approval made Witch denouncement and Witch persecutions a worthy activity. The fact that the property of condemned Witches was confiscated and distributed to the accusers and persecutors was another incentive. In England, Witch-hunting was a less popular pastime than in mainland Europe. English Witch persecutions, although bad, never reached the severity of their Continental or Scottish counterparts. In most European countries, the penalty for Witchcraft was burning at the stake and confessions were extracted by horrendous torture. In England, death was by hanging. Officially, physical torture was illegal, although the English magistrates did permit more sophisticated forms of psychological torture such as sleep-deprivation. Another saving factor was that the English Protestant Church had broken away from the Catholic Church in the mid-sixteenth century and was less affected by Papal pronouncements. The English attitude to Witches was also influenced by rationalists who did not subscribe to the devil-mongering theories of the Continent. No English edition of Malleus Maleficarum appeared until 1584 and, in the same year, an altogether more psychologically healthy work was published by the Englishman Reginald Scot – The Discoverie of Witchcraft.9 This was an unusual book for the time, written from the point of view of a sceptic. Scot’s book made explicit the connection between ritual magic and Witchcraft and included both Witchcraft practices and magical rites. It also includes some amusing accounts of conjuring tricks.
Overall in Europe, between 150,000 and 200,000 people were executed as Witches; of these around 100,000 came from Germany. The extent to which those accused in the Witch trials were practising ancient forms of Paganism or were village wise women or cunning men is impossible to estimate. It is likely that the majority of those tortured and killed were the victims of the fears and fantasies of a superstitious age – the unusual, the eccentric, those with enemies wanting to settle old scores, and those whose names were blurted out by pitiful torture victims in their desperation to bring an end to their pain.
Fortunately, the New World largely escaped this madness. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the evil of the Witch-hunts crossed the Atlantic to America. It was in the Puritan settlement of Salem, Massachusetts, that the greatest outbreak of Witch hunting began. Most of those accused were the victims of maliciousness and hysteria. Altogether 141 people were arrested, of whom 19 were hanged. One, 81-year-old Giles Corey, who refused to confess to Witchcraft, was crushed to death beneath a wooden plank piled with rocks.
Giles Corey died a martyr, not for Wicca, for this does not seem to have been his faith; but to the powers of irrationality and hate. These powers are still all too alive in the world today.
The Return of the Pagan
Although Pagan religion had been suppressed by the Christian Church, Pagan culture had not. This was preserved in the culture of the country people. Their shrines had been made over to another God, but folk customs of Pagan origin such as May Day celebrations, the bringing of an evergreen tree into the house at Yule, the making of Bride’s bed by Scottish Highland cottagers at Imbolc, customs for corn harvest, well-dressing and others meant that Paganism was embedded in the life of the land.
Paganism was also embedded in the life of the mind. The ancient Greek scholar Euhemerus, whose book was one of the first to be translated from Greek to Latin, had argued that originally the ancient Pagan Gods were worthy men and women who had been made Gods by their grateful communities. Euhemerism, as it came to be known, enjoyed a revival in the Christian period. Isis was accredited with teaching the ancient Egyptians the letters of the alphabet, Minerva, the Roman Goddess of wisdom, with inventing the art of working in wool, and Mercury was seen as the first musician.10 Euhemerism provided a cover under which mythology could be preserved. Rather than demonizing the Gods as earlier Christians had wished, their qualities were venerated and set up as models for human behaviour.
The influence of Paganism became more active from the fifteenth century on. In the fifteenth century a Renaissance began, a rebirth of knowledge and scholarship that had been suppressed by Christianity. Developments in intellectual thought made people question Christian dogmas, a process hastened by the corruption into which the Church had fallen. For some of the disaffected, the solution was to adopt one of the new brands of Christianity. For others who were looking for something which orthodox Christianity could not offer, there were other avenues to explore.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, adventurous European nobles had ridden to the Popes’ summons to the Crusades. Ostensibly worthy enterprises to defend Christian shrines in the Near East from the onslaught of Islam, the Crusades proved to be a rallying call for hundreds of thousands of European nobles and not-so-noble. Those whose forefathers had leapt from longboats shouting the name of Odin were now happy to don the Crusader’s cross and perform rape, pillage and plunder in the name of Christ.
The Crusaders’ armies marched eastwards and met their match. Their attempts to stop Islam were a failure. Instead, they brought back to Europe plunder, disease, heretical ideas and, most precious of all, ancient Pagan manuscripts which had been forgotten or destroyed in the West. The next 300 years saw a Renaissance in Pagan thought.
One of the most influential of the rediscovered books was the Corpus Hermeticum11 or Works of Hermes. The Corpus Hermeticum was mistakenly believed to be of very ancient origin, the work of a mythical magician Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-greatest Hermes. However, in reality the writings dated from the first to third centuries CE and were primarily Neoplatonist in outlook. One of the most well-known of the works is the Emerald Tablet which contains the words familiar to many Witches and Pagans:
That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to achieve the wonders of the one thing.12
In other words, the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. This is the basis of all astrology and divination: the patterning of the heavens, the runes, the tarot, is a reflection of what is or will come to be.
In 1450, the Italian nobleman Cosimo de’ Medici purchased the Corpus Hermeticum, installed the priest and philosopher Marsilio Ficino in the Villa Carregi in Florence and commissioned him to begin the work of translation. The translation overthrew Ficino’s Catholic ideas and he found himself more and more convinced of the truth of the Pagan religious vision. The universe was a visible manifestation of the Divine and the same Divine force lay behind all religions. Each religion was but a manifestation of a higher truth. Marsilio Ficino had the natal chart of a dedicated occultist: Sun and Mercury in Scorpio, with Aquarius rising and a practical streak of Moon in Capricorn. He was interested in practice as well as theory and did not stop at translation, but started to experiment with magic. Ficino was interested in magic as theurgy or spiritual development. His magic involved the use of chanting and music in order to achieve higher states of consciousness. Ficino was careful to try and keep on the right side of the Church by emphasising that his magic was natural magic dealing with the powers of the planetary spheres upon earthly things, rather than more dubious dealings with angels and demons.
Marsilio Ficino’s religious and magical ideas were taken up by others, many of whom were less cautious in their approach. A notable successor was Pico della Mirandola. Where Ficino had gone no farther than trying to use natural (i.e. non-Divine and non-angelic) forces, Pico della Mirandola favoured the use of magical ceremonies to contact aspects of Deity or angelic forces. Pico della Mirandola also had the advantage of knowing Hebrew and he was able to introduce concepts from the Jewish mystical and magical system known as the Qabalah into the framework of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Church reacted: anyone found reading Pico della Mirandola’s works would be excommunicated.
Magical ideas continued to evolve throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1531, Cornelius Agrippa, a native of Cologne in Germany, published his De Occulta Philosophia, On Occult Philosophy, which contained more lists of magical correspondences between the planets, earthly activities and objects such as
