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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