
(07:36):
Pharaoh's magicians did whateverhocus pocus they were doing,
demons showed up, grabbed their Staffs, split it off to, I don't
know, the the Sahara desert or something, found some snakes,
brought them back and put them in the hands of Pharaoh's
magicians. Perfectly natural process.
(07:56):
Bit strange, but a natural process which explained how
Pharaoh's magicians were able todo it.
But what this means is that quite early on in the Christian
tradition, there is a deep suspicion of the other wonder
working and they demonize it. They quite literally demonize
(08:17):
it. They say it's only possible
through commerce at some level with demons.
So this right from the earliest Christian tradition, because of
this need to differentiate themselves from other forms of
magic, there is this built in tension and hostility to this
sort of service magic tradition that you've talked about.
(08:40):
And the flip side of that is theonly safe and legitimate access
to supernatural power that people have is through Christian
rituals, Christian apparatus, Christian holy men.
So Christianity establishes, tries to give itself a monopoly
on wonder working and in the process to differentiate
(09:02):
themselves from these other traditions.
We're not them. Our magic, our wonder working is
safe and it's good and it's pure.
The other stuff is demonic and dangerous, so don't use that.
And can you tell us about service magic and attempting to
manipulate or influencing the natural world?
(09:25):
Yeah, so despite the Christian anxiety that I just described,
in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th century, 5th century, the Roman Empire is
rumbling at in the 4th, 5th century, secular power is
rolling back and instead the Germanic tribes begin to take
over. And this is a much more
(09:47):
illiterate period. Centralized authority just isn't
possible the way that it'd been in the third, second centuries
before. So what's happening in the
secular side is also happening in the ecclesiastical side.
It's very difficult for the church to enforce anything.
I mean, it can't. I mean, the Pope can sort of say
(10:08):
don't do magic, and who hears that?
I mean that there just isn't theinfrastructure to move these
ideas around very effectively orconsistently.
As the Germanic tribes replace Roman authority, they bring with
them their own sort of forms of service magic, and they combine
(10:31):
it with aspects of Christian ritual, Christian traditions.
So they still need to heal children, heal the sick, they
need to perform loved magic, they need to be able to predict
the future, whether the crops are going to be any good, all of
these sorts of things that you need to do with service magic.
But what they also do is they bring aspects of Christian
(10:55):
tradition into it. So if you're gathering herbs for
a particular potion to heal somebody, maybe do it under the
moonlight, for instance, to try and harness the power of the
moon or under some favoured to astrological sign.
(11:16):
But while you're mixing it up, why not say some prayers with
that as well? It's as if they're trying to
bring in every form of supernatural power that they've
got access to you. So you've got the power of the
herds, you've got the astrological power, but why not
bring in some Christian power aswell?
And then what you're making is going to be a super powerful
potion. We get complaints from Christian
(11:40):
authorities about this sort of stuff every now and again.
There's a fellow in the 9th century called Aguabard of Lyon
who complaints that people in the country sty still believe
that they can cause hailstorms or thunderstorms.
And we've got a guy in the 11th century writes a law code.
Guy's name's Burkhart of firms, and he lists all sorts of
(12:03):
popular superstitions that he says stay away from these.
These are ridiculous. Don't put your kid on top of an
oven or on your roof. If you're looking to try and
cure some sort of illness. As an historian, you look at
that and say, really, that's what people are doing.
Where does that come from? But it's probably just some sort
of tradition, and you don't knowif it's just A1 off that he's
(12:27):
heard about or if people are doing it all over the place.
You've got no context as an historian for that sort of
thing. In general, when churchmen run
across this sort of stuff, they prescribe just some sort of
penance for it. Don't do this sort of stuff.
It's not good, but do some penance.
(12:48):
No one's tortured. No one's executed.
The Church's point is simply to make clear that these beliefs
are wrong and potentially dangerous.
It is possible to get into trouble when using magic if
you're explicitly calling on demons to do something.
(13:09):
Obviously that's not all, and there are people who try to use
their occult knowledge or rituals to injure and to harm
people. Because obviously if you can
make somebody fall in love with you or two other people fall in
love with each other, you can cause them to hate each other as
well. It's the old adage.
(13:30):
If you know how to unwitch, you also know how to witch, right?
If you think of your doctor, your doctor gives you these
magical little pills to cure your illness, but you also know
that the doctor knows how to kill you as well, right?
You just trust that that's not happening, so the other side of
the knowledge is always possibleand dangerous.
(13:50):
And obviously that's not all. It's an evil deed, or in the
language of the time in Latin it's maleficium, which literally
means an evil deed. We have people trying to heal
children, trying to get people to fall in love with each other,
and even trying to harm their neighbors.
(14:12):
But do we have classic witchy features like flying yet?
Ah, no. And that's what's so
interesting. In the course of all of these
condemnations of magical practices that Burkhardt of
Verms mentions, he includes a copy of a Canon from a church
(14:33):
council. That's a ruling from a church
council, and this is called episcopy.
The term in Latin just means bishops.
The canons get their name by virtue of the first couple of
words in their title. So this one's addressed to
bishops. Hey, bishops do this.
So it's just known as Episcopy. Burkhart, when he's reproducing
(14:56):
this, thinks that Episcopy comesfrom the 4th century.
Modern scholars tend to think that it's probably 9th or 10th
century, but there's no reason to think that Burkhart would
have known that. So he's not being deceptive or
anything, he's just doing the best he can.
Episcopy says that there are some women who believe that on
(15:19):
certain nights they are summonedby the Roman goddess Diana, and
they come to her in the spirit and they ride out with the
goddess on the backs of beasts. They travel through the air huge
distances through the night sky.This sounds like the idea of
(15:43):
flying witches, and it seems to be based upon some sort of
belief of rural people. We really don't have very much
evidence for it, but Burkhart points this out based upon
reproducing a Canon from an earlier period.
But what Episcopy says, which isso interesting, is it says that
(16:06):
these women, in believing that they fly out with Diana at
night, are deceived by the devil.
They may think that they are flying through the air, but this
is actually an illusion planted in their minds.
It doesn't happen. What's more, the Canon goes on
(16:26):
to say that anybody who believesthat this does happen is, in the
language of the Canon, beyond doubt, an infidel.
Obviously, this is meant to be acriticism of the women who think
that they're engaged in night flight, but the idea of women
flying huge distances to worshipthe devil will become an
(16:50):
absolutely central feature of which bully 500 years down the
road. And this is going to be a real
problem for authors like those who wrote the Maleus
Maleficarum, which we'll be talking about in a little while.
Church law says this is impossible, it can't happen.
(17:13):
So it painted a fairly tolerant view of magic here in the early
Middle Ages. It's practical stuff and it
reflects the needs of people at the time to try and exercise
some sort of control over the world in which they live in that
sort of service magic area. But there's a few things that
(17:33):
are not permitted commerce wheredemons are not permitted and the
idea of night flying is just noton.
Do we have any people from the early Middle Ages who are
described as witches? Yes, the first account we've got
of a female witch who seems to have enlisted the devil to work
(17:54):
some sort of magic comes from the early 12th century.
It's in a work attributed to an English monk called William of
Malmesbury. He dies in 1143, and he
describes this story as a portent from hell.
The story concerns a woman who lives in the town of Berkeley.
(18:16):
In English, it's spelled Berkeley, but in English it's
pronounced Berkeley. William of Malmesbury doesn't
date this story, but where it puts it in his chronicle, it
comes just after the death of Pope Gregory the 6th and he dies
in 1048, so it's mid 11th century ish.
(18:37):
He says that he heard this from a reliable source.
This is the story. The woman has two surviving
adult children. One's now a monk, the other
one's a nun. She lives alone.
There's no mention of a husband,any male relative or anything
(18:58):
like that. She's older.
She's probably in her 40s, maybe50s, that sort of age.
And she's clearly a solitary figure.
And she has, of all things, a pet Raven.
We're told in the story that she's accustomed to using demons
(19:21):
to work sorcery, but it isn't really clear what she used to do
with it. The text just says that she used
sorcery to fuel her greed and her lust, but she's very, very
poor. She's alone, and obviously she's
(19:42):
not huntering up piles of wealthor anything like that, and she
thinks she could do a bit betterfor us if she was doing that.
But nevertheless, the story goeson.
The Raven tells her one day thatshe's about to die, so she calls
her kids the monk and the nun, and she admits to them that
(20:02):
she's practiced the demonic artsfor much of her life, but she
hoped that the piety of her two children would maybe benefit her
soul so she could still be saved.
Perhaps what she tells them is, she says when I die, sew my body
into the skin of a deer. Then put that into a stone
(20:25):
coffin. Seal the coffin with lead, bind
it with iron chains. Then she says to the kids,
arrange for a chorus of monks tosing psalms and say masses for
her for 50 days and nights afterwards.
And if demons are not able to take her body away after three
(20:47):
days, then the kids get to bury it.
So the kids do all of this for dear old mum.
Monks sing away and through the 1st 2 nights demons try to break
in and take her body away, but they can't get past all the
chains and the seal and so on. But on the third day, the story
(21:09):
goes, a huge demon smashed his way into the church where she
was, where her body was called to the woman in the tomb,
telling her to get her. The demon breaks the chains and
drags the woman off on a Black Horse covered with iron spikes.
And her wretched cries apparently could be heard for
(21:31):
four miles as they rode away. That's it, That's the story.
There's a couple of important features here that we need to
think about for what comes down the road.
First of all, this woman's a loner.
When the witch hunts pick up, they envision a vast demon.
(21:52):
It's by conspiracy of witches. That's not here.
That's absolutely not here. There's no suggestion also that
she's made a pact with the devilor demon.
She just seems to be using illicit magic.
But she's also not doing anything to harm anybody else.
(22:13):
The only person who's injured byher actions is her.
She's not harming anybody else, she's not trying to injure
people. She's just done some stupid
things and is going to have to pay for it herself.
Yeah. So it's quite a different story
(22:35):
to some of the diagnostic features that we see by the
later 15th and into the 16th century.
And in fact, it's quite possiblethat this anecdote is set up as
sort of a teaching tool. In William's account of it.
This is the sort of thing you shouldn't do.
By this point, we're just beginning to get preachers
(22:58):
wandering around, and they need good stories, right?
You can't just waffle on about this, that, and the other thing.
Otherwise you're going to be hitby every piece of rotting
vegetables around. You need a good story.
This is a good story. This will keep people
interested. You tell them a good story.
And then get into the morality of it.
So they'll take that away. So maybe this is just a
(23:19):
preaching story. We don't know.
That's the story, that's the context, That's all we've got.
But this is, there's a couple ofother stories similar to this in
William of Bombsbreed. But these people are not a major
problem to anybody except themselves.
And so the value of the story isdidactic.
Don't do this, kids. Stay away from this.
(23:41):
It's dangerous. It's a very fascinating story,
but those features that you mentioned raised some questions.
If the Witch of Berkeley was solitary, where do we get the
idea of a sect of witches who are in the with the devil?
Yeah, and this is absolutely crucial.
(24:02):
And about the time that the Witch of Berkeley story is set
down middle of the 12th century,the church is becoming
increasingly concerned with heresy.
There is a Pope in Rome, but thechurch really hasn't had an
effective mechanism for policingbelief until really the 12th
(24:23):
century. In the 12th century, they begin
to get interested in what some ordinary people believe.
And in fact, there are various heresies that begin to spring
up, particularly in the South ofFrance, that seem to be
postulating even the possibilityof a rival church.
This is the Cathar heresy. The Church is becoming
(24:44):
increasingly concerned with heresy, and it's for the first
time beginning to get the mechanisms to be able to deal
with it. The Church develops institutions
to try and deal with heresy. Firstly they try to persuade
heretics, teach them OK, the stuff you're teaching is wrong
and this is the right stuff. But then they become more
(25:08):
concerned about rooting it out. And in the year 1183, the Pope
sets up the Inquisition. At this early stage, the
Inquisition is really comparatively mild.
It requires every Bishop of so aBishop overseas, a diocese is
(25:28):
responsible for everything that's happening in the diocese.
It's requires each Bishop to go and visit all the parishes in
his diocese in which heresies being reported.
He has to do that twice a year, goes into the diocese.
He summons some learned men, some men of integrity and said,
(25:49):
do you know of any heretics here?
And if any heretics are identified, they're handed over
to the secular authorities for punishment.
And if there aren't any, he goeshome.
Every now and again, the Pope might appoint a special
inquisitor, an outsider concerned in particular for
(26:10):
rooting out heresy in one particular region.
And one of the earliest and the most infamous of these special
inquisitors is a man named Conrad of Marburg.
In 1231, Conrad is charged with rooting out heresy in parts of
(26:31):
the Germanic lands. His job is to investigate heresy
and then to act as judge and to sentence the accused.
And he operates with two converted ex heretics who claim
that they have a special gift for identifying heretics.
(26:52):
They said they don't need evidence, they just knew when
heretics were there, and for thenext two years, from 12:31 to
12:33, they had untold numbers of men and women burned at the
stake if they would not admit that they were heretics.
(27:12):
The thing is, it seems that whenConrad encountered these
heretics, he's understanding them in demonic terms, and this
is new and he reports this to the Pope as if this is a demonic
sect. What he describes, the Pope, is
an organized sect of devil worshippers, sort of an anti
(27:36):
church that is separate, set up almost to parody and mock all of
the established rites of Christianity.
And we've got a very detailed description of what he thinks
he's found. He says that when people try to
join this sect, they have to go through an initiation rite.
(28:00):
First of all, they have to kiss a huge toad.
Toads are believed to be poisonous.
At this time. They have to kiss the toad on
the mouth and they have to consummate the kiss with saliva.
Sometimes they have to kiss the rear of the toad.
Then after they they do this. And this is his language.
(28:24):
A pale skinned, emaciated man with dark eyes appears and
approaches the recruit. The two of them kiss.
Kissing is actually absolutely fundamental to the way medieval
society is structured within thefeudal system.
(28:44):
If somebody pledges to serve somebody else, if a vassal
pledges to serve the Lord, there's a whole ritual process
that's involved in that, but it's consummated with a kiss.
So this is an imitation of that.So they have to kiss this pale
skinned, emaciated man and they have to pledge to serve him.
(29:10):
Then there's a great banquet. Then a black cat comes into the
room backwards and with its tailup, and everybody, including the
pale man, has to kiss the cat onthe anus and then they receive
some sort of blessing from the pale man.
(29:33):
Candles are then blown out and according to the letter that
describes Conrad's sect, then begins the filthiest lecturing,
including homosexual incestual sex and women giving themselves
over, it says, to anal sex as well.
And then things get strange. The candles are relit and a
(29:57):
shining man appears. He's described as shining
brighter than the sun, but only from the waist up.
Below the waist he's hairy like a cat.
And the recruit and the shining man exchange tokens.
And again, this is sort of imitates the process whereby A
(30:18):
vassals agrees to serve the Lord.
And then the shining man vanishes.
And then after welcoming the newrecruit, everybody at this
assembly engages in every sort of blasphemy that they can
possibly imagine. They've got some consecrated
Eucharists at this point. And in Catholic theology, right,
(30:40):
this is very new Catholic theology proclaimed in 12/15.
The Eucharist is actually the real, literal body of Christ.
It's not a metaphor, it's not symbolic.
It is the real body of Christ. It's transformed from bread into
the body of Christ through the Mass.
(31:01):
And that doctrine's proclaimed in 12/15, so Conrad is only 1520
years after that becomes a visual doctrine.
Anyway, at this ceremony, they describe all sorts of outrageous
that they perpetrate on the consecrated Eucharist.
When they received the Eucharistin church, they keep it in their
(31:21):
mouth. They don't swallow it, so they
don't actually incorporate the body of Christ into their own
body. Instead, they take it back for
this ritual and they spit it into the latrine.
And then they proclaim that Lucifer was the creator of
everything. So what he thinks he's
(31:41):
discovered or what he says he's discovered actually takes every
blasphemous box that he can possibly imagine.
He tells the Pope this, and the Pope writes back a letter saying
you better deal with this, Conrad.
And that's how we know what Conrad's complaining about is
from the Pope's letter. And the Pope says that back in
(32:05):
the good old days in the Book ofExodus, Moses slaughtered 23,000
idolaters and a single day. We need to have a champion like
that now, somebody that ruthlessto deal with these sorts of
levels of abomination. Obviously, that doesn't happen.
Conrad is murdered just a coupleof weeks after this letter was
(32:28):
sent out, and the people who replace him just quietly let it
all disappear. But Conrad's report is important
because it contains many of the tropes who should go on to
feature in full-fledged witchcraft theory as it develops
in the 15th and to the 16th century.
It's a secret sect that operatesamong us.
(32:51):
If you read between the lines ofConrad's ideas, these people
look like you and me. They go to church, they
participate in the sacrament. They just don't swallow it.
You don't know that. So this could be your neighbors
we're talking about. That's very worrying.
And it's an inversion of Christianity as well.
It's an inversion of Christian rituals.
(33:13):
It's an inversion of social conventions as well.
It's this anti feudalism, this anti relationship between a Lord
and a vassal. And it also seems to involve
this shining man who's probably meant to be the devil.
Second Corinthians 11/14 says that Satan can transform himself
(33:37):
into an Angel of light. Well, maybe that's the shining
man. I mean, the text does not say
that explicitly, but that seems to be a possible interpretation.
Where do things go from there? How do they change in the 15th
century? Yeah, so they begin to change in
the 15th century in some quite significant ways.
(34:00):
We've got reports from a judge named Peter of Byrne.
Now, he's not a churchman, he's a secular judge.
And Peter is operating in the mountainous region around the
city of Bonn in modern Switzerland.
And this is quite important because much of the early
accusations of witchcraft seem to come from the northern side
(34:23):
of the Alps, spanning an area from Lyon in the West across to
pretty much Innsbruck in modern Austria in the east.
So they're coming from places which are more isolated, they're
going to be off the mainstream trade routes.
These are places people don't visit that much anyway.
(34:45):
Peter is Acts is active in that sort of region.
He's not an idiot, he's a judge.So he's he's been formally
trained, he's got a legal education.
A problem with Peter of Bern is that he's left us no records.
What we know of Peter Byrne actually comes second hand from
(35:07):
a theologian called Johannes Nieder, who writes a book called
The Formicarius, which he finishes writing in about 1438.
Formicarius means anthill. It's not actually a witch
hunting text, It's a text about church reform.
But the final bit of it seems todeal with many of these cases
(35:29):
that Peter of Byrne is suggesting.
So we know about Peter through Nida.
And according to Nida, Peter prosecuted one witch who told
him that there were various other witches in the region
who'd recently killed and eaten 13 infants in the region.
(35:49):
She confessed that these witchessecretly kill infants when
they're lying asleep in bed withtheir parents.
And parents think that they've smothered the child, that
they've just rolled over on them.
But actually, in actual fact, witches have killed the kid.
After that, the witches dig up the bodies of the infants once
(36:13):
they've been buried, and then they boil up the corpses until
the bones separate from the flesh.
They remove the bones and then they create some sort of, I
don't know, it's hard to come upwith appropriate language for
this, but stock, some sort of stock from the flesh and the fat
of these infants, and they use this liquid in some of their
(36:36):
ceremonies and in their magic. Nita also says that Peter
arrested a husband and wife teamof witches at one point and he
separated them. He put them in separate cells.
The wife refused to say absolutely anything.
But the husband confessed that he'd been a member of a secret
(36:57):
sect of witches. And he described the initiation
process whereby he had to do homage to a demon.
And after that this male witch drank some of the boiled baby
stock. And when he did, apparently he
knew all of the secrets of witchcraft.
(37:19):
It's really difficult to know what to make of this because of
elsewhere in Nita's text he's describes some more mundane
style of witches. Witches who seems to be just
guilty of practicing service magic.
Or that darker side of service magic, if you can find lost
(37:41):
items, if you can find lost grain or something like that,
you can also probably work up some sort of magic to steal
grain. If you can cause fine weather,
you can cause bad weather. So he seems to have people who
are these sort of witches that he's describing, but also people
who are just doing this nastier sort of fairly ordinary magic,
(38:05):
people who are not part of the sect.
They just do it because they they want to, or they've got the
power to, or they're trying to enrich themselves in some sort
of way. So it's not clear why we've got
2 sorts of witches described in Peter of Byrne, but it's clear
that things are beginning to change with Peter of Byrne.
(38:27):
Peter of Byrne is finding peoplewho seem to be confessing to
more extreme ideas of witchcraft.
What witchcraft law or policy would have he been convicting
them on? There isn't a witchcraft law.
This is assault. Technically the law, secular
(38:50):
law. Peter is a secular judge, so
he's not working through church courts.
But the secular law doesn't makea distinction between me
assaulting somebody with a dagger and me assaulting
somebody through a cult means. It's still assault slightly
more, well, quite a lot more difficult to prove that I
(39:10):
assaulted you through supernatural mates rather than
assaulting you after drinking too much and in a pub fight.
With this being an era before printing, how do ideas spread
from these isolated parts of thefoothills of the Alps?
Yeah, this is a really interesting thing, because the
(39:34):
short answer is we don't know for sure.
But what does happen is that between 1431 and 1439, there is
a large church council in the city of Basel in modern
Switzerland. It's on the north side of the
Alps in that region that we've just been describing where
(39:55):
things are beginning to happen. And Basil is only about 100
kilometres from Bern, so it's about four days ride from the
city of Bern. But what's happening is all of
the major churchmen of the day are coming to the city of Basil
to talk about church reform. And the council has a lot on its
(40:20):
plate. But one of the things which
absolutely was not on that platewas witchcraft.
But what scholars? A thinking happened is that
during the breaks between the sessions, the churchmen is
mingling. If they'd had coffee at this
time, during the coffee breaks, they would have been discussing
(40:41):
the sorts of things that they'rehearing are happening.
And we think that these sort of ideas are circulating amongst
all of these churchmen. And then of course, when they go
home, they're also thinking about these ideas and maybe
looking for them when they startinvestigating problems in those
sessions when they encounter heretics in their regions.
(41:05):
So this embryonic idea of witchcraft seems to have spread
as a result of this church council in the region.
And we've got a text which comesout of this, which has got a
really important early witchcraft document associated
with it. The document's called the Arores
Gazeriorum. Translated doesn't help very
(41:28):
much. The errors of the Ghazari.
We don't know who the Ghazari are.
When people translate it, peoplegenerally translate it as just
heretics. The errors of the heretics.
We've got three different versions of this.
We're still in the era of manuscripts, so things are
handwritten so that we always got variants, different versions
(41:52):
of text because they have to be copied out by hands.
We've got three different versions of them and they seem
to be produced over a 20 year period, but the earliest one
seems to date from about 1436. It's not very long and it's
anonymous, but it describes the beginnings of what is going to
become the witch's Sabbath or the witch's Sabbath.
(42:14):
It calls it the synagogue of Satan this early period, which
is an allusion to Revelations 29, and it looks a lot like what
Conrad of Marburg has described.Many of the features are the
same. Conrad's stuff is coming
probably as a result of interrogations, interrogations
(42:37):
with torture and the threat of torture.
And it seems quite likely that this is the source for the
Aurora's gazeriorum. It seems probably to be based
upon the interrogations of two witches in particular, but
again, there's a whole section about the process by which new
(42:59):
recruits are brought into this sect, and the text is explicit
they're male and female. Witchcraft becomes more gendered
over time, but right now it's male and female.
Talks about the need for an oathof loyalty for the recruit.
They do homage, this time directly to the devil who they
(43:21):
kiss on the posterior. The devil sometimes also appears
in the form of a black cat, sometimes in human form.
There's another big banquet where they based on every sort
of stretch dish included roastedand or boiled infants.
There's another great dance which leads into an orgy, and
(43:45):
it's abominable orgy. It says male partners with male,
female with female, mother with son, father with daughter, every
sudden abomination they can imagine.
And then once the candles are lit again, they prepare all
sorts of potions and powders using the fat from these
children that they've killed andcooked.
(44:06):
And they mix this with the poisons of various unclean
creatures like spiders, toads and lizards.
And with the devil's help, it says these potions help them
cast spells to kill people or animals.
But when rubbed on a stave, theyhelp the novice lie to the
(44:27):
synagogue of Satan whenever they're called, whenever they're
summoned. So this is the first sort of
allusion to the idea of flying witches, witches who can fly
with neither, with the Auroras, Gazeri, Orum.
What we're on the verge of is what scholars call the
(44:47):
cumulative or elaborated conception of witchcraft.
This is the sort of witchcraft which dominates in the later
15th, 16th century. It's very different to the witch
of Berkeley. The witch is not a solitary
she's part of a vast secret antiChristian conspiracy that is
(45:08):
ultimately led by the devil. It's secret.
You don't, you can't identify these people in normal life.
This relationship with the devilcomes in the form of a pact,
which is consummated through either this sort of kissing or
an increasingly later intercourse with the devil.
(45:30):
At certain times of the year, the witches are obliged to
travel through the air to the synagogue, or as it's called
later, the Sabbath. This is the large assembly of
witches, presided over by demonsand sometimes by Satan himself.
And at the Sabbath as well, theyshare all of their latest malice
(45:53):
and all of their sorts of potions and powders and
ointments that they use to work evil deeds.
Thank you so much for joining ustoday.
Do you have any concluding remarks about what we've
discussed so far? And can you preview what's
coming up next? Yes, absolutely.
Thank you. I think we're on the verge of
(46:15):
talking about the great early classic of which once I say
classic, but obviously it's a very important book, but it's
obviously a very problematic book.
So we're on the cusp here of talking about the Maleus
Maleficarum. The Maleus Maleficarum is the
first great witch hunting manual, but the thing which is
(46:35):
so important about it is when itappears, because it appears just
after the coming of printing. As I just discussed, early ideas
of witchcraft seem to have circulated through church when
leaving a church council. So it's individuals who've just
sort of learned about these things through discussions.
(46:55):
But with printing, what you've got is a book which circulates
in hundreds, thousands of copiesacross all of Europe.
And one of the things which we often forget as well is that
Latin is the intellectual language for all of Europe.
It doesn't matter where you are,France, the dramatic lands,
Spain, England, if you've got people who are university
(47:19):
educated, they can read this book.
So these ideas that have formulated in this area around
the Northern Alps spread with the malleus, and the malleus is
associated with the dissemination of this elaborated
conception of witchcraft, which becomes so very important
(47:40):
through the period of the high witch hunts in the second-half
of the 16th and into the 17th. Century, thank you for joining
us on this special double feature Week of Witch Hunt
podcast. You just heard Part 1, but Part
2 of the Special Conversation with Doctor Raiswell is
available right now. Both Part 1 and Part 2 are
(48:01):
available right now wherever youget your podcasts.
So let's go rejoin Professor Raiswell on Part 2.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
The Salem Witch Trials resulted in witchcraft accusations
against more than 150 people andthe executions of 20.
(48:21):
So what went wrong? We explored this and other
facets of the witch hunt in our new podcast The Thing About
Salem, premiering June 1st. The Thing About Salem offers
bite size episodes in both videoand audio formats that you can
enjoy in 15 minutes or less. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
(48:42):
I'm Sarah Jack. Our ancestors experienced the
Salem witch trials. And here's a little taste of
what you can expect from the Thing about Salem.
Possibly Doctor William Griggs decides that the girls, oh,
they're not sick in a natural way.
(49:03):
They're under an evil hand, justlike that one, Sarah.
So what does it mean that they're under an evil hand?
The devil has come to Salem. The devil's in Salem.
Each week, the Thing About Salembrings you information on a
(49:24):
thing from the witch trials. Episodes will stream on YouTube
and all podcast platforms. To get ready, find
usoutaboutsalem.com. Be sure to join us for Episode 1
on June 1st.
Welcome back to Witch Hunt Podcast.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack, we have a
special treat for you this week.Not one, but two new episodes
dropping simultaneously. That's right, today marks the
return of Professor Richard Raiswell of the University of
Prince Edward Island, who previously joined us for a
(00:21):
fascinating Speak of the Devil episode.
He's an expert in medieval lore,bringing years of scholarly
research to our discussion, including his work on the new
book The Rutledge History of theDevil in the Western Tradition.
That's a good looking book. It is.
Don't you love this nice picture?
Here? I do.
(00:44):
For those of you who might have missed it, Speaking of the
devil, what's the episode where we explored Satan as one of
history's most enduring and complex figures throughout
medieval thought? In today's two-part special,
Professor Raiswell takes us deeper into the dark
intersection where demonology meets witch persecution.
(01:04):
What was the critical relationship that developed
between demons and witchcraft, specifically in the 15th
century? A connection that would become
the driving force behind the witch hunts.
If you enjoyed our previous exploration of Devil lore, these
episodes are essential continuedlistening.
Professor Raiswell helps us understand how theological
(01:25):
concepts about Satan evolved into specific accusations and
persecution mechanisms that devastated real communities.
Both Part 1 and Part 2 are available right now wherever you
get your podcasts. So settle in for a fascinating
and chilling exploration of demonic beliefs times 2.
(01:47):
Welcome back to Witch Hunt podcast, Doctor Raceball.
Can you refresh our listeners with a little background on your
expertise and work and tell us what we're going to be talking
about today? Well, thanks very much for
having me back and to tell more about the devil.
Obviously, it's one of my favorite things, but to talk
today about the relationship that develops, in particular in
(02:08):
the 15th century between demonism and witchcraft, the
kind of witchcraft that animate the witch hunts, that's the
focus of this podcast. I'm Richard Reyes.
I'm professor of history at the University of Prince Edward
Island in eastern Canada. I published lots of stuff on
aspects of the history of the devil, in particular in the
(02:30):
Middle Ages and in the early modern period.
Amongst the highlights are a collection of translations which
I did with a colleague, David Winter from Brandon University
in Canada called The Medieval Devil a Reader.
And I've also got coming out a big 600 page Routledge History
(02:50):
of the Devil, which is coming out in May.
And that's with David Winter again and the Michelle Brock
from Washington Lee University in the US.
So what's the connection betweenthe devil and witches?
Yeah, this is a really importantand interesting question.
And I think it goes back to early Christianity and the
(03:13):
process by which Christianity comes to define itself, because
one of the problems Christianityfinds itself in in the early
days is it's in a marketplace ofsupernatural wonder workers.
There are lots of people in the ancient world who offer some
(03:33):
sort of supernatural remedy for things.
All sorts of people offering, well, hurls, they're offering
love magic, they're offering allsorts of things.
Some of the things that you talked about when you talked to
Tabitha Stanmore about service magic.
The ancient world is full of these sorts of people.
And of course, when Jesus shows up, his principal activity is
(03:57):
wonder working. He's performing miracles all
over the place. He's healing people, he's
casting out demons, he brings the dead back to life.
So Christianity finds itself in this sort of strange space where
it's got to sort of define itself against this magical
tradition. So what is it we do which is
(04:17):
different from some of these other people?
In fact, some of the early Christian critics actually think
that Christianity is just another form of magic.
I mean, the classic example of that comes from the book of Acts
where you've got the figure of Simon Magus, Simon the magician
who approaches the apostles and asks to buy the secrets of the
(04:41):
magic that they're producing of the biblical story is that no,
this is not on. It doesn't work that way.
But Simon's point, if you think about it from Simon's
perspective, hey, these Christians are doing some very
powerful magic, how do I do the same sort of thing?
Well, I will behave just like they did elsewhere and I will
(05:02):
purchase these secrets. So Christians need quite early
on to differentiate themselves from magic.
But them, their wonder working isn't something that you buy in
the marketplace. It's proof of Christ's divinity
and it's proof of the power of their God.
(05:24):
The problem is Christians can't just say this other stuff is
rubbish. These people like Simon Magus
are frauds. That's just not on.
They can't say that because of astrange story.
What one of several, but this isthe classic one in the book of
Exodus. Exodus 7 and 8, where which
(05:46):
describes what can only really be characterized as a wonder
working contest between Moses and his brother on one side and
Pharaoh and his magicians on theother.
I mean, the story goes on for a bit, but the key elements of
that, that's Pharaoh's magiciansturn the Staffs that they're
(06:08):
holding into snakes. And in response to that, Moses
and his brother do the same thing.
Exactly the same thing. I mean, in the story, the snakes
that Moses and his brother conjure up go around and eat the
ones Pharaoh's magicians have conjured up.
(06:28):
And that's meant to signify thatthe magic of Moses is more
powerful than the magic of Pharaoh.
But what the story makes clear is that this magic works, right?
Nobody's saying that this is a fraud, that Pharaoh's magicians
have somehow sort of done some slight of hand shake and pulled
(06:50):
some snakes out and then managedto hide their Staffs.
Now it actually happened. It actually worked.
Something was going on there. So when early Christians turn to
this story, they've got to sort of account for it.
And what the argument comes to be is that Pharaoh's magicians,
(07:13):
what they did was they conjured up demons.
And as we talked about last timeround when we were chatting,
demons are natural creatures, but they've got certain powers
which are beyond people. One of them is they can move
incredibly quickly. So the argument is that when
(07:36):
Pharaoh's magicians did whateverhocus pocus they were doing,
demons showed up, grabbed their Staffs, split it off to, I don't
know, the the Sahara desert or something, found some snakes,
brought them back and put them in the hands of Pharaoh's
magicians. Perfectly natural process.
(07:56):
Bit strange, but a natural process which explained how
Pharaoh's magicians were able todo it.
But what this means is that quite early on in the Christian
tradition, there is a deep suspicion of the other wonder
working and they demonize it. They quite literally demonize
(08:17):
it. They say it's only possible
through commerce at some level with demons.
So this right from the earliest Christian tradition, because of
this need to differentiate themselves from other forms of
magic, there is this built in tension and hostility to this
sort of service magic tradition that you've talked about.
(08:40):
And the flip side of that is theonly safe and legitimate access
to supernatural power that people have is through Christian
rituals, Christian apparatus, Christian holy men.
So Christianity establishes, tries to give itself a monopoly
on wonder working and in the process to differentiate
(09:02):
themselves from these other traditions.
We're not them. Our magic, our wonder working is
safe and it's good and it's pure.
The other stuff is demonic and dangerous, so don't use that.
And can you tell us about service magic and attempting to
manipulate or influencing the natural world?
(09:25):
Yeah, so despite the Christian anxiety that I just described,
in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th century, 5th century, the Roman Empire is
rumbling at in the 4th, 5th century, secular power is
rolling back and instead the Germanic tribes begin to take
over. And this is a much more
(09:47):
illiterate period. Centralized authority just isn't
possible the way that it'd been in the third, second centuries
before. So what's happening in the
secular side is also happening in the ecclesiastical side.
It's very difficult for the church to enforce anything.
I mean, it can't. I mean, the Pope can sort of say
(10:08):
don't do magic, and who hears that?
I mean that there just isn't theinfrastructure to move these
ideas around very effectively orconsistently.
As the Germanic tribes replace Roman authority, they bring with
them their own sort of forms of service magic, and they combine
(10:31):
it with aspects of Christian ritual, Christian traditions.
So they still need to heal children, heal the sick, they
need to perform loved magic, they need to be able to predict
the future, whether the crops are going to be any good, all of
these sorts of things that you need to do with service magic.
But what they also do is they bring aspects of Christian
(10:55):
tradition into it. So if you're gathering herbs for
a particular potion to heal somebody, maybe do it under the
moonlight, for instance, to try and harness the power of the
moon or under some favoured to astrological sign.
(11:16):
But while you're mixing it up, why not say some prayers with
that as well? It's as if they're trying to
bring in every form of supernatural power that they've
got access to you. So you've got the power of the
herds, you've got the astrological power, but why not
bring in some Christian power aswell?
And then what you're making is going to be a super powerful
potion. We get complaints from Christian
(11:40):
authorities about this sort of stuff every now and again.
There's a fellow in the 9th century called Aguabard of Lyon
who complaints that people in the country sty still believe
that they can cause hailstorms or thunderstorms.
And we've got a guy in the 11th century writes a law code.
Guy's name's Burkhart of firms, and he lists all sorts of
(12:03):
popular superstitions that he says stay away from these.
These are ridiculous. Don't put your kid on top of an
oven or on your roof. If you're looking to try and
cure some sort of illness. As an historian, you look at
that and say, really, that's what people are doing.
Where does that come from? But it's probably just some sort
of tradition, and you don't knowif it's just A1 off that he's
(12:27):
heard about or if people are doing it all over the place.
You've got no context as an historian for that sort of
thing. In general, when churchmen run
across this sort of stuff, they prescribe just some sort of
penance for it. Don't do this sort of stuff.
It's not good, but do some penance.
(12:48):
No one's tortured. No one's executed.
The Church's point is simply to make clear that these beliefs
are wrong and potentially dangerous.
It is possible to get into trouble when using magic if
you're explicitly calling on demons to do something.
(13:09):
Obviously that's not all, and there are people who try to use
their occult knowledge or rituals to injure and to harm
people. Because obviously if you can
make somebody fall in love with you or two other people fall in
love with each other, you can cause them to hate each other as
well. It's the old adage.
(13:30):
If you know how to unwitch, you also know how to witch, right?
If you think of your doctor, your doctor gives you these
magical little pills to cure your illness, but you also know
that the doctor knows how to kill you as well, right?
You just trust that that's not happening, so the other side of
the knowledge is always possibleand dangerous.
(13:50):
And obviously that's not all. It's an evil deed, or in the
language of the time in Latin it's maleficium, which literally
means an evil deed. We have people trying to heal
children, trying to get people to fall in love with each other,
and even trying to harm their neighbors.
(14:12):
But do we have classic witchy features like flying yet?
Ah, no. And that's what's so
interesting. In the course of all of these
condemnations of magical practices that Burkhardt of
Verms mentions, he includes a copy of a Canon from a church
(14:33):
council. That's a ruling from a church
council, and this is called episcopy.
The term in Latin just means bishops.
The canons get their name by virtue of the first couple of
words in their title. So this one's addressed to
bishops. Hey, bishops do this.
So it's just known as Episcopy. Burkhart, when he's reproducing
(14:56):
this, thinks that Episcopy comesfrom the 4th century.
Modern scholars tend to think that it's probably 9th or 10th
century, but there's no reason to think that Burkhart would
have known that. So he's not being deceptive or
anything, he's just doing the best he can.
Episcopy says that there are some women who believe that on
(15:19):
certain nights they are summonedby the Roman goddess Diana, and
they come to her in the spirit and they ride out with the
goddess on the backs of beasts. They travel through the air huge
distances through the night sky.This sounds like the idea of
(15:43):
flying witches, and it seems to be based upon some sort of
belief of rural people. We really don't have very much
evidence for it, but Burkhart points this out based upon
reproducing a Canon from an earlier period.
But what Episcopy says, which isso interesting, is it says that
(16:06):
these women, in believing that they fly out with Diana at
night, are deceived by the devil.
They may think that they are flying through the air, but this
is actually an illusion planted in their minds.
It doesn't happen. What's more, the Canon goes on
(16:26):
to say that anybody who believesthat this does happen is, in the
language of the Canon, beyond doubt, an infidel.
Obviously, this is meant to be acriticism of the women who think
that they're engaged in night flight, but the idea of women
flying huge distances to worshipthe devil will become an
(16:50):
absolutely central feature of which bully 500 years down the
road. And this is going to be a real
problem for authors like those who wrote the Maleus
Maleficarum, which we'll be talking about in a little while.
Church law says this is impossible, it can't happen.
(17:13):
So it painted a fairly tolerant view of magic here in the early
Middle Ages. It's practical stuff and it
reflects the needs of people at the time to try and exercise
some sort of control over the world in which they live in that
sort of service magic area. But there's a few things that
(17:33):
are not permitted commerce wheredemons are not permitted and the
idea of night flying is just noton.
Do we have any people from the early Middle Ages who are
described as witches? Yes, the first account we've got
of a female witch who seems to have enlisted the devil to work
(17:54):
some sort of magic comes from the early 12th century.
It's in a work attributed to an English monk called William of
Malmesbury. He dies in 1143, and he
describes this story as a portent from hell.
The story concerns a woman who lives in the town of Berkeley.
(18:16):
In English, it's spelled Berkeley, but in English it's
pronounced Berkeley. William of Malmesbury doesn't
date this story, but where it puts it in his chronicle, it
comes just after the death of Pope Gregory the 6th and he dies
in 1048, so it's mid 11th century ish.
(18:37):
He says that he heard this from a reliable source.
This is the story. The woman has two surviving
adult children. One's now a monk, the other
one's a nun. She lives alone.
There's no mention of a husband,any male relative or anything
(18:58):
like that. She's older.
She's probably in her 40s, maybe50s, that sort of age.
And she's clearly a solitary figure.
And she has, of all things, a pet Raven.
We're told in the story that she's accustomed to using demons
(19:21):
to work sorcery, but it isn't really clear what she used to do
with it. The text just says that she used
sorcery to fuel her greed and her lust, but she's very, very
poor. She's alone, and obviously she's
(19:42):
not huntering up piles of wealthor anything like that, and she
thinks she could do a bit betterfor us if she was doing that.
But nevertheless, the story goeson.
The Raven tells her one day thatshe's about to die, so she calls
her kids the monk and the nun, and she admits to them that
(20:02):
she's practiced the demonic artsfor much of her life, but she
hoped that the piety of her two children would maybe benefit her
soul so she could still be saved.
Perhaps what she tells them is, she says when I die, sew my body
into the skin of a deer. Then put that into a stone
(20:25):
coffin. Seal the coffin with lead, bind
it with iron chains. Then she says to the kids,
arrange for a chorus of monks tosing psalms and say masses for
her for 50 days and nights afterwards.
And if demons are not able to take her body away after three
(20:47):
days, then the kids get to bury it.
So the kids do all of this for dear old mum.
Monks sing away and through the 1st 2 nights demons try to break
in and take her body away, but they can't get past all the
chains and the seal and so on. But on the third day, the story
(21:09):
goes, a huge demon smashed his way into the church where she
was, where her body was called to the woman in the tomb,
telling her to get her. The demon breaks the chains and
drags the woman off on a Black Horse covered with iron spikes.
And her wretched cries apparently could be heard for
(21:31):
four miles as they rode away. That's it, That's the story.
There's a couple of important features here that we need to
think about for what comes down the road.
First of all, this woman's a loner.
When the witch hunts pick up, they envision a vast demon.
(21:52):
It's by conspiracy of witches. That's not here.
That's absolutely not here. There's no suggestion also that
she's made a pact with the devilor demon.
She just seems to be using illicit magic.
But she's also not doing anything to harm anybody else.
(22:13):
The only person who's injured byher actions is her.
She's not harming anybody else, she's not trying to injure
people. She's just done some stupid
things and is going to have to pay for it herself.
Yeah. So it's quite a different story
(22:35):
to some of the diagnostic features that we see by the
later 15th and into the 16th century.
And in fact, it's quite possiblethat this anecdote is set up as
sort of a teaching tool. In William's account of it.
This is the sort of thing you shouldn't do.
By this point, we're just beginning to get preachers
(22:58):
wandering around, and they need good stories, right?
You can't just waffle on about this, that, and the other thing.
Otherwise you're going to be hitby every piece of rotting
vegetables around. You need a good story.
This is a good story. This will keep people
interested. You tell them a good story.
And then get into the morality of it.
So they'll take that away. So maybe this is just a
(23:19):
preaching story. We don't know.
That's the story, that's the context, That's all we've got.
But this is, there's a couple ofother stories similar to this in
William of Bombsbreed. But these people are not a major
problem to anybody except themselves.
And so the value of the story isdidactic.
Don't do this, kids. Stay away from this.
(23:41):
It's dangerous. It's a very fascinating story,
but those features that you mentioned raised some questions.
If the Witch of Berkeley was solitary, where do we get the
idea of a sect of witches who are in the with the devil?
Yeah, and this is absolutely crucial.
(24:02):
And about the time that the Witch of Berkeley story is set
down middle of the 12th century,the church is becoming
increasingly concerned with heresy.
There is a Pope in Rome, but thechurch really hasn't had an
effective mechanism for policingbelief until really the 12th
(24:23):
century. In the 12th century, they begin
to get interested in what some ordinary people believe.
And in fact, there are various heresies that begin to spring
up, particularly in the South ofFrance, that seem to be
postulating even the possibilityof a rival church.
This is the Cathar heresy. The Church is becoming
(24:44):
increasingly concerned with heresy, and it's for the first
time beginning to get the mechanisms to be able to deal
with it. The Church develops institutions
to try and deal with heresy. Firstly they try to persuade
heretics, teach them OK, the stuff you're teaching is wrong
and this is the right stuff. But then they become more
(25:08):
concerned about rooting it out. And in the year 1183, the Pope
sets up the Inquisition. At this early stage, the
Inquisition is really comparatively mild.
It requires every Bishop of so aBishop overseas, a diocese is
(25:28):
responsible for everything that's happening in the diocese.
It's requires each Bishop to go and visit all the parishes in
his diocese in which heresies being reported.
He has to do that twice a year, goes into the diocese.
He summons some learned men, some men of integrity and said,
(25:49):
do you know of any heretics here?
And if any heretics are identified, they're handed over
to the secular authorities for punishment.
And if there aren't any, he goeshome.
Every now and again, the Pope might appoint a special
inquisitor, an outsider concerned in particular for
(26:10):
rooting out heresy in one particular region.
And one of the earliest and the most infamous of these special
inquisitors is a man named Conrad of Marburg.
In 1231, Conrad is charged with rooting out heresy in parts of
(26:31):
the Germanic lands. His job is to investigate heresy
and then to act as judge and to sentence the accused.
And he operates with two converted ex heretics who claim
that they have a special gift for identifying heretics.
(26:52):
They said they don't need evidence, they just knew when
heretics were there, and for thenext two years, from 12:31 to
12:33, they had untold numbers of men and women burned at the
stake if they would not admit that they were heretics.
(27:12):
The thing is, it seems that whenConrad encountered these
heretics, he's understanding them in demonic terms, and this
is new and he reports this to the Pope as if this is a demonic
sect. What he describes, the Pope, is
an organized sect of devil worshippers, sort of an anti
(27:36):
church that is separate, set up almost to parody and mock all of
the established rites of Christianity.
And we've got a very detailed description of what he thinks
he's found. He says that when people try to
join this sect, they have to go through an initiation rite.
(28:00):
First of all, they have to kiss a huge toad.
Toads are believed to be poisonous.
At this time. They have to kiss the toad on
the mouth and they have to consummate the kiss with saliva.
Sometimes they have to kiss the rear of the toad.
Then after they they do this. And this is his language.
(28:24):
A pale skinned, emaciated man with dark eyes appears and
approaches the recruit. The two of them kiss.
Kissing is actually absolutely fundamental to the way medieval
society is structured within thefeudal system.
(28:44):
If somebody pledges to serve somebody else, if a vassal
pledges to serve the Lord, there's a whole ritual process
that's involved in that, but it's consummated with a kiss.
So this is an imitation of that.So they have to kiss this pale
skinned, emaciated man and they have to pledge to serve him.
(29:10):
Then there's a great banquet. Then a black cat comes into the
room backwards and with its tailup, and everybody, including the
pale man, has to kiss the cat onthe anus and then they receive
some sort of blessing from the pale man.
(29:33):
Candles are then blown out and according to the letter that
describes Conrad's sect, then begins the filthiest lecturing,
including homosexual incestual sex and women giving themselves
over, it says, to anal sex as well.
And then things get strange. The candles are relit and a
(29:57):
shining man appears. He's described as shining
brighter than the sun, but only from the waist up.
Below the waist he's hairy like a cat.
And the recruit and the shining man exchange tokens.
And again, this is sort of imitates the process whereby A
(30:18):
vassals agrees to serve the Lord.
And then the shining man vanishes.
And then after welcoming the newrecruit, everybody at this
assembly engages in every sort of blasphemy that they can
possibly imagine. They've got some consecrated
Eucharists at this point. And in Catholic theology, right,
(30:40):
this is very new Catholic theology proclaimed in 12/15.
The Eucharist is actually the real, literal body of Christ.
It's not a metaphor, it's not symbolic.
It is the real body of Christ. It's transformed from bread into
the body of Christ through the Mass.
(31:01):
And that doctrine's proclaimed in 12/15, so Conrad is only 1520
years after that becomes a visual doctrine.
Anyway, at this ceremony, they describe all sorts of outrageous
that they perpetrate on the consecrated Eucharist.
When they received the Eucharistin church, they keep it in their
(31:21):
mouth. They don't swallow it, so they
don't actually incorporate the body of Christ into their own
body. Instead, they take it back for
this ritual and they spit it into the latrine.
And then they proclaim that Lucifer was the creator of
everything. So what he thinks he's
(31:41):
discovered or what he says he's discovered actually takes every
blasphemous box that he can possibly imagine.
He tells the Pope this, and the Pope writes back a letter saying
you better deal with this, Conrad.
And that's how we know what Conrad's complaining about is
from the Pope's letter. And the Pope says that back in
(32:05):
the good old days in the Book ofExodus, Moses slaughtered 23,000
idolaters and a single day. We need to have a champion like
that now, somebody that ruthlessto deal with these sorts of
levels of abomination. Obviously, that doesn't happen.
Conrad is murdered just a coupleof weeks after this letter was
(32:28):
sent out, and the people who replace him just quietly let it
all disappear. But Conrad's report is important
because it contains many of the tropes who should go on to
feature in full-fledged witchcraft theory as it develops
in the 15th and to the 16th century.
It's a secret sect that operatesamong us.
(32:51):
If you read between the lines ofConrad's ideas, these people
look like you and me. They go to church, they
participate in the sacrament. They just don't swallow it.
You don't know that. So this could be your neighbors
we're talking about. That's very worrying.
And it's an inversion of Christianity as well.
It's an inversion of Christian rituals.
(33:13):
It's an inversion of social conventions as well.
It's this anti feudalism, this anti relationship between a Lord
and a vassal. And it also seems to involve
this shining man who's probably meant to be the devil.
Second Corinthians 11/14 says that Satan can transform himself
(33:37):
into an Angel of light. Well, maybe that's the shining
man. I mean, the text does not say
that explicitly, but that seems to be a possible interpretation.
Where do things go from there? How do they change in the 15th
century? Yeah, so they begin to change in
the 15th century in some quite significant ways.
(34:00):
We've got reports from a judge named Peter of Byrne.
Now, he's not a churchman, he's a secular judge.
And Peter is operating in the mountainous region around the
city of Bonn in modern Switzerland.
And this is quite important because much of the early
accusations of witchcraft seem to come from the northern side
(34:23):
of the Alps, spanning an area from Lyon in the West across to
pretty much Innsbruck in modern Austria in the east.
So they're coming from places which are more isolated, they're
going to be off the mainstream trade routes.
These are places people don't visit that much anyway.
(34:45):
Peter is Acts is active in that sort of region.
He's not an idiot, he's a judge.So he's he's been formally
trained, he's got a legal education.
A problem with Peter of Bern is that he's left us no records.
What we know of Peter Byrne actually comes second hand from
(35:07):
a theologian called Johannes Nieder, who writes a book called
The Formicarius, which he finishes writing in about 1438.
Formicarius means anthill. It's not actually a witch
hunting text, It's a text about church reform.
But the final bit of it seems todeal with many of these cases
(35:29):
that Peter of Byrne is suggesting.
So we know about Peter through Nida.
And according to Nida, Peter prosecuted one witch who told
him that there were various other witches in the region
who'd recently killed and eaten 13 infants in the region.
(35:49):
She confessed that these witchessecretly kill infants when
they're lying asleep in bed withtheir parents.
And parents think that they've smothered the child, that
they've just rolled over on them.
But actually, in actual fact, witches have killed the kid.
After that, the witches dig up the bodies of the infants once
(36:13):
they've been buried, and then they boil up the corpses until
the bones separate from the flesh.
They remove the bones and then they create some sort of, I
don't know, it's hard to come upwith appropriate language for
this, but stock, some sort of stock from the flesh and the fat
of these infants, and they use this liquid in some of their
(36:36):
ceremonies and in their magic. Nita also says that Peter
arrested a husband and wife teamof witches at one point and he
separated them. He put them in separate cells.
The wife refused to say absolutely anything.
But the husband confessed that he'd been a member of a secret
(36:57):
sect of witches. And he described the initiation
process whereby he had to do homage to a demon.
And after that this male witch drank some of the boiled baby
stock. And when he did, apparently he
knew all of the secrets of witchcraft.
(37:19):
It's really difficult to know what to make of this because of
elsewhere in Nita's text he's describes some more mundane
style of witches. Witches who seems to be just
guilty of practicing service magic.
Or that darker side of service magic, if you can find lost
(37:41):
items, if you can find lost grain or something like that,
you can also probably work up some sort of magic to steal
grain. If you can cause fine weather,
you can cause bad weather. So he seems to have people who
are these sort of witches that he's describing, but also people
who are just doing this nastier sort of fairly ordinary magic,
(38:05):
people who are not part of the sect.
They just do it because they they want to, or they've got the
power to, or they're trying to enrich themselves in some sort
of way. So it's not clear why we've got
2 sorts of witches described in Peter of Byrne, but it's clear
that things are beginning to change with Peter of Byrne.
(38:27):
Peter of Byrne is finding peoplewho seem to be confessing to
more extreme ideas of witchcraft.
What witchcraft law or policy would have he been convicting
them on? There isn't a witchcraft law.
This is assault. Technically the law, secular
(38:50):
law. Peter is a secular judge, so
he's not working through church courts.
But the secular law doesn't makea distinction between me
assaulting somebody with a dagger and me assaulting
somebody through a cult means. It's still assault slightly
more, well, quite a lot more difficult to prove that I
(39:10):
assaulted you through supernatural mates rather than
assaulting you after drinking too much and in a pub fight.
With this being an era before printing, how do ideas spread
from these isolated parts of thefoothills of the Alps?
Yeah, this is a really interesting thing, because the
(39:34):
short answer is we don't know for sure.
But what does happen is that between 1431 and 1439, there is
a large church council in the city of Basel in modern
Switzerland. It's on the north side of the
Alps in that region that we've just been describing where
(39:55):
things are beginning to happen. And Basil is only about 100
kilometres from Bern, so it's about four days ride from the
city of Bern. But what's happening is all of
the major churchmen of the day are coming to the city of Basil
to talk about church reform. And the council has a lot on its
(40:20):
plate. But one of the things which
absolutely was not on that platewas witchcraft.
But what scholars? A thinking happened is that
during the breaks between the sessions, the churchmen is
mingling. If they'd had coffee at this
time, during the coffee breaks, they would have been discussing
(40:41):
the sorts of things that they'rehearing are happening.
And we think that these sort of ideas are circulating amongst
all of these churchmen. And then of course, when they go
home, they're also thinking about these ideas and maybe
looking for them when they startinvestigating problems in those
sessions when they encounter heretics in their regions.
(41:05):
So this embryonic idea of witchcraft seems to have spread
as a result of this church council in the region.
And we've got a text which comesout of this, which has got a
really important early witchcraft document associated
with it. The document's called the Arores
Gazeriorum. Translated doesn't help very
(41:28):
much. The errors of the Ghazari.
We don't know who the Ghazari are.
When people translate it, peoplegenerally translate it as just
heretics. The errors of the heretics.
We've got three different versions of this.
We're still in the era of manuscripts, so things are
handwritten so that we always got variants, different versions
(41:52):
of text because they have to be copied out by hands.
We've got three different versions of them and they seem
to be produced over a 20 year period, but the earliest one
seems to date from about 1436. It's not very long and it's
anonymous, but it describes the beginnings of what is going to
become the witch's Sabbath or the witch's Sabbath.
(42:14):
It calls it the synagogue of Satan this early period, which
is an allusion to Revelations 29, and it looks a lot like what
Conrad of Marburg has described.Many of the features are the
same. Conrad's stuff is coming
probably as a result of interrogations, interrogations
(42:37):
with torture and the threat of torture.
And it seems quite likely that this is the source for the
Aurora's gazeriorum. It seems probably to be based
upon the interrogations of two witches in particular, but
again, there's a whole section about the process by which new
(42:59):
recruits are brought into this sect, and the text is explicit
they're male and female. Witchcraft becomes more gendered
over time, but right now it's male and female.
Talks about the need for an oathof loyalty for the recruit.
They do homage, this time directly to the devil who they
(43:21):
kiss on the posterior. The devil sometimes also appears
in the form of a black cat, sometimes in human form.
There's another big banquet where they based on every sort
of stretch dish included roastedand or boiled infants.
There's another great dance which leads into an orgy, and
(43:45):
it's abominable orgy. It says male partners with male,
female with female, mother with son, father with daughter, every
sudden abomination they can imagine.
And then once the candles are lit again, they prepare all
sorts of potions and powders using the fat from these
children that they've killed andcooked.
(44:06):
And they mix this with the poisons of various unclean
creatures like spiders, toads and lizards.
And with the devil's help, it says these potions help them
cast spells to kill people or animals.
But when rubbed on a stave, theyhelp the novice lie to the
(44:27):
synagogue of Satan whenever they're called, whenever they're
summoned. So this is the first sort of
allusion to the idea of flying witches, witches who can fly
with neither, with the Auroras, Gazeri, Orum.
What we're on the verge of is what scholars call the
(44:47):
cumulative or elaborated conception of witchcraft.
This is the sort of witchcraft which dominates in the later
15th, 16th century. It's very different to the witch
of Berkeley. The witch is not a solitary
she's part of a vast secret antiChristian conspiracy that is
(45:08):
ultimately led by the devil. It's secret.
You don't, you can't identify these people in normal life.
This relationship with the devilcomes in the form of a pact,
which is consummated through either this sort of kissing or
an increasingly later intercourse with the devil.
(45:30):
At certain times of the year, the witches are obliged to
travel through the air to the synagogue, or as it's called
later, the Sabbath. This is the large assembly of
witches, presided over by demonsand sometimes by Satan himself.
And at the Sabbath as well, theyshare all of their latest malice
(45:53):
and all of their sorts of potions and powders and
ointments that they use to work evil deeds.
Thank you so much for joining ustoday.
Do you have any concluding remarks about what we've
discussed so far? And can you preview what's
coming up next? Yes, absolutely.
Thank you. I think we're on the verge of
(46:15):
talking about the great early classic of which once I say
classic, but obviously it's a very important book, but it's
obviously a very problematic book.
So we're on the cusp here of talking about the Maleus
Maleficarum. The Maleus Maleficarum is the
first great witch hunting manual, but the thing which is
(46:35):
so important about it is when itappears, because it appears just
after the coming of printing. As I just discussed, early ideas
of witchcraft seem to have circulated through church when
leaving a church council. So it's individuals who've just
sort of learned about these things through discussions.
(46:55):
But with printing, what you've got is a book which circulates
in hundreds, thousands of copiesacross all of Europe.
And one of the things which we often forget as well is that
Latin is the intellectual language for all of Europe.
It doesn't matter where you are,France, the dramatic lands,
Spain, England, if you've got people who are university
(47:19):
educated, they can read this book.
So these ideas that have formulated in this area around
the Northern Alps spread with the malleus, and the malleus is
associated with the dissemination of this elaborated
conception of witchcraft, which becomes so very important
(47:40):
through the period of the high witch hunts in the second-half
of the 16th and into the 17th. Century, thank you for joining
us on this special double feature Week of Witch Hunt
podcast. You just heard Part 1, but Part
2 of the Special Conversation with Doctor Raiswell is
available right now. Both Part 1 and Part 2 are
(48:01):
available right now wherever youget your podcasts.
So let's go rejoin Professor Raiswell on Part 2.
Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
The Salem Witch Trials resulted in witchcraft accusations
against more than 150 people andthe executions of 20.
(48:21):
So what went wrong? We explored this and other
facets of the witch hunt in our new podcast The Thing About
Salem, premiering June 1st. The Thing About Salem offers
bite size episodes in both videoand audio formats that you can
enjoy in 15 minutes or less. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
(48:42):
I'm Sarah Jack. Our ancestors experienced the
Salem witch trials. And here's a little taste of
what you can expect from the Thing about Salem.
Possibly Doctor William Griggs decides that the girls, oh,
they're not sick in a natural way.
(49:03):
They're under an evil hand, justlike that one, Sarah.
So what does it mean that they're under an evil hand?
The devil has come to Salem. The devil's in Salem.
Each week, the Thing About Salembrings you information on a
(49:24):
thing from the witch trials. Episodes will stream on YouTube
and all podcast platforms. To get ready, find
usoutaboutsalem.com. Be sure to join us for Episode 1
on June 1st.
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