The witch report
Brian Inglis
Europe's Inner Demons Norman Cohn (Chatto, Heinemann for Sussex University Press £4.50) When in 1231 the Archbishop of Mainz appointed Conrad of Marburg to eradicate heresy in his see, he was unwittingly responsible for founding that cruellest of blood sports, witch hunting. Conrad had been blooded as Confessor to the young Countess Elizabeth of Thuringia, later to be canonised; a status she had certainly earned, as he liked to trip her into minor infringements of his rules, for which he could have her savagely whipped. He was a sincere, crazy fanatic; but in his employment were a couple of young inquisitors who realised the advantages offered by the law that condemned heretics must forfeit their property. Charges of heresy and witchcraft were laid both with discrimination, to trap the wealthy, and indiscriminately ("we would gladly burn a hundred if just one were guilty,") until the indictment of the pious and influential Count Henry of Sayn, on the ground that he had been seen riding the night sky on a crab, showed that nobody was safe. Conrad was found murdered, and the reign of terror abruptly ceased.
There were to be many more such epidemics over the next five hundred years, and they have hitherto defied rational explanation. No longer: Europe's Inner Demons may not be the definitive book on the subject, for that will never be written, but it is lucid, carefully argued, convincing, and painfully readable. Witches (and witch-doctors) there have been in all societies, in every era. In the Judaeo-Christian record, there have also been countless men and women who have been tempted, goaded, or Possessed by the devil. But it was the fusion, and confusion, of these two forces in the minds of men like Conrad, Professor Cohn suggests, and the grotesque fantasies which resulted, which brought thousands of innocent People to torture and the stake. 13ut, how did it happen? The tendency has oeen to assume that there must have been a real witch-heretic cult, or cults, at the core. Professor Cohn has patiently tracked down the sources, and finds that this belief has no more reality than Piltdown man: the cult was a myth, derived from forgeries and hoaxes. He has even been able to identify the individual forgers and hoaxers, and to show that it was not until much ater that their writings were found, taken seriously, and exploited: sometimes by fanatics such as Conrad, but often by Church and State against groups who were too devout for cOrnfort, like the Waldensians, or who were too rich for their own good, like the Jews. A considerable industry has been built on the presumed reality of the witch-heretic cult. The Golden I3oughery boys (and girls, like Margaret LvatrraY) traced it to some ancient fertility rite; fand goose-pimpled suburban covens still per_,°rIln esoteric rituals, fondly believing they _uerive from pagan ceremonial when in fact, as ko-:Ohn unkindly reveals, they were the product Ho the mania-induced delusions of medieval o'Y Willies. Still more important, he ",..e,Molishes the no-smoke-without-fire brigade, ,wno have argued that so many thousands of Reople would not have confessed to sabbat H_ Ights and black masses and kissing the devil's c rj-tomP unless there was a belief in them. When dunfalsession was the only way innocent individe oath,
Could save themselves from torture and What were they to do? ften there was not even that choice: anybody accused of witch-heresy was doomed. In one Swiss Canton, Cohn records, in a ninety year period, of the three thousand people arraigned every one, without exception, was ' executed. Death was welcome, then, as a respite from torture. The saddest aspect of what surely is civilisation's saddest story is the endless procession of Christians who went to the stake recanting their confessions, and calling in vain on the God who had forsaken them.
In a concluding chapter, which he admits is speculative, Cohn presents an explanation of the witch-hunts, from Conrad's to the Salem affair, in psycho-analytic terms. The faith built on the teachings of the Old and New Testaments was ceasing to satisfy; and, before agnosticism and materialism arrived to release the pressure, it had been building up in the form ot "unconscious resentment, against Christianity as too strict a religion, and Christ as too stern a taskmaster." It was this resentment which drove men like Conrad out of their minds — as it had driven Saul out of his mind, into acceptance of the Christianity he had reviled.
There was also, I suspect, another force at work. In all earlier ages room had been left not just for resentment, but for unconscious forces of many other kinds to emerge: the safety valve of the trance state, in which mediums and seers, witches and shamans divined and prognosticated, and they were much respected for their presumed powers. The Church had been unable to incorporate this device, except in the case of a few saints, and they rarely qualified until after death. As a result people who had what would now be described as clairvoyant, mediumistic, mystical or out-of-the-body experiences often became outlaws, branded as witches and heretics. There was never any cult, and there was in all probability very little witchcraft, in any meaningful sense; but there was all the more disposition to accept the witch-heretic myth because the reality was suppressed. The march of science helped to sweep away old style witch hunts; but it did so by explaining not just that there were no witches, but that mediumship, divination and the rest were all occultist nonsense. So it simply cleared the way for witch hunts, new style: Hitler's persecution of the Jews, Stalin's purges, McCarthyism. The resemblance they bear to Conrad's is frightening: particularly the exploitation of the fact that the bigger the lie, the easier it is for people who want to believe it to believe it. Even that repulsive black comedy duet, Cohn and Schine, look in retrospect like a puppetshow parody of Conrad's inquisitors. • What do we do, then, when the next rough beast's hour comes round? At least Cohn — the author, that is, not McCarthy's little bully-boy — has given us fair warning what to expect: charges as crazy as Conrad's, evidence as bogus as the Protocols of Zion, courts presided over by prosecutors. Confess everything, the answer seems to be, except the truth (which the court will not be concerned with anyway): but embroider the confession so skilfully that friends, at least, will not be deceived into thinking it is genuine. Like that purged Czech whose apologetic words were lifted, it was later
realised, from Darkness at Noon. It may not help the victim, but it may assist in the long
struggle to bring such cruel absurdities tumbling down in ridicule; a campaign in which Europe's Inner Demons will be a most welcome and valuable ally.
Brian Inglis's latest book, The Forbidden Game, a social history of drugs, is to be published next week.
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