Witchcraft and magic in Europe Vol. 6, The twentieth century / Willem de Blécourt, Ronald Hutton, Jean La Fontaine PDF
Preview Witchcraft and magic in Europe Vol. 6, The twentieth century / Willem de Blécourt, Ronald Hutton, Jean La Fontaine
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe Volume 6. The Twentieth Century This page intentionally left blank Witchcraft and Magic in Europe The Twentieth Century WILLEM DE BLÉCOURT RONALD HUTTON JEAN LA FONTAINE THE ATHLONE PRESS LONDON First published in 1999 by THE ATHLONE PRESS 1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG © The Contributors 1999 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 485 89006 2 hb 0 485 89106 6 pb All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Typeset by Ensystems, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd Contents Introduction vii Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark PART 1: MODERN PAGAN WITCHCRAFT 1 Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol Section 1: The Background to Pagan Witchcraft 3 Secret Societies and Ritual Magic 3 Popular Witchcraft and Magic 13 The Thought-World of Modern Paganism 17 The Goddess and God of Modern Paganism 20 Romantic Folklore 26 The Myth of Pagan Witchcraft 31 Forerunners 36 Section 2: The History of Pagan Witchcraft 43 Gerald Gardner 43 The Gardnerians 52 Other Traditions 55 American Feminist Witchcraft 60 A Coming of Age 65 The Nature of Modern Pagan Witchcraft 71 PART 2: SATANISM AND SATANIC MYTHOLOGY 81 Jean La Fontaine, London School of Economics Section 1: The History of the Idea of Satan and Satanism 83 The Servants of Satan 85 Modern Ideas of Satanism 86 Satanism and the Occult 88 Section 2: Satanism and Pseudo-Satanist Groups 94 The Church of Satan 96 Organization 99 The Temple of Set 101 Organization 103 The Process-Church of the Final Judgement 105 vi Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century Other Satanist Groups 107 Numbers of Satanists 107 Section 3: Heathenism/Odinism 110 m Section 4: Satanic Abuse Mythology 115 The Social Context of the Myth 116 A History of Accusations of Satanism 119 The Components of Satanic Abuse Mythology 124 Sources of Allegations 126 The Spread of the Satanic Abuse Mythology 129 Sources of Allegations 132 Adult survivors 132 Children's cases 135 Confessions 136 PART 3: THE WITCH, HER VICTIM, THE UNWITCHER AND THE RESEARCHER: THE CONTINUED EXISTENCE OF TRADITIONAL WITCHCRAFT 141 Willem de Blécourt, Huizinga Institute, Amsterdam/University of Warwick Traces of Bewitchment 143 Studies of Witchcraft 146 Types of Witchcraft 150 The Researcher's Position 154 Journalists and Folklorists 158 Sliedrecht, 1926 162 Folklore Indexes 165 Legend Repertoires 168 Gendered Legends 172 Witchcraft in Court 176 Sarzbiittel, 1954 180 The Power of the Unwitcher 183 Active Bewitchments 188 The Evil Eye 192 Mayenne, 1970 197 Spatial Dimensions 202 Cultures of Witchcraft 205 Witchcraft Conflicts 208 The End of Witchcraft? 212 Future Research 216 Bibliography 220 Index 236 Introduction Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark This volume brings the History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe up to the present day by surveying developments during the last century of the millennium. These display again the same two features that seem to have characterised witchcraft and magic, more than most cultural phenomena, down the ages — a capacity to adapt to and reflect contemporary needs and aspirations and yet, at the same time, an identity based on what are perceived to be highly traditional forms. It is as though they have survived for so long by being simultaneously responsive to the present and tied to the past; again and again, they are re-invented to provide answers to immediate problems, yet always with the reassurance — or perhaps threat — of a supposed continuity. Of course, these things are not necessarily the same to practitioners or believers and to observers (particularly historians). The answers may seem hollow and the continuity spurious to those who behave and believe differently. This differential in the way witchcraft and magic are viewed has been another constant element in both the history and the historiography of our subject and it is also illustrated in this volume. Witchcraft and magic, then, are marked both by contemporaneity and by timelessness. The prognostications and prophylactics, the recipes and remedies, that have made up much of everyday magic have existed for so long because they have continued to seem efficacious in situations of practical need, but they have owed their transmission — and something of their status — to the traditionalisms of oral communication and to the re- cycling of texts that seem hardly to have changed. The magic of the magus has never ceased to appeal for its solutions to problems of power and knowledge and yet its literature, too, has been remarkably canonical and static. The early modern witch was the focus of fears that were largely the product of early modern conditions, while her identity — at least for intellectuals — was consciously fashioned from biblical law and history, classical poetry and legend, and medieval theology, as if there was no such thing as anachronism. Even today, the evil witch remains highly relevant to children's literature and the popular media even though she consists of archaisms. The three studies that follow each testify to this abiding ambiguity and suggest ways to account for it, and even to resolve it. Nobody could viii Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century suppose that the phenomena they describe are anything but embedded in twentieth-century life and thought. Modern pagan witchcraft, the subject of the first essay, must be seen in relation to many of the conventional features of contemporary religion and religious ritual, of notions of the self and of human abilities, and of attitudes to the world and its workings. Ronald Hutton explains that among its inspirations have been some of the most powerful impulses in modern culture — 'nostalgia for the natural and rural world, feminism, sexual liberation, dissatisfaction with established religious institutions and social norms, and a desire for greater individual self-expression and self-fulfilment/ (p. 59) It flourishes, therefore, because of its obvious relevance to contemporary lives and contemporary debates. The self-styled satanist groups examined by Jean La Fontaine in the second essay have also emerged as products of late second-millennium culture, even if in violent reaction against what they see as its repressive and authoritarian morality and social codes. Nor would the modern myth of satanism and of the satanic abuse of children — a very different thing altogether, as she decisively shows - be possible without the emergence of twentieth-century religious fundamentalism and, more precisely, public anxieties about parenting. It is true that this sense of contemporary relevance is weakest in the witchcraft cases discussed by Willem de Blecourt, who concludes our volume and our series. He concedes that one of the features of these episodes, confined as they largely are to remote rural areas, is their increasing marginality. The traces of the accompanying discourse, he suggests, may 'represent its last vestiges/ (p. 215) Even so, those who attacked the witch in the port of Naples in 1921, or who were consulting the witch-doctor Waldemar Eberling in the German village of Sarzbiittel before and during the 1950s, or who reluctantly confided their fears about bewitchment to the anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada in the Bocage around 1970 were all acting and speaking out of a conviction that witchcraft had a place in their lives and their social world. It is precisely this sense of having a place 'today*, argues de Blecourt, that is threatened or denied whenever twentieth-century witchcraft is described as archaic or anachronistic. And yet it is precisely the archaic that all these manifestations of witchcraft and magic in our century seem to exhibit. They do present themselves — or at least are presented — as timeless, or at least immemorial, not time bound. The clearest case, of course, is that of paganism, with its explicit debt to the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, its celebration of pagan deities and goddesses and the values associated with them, and, above all, its commitment to the view that the witches prosecuted during the early modern centuries were surviving practitioners of an 'old' religion, of which modern Wicca too is a further benign form. Everyone interested in the history of witchcraft knows of Margaret Murray's influence in this Introduction ix regard, particularly since the 1940s - although few, if any, will have realised that she considered herself a witch and even practised cursing! Here described as the 'godmother of Wicca' for her approving foreword to Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today (1954), her studies did more than anything else to create the impression of an age-old witch religion, continuous from pagan times and marked by veneration of a nature-god and by fertility rites. This was the religion whose twentieth-century discovery was announced in Gardner's book. With satanism the situation is more complex. Unlike the modern pagans, none of the satanist groups that have actually existed in recent years has ever claimed continuity with demon-worshippers from the past. For these modern groups Satan certainly represents freedom from the constraining moralities of Christianity and the State, thus symbolizing rebelliousness, iconoclasm and hedonism. In this sense, therefore, it is true that satanism is still defined in opposition to Christianity. But, otherwise, its few devotees practice magic, not deity worship, and its only common philosophy seems to have been a form of social Darwinism. Instead, the element of timelessness here lies in the extraordinary persistence into the modern world of a mythology which attributes to twentieth-century satanism a kind of diabolism it has never exhibited. As previous volumes in this series have shown, Western Christianity rapidly developed a demonology in which human allies of Satan were thought to threaten the faithful by their secret organisation, their ritual celebration of demonism, and their magical powers. Of most relevance to the history of medieval heresy and early modern witchcraft, this demonology has nevertheless continued, even down to our own day, to generate myths which virtually replicate those of earlier centuries. Thus it is that in the twentieth century, organised satanism has again assumed a mythological significance — particu- larly, it seems, for Protestant fundamentalists and 'New Christians' — that bears little relation to either the actual practices, or even the very existence, of real satanists. Not only the latter, but pagans and Wiccans, astrologers and spiritualists, some forms of rock music, and even the Duke of Edinburgh (for his presidency of the World Wild Life Fund) have been attributed with aims similar to those of the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century sabbat goers. Like the accusers of heretics and witches in the past, the modern mythologisers have assumed both a continuous reality in the 'crimes' of devil-worshippers and also a uniform guilt. The consequences for attitudes and, indeed, policies towards child abuse have been particularly profound and disturbing. Under the influence of this same lingering mythology - sometimes in the guise almost of a folk belief - the abduction and sexual abuse of children, because it is among the most horrendous and inhuman of late twentieth-century crimes, has been deemed to be carried out by ritual Satanists. Jean La Fontaine records
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