Such were the women whom their neighbours most easily came to think of as witches — but how did the women think of themselves? Did they feel themselves to possess some supernatural power for evil? Or were they outraged at the accusation? The answer is that both situations could occur.
The Lucerne material includes, in addition to the depositions of the accusers, some statements by the accused. Thus is 1549 Barbara Knopf of Mur was accused by several neighbours of bewitching and killing cattle, and of crippling and blinding human beings. Arrested and taken to prison, she denied every accusation and added — in the words of the magistrate — that “she had done nothing, only she had a nasty tongue and was an odd person; she had threatened people a bit, but had done nothing wicked. She desired to be confronted with those who said such things about her and she would answer them....(44) That is how a woman arrested on a charge of maleficium usually reacted, when no torture was used. These answers have the ring of truth. There is in fact no reason to suppose that most women accused as witches regarded themselves as such.
But some did. As we have seen, maleficia really were practised; some women really did try to harm or kill people or animals, or to destroy crops or property, by occult means. These things had been done since time immemorial and they were still being done during the great witch-hunt — indeed, in some remote and backward regions they are still being done today. And it is not difficult to think of one category of women who must always have been particularly tempted by such practices. “Wise women” or “white witches”, who felt able to perform cures by supernatural means, must also have felt able to inflict harm by supernatural means; and some of them certainly did attempt the latter as well as the former. In the Lucerne material, the “wise woman” Stürmlin may or may not have intended to inflict impotence on the young man who had jilted her daughter and married another.(45) But less ambiguous cases have also been recorded. In a trial in Fortrose in Black Isle, north of Inverness, in 1699, a woman boasted of her power to harm as well as to heal; thereby accusing herself, it seems, quite voluntarily. The evidence reads as follows:
Margaret Bezok alias Kyle spouse of David Stewart in Balmaduthy declared she threatened John Sinclair using a phrase that she would quicklie overturn his cart and within a week thereafter his wife fell ill, and that she was brought to see the seek wife and touched and handled her and heard that thereafter she convalesced.
John Sinclair in Miuren declared that she said Margaret did threaten ut supra and that thereafter his wife distracted within less than a week and continued in that distemper till the said Margaret was brought to see her, and that she handled and felt his wife who thereafter grew better but continues something weak still and that it is eight weeks since the first threatening.(46)
This little tale completes nicely our picture of the traditional, age-old world of maleficium and maleficium beliefs as it existed amongst the peasantry of western Europe.
There existed, then, two completely different notions of what witches were.
For the peasantry, until its outlook was transformed by new doctrines percolating from above, witches were above all people who harmed their neighbours by occult means; and they were almost always women. When the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum produced quasi-theological reasons to explain why witches were generally female, they were simply trying to rationalize something which peasants already took for granted.(47)
Why was it taken for granted? The answer has sometimes been sought in the circumstances of village life in the early modern period. It has been argued that, as the traditional sense of communal responsibility declined, elderly women who were unable to provide for themselves came to be felt as a burden which the village was no longer willing to shoulder;(48) or else that spinsters and widows increased so greatly in number that they came to be felt as an alien element in a society where the patriarchal family still constituted the norm.(49) Such factors may well have provided an additional impetus for witch-hunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they certainly do not fully account for the notion that the witch is, typically, a woman. At least in Europe, the image of the witch as a woman, and especially as an elderly woman, is age-old, indeed archetypal.
For centuries before the great witch-hunt the popular imagination, in many parts of Europe, had been familiar with women who could bring down misfortune by a glance or a curse. It was popular imagination that saw the witch as an old woman who was the enemy of new life, who killed the young, caused impotence in men and sterility in women, blasted the crops. And it was also popular imagination that granted the witch a chthonic quality. The Malleus again reflects a popular, not a theological belief when it recommends that a witch who is to be taken into custody should first be lifted clear of the earth, to deprive her of her power.(50)
The other notion of the witch came not from the peasantry but from bishops and inquisitors and — to an ever-increasing degree — from secular magistrates and lawyers. Admittedly, rural magistrates were often themselves of peasant origin; but they were literate, which meant that a view of witchcraft which was enshrined above all in written texts was current amongst them, and in this view a witch was above all a member of a secret, conspiratorial body organized and headed by Satan. Such a witch could just as well be a man as a woman, and just as well young as old; and if, in the end, most of those condemned and executed as witches were still elderly women, that was the result of popular expectations and demands. As we have seen, the earliest witch-trials were quite free from such one-sidedness; and still at the height of the great witch-hunt, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many men, young women and even children were executed.
The complaint against these people was not primarily or necessarily that they harmed their neighbours by occult means but that they attended the sabbat. Collective worship of the Devil in corporeal, usually animal form; sexual orgies which were not only totally promiscuous but involved mating with demons; communal feasting on the flesh of babies — these constituted the essence of witchcraft as it was imagined and formulated by educated specialists during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Practices which in earlier centuries had been vaguely ascribed to certain heretical groups, notably the Waldensians, now constituted an independent offence, which in time came to be called the crimen magiae. Admittedly, maleficium was not excluded — at the end of the sabbat the Devil commonly required his followers to report on the harm they had recently brought about, and instructed them on the harm they were expected to do during the coming weeks or months. Nevertheless, in this version of witchcraft, maleficium was of secondary importance. Here a witch was not simply a malicious, dangerous person but an embodiment of evil; above all, an embodiment of apostasy.