As so often in the past, I am greatly indebted to the staff of what is now the British Library, but which I still think of as the Reading Room and the North Library of the British Museum; and to the staffs of the Warburg Institute, the Bodleian, the Cambridge University Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale. But on this occasion I must also express my special thanks to the Librarian of the University of Glasgow, Mr R. Ogilvie McKenna, and his staff. Moreover, one particular riddle — the true nature of the witch of Orta (see the third section of Chapter 7) — could not have been unravelled without the collaboration of the libraries of the Middle Temple, of three Cambridge colleges— Trinity, Magdalene and Trinity Hall — and (yet again) Glasgow. For this assistance too I am most grateful.
I am indebted to the boards of the British Library, the Bibliotheque royale Albert Ier, the Museo Lázaro Galdiano and the Prado for permission to reproduce pictorial material in their keeping. Particulars are given in the list of illustrations.
I am also indebted to the following publishers for permission to quote from the works listed: Basil Blackwell, Oxford, and the New York University Press, Martyrdom and persecution in the early Church, by W. H. C. Frend; the Cornell University Press, Witchcraft in the middle ages, by Jeffrey B. Russell; the Oxford University Press and the International African Institute, Witchcraft and sorcery in Rhodesia, by J. R. Crawford; Routledge & Kegan Paul, The history of witchcraft and demonology, by Montague Summers; the Stanford University Press, Witch hunting in southwestern Germany, 1562–1684, by H. C. Erik Midelfort; the Toronto University Press, A razor for a goat, by Elliot Rose; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, and Scribner, New York, Religion and the decline of magic, by Keith Thomas.
The work has been generously financed throughout by the Columbus Trust, particulars of which are given in the Editorial Foreword.
EUROPE’S INNER DEMONS
1. PRELUDE IN ANTIQUITY
In the second century after Christ the Christian communities in the Roman Empire — still small and scattered groups — were the object of strange suspicions and accusations. One of the first of the Latin apologists for Christianity, Minucius Felix, who probably wrote towards the close of the century, has recorded them in detail. He makes a pagan describe the practices of Christians as follows:
I am told that, moved by some foolish urge, they consecrate and worship the head of a donkey, that most abject of all animals. This is a cult worthy of the customs from which it sprang! Others say that they reverence the genitals of the presiding priest himself, and adore them as though they were their father’s… As for the initiation of new members, the details are as disgusting as they are well known. A child, covered in dough to deceive the unwary, is set before the would-be novice. The novice stabs the child to death with invisible blows; indeed he himself, deceived by the coating dough, thinks his stabs harmless. Then — it’s horrible! — they hungrily drink the child’s blood, and compete with one another as they divide his limbs. Through this victim they are bound together; and the fact that they all share the knowledge of the crime pledges them all to silence. Such holy rites are more disgraceful than sacrilege. It is well known, too, what happens at their feasts. . On the feast-day they foregather with all their children, sisters, mothers, people of either sex and all ages. When the company is all aglow from feasting, and impure lust has been set afire by drunkenness, pieces of meat are thrown to a dog fastened to a lamp. The dog springs forward, beyond the length of its chain. The light, which would have been a betraying witness, is overturned and goes out. Now, in the dark, so favourable to shameless behaviour, they twine the bonds of unnameable passion, as chance decides. And so all alike are incestuous, if not always in deed at least by complicity; for everything that is performed by one of them corresponds to the wishes of them all. . Precisely the secrecy of this evil religion proves that all these things, or practically all, are true.(1)
If the passage in Minucius Felix stood alone one might suspect the author of rhetorical exaggeration; but other sources bear him out in almost every detail. The first really great writer of the Latin church, Tertullian, was familiar with these same accusations, and in the year 197 he set out to refute them. He describes how, in his own town of Carthage, a criminal who normally earned his living dodging wild beasts in the arena had recently been hired to display a picture of the donkey-god. It showed a creature with ass’s ears and a hoofed foot, but standing erect, dressed in a toga and carrying a book; and it bore the inscription “The god of the Christians, ass-begotten”.(2) Tertullian’s answer is ridicule: “We laughed at the name and at the shape.” Mockery is also his response to the tales of incestuous orgies, infanticide and cannibalism. If these tales were true, he comments, a would-be Christian would be confronted with some curious demands: “You will need a child of tender years, who does not know what death means, and who will smile under the knife. You will need some bread to soak up the blood; also some candlesticks and lamps, and some dogs, and some scraps of meat to make them jump and upset the lamps. Above all, be sure to bring your mother and sister. But what if the mother and sister will not comply, or if the convert has none?… I suppose you cannot become a regular Christian if you have neither mother nor sister?”(3)
Minucius Felix and Tertullian provide the fullest evidence for the suspicions under which the Christians laboured, but by their time the suspicions were already traditional. The most damaging can be detected already in the comments of the younger Pliny in 112 or 113. Installed as Governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, Pliny had the task of examining some former Christians he found there; and he wrote to the emperor asking how they were to be treated. These people, he reported, admitted that they used to attend meetings where they took nourishment together; but they insisted that, whatever others might say, the nourishment was an innocent one.(4) There is little doubt what lies behind this cryptic phrase: Pliny had been trying to establish whether Christians did or did not practise collective cannibalism.
By 152 the Christian apologist Tatian, writing for the benefit of the pagan Greeks, thought it necessary to state explicitly, “There is no cannibalism amongst us.”(5) In the same decade Justin Martyr also refers repeatedly to these slanders. In his Apology he asks how a glutton who enjoys eating human flesh could possibly bring himself to welcome death, as Christians did; for would it not deprive him of his pleasure?(6) And in his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho he asks whether, like the Gentiles, the Jews believe that Christians eat human beings.(7) Justin recognizes, too, that this particular accusation docs not stand alone: when Christians are accused of cannibalism they are also commonly accused of promiscuous and incestuous orgies.