Tonight when the kids dress up and don green plastic masks, many adults will be inwardly groaning. They may well focus their complaints on Halloween as an American import with commercial trappings. But their unease may go deeper. Is Halloween a benign seasonal festival with its roots in the Eve of All Hallows, or is it more dangerous, as the Church suggests, encouraging children to take an interest in Satanic rituals?
Witchcraft still has the power to stir up anxiety. The evidence from sales of specialist magazines and witches’ paraphernalia suggests that the practice of witchcraft involves the same numbers as minority religions like Buddhism. It is especially popular with feminists seeking a pre-Christian religion in which women, nature and the occult are central. Dr Ronald Hutton, author of Pagan Religions Of The British Isles, says: “Most covens share the core tenets of goddess worship, a belief that nature is sacred and the honouring of entities, such as night, moonlight and the feminine. In this respect, it is a counter-religion which venerates that which has been downgraded by our culture.”
Ask around and most women with half an eye on things alternative have some notion who the real witches were: primitive healers, herbalists, women’s doctors, nature worshippers. Consistently, the 16th-century witches are seen as persecuted innocents.
The popular re-evaluation of witches dates from the 1970s. Historians and anthropologists have pointed out that those killed in the 16th-century witch-hunts were mainly ‘marginal’ women – widows, unmarried and infertile women. In Religion And The Decline Of Magic, Keith Thomas argues that the hostility to magic during the Reformation left many simple country people feeling totally powerless in the face of life’s vicissitudes. Their sense of vulnerability found expression in fears that were projected outside their own environment. The image of the outsider, the woman in a secret pact with the Devil, became a potent scapegoat for the ills of the community.
Some feminists latched on to this concept of the lonely and excluded woman, reviled for her secret powers. In America, a movement called Witch (Women Inspired To Commit Herstory) argued that the fear and loathing inspired by the witch reflects the power of a femininity that does not fit into a male-dominated society. In the feminist imagination, the witch became a wise woman and a healer, an upholder of traditional understanding of the natural world in opposition to rationality, science and medicine.
The Romantic period provides a ready-made mythology of witches as benign nature worshippers. The rationalists of the Enlightenment refused to believe that witchcraft existed, so they saw the witch-hunts as the horrific martyrdom of innocents. The implied criticism, that the church had allowed this to happen, outraged reactionary writers who struck back with an alternative idea: the alleged witches were pagans. While more liberal writers maintained that these ‘outsiders’ stood for religious and social freedom opposed to a feudal state and intolerant church.
In the 1920s, Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist, claimed to have found evidence that the witches were practising pagans. Later it emerged that she had misrepresented her findings, but by then her ideas had been taken up by the founding fathers of modern witchcraft, writers like Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner.
Gardner’s book Modern Witchcraft, published in 1954, became the acknowledged manual of the art. He merged nature worship and interest in ancient symbols and high magic, claiming this was the original religion of paganism. Susan Greenwood, an anthropologist currently studying contemporary witchcraft in Britain, comments: “He also added his own inflection – his interest in dominant women and a well-documented penchant for flagellation.’”
The witch became the high priestess of the Wiccan religion, creating a myth of female power and intuitive knowledge of nature so beloved by contemporary feminism. Starhawk, probably feminism’s best-known witch, has updated the myth by adding shamanism and an interest in the practices of the native Americans. She adheres to Gardner’s ideas of witchcraft as an ancient goddess religion, “venerating the Universal Feminine Principle which has long been neglected in our culture.”
Dr Ronald Hutton says that four of the elements thrown into Gardner’s cauldron have a long history. They are high magic like Kabbalism, hedge magic (the use of herbs), seasonal ritual and the love affair with the ancient. But these never amounted to a coherent pagan matriarchal religion. Nor is there any evidence that the women persecuted in the past were pagan nature worshippers. “They were simply people who had a lot of enemies. They were unlucky.”
But if the real witches weren’t pagans, who were they? One feminist historian has recently thrown doubt on the idea of the benevolent earth worshipper. In Oedipus And The Devil, Lyndal Roper uses psychoanalysis to interpret the fantasies involved in witchcraft accusations. From her research on witch-hunts in 16th-century Germany, she concluded that, “Even though men conducted the trials, most of the accusations were first made by women against other women who were believed to be causing harm, usually to a child. These accused women were often cold and heartless about the deaths of other women. There was a lot of negative emotion.”
Roper believes that accusations of witchcraft were rooted in envious and hostile fantasies surrounding maternity. In Germany, she found that midwives were over-represented in the group of women persecuted. There were other types of women among the accused but “what they have in common, is that they are often in some sort of maternal or dependent relationship with the accuser.”
The pattern is similar in England where the sorts of women who were accused included grandmothers, childless women and in particular, lying-in nurses, who would help at the birth of a child. Such women were particularly vulnerable to fantasies and anxieties stirred up at the time.
“In this period, when a woman had a child, the first six weeks were a strange time. The woman had not been ‘churched’ – that is, purified and brought back into the Christian community. She was surrounded mainly by women. If a child died, it couldn’t be buried. The lying-in nurse provided food and looked after the baby, so if anything went wrong with the baby, it was almost certainly down to the food. Most of the accusations were about food-poisoning, especially of children. There were also accusations about ailments and signs on children’s bodies. One woman was accused of causing nipples to grow all over a child. And if anything went wrong later, women looked back to those who might have been hostile and envious of them during their pregnancy.”
Roper considers the ideas of Melanie Klein particularly useful. “The usual reservations about Klein ascribing psychotic behaviour to normal infants don’t really hold. Accusations and counter-accusations about witchcraft are psychotic. They come from primitive fears of abandonment. This awakens aggression which in turn produces fear of retaliation by the mother. Hostility to the mother often gets re-awakened around the birth of a woman’s own child. And if there is illness and danger, these frightening negative emotions are pushed out on to someone in a sort of maternal relationship to the child.’
Roper’s ideas about fantasies of the malevolent mother are illuminating in explaining why the accusations were so potent. “I can’t substantiate this yet. But I think the changing status of Mary for both Protestants and Catholics may be relevant.”
Reflections of this kind strip the contemporary witch of the historical antecedents connecting her to ancient nature worshippers. But they are unlikely to undermine contemporary witchcraft.
Dr Hutton thinks that contemporary witchcraft has established itself successfully as a minority religion because it is meeting real contemporary needs, “it is the green party at prayer.” But he wouldn’t deny that extreme negativity still attaches to the term witch. “A lot of contemporary witches were quite naive. But now many avoid the w-word altogether. When vaguely New Age families lost their children in accusations of Satanic abuse in the Orkneys, it concentrated their minds. It brought home to pagans how vulnerable they were if that configuration of circumstances ever occurred again.”
