The Malleus Maleficarum by James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer
(Dover Publications, 1971)
A Black Book masquerading as a holy one. It was a witch-hunter's manual and it was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, few of whom were actually witches.
The 16th Century
If we were to think that the Reformation or the Renaissance enlightened people and did away with superstition, we would be wrong. There seemed to be an increase of belief in witches having familiars and dancing with the devil, demonology, necromancy and so forth. Nor was only the Catholic Church guilty of persecuting people believed to be witches and warlocks; the Protestant Church was as bad. By the 17th century, witch-hunting was at least as popular as it had been in the 14th century. Nobody is sure how many “witches” were executed during this time. Numbers range from 40,000, which seems to be accurate, to 10 million, which is certainly too high. During this time, no one was safe. To be a female was to run the risk of being accused a witch by everyone from other jealous females to males angry at being rejected as suitors. Old women were even more prone to be accused because her appearance harked back to the old pagan fear of "the Hag." But girls as young as eight years were accused and executed. Those who defended the accused were also accused in turn. Those who did not participate in the burnings of these unfortunates ran the risk of being accused. Even infants were accused.
The Malleus Maleficarum a.k.a. The Witch Hammer (c. 1486), by two German Catholic inquisitors, James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, became the law book of the day. In its pages were methods of identifying witches as well as the most effective methods of disposing of them. Witches were accused of everything from crop failures to the souring of milk. Montague Summers states that
The Malleus Maleficarum “lay on the bench of every judge, on the desk of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority. It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant legislature.” Such should demonstrate just how seriously witchcraft was regarded at this time.
Animals were accused of being familiars (a type of animal helper with supernormal intelligence) of the witch and were burned. Often, it was customary to burn a black cat along with a witch. When black cats ran low, any cat was game. As a result, the cat population of Europe dipped very low and many feel that this allowed diseases as the Black Death to spread unchecked because the rat population ballooned out of control with no cats to hunt them. But again, the Black Death was assumed to be the work of Satan and outbreaks were often attributed to innocent old women or pretty young ladies and they went to the stake, the ducking stool or the gallows, one and all, without mercy. And with them went some poor, hapless animal.
While stories of witches making pacts with Satan and suckling their familiars, usually a cat or dog, with a special teat on their bodies were lurid with accounts of debauchery and sex, the witch-hunting tactics were the very embodiment of perversion.
Indeed the Catholic Church seemed to be enforcing its moral code on the populace via the threat of the charge of witchcraft. Using the Hammer a their guide, if a man kept a mistress, the mistress was a witch. If a woman inflamed a man's passions, whether she wanted him or not, the woman was a witch. Her bewitching powers could be activated by feeding a man her dung (and here we see that the authors of the Hammer were familiar wit Black Books as the
Picatrix). If a woman was a midwife, she was a witch (i.e. she places herself in a position to procure children to sacrifice to Satan). If woman healed with herbs, she was a witch. And so on.
Although the witch hunts were aimed primarily at people who were not witches and made victims simply of other Christians, especially the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this should not be mistaken for saying there were no real witches. There were and the witch-finders and inquisitors did occasionally interrogate, torture and execute actual witches.
The influence of the Church did not extend into the rural areas of Europe in the sixteenth century. Even where it did, it was simply mixed with the pagan peasant religions that predominated in the area for centuries. The peasant religions were essentially agrarian cults.
Italy, for example, had an agrarian cult known as “benandanti” (lit. “good walkers”). Those who claimed to be of the benandanti told the inquisitors that they fought for Christ against witches that worshiped the devil. The two groups met at night as battling armies who rode on the backs of hares and cats. The armies challenged one another four times a year and then named a location for the battle. On the appointed night, always on Thursdays or the “Ember Days,” the armies met in the spirit, each carrying its own standard—red (or yellow) for the witches and white for the benandanti. They would then battle over crops and livestock. The evil ones fought using sorghum stalks as weapons while the benandanti fought using fennel stalks (or viburnum branches) in a competition that was essentially jousting. If the benandanti won the battle, that crop or livestock would be plentiful for that season. Those who claimed to be benandanti told their interrogators that they could not reveal too much or they would be beaten by the others.
Further investigation revealed that the men and women who were benandanti were called to the ranks at age twenty by the beating of a drum. The drummer, the captain, was another peasant man who was placed over them and assumed to be appointed by god. The benandanti was released from his or her obligation of nocturnal battle at the age of forty although the chosen could stay on if he or she wanted to. One man, Moduco, added that those who are chosen as benandanti are born with a “caul” wrapped about them. A benandanti who does not wear the caul cannot participate in the nocturnal battles. The caul appears to be the placenta which is saved by the mother, who has it baptized along with the child and has nine masses said over it, and given to the child at the proper time. The placenta in many of the old rural pre-Christian religions is believed to possess magical powers and protect soldiers from blows. This ties in with the benandanti being soldiers who were under the command of a captain and march to battle to a drumbeat.
What we can gather about the benandanti then is the following: The benandanti were a type of secret military order among the peasantry where battling was done in the spirit and appears to be generational and matriarchal. Although the inquisitors would turn the benandanti into a diabolic cult and their night battles into witches’ sabbats, the earliest accounts of the battles by those who claimed to be benandanti contain no references to any appearance of a devil or Satan present at the battles nor any type of worship performed. There were references to the playing of games, dancing and a battle over crops and livestock that consisted of a form of jousting.
We find many similarities between benandanti and witches even though the former were always careful to distinguish themselves from the latter. Both witches and benandanti claimed to attend “games” in the spirit leaving the physical body behind (although some witches claimed to attend their conventicles in the flesh either on occasion or as a matter of habit). To an observer, the body would appear to be dead. Both claimed that if the spirit were gone too long, it would not be able to re-enter the body. Both claimed the spirit or soul traveled about on an animal or in animal form, the most common being the mouse (although cats are quite popular among witches while benandanti often claimed to arrive at the battlefields riding on cats). If the soul failed to re-enter the body, it would be forced to wander about in the animal form. Witches claimed to anoint or grease themselves prior to falling into their deathlike trances while benandanti claimed only to fall into the trances but omitting mention of anointing and some outright denying it; others, however, did claim to anoint. These similarities were enough to get the benandanti labeled as witches by the Inquisition. However, at no point does the benandanti night battle take on any resemblance to a sabbat.
Clearly, this was a different peasant religion than witchery and one that apparently saw itself opposed to witchery despite the superficial resemblances.
But what was the purpose of the benandanti, the spiritual army? Obviously, their purpose was, as a fertility cult, to protect the harvest. Their claim of participating in the night battles four nights out of the year on the Ember Days shows that they performed one battle at the turn of each season. The army they battled was that of famine, flood, hail, wind, erosion, blizzard, drought and anything else that might threaten their survival. There were also many instances in European history where warring kingdoms and nations sent armies into the other’s territory to attack farmers’ crops and raze them as an attempt to force famine on the foe. These spiritual night battles may also have arisen from memories of such wars in hopes of preventing future ones.
The benandanti inquisition took place in the 1580s, so we can see that well into the Christian era Europe was far from being united under Christendom that history would have us believe was the case since the times of Charlemagne. The benandanti, the true witches, the Cathars, the Druids, the Hermetic Cabalists and other groups demonstrated that Europe was a many-varied patchwork of spiritual systems and folk religions that persisted despite all the Church’s efforts to get rid of these “heresies” and monopolize Europe under a single Christian banner.
This should demonstrate how far the mighty had fallen. The Christian Church had perverted the meaning of Satan. The goatish Pan-like image was turned into an image of an evil being. In reality, Pan was the same god that the Christian Church claimed to worship. Pan was created from an early time in human history before humanity had learned its own power and potential. In this very early stage of human consciousness, animals were used to represent the powers of the elements and nature which held sway over hapless humanity. A storm god might be imaged as a raging bull rather than a big, fearsome man wielding a big stone axe because humanity had not yet advanced far enough to make axes. This god was impersonal but could be temporarily sated with the proper propitiation. As time wore on, the animal started to become anthropomorphized. He went eventually from a horned man-animal to a man wearing the skin and antlers of a stag to a man wearing a horned helmet and so on. Satan was simply a nature deity. But this deity was now in competition with the Christian Church and so its image was debased and maligned.
Likewise, the words “witch” and “wizard” became synonymous with evil. The roots of both words actually deal with knowledge and wisdom. The wizard is the wise one. The witch has wits, that is, knowledge. If either ever cavorted with Satan the reason would only be because, as nature-worshipers, they would obviously hold the nature god in high esteem and seek communion with this presence whose powers rule over the earth and all life. The Christian Church used its own Gnostic roots (which it vigorously denies) to first disparage matter as evil (except Gnostics believed matter to be biologically evil while the Church said matter was morally evil) and then said that since Satan is the god of the world of matter, he too is evil. Therefore, anyone who worships or seeks communion with this god is evil. In reality, the Christian god and Satan are the same god conceived in different stages of humanity’s conscious development.
Fortunately, not all of Europe was so oppressed.