In this article from 1922, author Herbert Thurston provides a scathing rebuttal of Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology – in large part against her dubious use of sources; her use of dubious sources; her claims that confessions of witchcraft made in absence of torture were proof of the existence of genuine pagan religion; and her positing that amongst those killed during the European witch trials were those who willingly went to their death in service to their god, á la Christian martyrs, and not victims who were tortured into false confession.
Murray – a multi-hyphenate scholar who was the first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom – was a proponent of a witch-cult theory which suggested in-part that the accusations made during European witch-trials were based on an extant, secretive, and ancient pagan religion.
Born in 1856, Thurston was an English Jesuit and scholar who was particularly prolific in the areas of liturgical, literary, historical and spiritual matters. During his lifetime, he was was also regarded as an expert on spiritualism.
Herbert Thurston, ‘Witchcraft’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 11, No. 41 (Mar., 1922), 97-110. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30093110
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What is the truth about witchcraft? A lady of advanced views, learned in Coptic and professing to speak in the name of the science of anthropology, has lately published at the Clarendon Press some very astonishing conclusions on the subject of witches. Although she is prudently vague as to what she does precisely accept as reliable testimony in this matter, she repudiates with emphasis the idea that the so-called confessions of the accused are all unworthy of credence. She affirms that there were people of both sexes, commonly known as “witches” who formed a class apart from the community at large.
She declares that they bound themselves to their chief, whom they regarded as devil or god, by some kind of pact; that they renounced Christianity and went through a formal ceremony of initiation; that they were organized locally into circles or “covens”; that they held regular meetings called “sabbaths”, at which hideous obscenities were practised, with feasting and dancing, as well as ritual observances which parodied the Mass; that at the instigation of their leaders they deliberately set themselves to work mischief – not stopping short of bodily injury or death – upon neighbours whom they considered objectionable; that they practised sacrificial rites, sometimes by shedding their own blood, sometimes by the immolation of animals or children; that they kept “familiars”, both for purposes of divination and also to render service to the witch herself, these familiars being believed to be spirits or devils which had been transformed into animals – cats, dogs, birds, mice, toads, and other such small deer; finally, that the witches often gloried in their dependence upon the object of their worship, and that they went rejoicing to their death, under the belief that they were his substitutes in some hazily conceived drama of divine self-immolation.
Those who are familiar with Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough will not fail to perceive here the echo of ideas which that work was the first to popularize, and in fact Miss Murray in the opening pages of her book propounds the theory that what she calls the “witch-cult” was simply the survival of a prehistoric form of religion which a thousand years of Christianity had not been able to eradicate. According to her theory the witches who were the victims of the Hexenwahn were the representatives, often through heredity, of certain primitive beliefs of paganism. They served another god, different from and, as they supposed, more powerful than the God of the Christians. They were content that in their confessions this deity should be identified with the devil or Satan, for many of his attributes were evil, licentious and cruel. Miss Murray gives to the whole complex of beliefs and practices which she deduces from her study of the witch trials the name of “the Dianic cult”.
Though I find myself fundamentally opposed to her chief conclusions and entirely distrustful of the very loose process of reasoning by which she elaborates them from the data before her, still I am not prepared to say that no colour of justification at all can be found for the line of argument she adopts. It is possible and even likely that some vestiges of primitive folk beliefs should survive among the class of persons, generally very ignorant and often isolated, because malicious and unpopular, who most readily fell under suspicion. The so-called “Canon Episcopi” of the ninth century which is preserved to us in the “Ecclesiastical Discipline” of Regino of Prum, provides a notable example of such survivals of paganism. It recounts how:
Certain abandoned women, turning aside to follow Satan, being seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that in the dead of night they ride upon certain beasts along with the pagan goddess Diana and a countless horde of women, and that in these silent hours they fly over vast tracts of country and obey her as their mistress, while on other nights they are summoned to pay her homage.
The “countless horde of women” here spoken of, as we learn from another passage, were not understood to be real women but only “a crowd of demons transformed into the likeness of women”; but, as the Canon proceeds to point out, the worst mischief of these delusions is that a multitude of other people are misled by such tales and begin to think that the pagans are right in believing that there may be some rival divinity outside the one true God (aliquid divinitatis aut numinis extra unum Deum esse). For this reason priests are admonished “earnestly to instruct the people that these things are absolutely untrue and that such imaginings are planted in the minds of misbelieving folk not by a divine spirit, but by the spirit of evil”. It is plain also that, amongst the other superstitious pagan beliefs which were current at this period must be included the idea that it was possible for human beings to be transformed into animals; for the Canon concludes by declaring that “whoever believes that anything can be made, or any creature changed to a higher or lower nature, or be transformed into another shape or appearance, save only by the Creator Himself, who made all things and by Whom all things were made, such a one beyond doubt errs against the Faith”.
But while we must expect to find isolated fragments of paganism, such as a belief in the aerial flights of the goddess Diana or in lycanthropy and other theriomorphic transformations, embedded in the witch-lore of this and other much later periods, I fail to find in Miss Murray’s pages any justification at all for the theory that the superstitions which evoked such horrible excesses of cruelty, on the part of Protestants and Catholics alike, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were a recrudescence in an organised form and on a vast scale of a prehistoric cult anterior to Christianity.
To begin with, I cannot for one moment share that lady’s belief in the trustworthiness of what is, practically speaking, the only available evidence and is certainly the only evidence which she quotes, viz., the confessions of the witches themselves. Miss Murray would have us suppose that many of these avowals were not extracted by torture She says:
In most of the English and many of the Scotch trials legal torture was not applied; and it was only in the seventeenth century that pricking for the mark, starvation and prevention of sleep were used. Even then there were many voluntary confessions given by those who, like the early Christian martyr, rushed headlong on their fate, determined to die for their faith and their god.
One would like to have more information about these last cases, but though it would seem an important point in the whole train of her argument, Miss Murray, beyond this general remark, tells us, practically speaking, nothing of the circumstances under which the confessions she quotes were obtained. They are all shuffled together to illustrate the particular points she is concerned with at the moment, and identical extracts of many lines from the same confessions are sometimes printed two or three times over within a few pages of each other. Our author seems to assume that her readers must have very short memories.
The one “martyr” about whom the book before us supplies any details is John Fian, executed in 1591 for plotting the murder of King James VI of Scotland by witchcraft. Fian, under torture, made a confession; then finding apparently that his confession would not save him, he made his escape from prison, but was recaptured. After this he retracted his confession, and no torments which could be devised were able to draw from him any renewal of his former admissions. That he was a brave man is plain, but this is hardly a case which could be quoted in proof of the trustworthiness of the confessions made in the witch-trials. Father Frederick Spee, the heroic Jesuit of whom Father Duhr has given us so attractive an account in his Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, leaves a somewhat different impression of the value of confessions such as those which Miss Murray quotes so freely. In his famous work, Cautio Criminalis, Spee speaks as follows:
But in further proof that they understand not, I refer to their usual mode and manner of speaking, when they say that of the accused some had confessed to the sin of witchcraft without being subjected to the torture. For the like have I heard more than once with my own ears, and this not only from judges and commissaries, but also from ministers of religion, and all these have I heard declare that such and such a one had freely and voluntarily acknowledged his sin and therefore must be guilty thereof.
Is it not indeed a, matter of wonder that men should make so evil a use of the gift of speech? For when I questioned them still further how and in what manner it had happened that their voluntary confessions were made, they acknowledged to me that the said individuals were indeed tortured, but only with the hollow or toothed leg screws (Beinschrauben) on the shin bones, whereby on that tender part the flesh and the bone were crushed together as it were into one mass, so that the blood spurts out, and many hold that not the strongest man can withstand the same; and yet this is said to be a confession voluntarily made and without torture…
Or let us take another example, the official records of which have only been published in quite recent years. In 1657 Jeanette Huart, of Sugny, in the Ardennes, an elderly woman, who was the more exposed to suspicion because her mother and aunt had previously both been burnt as witches, was accused of witchcraft and brought to trial. When she was first subjected to the usual interrogatories, she absolutely denied all the evil and malicious practices of which she stood arraigned. It was held, however, that, owing to her antecedents and associates, there was vehement suspicion of her guilt, and she was accordingly tortured. In the agony of her sufferings the poor woman admitted everything which had been alleged against her. She had denied her baptism, she had made a pact with a devil who was named “Souffoque,” she had attended the Sabbath dances – etc., etc.
Then, in the official record of the process, it is stated that “she ratified the heads and declarations set out above purely of her own free will (de sa pure et franche volonté), without the least threat of torture”, and she was in due course hanged and immemediately afterwards burnt. Who can for a moment doubt that if she had refused to ratify the confession, thus extorted from her, she would at once have been subjected to torments still more extreme than those already inflicted until she had learned by experience what the phrase de sa pure et franche volonté really amounted to? She was a wise woman to make a virtue of necessity.
…It is interesting to learn from section 7 of the interrogatory still preserved to us that the parish priest had spoken out in defence of the accused. A question was put to Jeannette Huart in the following form:
Who has informed her of what the Curé of Sugny said last Sunday in the church in favour of the prisoners, she having told her gaolers that she knew of it by divine revelation?
Answer: Someone told her that the Curé had spoken strongly in their behalf, but she forgets whom she learned it from
(…)
Of really authentic records of our witch trials we possess practically nothing which gives the proceedings in any detail. Every one knows, of course, that it is the proud boast of the common law of England that it never recognised torture as legal. Still that little detail did not prevent the hideous cruelties of Topcliffe and other priest-hunters in the reign of Elizabeth; and the mere fact that there is no explicit mention of the rack in such reports as we possess of certain witch trials proves nothing.
Speaking of these sorcery cases Dr. J. Williams says: “Confessions, too, appear to have been often extorted by actual torture, and torture of an unusual nature, as the devil was supposed to protect his votaries from the effects of ordinary torture.” Miss Murray makes considerable use of certain unpublished trials found in the Guernsey greffe, but she does not mention that, as we learn from another source, the confessions in witchcraft cases in the Channel Islands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were frequently obtained by torture…Even more damaging to the credibility of the witch confessions than the fact that they were for the most part made under torture, or under threat of torture, is the nature of the communications themselves. Miss Murray employs, of course, a certain euhemerism in their interpretation. She rationalises their more glaringly preternatural features. When these unfortunate women declare that they met the devil and signed a pact with him, our author is satisfied that the meeting really took place but that the supposed devil was an ordinary man who played the part.
Indeed she implies, if she does not explicitly affirm, that in many cases the witches themselves were quite well aware that he was a man, that they even knew his name and where he lived, but that they believed that the divinity whom they worshipped was incarnate in him. The lord of the particular coven was in fact their god, and they paid him homage with all the incredibly filthy rites which Miss Murray, it would almost seem, goes out of her way to emphasize. When this god or devil is stated in the depositions to have appeared in the form of a goat, or a bull, or a stag, or a dog, or a cat, these descriptions, we are told, need cause no sort of difficulty. It was simply a man dressed to play the part…
(…)
Miss Murray entirely ignores the other alternative, viz., that the evidence points even more strongly to the fact that the whole description was a crazy figment, sometimes developed by the leading questions of the examiners, sometimes suggested by the fantastic and traditional stories that were everywhere current – and especially in those districts where the witch epidemic had taken firm hold – regarding the devil’s appearance and behaviour, sometimes deliberately invented with that morbid desire of the hysterical to startle or astonish…Take, for instance, the riding through the air on beasts or broomsticks. Miss Murray declares that the number of witches who claim to have done this is relatively few. They may be relatively few in her pages, but there are plenty of such stories in the German witch trials and in other similar sources.
Take, for example, the Guernsey witches Collette du Mont, Marie Massy and Isabel Becquet. They were all tortured after conviction to obtain information regarding their accomplices. Under these circumstances they each of them described how the devil appeared to them, sometimes in the form of a cat, sometimes of a dog, sometimes of a hare; further, how they each had anointed themselves, when he bade them do so, with flying-ointment…Similarly in cases cited by Miss Murray we learn how Françoise Secretain, on her own confession, admitted that “she had gone to the Sabbath ever so many times, and that she went upon a white stick which she put between her legs”. Claire Goenon confessed that she had travelled to the meeting of witches “by means of a stick greased with ointment”. Julian Cox, in 1664, declared that “one evening she walked out about a mile from her own house, and there came riding towards her three persons upon broom-staves, borne up about a yard and a half from the ground”.
…One docs not know how Miss Murray proposes to rationalise those accounts, but she apparently thinks that the matter is quite easy. She admits that the flying on a broomstick through the window and up the chimney “is usually considered the ultimate proof of the absurdity and incredibility of the whole system.” For my part I should prefer to say that it is first of all a proof of the entire untrustworthiness of the testimony given by the parties concerned. Miss Murray, however, seems satisfied that the flying on broomsticks “can be accounted for when the form of early mound dwellings is taken into consideration, and when it is remembered that among savage tribes there are often taboos connected with the door, the two-faced god (Janus or Dianus) being essentially a deity of the door”.
This, I must confess, seems to me the loosest sort of thinking I can remember ever to have come across, not even excepting the logic of Sir James Frazer. No doubt the anthropological data mentioned may help to explain the presence of the idea of flying up the chimney in any person’s mind. If he wants to get out, and must not go through the door, and there is a hole in the roof, his thought will naturally turn to the practicability of going up like a sky rocket. But if he afterwards reports that he actually did fly through the roof, he still remains an unveracious person and an absolutely untrustworthy witness, though we may be able to explain to ourselves how it happened that his romancing took the particular form it did.
But once we declare that the witches in their confessions stated things to be facts merely because the idea of such things was in their minds, where are we to stop? Miss Murray wants her readers to accept as realities the appearances of the witch-god (a man) in animal form, the assembling of men and women in remote places to perform all the hideous rites of the sabbath, the black Mass, and all the other horrors.
But why is it not sufficient to believe that these ideas, being part of the devil lore of remote ages, were already in the minds of the hysterical and mentally unbalanced women who formed the great bulk of the victims of the witch mania, and that in the confusion between dream and fact which is characteristic of such cases, they partly, sometimes wholly, persuaded themselves that the incidents they confessed to had really occurred. Miss Murray’s idea of a human witch-god dressing himself up in the most fantastic disguises, with animals’ heads and skins, in order to persuade some poor elderly and probably ill-favoured woman to become his tool or to gratify his passions appears incredibly extravagant when we bring it to the test of the actual depositions, even as they are given in scrappy extracts in her own pages.
How was it that the man who impersonated the devil was never caught, but only his poor victims? How was it that he was able in those days of most difficult locomotion to travel to remote country places, carrying with him a whole trunk-full of theatrical properties such as Miss Murray’s theory inevitably requires; for often the devil in a few minutes changed from a cat into a hare or into a bull or into a horse?…There is no end to the questions which suggest themselves the moment one begins to treat the impersonation theory as a practical proposition and to try to reconcile it with the facts.
When we calmly review the data of this intricate problem of witchcraft and witch persecution the only sane conclusion seems to be that nine-tenths, perhaps ninety nine hundredths, of the trouble was due to the morbid and hysterical mental conditions engendered among a number of superstitious and very imperfectly educated people by an atmosphere of suspicion, terror and mystery. No doubt there were here and there persons of intelligence like Gilles de Rais, for example, who believed in these things, and who for mercenary or evil ends did deliberately seek to put themselves in communication with the spirit of all evil, and who, having become desperate, stopped short at no kind of crime, blasphemy, or sacrilege. But the immense majority had probably been guilty of little more than a curious or sometimes malicious dabbling in things occult and dangerous.
…As Father Duhr has lately shown in his Geschichte der Jesuiten, the mania of witch-hunting invaded every order and class, so that even the colleges of the Society were not exempt from it and their quite young pupils were in some cases gravely suspected…another distinguished Cardinal, James de Vitry, who held similar views as to the delusions generated by a belief in witchcraft, preached a sermon on the sin of superstition, which he enlivened with the following “example”:
I have heard of a certain woman who declared that together with sundry other dames she used to ride at night upon strange steeds and thus in a single hour traversed vast tracts of country. The fact was that there were demons who made a sport of her in her sleep and who showed her these wonders. Now it happened that on a certain day this woman being in the church said to her parish priest: “Reverend sir, this past night I rendered you a great service and I delivered you from grievous trouble; for those dames with whom I am wont to travel at night came into your room, and if I had not deterred them and pleaded in your behalf, they would have done you great mischief”.
To whom the priest replied: “My room door was closed and locked; how were you able to get in?” Then the old woman answered: “Reverend sir, neither door nor lock can detain us, or hinder us from free ingress and egress”. Then said the priest: “I should like to try if what you say is true, in order that I may render you a proper recompense for the service you have done me”. Thereupon, locking securely the door of the church, and taking the stick which served as the handle of the processional cross, he set to work to belabour her with all his might. And when the old woman cried out and begged for mercy, the priest said to her: “Leave the church and make your own way out, if you can, since neither lock nor door can detain you”. And so he chastised the old woman and delivered her from the superstition which had deceived her. I tell you, therefore, that no trust should ever be placed in vain and diabolical illusions or in any sort of incantations.
…This was the spirit which seems to have prevailed everywhere in the Church until the Dualism of the Waldenses with its demoniacal practices, probably exaggerated, awoke an unhealthy suspicion in their over-zealous political foes. The virus germinated in an atmosphere of religious strife. Those countries in which, like Italy and Spain, the predominance of Catholic teaching was stable and unchallenged, enjoyed throughout a comparative immunity from the horrors of the witch mania.
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