It is not really surprising, then, that no tradition ever developed of bringing unsolicited accusations of maleficium; nor does the absence of such a tradition prove that during the Middle Ages the common people were not preoccupied with maleficium. The lynchings listed above are enough to show that maleficium was feared and that those who practised it, or were suspected of practising it, were hated. Indeed, they may show more than that: for lynchings are just what one would expect in a situation where fear and hatred were widespread but could find no expression through legal, institutionalized channels.
Much had to change before maleficium trials could become frequent, let alone before mass witch-hunts could begin. The accusatory had to be replaced by the inquisitorial procedure, while maleficium itself had to be seen in a new and more sinister light.
9. MAGICIAN INTO WITCH (1)
So long as the forgeries of Bardin, Lamothe-Langon and Piotto remained undetected, it seemed plausible that the great witch-hunt should have developed out of the Inquisition’s struggle, during the fourteenth century, against heresy amongst the common people of southern France and northern Italy. But the demolition of the three forgeries changes everything. Traditional assumptions break down, familiar sources acquire different meanings, perspectives shift, the outlines of a new picture emerge.
It remains true that the first steps towards the great witch-hunt were taken when the inquisitorial procedure was brought to bear on new notions of maleficium. But these new notions of maleficium had nothing to do with heretical movements in southern France or northern Italy but reflected developments in quite different quarters; while the inquisitorial procedure was applied mainly not by professional inquisitors but by quite different authorities.
These bald statements call for elaboration. It is generally believed that ritual magic (or ceremonial magic, as it is sometimes called) had nothing whatsoever to do with witchcraft; and on the face of it that seems obvious. The practitioner of ritual magic operated above all by means of conjuration: he would summon one or more individual demons by name, with the object of persuading or compelling them to carry out a specific task. More often male than female, a commander of demons rather than their servant, a specialist skilled in a most elaborate technique, he was a very different figure from the witch as she was imagined at the time of the great witch-hunt. Yet if, after excluding the fabrications of Bardin, Lamothe-Langon and Piotto, one re-examines the remaining thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sources without any preconceptions, one finds that they are practically all concerned with ritual magic, and with that alone. One can also observe how, over a period of generations ritual magic and the struggle against ritual magic helped to produce the fantastic stereotype of the witch. It turns out that the source of the new notions of maleficium lies there.
Although a comprehensive history of ritual magic in the Middle Ages has yet to be written, the main outlines of the story are clear.(1) Some awareness of the art had existed ever since Antiquity;(2) but in the later Middle Ages the art became far more elaborate, and it also began to evoke far more interest. A couple of contemporary comments will give a fair idea of what was involved. They come from educated men who were neither magicians nor persecutors of magicians but who, through their professional concerns, were well placed to know about such things.
Michael Scot was court astrologer and tutor to the young emperor Frederic II, and in the opening years of the fourteenth century, probably at Palermo, he wrote for him a vast work, the Liber introductorius, on astrology and related subjects.(3) In it he not only gives a list of the names by which demons may be invoked, he also states that, if a demon is to be imprisoned in a ring or a bottle, sacrifices have to be made first — indeed, as demons have a taste for human flesh, the magician may have to take some from a corpse, or even cut off a piece of his own.(4) A century later, also in Italy, another writer on astrology and astronomy, Cecco d’Ascoli, gives a similar indication. It was traditional to ascribe the invention of ritual magic to Zoroaster; and according to Cecco, Zoroaster discovered that “those four spirits of great virtue who stand in cruciatis locis, that is, in east, west, south and north, whose names are as follows: Oriens, Amaymon, Paymon and Egim, who are spirits of the major hierarchy and who have under them twenty-five legions of spirits each. . because of their noble nature seek sacrifice from human blood and likewise from the flesh of a dead man or a cat. But this Zoroastrian art cannot be carried on without great peril, fastings, prayers and all things which are contrary to our faith.”(5)
Sacrifices of blood or flesh were not the only way of soliciting the attention of demons. Around 1300 the Catalan Arnald of Villanova, who was eminent both as a writer on medicine and alchemy and as the physician and confidant of popes and kings, wrote a critique of ritual magic. He noted that some magicians tried to coerce spirits by means of artificial figures, words or “characters”; though for his part he did not accept that mere men could coerce spirits at all.(6) But already before 1250 the German monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, whose views on demons we have already considered, had hinted at a whole ritual of conjuration. In the Dialogus miraculorum he tells how a sceptical knight was converted to a belief in demons by a priest called Philip, who was a practitioner of ritual magic. Challenged to show what he could do, the magician took the knight to a cross-roads at noon — like midnight, a propitious time for such operations. He drew a circle on the ground with a sword, placed the knight inside it and warned him that if he allowed any of his limbs to stray across the circumference he would infallibly be seized and torn to pieces. The magician having withdrawn to perform his ritual, the knight was left to watch demonic manifestations all around him, ending with the appearance of a gigantic black demon, too hideous to look at.(7)
These scattered references effectively dispose of what would otherwise have been a formidable obstacle. It is known that the techniques of conjuring up demons were enshrined in writing as early as the thirteenth century; but very little of the extant material dates from earlier than the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and without confirmatory evidence we could hardly have assumed that the prescriptions we find there were known to practising magicians centuries earlier. The comments of Michael Scot, Cecco d’Ascoli, Arnald of Villanova and Caesarius of Heisterbach settle the matter: it is clear that the extant sources are closely modelled on — if indeed they are not copied from— the magical books of the Middle Ages.
At this point we are confronted by the great jungle of the pseudo-Solomonic writings. It was natural that many spurious works should be foisted on to the great king of Israel, who is glorified in the Talmud and the Koran as well as in the Bible, and whose name evokes images of superhuman wisdom and fortune even to the present day. The earliest surviving example is the Testament of Solomon, which seems to have originated in Palestine in the first century after Christ.(8) This is a medico-magical work and is not at all concerned with conjuring up demons; and the same could be said of most of the pseudo-Solomonic books which were written — some in Hebrew, some in Greek, some in Arabic — during the next thousand years. But from the twelfth or thirteenth century onwards pseudo-Solomonic works of quite a different kind were circulating in western Europe — true manuals on the art of conjuration, written by magicians for magicians. In the first half of the thirteenth century Guillaume d’Auvergne, bishop of Paris, in his treatise on laws warned readers against books bearing the name of Solomon and containing idolatrous images and detestable invocations.(9) Around 1267 the English philosopher Roger Bacon — at that time resident in Paris — complained that magicians were producing more and more pseudo-Solomonic works, written in grandiloquent language and containing formulae for conjuring up demons and specitications of the sacrifices to be offered them.(10) The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources mentioned above are variants or copies of those late medieval pseudo-Solomonic works. The most relevant to our purpose is the Lemegeton, otherwise known as the Lesser Key of Solomon, which tells us all we need to know.