Table Of ContentWitchcraft and Magic in Europe
Volume 6. The Twentieth Century
This page intentionally left blank
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe
The Twentieth Century
WILLEM DE BLÉCOURT
RONALD HUTTON
JEAN LA FONTAINE
THE ATHLONE PRESS
LONDON
First published in 1999 by
THE ATHLONE PRESS
1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG
© The Contributors 1999
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 0 485 89006 2 hb
0 485 89106 6 pb
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
Typeset by Ensystems, Saffron Walden, Essex
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd
Contents
Introduction vii
Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark
PART 1: MODERN PAGAN WITCHCRAFT 1
Ronald Hutton, University of Bristol
Section 1: The Background to Pagan Witchcraft 3
Secret Societies and Ritual Magic 3
Popular Witchcraft and Magic 13
The Thought-World of Modern Paganism 17
The Goddess and God of Modern Paganism 20
Romantic Folklore 26
The Myth of Pagan Witchcraft 31
Forerunners 36
Section 2: The History of Pagan Witchcraft 43
Gerald Gardner 43
The Gardnerians 52
Other Traditions 55
American Feminist Witchcraft 60
A Coming of Age 65
The Nature of Modern Pagan Witchcraft 71
PART 2: SATANISM AND SATANIC MYTHOLOGY 81
Jean La Fontaine, London School of Economics
Section 1: The History of the Idea of Satan and Satanism 83
The Servants of Satan 85
Modern Ideas of Satanism 86
Satanism and the Occult 88
Section 2: Satanism and Pseudo-Satanist Groups 94
The Church of Satan 96
Organization 99
The Temple of Set 101
Organization 103
The Process-Church of the Final Judgement 105
vi Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century
Other Satanist Groups 107
Numbers of Satanists 107
Section 3: Heathenism/Odinism 110
m
Section 4: Satanic Abuse Mythology 115
The Social Context of the Myth 116
A History of Accusations of Satanism 119
The Components of Satanic Abuse Mythology 124
Sources of Allegations 126
The Spread of the Satanic Abuse Mythology 129
Sources of Allegations 132
Adult survivors 132
Children's cases 135
Confessions 136
PART 3: THE WITCH, HER VICTIM, THE UNWITCHER
AND THE RESEARCHER: THE CONTINUED
EXISTENCE OF TRADITIONAL WITCHCRAFT 141
Willem de Blécourt, Huizinga Institute, Amsterdam/University of Warwick
Traces of Bewitchment 143
Studies of Witchcraft 146
Types of Witchcraft 150
The Researcher's Position 154
Journalists and Folklorists 158
Sliedrecht, 1926 162
Folklore Indexes 165
Legend Repertoires 168
Gendered Legends 172
Witchcraft in Court 176
Sarzbiittel, 1954 180
The Power of the Unwitcher 183
Active Bewitchments 188
The Evil Eye 192
Mayenne, 1970 197
Spatial Dimensions 202
Cultures of Witchcraft 205
Witchcraft Conflicts 208
The End of Witchcraft? 212
Future Research 216
Bibliography 220
Index 236
Introduction
Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark
This volume brings the History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe up to
the present day by surveying developments during the last century of the
millennium. These display again the same two features that seem to have
characterised witchcraft and magic, more than most cultural phenomena,
down the ages — a capacity to adapt to and reflect contemporary needs
and aspirations and yet, at the same time, an identity based on what are
perceived to be highly traditional forms. It is as though they have survived
for so long by being simultaneously responsive to the present and tied to
the past; again and again, they are re-invented to provide answers to
immediate problems, yet always with the reassurance — or perhaps threat
— of a supposed continuity. Of course, these things are not necessarily the
same to practitioners or believers and to observers (particularly historians).
The answers may seem hollow and the continuity spurious to those who
behave and believe differently. This differential in the way witchcraft and
magic are viewed has been another constant element in both the history
and the historiography of our subject and it is also illustrated in this
volume.
Witchcraft and magic, then, are marked both by contemporaneity and
by timelessness. The prognostications and prophylactics, the recipes and
remedies, that have made up much of everyday magic have existed for so
long because they have continued to seem efficacious in situations of
practical need, but they have owed their transmission — and something of
their status — to the traditionalisms of oral communication and to the re-
cycling of texts that seem hardly to have changed. The magic of the magus
has never ceased to appeal for its solutions to problems of power and
knowledge and yet its literature, too, has been remarkably canonical and
static. The early modern witch was the focus of fears that were largely the
product of early modern conditions, while her identity — at least for
intellectuals — was consciously fashioned from biblical law and history,
classical poetry and legend, and medieval theology, as if there was no such
thing as anachronism. Even today, the evil witch remains highly relevant
to children's literature and the popular media even though she consists of
archaisms.
The three studies that follow each testify to this abiding ambiguity and
suggest ways to account for it, and even to resolve it. Nobody could
viii Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century
suppose that the phenomena they describe are anything but embedded in
twentieth-century life and thought. Modern pagan witchcraft, the subject
of the first essay, must be seen in relation to many of the conventional
features of contemporary religion and religious ritual, of notions of the self
and of human abilities, and of attitudes to the world and its workings.
Ronald Hutton explains that among its inspirations have been some of the
most powerful impulses in modern culture — 'nostalgia for the natural and
rural world, feminism, sexual liberation, dissatisfaction with established
religious institutions and social norms, and a desire for greater individual
self-expression and self-fulfilment/ (p. 59) It flourishes, therefore, because
of its obvious relevance to contemporary lives and contemporary debates.
The self-styled satanist groups examined by Jean La Fontaine in the second
essay have also emerged as products of late second-millennium culture,
even if in violent reaction against what they see as its repressive and
authoritarian morality and social codes. Nor would the modern myth of
satanism and of the satanic abuse of children — a very different thing
altogether, as she decisively shows - be possible without the emergence of
twentieth-century religious fundamentalism and, more precisely, public
anxieties about parenting. It is true that this sense of contemporary
relevance is weakest in the witchcraft cases discussed by Willem de
Blecourt, who concludes our volume and our series. He concedes that
one of the features of these episodes, confined as they largely are to remote
rural areas, is their increasing marginality. The traces of the accompanying
discourse, he suggests, may 'represent its last vestiges/ (p. 215) Even so,
those who attacked the witch in the port of Naples in 1921, or who were
consulting the witch-doctor Waldemar Eberling in the German village of
Sarzbiittel before and during the 1950s, or who reluctantly confided their
fears about bewitchment to the anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada in the
Bocage around 1970 were all acting and speaking out of a conviction that
witchcraft had a place in their lives and their social world. It is precisely
this sense of having a place 'today*, argues de Blecourt, that is threatened
or denied whenever twentieth-century witchcraft is described as archaic
or anachronistic.
And yet it is precisely the archaic that all these manifestations of
witchcraft and magic in our century seem to exhibit. They do present
themselves — or at least are presented — as timeless, or at least immemorial,
not time bound. The clearest case, of course, is that of paganism, with its
explicit debt to the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, its celebration
of pagan deities and goddesses and the values associated with them, and,
above all, its commitment to the view that the witches prosecuted during
the early modern centuries were surviving practitioners of an 'old' religion,
of which modern Wicca too is a further benign form. Everyone interested
in the history of witchcraft knows of Margaret Murray's influence in this
Introduction ix
regard, particularly since the 1940s - although few, if any, will have
realised that she considered herself a witch and even practised cursing!
Here described as the 'godmother of Wicca' for her approving foreword
to Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today (1954), her studies did more than
anything else to create the impression of an age-old witch religion,
continuous from pagan times and marked by veneration of a nature-god
and by fertility rites. This was the religion whose twentieth-century
discovery was announced in Gardner's book.
With satanism the situation is more complex. Unlike the modern
pagans, none of the satanist groups that have actually existed in recent
years has ever claimed continuity with demon-worshippers from the past.
For these modern groups Satan certainly represents freedom from the
constraining moralities of Christianity and the State, thus symbolizing
rebelliousness, iconoclasm and hedonism. In this sense, therefore, it is true
that satanism is still defined in opposition to Christianity. But, otherwise,
its few devotees practice magic, not deity worship, and its only common
philosophy seems to have been a form of social Darwinism. Instead, the
element of timelessness here lies in the extraordinary persistence into the
modern world of a mythology which attributes to twentieth-century
satanism a kind of diabolism it has never exhibited. As previous volumes
in this series have shown, Western Christianity rapidly developed a
demonology in which human allies of Satan were thought to threaten the
faithful by their secret organisation, their ritual celebration of demonism,
and their magical powers. Of most relevance to the history of medieval
heresy and early modern witchcraft, this demonology has nevertheless
continued, even down to our own day, to generate myths which virtually
replicate those of earlier centuries. Thus it is that in the twentieth century,
organised satanism has again assumed a mythological significance — particu-
larly, it seems, for Protestant fundamentalists and 'New Christians' — that
bears little relation to either the actual practices, or even the very existence,
of real satanists. Not only the latter, but pagans and Wiccans, astrologers
and spiritualists, some forms of rock music, and even the Duke of
Edinburgh (for his presidency of the World Wild Life Fund) have been
attributed with aims similar to those of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century sabbat goers. Like the accusers of heretics and witches in the past,
the modern mythologisers have assumed both a continuous reality in the
'crimes' of devil-worshippers and also a uniform guilt.
The consequences for attitudes and, indeed, policies towards child abuse
have been particularly profound and disturbing. Under the influence of
this same lingering mythology - sometimes in the guise almost of a folk
belief - the abduction and sexual abuse of children, because it is among
the most horrendous and inhuman of late twentieth-century crimes, has
been deemed to be carried out by ritual Satanists. Jean La Fontaine records
