Europe's inner demons
- Автор: Кон Норман
- Год: 1975
- Язык: английский
- Год: BASIC BOOKS,.INC., PUBLISHERS
- ISBN: 465-0131-X
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Europe's inner demons». Краткое содержание книги:
Who were these “witches” and “devils” and why did so many people believe in their terrifying powers? What explains the trials, tortures, and executions that reached their peak in the Great Persecutions of the sixteenth century? In this unique and absorbing volume, Norman Cohn, author of the widely acclaimed Pursuit of the Millennium, tracks down the facts behind the European witch craze and explores the historical origins and psychological manifestations of the stereotype of the witch.
Professor Cohn regards the concept of the witch as a collective fantasy, the origins of which date back to Roman times. In Europe's Inner Demons, he explores the rumors that circulated about the early Christians, who were believed by some contemporaries to be participants in secret orgies. He then traces the history of similar allegations made about successive groups of medieval heretics, all of whom were believed to take part in nocturnal orgies, where sexual promiscuity was practised, children eaten, and devils worshipped.
By identifying' and examining the traditional myths — the myth of the maleficion of evil men, the myth of the pact with the devil, the myth of night-flying women, the myth of the witches' Sabbath — the author provides an excellent account of why many historians came to believe that there really were sects of witches. Through countless chilling episodes, he reveals how and why fears turned into crushing accusation finally, he shows how the forbidden desires and unconscious give a new — and frighteningly real meaning to the ancient idea of the witch.
The witches of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, were adherents of the most extreme of all heresies, members of the most nihilistic of all sects. But this heresy and this sect were the products of a Christian society which insisted on religious conformity, and they drew new strength from every drive to enforce that conformity. The Inquisition was largely responsible for the spread of witchcraft, but only because of all institutions it was the one most directly concerned with repressing dissent. In the last analysis medieval Christian civilization as a whole was responsible.
Yet if that is the main purport of Russell’s argument, it is not the whole purport; for, like so many before him, he also believes that witchcraft was partly rooted in folk practices and beliefs connected with fertility. Fully aware of the inadequacies of Margaret Murray’s work, he nevertheless takes her central thesis seriously. Like Runeberg, he holds that fertility rites, with dancing, eroticism, banqueting and the rest, were transformed by the pressures of a hostile Christian society into the witches’ sabbat.(47) Moreover he considers that “enormous weight” has been lent to Runeberg’s view by the researches of the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg. As he sees it, Ginzburg’s book I Benandanti, published in 1966, illustrates how members of a fertility cult were transformed into witches. Up to 1610 a group of peasants in the district of Friuli in northern Italy fought pitched battles at night against “members of the local witch cult”; by 1640, after a generation of inquisitorial trials, they were generally regarded, and even regarded themselves, as being Devil-worshipping witches. In Russell’s view “no firmer bit of evidence has ever been presented that witchcraft existed”.(48)
Such is the case presented in Witchcraft in the Middle Ages for believing that there really was an organization, indeed a sect, of witches. It is presented with great erudition and persuasiveness — and nevertheless it completely fails to stand up.
To deal first with the matter of the fertility cult: the whole argument is based on a misreading of I Benandanti. For as described by Ginzburg, the Friuli peasants did not really fight battles with “members of the local witch cult” — they went into cataleptic trances during which they dreamed that, mounted on boats and cats, they fought witches. All that happened physically was that they lay motionless in bed, as though dead, for a couple of hours. The true significance of Ginzburg’s researches will be considered in a later chapter. Here it is only necessary to note that they do not in any way confirm Runeberg’s contention that real gatherings of fertility cultists were transformed, by persecution, into witches’ sabbats.
That Russell should so misunderstand the purport of Ginzburg’s book is itself significant. It points to a methodological confusion which leads him into other, more serious errors. “What people thought happened”, he writes, “is as interesting as what ‘objectively did happen’, and much more certain.”(49) No doubt — but the two things are by no means the same. Thirty or forty years ago great numbers of Germans believed that world affairs were in the hands of the Jews, who in turn were controlled by a secret government known as the Elders of Zion; while great numbers of Russians believed that Soviet society was riddled from top to bottom by followers of Trotsky who were also agents of the “imperialist” powers. In both cases, the prevalence of such beliefs facilitated the destruction of many millions of human beings. The historian’s interpretation of those events will differ greatly according to whether he regards the beliefs as having been substantially correct or, on the contrary, grossly misguided. In the case of the great witch-hunt the situation was, as we shall see, more complex than in the modern persecutions; but it is still the historian’s task to distinguish between fact and fantasy so far as is humanly possible.
The task is not as insuperable as Russell, in certain passages, makes it sound. My own grounds for not accepting the existence of a sect of orgiastic, infanticidal, cannibalistic, Devil-worshipping heretics between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries have been given in detail in Chapter III and need not be repeated here. Russell himself explicitly states that charges of ritually murdering children and consuming their blood were “absurd” when brought against Jews;(50) had he included the case of the Fraticelli in his study, he might have concluded, as I did, that similar stereotyped accusations were no more justified when levelled against heretics. My grounds for not accepting even in part the tales of witches’ sabbats, as they were retailed from the fifteenth century onwards, have been made abundantly clear in the course of the present chapter. In my view, stories which contain manifestly impossible elements ought not to be accepted as evidence for physical events.
There is a further reason why the notion of a secret society of witches cannot be satisfactorily explained by postulating the real existence of such a society. As we shall see in a later chapter, present-day anthropologists have found very similar notions firmly embedded in the world-views of “primitive” societies in various parts of the world. Bands of destructive witches who kill human beings, especially children; who travel at night by supernatural means; and who foregather in remote spots to devour their victims — these crop up again and again in anthropological literature. But anthropologists are agreed that these bands exist in imagination only; nobody has ever come across a real society of witches. And that indeed is the nub: from Jarcke and Mone onwards, the tradition we have been considering has suffered from the same defect, of grossly underestimating the capacities of human imagination.
Taken as a whole, that tradition itself forms a curious chapter in the history of ideas. Over a period of a century and a half, the non-existent society of witches has been repeatedly re-interpreted in the light of the intellectual preoccupations of the moment. The theories of Jarcke and Mone were clearly inspired by the current dread of secret societies; that of Michelet, by his enthusiasm for the emancipation of the working classes and of women; those of Murray and Runeberg, by the Frazerian belief that religion originally consisted of fertility cults; those of Rose and Russell, maybe, by the spectacle of the psychedelic and orgiastic experiments of the 1960s.
But it is time to turn to the other traditional explanation of how the stereotype of a sect of witches came into being in medieval Europe.
7. THREE FORGERIES AND ANOTHER WRONG TRACK
Most historians who were not persuaded that a sect of witches really existed have accepted that the stereotype came into being during, and as a result of, the Inquisition’s campaign against Catharism in southern France and northern Italy. They have also been in agreement about the immediate consequences: in France, the execution of the first living example of the stereotype, a woman burned at Toulouse in 1275; the first mass trial and execution of witches, carried out in 1335, also at Toulouse; other similar trials, resulting by 1350 in the execution of some 400 persons at Toulouse and a further 200 at Carcassonne; in Italy, a woman of Orta, in the diocese of Novara, tried and presumed burned some time between 1341 and 1352; further trials and executions around 1360, in the neighbouring diocese of Como.