Witchcraft, Psychopathology, and the Faces of Johann Weyer

Witchcraft, Psychopathology, and the Faces of Johann Weyer

D. A. Begelman, Ph.D.*

Several psychiatric historians (Zilboorg, 1935; Zilboorg & Henry, 1941; Alexander & Selesnick, 1966; Kolb, 1973; Davison & Kneale, 1978) have indicated that the care of souls before the ascendancy of modern medicine and during the medieval and early modern periods was principally under the spell of demonology. This was the belief system that interpreted classes of earthly events to be the effect of occult sources or diabolical agency (Flint, 1991). The viewpoint may be in error. Traditions of naturalistic medicine endured intact since the earliest days of Greek and Arab innovation. Moreover, the naturalistic tradition was acknowledged and respected by medieval and early modern clerics who themselves underscored the importance of ruling out natural causation before declaring occult influence (Bassoe, 1944; Rosen, 1968; Kroll, 1973; Clarke, 1975; Neugeberger, 1979; Kemp & Williams, 1987).

The relative importance of each of the competing schema was a shifting affair across time. Which one came to prevail in explaining events depended upon the interplay of many variables. Yet some historians contend that explanation became particularized as diabolism when it came to specific conditions. For example, Estes (1983) contends that the failure of Galenic medical categories to cover unusual conditions, or what came to be viewed as “witch diseases” enlarged the compass of demonological explanation. Estes’ hypothesis reverses the traditional understanding of the role of Renaissance medical science in offsetting theories of diabolical agency. He believes the former enabled, not decreased, witch-hunting:

  Yet the increasing attention that the medical profession was paying to certain psychological states, linked with the inability of medical theory to expand or change fast enough to provide adequate explanations for all of the new facts that were emerging, meant that the individual physician would certainly encounter many ailments whose symptomatology was so unusual or irregular that he could not easily fit them into a known disease category and, consequently, for which he could not offer an intelligible remedy. What was he to do and how was he to proceed in such a situation? Fernal argued, and most physicians for the next century followed him in this as in so many other things, that such diseases had an unnatural or supernatural cause, and were probably the result of the intervention of the Devil (Estes, 1983, p. 272).

 Estes’ formulation demarcates “irregular” conditions ill-fitted to older categories of medicine as the springboard for accusations of witchcraft.  Despite this, the foundational basis for many, if not most, accusations of witchcraft were the causal connections perceived between a suspect and a quite ordinary blight (e. g., crop failure, unwanted and heavy rainfall or hail storms, low cow yield, etc.) quite independent of any unusual “disease.” Even when it came to human disabilities, the fault was not inevitably laid at the doorstep of demonic forces. For example, both Regino of Prűm and Honorius III in 1220 referred to marriages dissolved by impotence that were not a result of sorcery, and Gregory IX, in his Decretal De Frigidis et Maleficiatis et Impotentia regarded impotence as due to natural causes (Lea, 1957, p.163). Yet impotence cast through ligature was often a routine accusation against witches. In the bull of Innocent VIII,  Summis desiderantes affectibus of 1484, a document that helped unleash the witch-hunts across Europe, blights the pontiff considered possible effects of bewitchment were stillborn babies and cattle, crop failures, pains and certain diseases, impotence, and infertility, all of which could also be regarded as natural blights, depending upon circumstance.

“Ordinary blight” refers to happenstances that were considered to be just a disagreeable aspect of life—unless they were, for situational reasons, attributed to the magical influence of a servant of Satan who had it in for the victim. Without the perceived causal connection between misfortune and malefactor, the disease or blight was shorn of demonological import, and, consequently, the possibility of an accusatory mind-set.

Since those misfortunes regarded as the effects of witch spells were in other contexts attributed to nature or chance, demonologists were selective in diagnosing occult causation. A sudden rainstorm was a normal enough occurrence to be considered a natural event. Yet it could also be attributed to a magical spell when coinciding with suspicions about a neighbor. In these attributions, the entire social context often mattered more than the intrinsic nature of the blight. There were, of course, a minority of irregularities like demon possession that resisted classification as natural occurrence. In such cases a supernaturalistic explanatory bias or one involving maleficia tended to prevail.

Witchcraft in the Colonies 

Many of us may harbor a skewed picture of the American witch-craze, believing that events in Salem Village, Massachusetts in 1692, exemplify the era. Actually, the first execution in the colonies was the Connecticut hanging of Alyce Young in 1647 (Drake, 1968). The events of Salem Village were in important ways unrepresentative of the colonies generally, and of Massachusetts in particular. When we take a closer look at the controversies over witchcraft as they developed in their own time, there was a far from uniform pattern.

As an instance of a 1692 Connecticut Puritan community with a more skeptical bent about witchcraft than its brethren in Salem Village, Massachusetts, Godbeer (2005) reviews the trials that sparked the allegations of a teenager prone to visions, fits, and trances, Katherine Branch. The seventeen year-old had accused such neighbors as Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough of casting spells on her. The reaction of members of a Court of Oyer and Terminer convened on June twenty second, as well as segments of the community in Stamford, Connecticut, was to harbor nagging doubts about the honesty of the young accuser. The entire saga was characterized by an experimental approach to witchcraft—that is, as experimental as a terrified community could get after it felt its younger children were endangered through sorcery. Citizens continually tested the veracity of the allegations, as well as the integrity of spectral evidence: that involving spiritual visitations by the accused.

The Stamford example was not unique. The distortion that most, if not all, accused witches were eventually executed does violence to the actual record, both in America and abroad. Even during the most ferocious European witch panics, the percentage of convictions out of the total number of accusations and subsequent trials for witchcraft averaged only around fifty per cent (Midelfort, 1972; Levack, 1987; Katz, 1992). In Salem Village, 162 persons were accused of witchcraft. Of these, 76 were tried, but only 30 convicted (Levack, 1987, p. 162). Deliberations of many juries across the Continent and in America considering cases against alleged witchcraft involved sifting carefully through the evidence for the crimen exceptum. This was not the uncomplicated affair we might imagine it to have been. The approach was often judicially painstaking and systematic, and minute attention was given to distinguishing natural causes from demonological influence. Jurists often wracked their brains over determining which of the two was playing the essential role. Hence, there grew to be an obsessive reliance on “signs” that would clinch the issue and remove uncertainty. These included the Devil’s mark, the supernumerary nipple, the rejection by water, the testimony of neighbors, an accused family member or members, and most decisively, the confession—however extracted. Considering the amazing array of approaches to witchcraft, it appears to be a historical distortion to collapse the era uniformly into a mindless juggernaut of terror and unthinking superstition. 

The whittling down of demonology and the ascendancy of naturalistic medicine took place by stages, with varying admixtures of both, depending upon region and circumstance. It was mediated by shifting conceptions of magic. “Magic” covered those effects propagated both by diabolical agency and the natural order of things. It was this latter emphasis, propounded by such proto-scientists as alchemists and astrologers, which paved the way for systems of thought no longer relying on the intervention of diabolical agency. During the thirteenth century, for example, the influx of Arab thinking, especially systems emphasizing astral influence on human affairs, did much to emancipate magic from an exclusively demonological framework. Accordingly, the notion of “magic” varied, depending upon era. It was not until the late Renaissance that the idea of a non-diabolical, natural magic became popular (Kieckhefer, 1989, p. 12). The importance of the notion of natural magic cannot be overestimated, being a stepping stone to the more embracing scientific world-view holding sway subsequently.

Witch-panics carried the seeds of their own demise, whatever the explanatory take on the triggers for them. This is because a characteristic of the panics was their tendency to transcend social levels, and embrace ever expanding classes of citizenry, including individuals of both sexes and of higher station. The effect inevitably was to implicate those with enough institutional power to call a halt to escalating cycles of accusation—if only to protect themselves. Accordingly, over time the witch-craze tended to collapse under its own legal weight (Thomas, 1971).

The Libertarian and the Psychopathologist

In his book The Manufacture of Madness (1970), the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz explores parallels between the social control exercised over mental patients by institutional psychiatry, and the methods used by inquisitors in persecuting “witches.” In doing so, he undertakes to challenge a certain view about the witch-craze during the early modern period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the theory that most witches were actually “mentally ill,” a view propounded by such medical authorities as Calmeil, Pinel, Esquirol, Rush, Charcot, Freud, and more recently, Zilboorg (1969). Szasz calls this view the “psychopathological theory of witchcraft,” insisting it not only lacks evidence, but also serves to extend the purview of “psychiatric imperialism” (Szasz, 1970, p.75).   

In opposing the psychopathological theory of witchcraft, Szasz contends that contemporary psychiatrists are generally “impressed by the need to make psychopathological diagnoses” (Szasz, 1970, p. 70). According to him, the bias contributes to a tendency to view all manner of deviant behavior as a manifestation of mental illness, and paves the way for the “view that witches were mentally ill persons [as] an integral part of this psychiatric perspective” (Szsaz, 1970, p. 76). He also asserts that Zilboorg and other “psychiatric imperialists” have declared witches to be insane persons for the purpose of conquering “the Middle Ages for medical psychology” (Szasz, 1970, p. 76).

Szasz goes on to contrast the emphasis in the writings of the psychopathologists on the mental illness of the women accused of witchcraft with the focus of such nineteenth century historians as Henry C. Lea (1957) and Josef Hansen (1900). These historians, Szasz declares, bring to light how the “data” confirming the theories of the psychopathologists actually arose. Most of it was fabrication, extracted by torture “…unless [witches] confess to crimes for which the penalty is burning at the stake” (Szasz, 1970, p.79).

In order to arrive at a truer picture of what happened during the witch-craze, we must, Szasz asserts, reconstruct the reality of those dark times by attending to the behavior of the accusers, not the persecuted. Any other approach—including the one we are urged by the psychopathologists to appropriate—ignores how phenomena like witchcraft and today’s “mental illness” are actually created through the “social interaction of oppressor and oppressed” (Szasz, 1970, p. 81). Since it is the purpose of Szasz’s analysis to draw analogies between mental illness and witchcraft as mythic concepts, he feels the way in which “mental illness” is created nowadays can be likened to the way “witchcraft” was created in yesteryear. Yet analogies between the two concepts break down.

In a previous publication, The Myth of Mental Illness (Szasz, 1961), Szsaz asserts that while the concept of mental illness is mythic, this does not mean that the personal conduct or problems in living experienced by individuals so labeled do not exist. To be sure, he says, some lives are problematic—sometimes exceedingly so. His proviso is that the concept of mental illness as applied to such problems in living is illicit. For him, the connection between accusations of witchcraft and diagnoses of mental illness is close. He dramatizes the connection by drawing attention to the way in which innocent men and women were made to confess imaginary heresies. In this sense, “witchcraft” was a fantasy in the minds of inquisitors, not a reality existing independently of the way the witch was treated by his or her persecutors.

According to Szasz, “witchcraft” was created through torture, just as the myth of “mental illness” is created by diagnostic acts reflecting the social power of institutional psychiatry. It is precisely at this point the analogy breaks down. For while the unreality of witchcraft means that engaging in maleficia, nightflying, shapeshifting, suckling imps, practicing ligature, causing thunderstorms, hailstorms, crop failure, male impotence, and low cow-yield, attending sabbats, practicing ritual infanticide and cannibalism, and entering into pacts with the Devil did not occur, the unreality of mental illness does not mean that such problems in living as social withdrawal, depression, mania, hyperactivity, or hallucinations, etc. do not occur. Creating mental illness in Szazsian terms is thus not tantamount to denying the existence of patterns the term usually—albeit according to him, illicitly—embraces. It only calls into question the validity of a certain way of conceptualizing those patterns. On the other hand, “witchcraft” does involve the creation of a false picture of reality the term is meant to cover. Insofar as “witchcraft” corresponds to a non-existent exercise of unnatural powers, it is unlike a diagnosis which, far from denying certain clinical facts, conceptually dislocates them, i.e., the way in which Szasz feels “mental illness” conceptually distorts “problems in living.”

Aspects of Szasz’s quarrel with the psychopathologists over witchcraft are, in the opinion of the present author, sound, as far as they point to an inappropriate psychiatric reach. However, at points his arguments are confusing. For example, it is difficult to know how to construe his claim that “mental illness” is an improper characterization of those accused of witchcraft. Indeed, if his quarrel is with the conceptual legitimacy of the very notion of mental illness, what can we make of his assertion that “Zilboorg…does [not] present any evidence to show that witches were mentally ill” (Szasz, 1970, p. 75). Given Szasz’s assault on the mental illness concept, what kind of evidence could psychopathologists possibly adduce to show that the diagnosis pertains to witchcraft cases? Does Szasz charge commentators like Zilboorg with a conceptual failure wedded to the inability to make the very notion of mental illness coherent? Or is the failure in question the inability of the psychopathologists to provide factual proof of witch patterns that can, according to him, only rightfully be characterized as “problems in living”? Sometimes it seems as though Szasz’s central point is the latter one. For example, in another section of his book he states that the psychopathological theory “…is…not the only available or possible explanation of the witch-hunts” (Szasz, 1970, p. 99), a remark that is incoherent on the assumption it is wedded to his philosophical assault on the mental illness concept itself. Here, the psychopathological theory could not even be a conceivable explanation of witches’ confessions—or any other pattern of human behavior before or since the early modern holocaust.

Szasz’s empirical critique of the psychopathological theory, that something was amiss in the behavior of inquisitors, not witches, is peppered with questionable historical reconstructions, especially when it comes to Johann Weyer, the sixteenth century physician the psychopathologists call “the father of modern psychiatry” (Anderson, 1970; Cobben, 1976; Zilboorg, 1969). Just as commentators like Zilboorg attempt to deify Weyer as a medical or scientific spokesman against the depredations of a superstitions age, Szsaz has permitted his own preference for libertarianism and nineteenth century rationalism to color his exegesis of Weyer. He sees the physician as a radical campaigner for the timeless values of humanism, personal freedom, and the defense of the universally downtrodden, not a psychopathologist himself. In the opinion of the present author, both Zilboorg and Szsaz, albeit on opposite sides of the issue, distort the historical record. Zilboorg first: 

It is doubtful whether Weyer believed in the existence of the devil at all, for it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the word devil in the sixteenth century covered the same multitude of sins as do today  the words complex or inferiority complex which have crept into common usage without, however, conveying any definite scientific concept. As one reads De praestigiis daemonum, one obtains a clear impression that Weyer uses the word devil in a rather free manner and somewhat as we use the colloquial expression crazy. At no time, despite frequent references to the devil, does Weyer depart from the positivistic, empirical, and medical point of view (Zilboorg, 1969, p. 138).

This, of course, sanitizes the demonological texture of Weyer’s work. His principal treatise, De Praestigiis Demonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis, fairly brims with passages about the influence of the living Devil, and the ways in which his control over human affairs is even wider than it is in the famous fifteenth century witch manual Malleus Maleficarum of Kramer and Sprenger (Stephens, 2002). In addition, and as an appendix to De Praestigiis Daemonum, Weyer added Pseudomonarchia Deamonum, a catalogue of demons, listed by name, office, and characteristics, from Bael to Stolas. Several medical glosses on the catalogue are implausible ones. For example, Ehrlich contends “In 1577 Weyer wrote a parody of the many works of the day attempting to describe in detail the devil and his brood, but the irony in Pseudomonarchia daemonum escaped his readers” (Ehrlich, 1960, p. 246). The inventory, ironic or not, is hardly a list of metaphors. In Weyer’s perspective, the word devil covered a multitude of sins because he held that the demon was the actual author of them, not simply a symbolic expression for what Weyer found distasteful about life.  As we shall see, demonic influence for Weyer is no more apparent than when it came to witchcraft. In fact, the source of Weyer’s approach to the subject was hardly an allegiance to “science” as we know it today. Rather, it culminated in a humanitarianism that was a by-product of letting witches off the hook primarily because the Devil deluded them into believing their prowess at maleficia was real, not imaginary.

Zilboorg airbrushes Weyer’s view of women. He references the latter’s “more sympathetic attitude towards women,” and that “Weyer could not have overlooked Agrippa’s [feminist] treatise” (Zilboorg, 1969, p. 164). Yet there was nothing in his teacher’s enlightened treatise that mirrored Weyer’s derogatory view of women, while Zilboorg spliced the contrasting views of mentor and pupil into, implausibly, one feminist take on the matter: “…the misogynous trend of the age was not to be bent by the views of Agrippa and Weyer,” (Zilboorg, 1969, p. 165). Ostensibly, Zilboorg highlights the misogyny represented by singling out women for persecution—a campaign opposed by both Agrippa and Weyer, obscuring the misogyny evident in Weyer’s outlook about the essential inferiority of women—one not shared by his mentor Agrippa. However, it is difficult to pin down Weyer’s “revered teacher” to a consistent point of view; he had the tendency to switch positions markedly from one phase of his career to another (Midelfort, 1988, p. 238).

In another section of his monograph, Zilboorg’s take on Weyer’s statement that a certain nobleman was not bewitched, but rather possessed by the Devil, is: “Here again Weyer uses this expression in its colloquial rather than its purely literal sense” (Zilboorg, 1969, p. 172). Zilboorg once more deconstructs Weyer when the latter, commenting on Judith, a novitiate at the Convent of Bosleduc, states: “I saw (her) tormented by the devil with strange convulsions.” Zilboorg again maintains that Weyer is speaking “colloquially,” and that his “conception of the devil was not the traditional superstitious one” (Zilboorg, 1989, p. 186). Superstitious enough, one might conjecture, if we were resolved to arrive at a more faithful picture of Weyer by getting beyond the image of the poster-boy prominent in some contemporary psychiatric commentary. In connection with overstressing Weyer’s naturalistic bent, Baroja points out: 

This, however, should not lead us to assume that the doctor is virtually a nineteenth century scientist. For at times he pays tribute to the Devil himself in spite of imposing limitations on his activities. He maintains, for instance, that the Devil frequently forewarns witches of the approach of a storm so that they can make the spells which they believe are responsible for the bad weather. This is like shutting the door to keep out the cold and leaving the windows open (Baroja, 1965, p. 110).

Szsaz, on the other hand, declares:

But Weyer did not discover the madness of witches. To be sure, he       deserves credit for opposing the Inquisition, the principal oppressive institution of his time. But taking a courageous stand for human decency is not the same as propounding a fresh theory or making a new empirical discovery (Szasz, 1970, p. 112).

What Weyer most strongly emphasized was that individuals accused of witchcraft usually were innocent of any wrongdoing. The issue of mental illness is neither crucial nor prominent in Weyer’s argument. Above all else, De Praestigiis is an attack on the corruption and inhumanity of the inquisitors” (Szasz, 1970, p. 77).

Just as Zilboorg attempts to denude Weyer of demonological trappings, Szasz confuses his own libertarian formulation with the views Weyer actually propounded. Szasz’s effort to rescue the sixteenth century physician from the ranks of the psychopathologists runs afoul of the historical record. Weyer’s refrain that witches were, in today’s terms, “mentally ill,” is the overriding and consistent theme of De Praestigiis Demonum:

I fight with natural reason against the deceptions which proceed from Satan, and the crazy imagination of the so-called witches; my object is also medical, in that I have to show that those illnesses, whose origins are attributed to witches, come from natural causes…witches can harm no one through the most malicious will or the ugliest exorcism, that rather their imagination—inflamed by the demons in a way not understandable to us—and the torture of melancholy makes them only fancy that they have caused all sorts of evil (quoted by Zilboorg, 1969, 117-119).

Since the so-called Lamiae [witches] are indeed poor women—usually old women—melancholic by nature, feeble-minded, easily given to despondency, and with little trust in God, the Devil all the more gladly attaches himself to them, as being suitable instruments for him, and he insinuates his way into their bodies all the more easily, in order to confound their minds with various images. Bewitched by these illusory images, they believe and confess that they have done that which it was quite impossible for them to have done…one will find that everything is really contrived and perpetrated by the demon (Mora, et. al., 1991, p. 498).

Weyer’s World

Szasz advances the argument that Weyer’s critique of the inquisitorial treatment of the witch was essentially a moral/legal, not psychiatric move. Actually, it was both. Even at that, Weyer’s moral contribution to witchcraft was an uneven one. As we shall see, his reputation for humanism tended to be selective, in contrast to the theologian to whom he is frequently compared: Desideratus Erasmus. In addition, Weyer’s diagnostic view of the witch is unlike any to be found in contemporary psychiatric manuals. It is heavily saturated with, not purified of, demonological speculation, no doubt a disappointing note for medical historians who, like Zilboorg, seek to establish close parallels between Weyer’s ideas and contemporary psychiatric practice—even at the cost of portraying him as someone he was not. These historians confuse an offshoot of Weyer’s demonological theories, his attitude toward the execution of witches, with a broad humanitarianism they, like Zilboorg, take to be a principal legacy of the medical model, or, like Szasz, to be a thrust of non-medical libertarian traditions. In countering both these historical misrepresentations, it is necessary to raise certain questions. Just what was the real source of Weyer’s attitude toward accused witches? What was the nature of Renaissance medicine?

Weyer’s denunciation of witch-hunting did not spring from an aseptically applied medical “empiricism.” Given the demonological cast to his thinking, being kind to witches was an offshoot of his conception of her place within his broader theological framework. Weyer believed that witches were easy pickings for the Devil. Of inferior mettle because they were women, they fell prey to delusions installed by Satan who had them convinced they were capable of the nefarious deeds they were widely believed to have perpetrated. Contrary to Szasz, Weyer propounded a version of psychopathological theory positing delusional witch beliefs based on melancholia, a Renaissance omnibus term for what today would comprise several types of mental disturbance, although specific enough in yesteryear to be a disorder of black bile, according to Galen’s humoral theory. For Weyer, it was this psychological disorder that gave rise to a taint that rendered the individual, especially a woman, susceptible to deceptions created by the Devil. In Book III, Chapter 4 of De Praestigiis Daemonum, Weyer speaks of the demon maddening the witch “through forms impressed upon their powers of imagination” (Mora, et. al, 1991, p. 176). Thus, he felt it was this psychological weakness and a Satanic ploy that were principally responsible for the confessions not, as Szasz would have it, the brutal methods employed by the Inquisition.

While at times Weyer was cognizant of the questionable status of statements extracted under torture, like other demonologists of his time he took the confessions to be in the main faithful expressions of what witches themselves believed about their own Satanic powers. In Book VI, Chapter XXIV of De Praestigiis Demonum, Weyer avers that his opponents can never show that witches have concluded pacts with demons. They believe this on the basis of confessions produced by torture—in which case the testimony is not to be trusted; or they base their theories on three types of voluntary confession, the last being “defective because after the fact the Devil impresses it upon the imaginations of these poor women that they have done that which occurred naturally or that which he himself brought about” (Mora, et. al., 1991, p. 549). Elsewhere in the same chapter, Weyer characterizes witches as “stupid, deluded, old women” (Mora, et. al., p. 548).

Given the frenzied atmosphere prevailing during full-blown witch-panics, there were, in all likelihood, a variety of psychological profiles of the accused. Because of this, it may be premature to posit an invariant one. Many women probably manifested quite ordinary patterns of conduct prior to conviction, although they fell under suspicion due to some unusual feature of social circumstance, age, condition, or status. Others may have hastened their end due to deviancy of behavior, while a smaller minority came forth to confess without ostensible pressure from ecclesiastical authorities (Michelet, 1965; Thomas, 1971; Swales, 1982). Naturally, during the tempestuous days of the craze, this last category of the accused was touted as proof for why witchcraft could not be regarded as fictional or attributed to extreme pressures creating the confessions. In addition, several opponents of Weyer argued that his system was flawed in that that not all witches were melancholics.

Voluntary Confessions

Weyer, like most of his contemporaries, was prepared to classify as “voluntary” disclosures that would not be this for modern jurisprudence. “Voluntariness” of testimony for contemporary American jurists might be ruled out for a variety of reasons that for early modern lawyers, magistrates, and inquisitors was handily assimilated to the idea of a freely undertaken act. During the Salem Village scare of 1692, all defendants who confessed to witchcraft were spared execution. It would be difficult to plead voluntariness of confession on the part of such defendants in a modern court of law, especially if it could be established that the accused were aware of the connection between confessing and avoiding the gallows—or being pressed to death, as in the case of Giles Corey. In Alonso de Salazar’s Spanish 1610 investigation of Basque witchcraft, this inquisitor concluded that “voluntary” confessions were effects of being compelled to confess, because other inquisitors promised the accused they would go free if they owned up to their misdeeds: “thus insinuating ideas into their minds in various ways” (Baroja, 1965, p. 187; Henningsen, 1969; 1980).

Cobben points out that: “…persons who accused themselves or spontaneously confessed to crimes did much, by these confessions, to further belief in witches,” (1976, p. 44) a plausible hunch. But he goes on to make the claim that “…in certain instances such woman suffered from endogenous depression or from schizophrenia” (1976, p. 44), a non sequitur. There is simply no way to justify pathologizing “voluntary” confessions without being privy to the total social context in which they occurred. An accused woman who elected to go directly to the stake without experiencing the torture chamber might rationally choose to voluntarily “confess” in order to spare herself the prolonged agony (Levack, 1987). Since there is no way of determining this several hundred years after the fact, the psychiatric diagnosis is, to put it bluntly, a shot in the dark.

Magician as Villain   

When Weyer’s alleged “empirical observations” led him to see the Devil’s hand writ large in human affairs, he felt witches were exonerated from the evil deeds attributed to them principally because they were deluded, whereas evil doers could be identified in the ranks of poisoners, magi, and Catholic priests: agents of the Devil deserving   punishment, since their crimes were in the nature of freely undertaken acts. Sanctions against magi are taken up by Weyer in Book VI of De Praestigiis Daemonum; they stop short of the death penalty, and, depending upon the severity of the magician’s crime, range from imposing a penalty of silence, fines, repentance, or exile. However, backing off from overextending the reach of a physician into legal matters, Weyer defers “…to the proper authorities the power of decreeing and adding to or changing the penalty in proportion to the enormity of the crime” (Mora, et. al., 1991, p. 481). This would seem to open a door for the death penalty should a magistrate passing sentence become imbued with the sanctions against sorcery outlined in Leviticus, 22:18. The humanity Szasz reads into Weyer’s thinking suddenly evaporates when it comes to magicians barely distinguishable from witches save on the basis of sex.

For Weyer, male magicians and sorcerers were therefore deserving of punishment because they were not deluded by the Devil into believing they had magical powers. Yet in Book IV, Chapter XVII of De Praestigiis Demonum, Weyer admits that even physicians—the professionals whom he insists alone should be investigating claims of diabolical possession—can be taken in by Satan. Of course, Weyerian terms are occasionally softened when it comes to medical men, presumably in order to rescue them from the vulnerability of mind that is the female lot. The latter are deluded in their relationship to the demon; whereas the former are merely circumvented or being mocked when they are blinded by the artfulness of the demon (Mora, et. al., 1991, p. 326). 

At any rate, Weyer’s discriminatory theory did not see the witch as a like-minded player in serving the Devil, hardly a consistent stance in any effort to medicalize a subject matter. In addition, in Book IV, Chapter XXV of his treatise, Weyer specifically designates the existence of a class of melancholics not “driven by demons” (Mora, et. al.,  1991, p. 346), implying that being melancholic for Weyer was a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for being a witch. Such an admission is a costly one for his argument, since it allows for the existence of melancholics whose fantasies are not installed by the Devil, undercutting any systematic way of distinguishing two classes of cases: witches driven by demons, and melancholics who, free of diabolical influence, believe themselves to be witches.

Weyerian Diagnoses

Medicine during the Renaissance for physicians like Weyer was an alternative to demonology only within a system of understanding in which the latter was often the trump card. Which of the two magisteria prevailed in given cases depended on the situation and stakes involved. For example, in the case of ten year-old Barbara Kremens of Unna, the girl presumably lived without eating (Mora, et. al., 1991, pp. LXVIII-LXIX). Rather than concede prematurely to a theory of diabolical influence, Weyer took the girl into his own home along with her older sister, Elsa. In monitoring the activities of his two young guests, Weyer discovered that Elsa was sneaking victuals to her sister on the sly, thus clearing up the mystery of how a youngster could manage to survive without eating. The case is hardly a triumph of the medical model, and more like some smart detective work. It is, nevertheless, an instructive example of how Weyer’s naturalistic bent—when he pursued one—could preempt demonological explanation. However, competition between the two paradigms was a continuing challenge for the Renaissance physician. Another challenge was the very concept of “observation” that some medical historians feel was one of Weyer’s scientific strengths. The troubling and shifting aspect of the concept can be illustrated in a chapter from Weyer’s student days.

When he was in his adolescence, Weyer became a student of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Antwerp. This well-known savant nettled many of the witch-theorists of his era who, like Jean Bodin (Monter, 1969), accused him of sorcery. Agrippa, as if to pour salt on the wound, authored a treatise entitled Concerning the Superiority of the Feminine Agenda, an early expression of feminist ideology. Contrary to the intimations of Zilboorg, the tome appears to have worked in reverse on Agrippa’s admiring pupil, whose view of women was in marked contrast to his mentor’s ideas. Despite this, Weyer subsequently defended his teacher from Bodin’s allegations and the charge that Agrippa’s dog was a demonic familiar. Weyer says:

I have seen the dog under discussion and I know him well. He was black, of medium size, and was called Monsieur…Agrippa, as many masters do, coddled this dog too much. He often kissed him, had him sit at his table and sleep in his bed, especially after he had sent his wife, a native of Mechelen, away…He kept the dog in his study , which was crammed full of books, and most of the time the dog sat on the table between Agrippa and me. Agrippa busied himself constantly with his books, sometimes remaining in his study for as long as eight days at a time. Nevertheless he knew what was going on in various countries and this fact led some authors to believe that Agrippa’s knowledge was accrued from the magical powers of the dog. They assumed the dog was the devil and could impart news to Agrippa (Cobben, 1976, p. 7).

Just what had Weyer “observed” about Agrippa and his dog that effectively eliminated a taint of sorcery? A theorist like Bodin might have used precisely the same “observations” to confirm this charge against Agrippa. Had the latter been hauled before the Inquisition to answer Bodin’s charges, would Weyer’s “observations” have strengthened the cause for the defense or prosecution? Moreover, what conception of having a demonic dog was harbored by Weyer that did not match the “observations” he had made of Agrippa and his cur? In this case, as in others, we are inclined to assume that “observations” can be shorn of theory-laden assumptions, when they may be driven by the theoretical constructs we bring to the raw data. During the Renaissance, scholars saw different things in the same facts, given distinguishable mind-sets. Is it any different nowadays?

            Another paradox in Weyer’s devotion to his mentor Agrippa was that the latter, unlike other magicians, never qualified for the punition and disdain Weyer insisted in Book VI of De Praestigiis Daemonum should be the lot of like-minded magicians. The inconsistency was all the more glaring considering Agrippa’s flirtation with magic in his De Occulta Philosophia. Agrippa himself was something of an inconstant magus, and he appears to have reversed his course on the value of magic, science, and religion in his later tract On the Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences.

Female Inferiority

While misogyny was rife in Renaissance medicine and religion, the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger, held that witches were vulnerable to forming alliances with Satan principally because they were women (Stephens, 2002). Weyer insisted they should be exonerated for precisely the same reason. Accordingly, Weyer and his critics drew different conclusions from the fancied inferiority of women. In the Malleus, female inferiority was transformed into carnality, viciousness, and weakness of will culminating in heresy, whereas the last of these corrupt attributes was transformed into melancholia in De Praestigiis Demonum. The two Dominican friars concluded that the female vices increased the likelihood of freely throwing in with the Devil, whereas Weyer concluded that the tendency for women to be melancholic made them easy prey for the diabolical implantation of fantasies of magical powers. Weyer’s humanitarianism toward witches was, underneath it all, something of a back-handed concession: they were not to be persecuted because they were innocent, true; but they were innocent because as women, they were of inferior caliber. As such, their temperaments were ideally suited for the ploys of the Devil.

German Providential Theology

In 1505, over a half century before the publication of De Praestigiis Daemonum, the German theologian Martin Plantsch, became a trend setter in what Midelfort (1972) has characterized as the Wurttemberg School of witchcraft theory. In 1507, he set forth his ideas in his Opusculum de sagis maleficis. Unlike witch-theorists elsewhere on the European continent—and certainly in other areas of southwestern Germany like Wurtzburg and Bamberg, where witch-hunting had been the most ferocious—the treatise refused to grant the witch any power to cause the harm elsewhere attributed to her in this sprawling region. The School emphasized the idea that all earthly blight was nothing other than punishment from God—a past echo of the admonitions of contemporary evangelical ministers who considered 9/11 heavenly retribution for the sinful ways of urban humankind. (Some prominent televangelists are paradoxically silent on the heavenly significance of destructive tornados in the Bible Belt of American red states or in Kansas where Creationism had been voted into school biology curricula.)

Another preacher of the School, Johann Brenz, echoed Plantsch’s view about the impotence of witches, claiming that the Devil, aware of any impending natural blight, arranged to delude the witch into thinking that her suitably occasioned imprecations were responsible for the events that would have occurred without them. The theory has a Weyerian ring, in that the Devil’s role in the providential formulation involved creating a delusion of causality between a witch’s curse and ensuing disasters, forcing her to commit the logical fallacy of  post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Brenz, despite his theory of the powerlessness of witches to wreak harm through maleficia, nevertheless believed they should be punished, unlike Weyer. Brenz’s reply to Weyer is contained in the latter’s Liber apologeticus, appended to De Praestigiis Daemonum. The controversy here revolves around whether the witch is still guilty of a spiritual crime by believing she is a consort of, or in league with, the Devil. Weyer, in Book III, Chapter III of his tract, allowed an escape-hatch for the witch by insisting she cannot be guilty of a pact with the Devil since her relationship with him does not meet the necessary criteria for a legally binding contract, since one or both parties fail to live up to contractual obligations (Midelfort, 1988). Accordingly, the pact, an important element in the accusatory mind-set against witches, was, according to Weyer, illusory in the legal sense.  

The relationship between a witch’s power to cause harm and the punishment that would be appropriate for her was to undergo many twists and turns before demonological theory was downsized a century or two later. Weyer hardly innovated a theory of the witch “delusion,” even in his own time: Plantsch for one preceded him. Rather, he was more influential than others in the circulation of his theories, coupled as they were with the distinctively naturalistic tincture to many of his speculations.  

While the psychopathologists perceive Weyer as “the father of modern psychiatry” (Roback, 1962) the demonological cast to his thinking renders his diagnosis of the witch delusion unlike any concept in contemporary psychiatric manuals, like the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). His conception of witch delusions of power were just that. However, the delusions represented thought-insertions by a veridical source, the Devil, not, in contemporary terms, an endogenous process traceable to a personality pattern, organicity, or toxicity. The last named category grew to have overriding significance in the early modern period, in the form of transformations allegedly introduced by poisons and unguents.

Poisons, Powders, Salves, Unguents

For Weyer, the witch was culpable and should be punished only when her misdeed involved poisoning others. To bring his theory in accordance with scripture, he posited a mistranslation of “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” (Exodus 22:18) arguing that the biblical Hebrew term kashaph referred to poisoners, not witches. He insisted that poisoners were culpable since their crime could not be attributed to merely psychological weakness; it involved an objective one that could be substantiated by medical examination or analysis. Poisonings were a generalized concern during Weyer’s era, as the events unfolding in the tragedies of a certain playwright, especially Hamlet, reflect. All the same, the suspicion that so many deaths were due to this cause may have been exaggerated. As “cobra bites” in sudden deaths in Indian villages could often conceivably be a cover for other types of malfeasance, poisoning was the handy explanation in the early modern period for widespread deaths perhaps due to disease or natural causes in many cases.

Poisonings figured prominently in the episode of Chambre Ardente, a lurid tale of seventeenth century intrigue in the court of the French king, Louis XIV. The underbelly of the saga appears to have been the reliance on sorcery to secure favored positions at court. A prominent figure in the scandal was the Abbé Guilbourg, a cleric who conducted black masses. The latter were reportedly staged for the benefit of retired mistresses of the king, like, arguably, Madame de Montespan. As such, they seemed to have born affinities

with the rites of medieval magicians intent on harnessing, rather than adoring, demonic power (Cohn, 1975).

Chambre Ardente started auspiciously enough with accounts of abortion circles, backdoor politicking, fortune telling, and sorcery. It culminated in networks of poisoners dispatching such threats to vaulting social ambitions as husbands. Its smatterings of diabolism were overshadowed by social panics in which sudden deaths were attributed to poisonings contrived by a gang of purely political schemers. Vehicles for such plots took on a positively gothic, if not implausible, cast; they involved toxicological marvels like arsenic-laced chemises and gloves sublimating lethal gases into victims through delayed action effects.

The hysteria surrounding Chambre Ardente supposedly culminated in strata of French aristocracy steeped in Satanic ritual. Yet significant evidence of the royal pastime was at times extracted by torture, and from women put to the boot, a device used to crush the shin bones—slowly. The scribe who recorded testimony included the shrieks of key witnesses, and the saga, as in the case of the accused La Filastre, was also distinguished by recantations of confessions extracted under torture (Robbins, 1959).

 A good deal of the documentation of the saga can be credited to the assiduous note-taking of Nicolas de la Reynie, the king’s lieutenant-general of police (Mossiker, 1969). All the same, other of its chapters bear all the earmarks of older French stagings based upon the use of torture: the Knights Templar (Barber, 1978), Gilles de Rais (Murray, 1934) and the Loudon possessions (Huxley, 1952) spring to mind. In the last named case, the guilt of Urbain Grandier was clinched when a contract he reputedly signed with demons like Lucifer and Beelzebub was produced with their mirror-image signatures!

As for the unguents or salves that witches were accused of smearing over their bodies prior to transvections to sabbats, a scholarly tradition has sprung up attempting to link the witch confession to the hallucinogenic properties of certain preparations (Harner, 1973). In Book III, Chapter XVII of De Praestigiis Daemonum, Weyer similarly traces the fantasies of witches to “the natural powers of the ingredients” (Mora, et. al., 1991, p.225). In the opinion of the present author, this tradition puts the cart before the horse. If actual transvection, shapeshifting, or pacts with the Devil are themselves fictions, it would appear to be a scholarly form of cherry-picking to try to determine the psychotropic properties of unguents whose very existence likewise falls under a cloud. Spanos (1978) has outlined at least four reasons why theories about the psychotropic properties of the unguents are implausible, but there is a fifth. Why should hallucinogenic agents produce fantasies that are strikingly similar, if not identical, for all witches, despite their cultural and geographical separation?

Weyer and the Reformation

It is possible that Weyer’s influence and visibility stemmed in good part from his being highly placed within the court of Duke William of Cleve, Julich, and Berg. Accordingly, he was viewed by his Catholic opponents elsewhere on the Continent as a nidus of Dutch deviationism. In this respect, Weyer’s treatise could have been emblematic for many of the path religion took when corrupted by the sensibility rife in territories like the Low Lands. It was, after all, but a short step from the Erasmian mode to the emerging Lutheran heresy, and the Protestant cast to Weyer’s thinking was obvious. One may well ponder the parallel between Luther’s “justification through faith” (Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 1:17) and Weyerian themes. In the Lutheran scheme, our relationship to God is stripped of priestly intermediaries; in Weyer’s theology, there are no witch intercessories between the Devil and the mayhem he wreaks on humanity. Just as the sinner’s relationship to God in Martin Luther’s religion was shorn of churchly contrivances and ritual, so too did the apparatus of diabolism for Weyer shed its reliance on a retinue of female votaries in order to accomplish its ends. For Weyer, the Devil was quite adept at managing his own affairs single-handedly. Not requiring any witch-assistance, the master of deception was capable of convincing witches their maleficia was real, albeit installed through bewitchment by him. Far from being an outcast in any “empirical” or “scientific” formulation, Weyer’s Devil was more, not less, awesome than he was in Catholic orthodoxy. In the latter, there was at least the suggestion that Satan’s power was somehow lessened to the extent it was shared or redistributed among an army of female votaries likewise dedicated to the destruction of Christendom.

 In Weyer’s era, advances in scientific understanding were a matter of degree. To his credit, he pushed further than most learned men of his time for naturalistic explanations of unusual phenomena, and the tendency augured something for the future direction of thought in which the grip of demonology was lessened. In terms of a early modern mind-set, however, Weyer’s favorable treatment of the witch was an arbitrary and discriminatory one, as his theological adversaries noted. We must not confuse the correctness of Weyer’s belief in the innocence of witches or our own preference for Enlightenment thinking with consistency on Weyer’s part. Indeed, some medical historians, intent on showing how the Renaissance was gradually being modernized through medical “discoveries,” tend to overlook the fact that Weyer was very much a man of his time, however troubling his outlook was for his adversaries.

Weyer’s system was a transitional one, incorporating strains of older theologies, and much that commemorated a growing, naturalistic tradition. The system, while encased in demonology, was infiltrated by intellectual tendencies that would come to prevail in the Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth century. The tension within the system between the two poles of discourse was visible throughout De Praestigiis Daemonum. In all likelihood, the strain was responsible for inconsistencies of outlook pounced upon by such critics of Weyer as Jean Bodin, author of De la Demonomanie de Sorciers (1580) and Le Fleau des Demons et Sorciers (1616), and Thomas Erastus, author of Disputation de de Lamiis seu Strigibus (1572).

Weyer and Scot

De Praestigiis Demonum, perched as it was between currents pulling in opposite directions, embodied the dilemma facing all Renaissance physicians: the juggling act between naturalism and supernaturalism. As in the case of many others before and after him, Weyer struggled to walk the thin line between incommensurate paradigms. Later sympathizers like Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot, 1972) were better able to iron out Weyerian contradictions by banishing all traces of the demonological in human affairs while remaining steadfastly religious. Scot, contrary to received opinion, was a devout believer. For him, emptying theology of worldly effects of diabolism was not equivalent to atheism, although enemies of his like the demonologist King James I, translator of the Bible, might have preferred to see him as such. Scot’s system had the effect of kicking God upstairs and the Devil downstairs, a standard ploy for believers who, like the deistic American Founding Fathers, were not prepared to make the final concession to disbelief, the ideology commonly viewed as the banner of Enlightenment notions and freethinkers like Rousseau, Hume, Voltaire, and  Diderot.

Scot’s contemporary descendents, like Gardner (1957), Randi (1982), and other spokespersons in the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), have continued the tradition of exposing as fraudulent the practices of individuals who author systems of supposedly magical effects they perpetrate on a gullible public. Scot’s efforts during his own time were directed at fashioning naturalistic explanations for many presumably demonological phenomena he was convinced were merely a bag of tricks foisted on an unwary public. All the same, his religious faith remained strong (Anglo, 1977; Estes, 1983).

 

Capitulary Skepticism

Psychiatric historians sometimes confuse the provenance of historically significant ideas. For example, Zilboorg summarizes Weyer’s role in combating the witch-craze as the person who “…had begun the fight” (Zilboorg, 1969, p. 154). Meerloo hastily contends that “Weir introduces the concept of delusion into medical history” (Meerloo, 1963, p.154). Mora (1963) claimed that Weyer was the first person to oppose the ideas presented in the foremost witch-manual of the fifteenth century, the Malleus Maleficarum of Sprenger and Kramer. These statements are all the more surprising in the light of the fact that De Praestigiis Daemonum cites lengthy passages from the works of Girolamo Cardano, a physician whose assault on the reality of witchcraft and the sanity of its alleged perpetrators was a documented basis for Weyer’s speculations. For example, in Book VI, Chapter X of Weyer’s treatise, Cardano is quoted as considering as fantasy witch assemblies, tales begot of rumor-mongering, transvections, magical ointments, and other appurtenances of witchcraft, comparing them to the man who imagined himself to be a rooster, arising at the appointed early hour for years to do his crowings.

Despite the foregoing contemporary opinions, the concept of delusional thinking was neither first introduced by Weyer, nor developed initially under medical auspices. The insistence that “Weyer was the first to call a halt to demonism” (Cobben, 1976, p. 26) consequently distorts the historical record. The strongest opposition to the Malleus did not have a secular provenance at all; it had a theological one. The delusional character of witch thinking was a firmly entrenched religious tradition promulgated centuries before the publication of De Praestigiis Demonum or the Malleus Maleficarum. The written tradition harkens back to at least the tenth century when Regino of Prüm, Abbot of Treve, published the Canon Episcopi, the church law promulgating the fantastical nature of certain witch beliefs in his De Ecclesiasticis Disciplinis et Religione Christiana. As Hoyt (1989) has noted, the commencement of the great witch-panics toward the latter half of the fifteenth century embraced attempts to circumvent canonical admonitions about the delusional character of flights or transvections to sabbats (witches’ conventicles) and the pact with the Devil. A leading spokesman for bypassing the older canonical tradition of skepticism was St. Thomas Aquinas. The Angelic Doctor was himself once hauled before a court to explain his encouragement of the “witchcraft delusion” inspired by his Scholasticism (Hopkin, 1940: Midelfort, 1972) Other luminaries, like Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, wiggled past the interdictions of the Canon Episcopi by seemingly fudging the problem. They insisted that while witch beliefs may be conceded to be unreal, the fact that the witch imagined herself to engage in heretical acts was enough to condemn her. A second maneuver of early modern witch theorists was to hold that the older Canon Episcopi only pertained to the excesses of its time, not the newer scourge of witch heresy.      

Other collections of the Canon Episcopi, like in the Decretum of the Bolognese monk Gratian in 1147 C. E. preceded Weyer’s treatise by half a millennium (Weyer cites Gratian’s views on demonic illusions in Book III, Chapter IV of his treatise). Informal traditions about the illusory nature of forms of witchcraft probably antedate it. Accordingly, the delusional nature of the magical powers of witches—at least as they encompass nightflying and attendance at sabbats--hardly originated in a “scientific” work like Weyer’s. Swales (1982, 1989) feels that Freud’s rejection of his seduction theory in 1897 in favor of a theory of infantile fantasy was inspired by Weyer’s tract. However, the latter was itself scooped by a much older theological tradition that had first introduced the notion of the witch delusion—or its counterpart, as this pertained to the beliefs of women who were the imagined “fly by night” votaries of a pagan cult of Diana or Herodias.

Ironically, the Canon Episcopi, in undermining the reality of certain, albeit not all, witch beliefs, also condemned male sorcery, precisely the Weyerian position—seven hundred years before the publication of De Praestigiis Demonum. Interdictions against beneficent sorcery, not maleficia, like the conciliar decrees of the Council of Treves in 1310, were the earmark of the medieval period—before benchmark transitions (magician to witch, ceremonial magic to maleficia, male to female) turned ugly.

 

Conclusion

 By way of summary, the present author is in sympathy with Szasz’s factual claim that witch confessions, far from being obvious signs of mental illness, were, for the most part the detritus of the early modern landscape of panic and social pressure. On the other hand, he is in accord with Zilboorg that Johann Weyer fostered psychopathological explanations of witch confessions. He is in disagreement with both historians about their view that the Renaissance physician promoted an ideology in which demonology played a minor or inconsequential role. Weyer, situated as he was between contrasting paradigms and appropriating both, continued to elude the understanding of psychiatric historians of vastly different persuasions. Finally, the panorama of the early modern historical period was an exceedingly complex one, even during the heightened period of the great witch-hunts. There was an amazing—and often bewildering variety—of witch-theories, early medical or scientific trends, and legal procedures across the American and European landscapes, despite the efforts of some historians to collapse them into singular themes or common molds.

  

*Dr. Begelman is a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist in private practice, and was theater critic for the Danbury News-Times, Danbury, Connecticut, and theater and film critic for The Citizen News of New Fairfield, Connecticut.

 

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