Text of page:

Page: 2

In addition to committing such acts, witches, it was said, evidenced other characteristics. They
were thought to be identifiable (differently in different parts of Europe) because they might bear
the mark of the devil on their bodies, have demonic companions (familiars), gather collectively
to pay homage to the devil (at assemblies that came to be called the "synagogue" or "sabbath"),
sacrifice infants, engage in acts of sexual promiscuity, and to be capable of flight and
shapeshifting. Although not all writers on demonology and witchcraft subscribed to all of the
aspects of the model for the offense of witchcraft here sketched, most did. The doctrines of
demonology and witchcraft as they developed between 1300 and 1500, moreover, were
consistent with the cosmology of the Church Fathers and later theologians and so appeared to be
confirmed by scripture.2

FROM MAGIC TO WITCHCRAFT

Until the fifteenth century witchcraft was not clearly distinguished from general sorcery or
magic.  Linguistically, this is still the case in French. In German Hexerei (witchcraft) was
differentiated from Zauberei (magic, sorcery) in the early fifteenth century, and in
Spanish this distinction was reflected in the terms hechicerķa (sorcery) and
brujerķa (witchcraft). In English witchcraft--from the Old English wiccecraeft,
which once meant divining, foretelling the future--was distinguished from magic/sorcery
somewhat earlier.
   
Sorcery was consistently described and condemned in scripture, in the writings of the church
fathers, especially St. Augustine [354-430] and Isidore of Seville [ca. 569-636], and later in
theology, such as the work of Thomas Aquinas [ca. 1227-1274] and in canon law. Although
sorcery was never the primary concern of the Church Fathers or medieval theologians before the
fifteenth century, their work provided a comprehensive and contextual view of its function in the
universe and in Christian cosmology.

Beginning in the twelfth century magic tended to divide into two types: learned magic, which
was natural--and arguably neither sinful nor demonic--and sorcery proper, which was both. The
division was shaped by the twelfth century influence of much Arabic (and much Greek via
Arabic) learning into Latin learning. Under this influence, European thinkers began to view
learned or natural magic as diabolical. From the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries, in
fact, scholars undertook a vigorous debate concerning the validity of learned/natural magic. This
raised some of the most important questions about spiritual causality that the period knew. As a
consequence, sorcery, necromancy (the raising of the spirits of the dead), divination, and other
forms of congress with the spirit world were all uniformly labelled as diabolical and came to be
associated with a number of practices: healing, recovering lost or stolen objects, and harming
one's neighbors. Witchcraft, learned demonology and other kinds of demonic magic became
objects of widespread popular belief and were the charges behind most trials and condemnations
during the period of the most intense persecutions, roughly from 1560 to 1660.
  
-notes-

2There is an excellent synthetic portrait in Robin Briggs,
Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New
York-London, 1996), Ch.1, "Myths of the Perfect Witch,"17-59.