In league with the devil
Kathryn Hughes is captivated by Lyndal Roper's investigative account of German witchcraft, Witch Craze
Saturday November 13, 2004
The Guardian
Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany
by Lyndal Roper
352pp, Yale, £25
From the way the devil is described in the court records of early modern Germany, you can see he was quite a catch. Usually disguised as a handsome young man, and often dressed in gorgeous colour, the evil one had a habit of turning up at the cottages of poor, middle-aged widows and offering them a few thalers and plenty of good sex. Unfortunately the thalers usually fell to dirt the moment the evil one had left the building, while the sex turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. For while the devil was nice and hard, he was also distinctly chilly. Sleeping with him must have felt like being penetrated by an icicle.
After this initial seduction scene, becoming a witch - someone in league with the devil - was rather mundane. The evil one himself tended to be quite casual about when he would next get in touch. Meanwhile, there were crops to spoil and cows to kill. Making a diabolic salve took up a lot of time, since one of the major ingredients was the crushed bones of babies (if there weren't any to hand, you had to dig them up from the graveyard). Flying around in the night sky wasn't particularly necessary, since the "Sabbaths" were usually held somewhere pretty central - next to the old mill, or down by the cheese market. Being evil turned out to be not much different from being a good Catholic or Lutheran. You still had to spend the day in a round of back-breaking labour, domestic drudgery and just getting by.
We know all this because the witches themselves described their dalliances with the devil in great detail to the court authorities who periodically rounded up likely suspects, and tortured them until they confessed. The women's stories were all remarkably similar, which suggests, says Lyndal Roper, that a narrative of witchcraft had been unconsciously devised by all the interested parties - secular, religious, high and low - to suit the psychic and social needs of the community. Witches whose confessional accounts were lacking - the devil didn't appear in quite the right way, the details about baby killing were vague - were tortured again until they supplied all the required elements. Only once their stories fitted the template were they permitted the release of a public death.
In this brilliant piece of investigative history, Roper uses the formulaic and pain-soaked narratives put up by the witches to go deep into the psychic and social structures of village life in post-Reformation and counter-Reformation Germany. These communities were tethered to the agrarian year, which means that at their heart stood the business - and it was a business - of reproduction. Witches, by virtue of being menopausal, were unable to contribute to the core activity of village life. And since they were mostly widows too, they were economically marginal and worryingly free from the rule of men.
But this kind of anthropological approach will only take you so far. It is, after all, a big jump from thinking that your elderly neighbour is a bit of an encumbrance to handing her over for almost certain death. What Roper does is graft on a psycho-analytical reading in an attempt to tease out the missing link, that dense interiority of desire and fear, especially around issues of mothering, that might explain exactly why someone decides that her neighbour is supping with the devil. Roper's working hypothesis is that there was a kind of powerful projected envy at work. According to the court reports, it is nearly always a young, fertile matron who holds an older, marginal woman responsible for harming her child. This older woman will, typically, have been previously involved in the child's life, perhaps as a nurse or baby sitter, certainly as a purveyor of tit-bits and cuddles. The point is that in the psychologically tense atmosphere created by material scarcity - a dead child, a blighted flock - it becomes easy to imagine that you see the envy of a non-mothering woman at work. Or, in Roper's own words, "Witchcraft accusations were a hall of mirrors where neighbours saw their own fear and greed in the shape of the witch."
Many of the witches held out a remarkably long time under torture: one woman lasted for 64 rounds, refused to confess, and had to be let go. In part this was probably because she wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to be confessing to. With a skilled inquisitor, however, a witch could be guided towards an account of her oddness, her not fitting in, that made sense to both parties. Roper sees these intense sessions, which could stretch over several months, as anticipating Freud's psycho-analytic "talking cure" of 300 years later (although Freud, mercifully, did not rely on thumb screws). The centrepiece of the narrative, the scene on which everything turned, was, of course, that initial "visitation" by the devil. It fitted the psychological and erotic economy of the time that the witch's induction into evil should be sexually transgressive (otherwise, presumably, she could simply have asked the devil in for a cup of tea). Something about her body - infertile yet still potentially sexual - tipped the community into a collective fantasy about what it might feel like to desire a woman whose stomach sagged and whose breasts were empty.
In this hugely ambitious book Roper wants to do more than offer an account of the German witch crazes of the late 16th century. She also hopes to find out how these witches - individual, historical actors with names such as Barbara Stetcher, Maria Holl and Juditha Wagner - ended up as the generic bogey women of the 19th-century fairy tale. Her stepping stone is an odd case that popped up as late as 1745 in the small village of Alleshausen in what is now Württemberg. Catharina Schmid, the 74-year-old accused of wiping out an entire family and a whole farmyard of animals, was forced to make her confession in the dawning age of Enlightenment, at a time when most sensible people were beginning to think that stories about dancing naked with the devil were frankly rather silly. It is for this reason, says Roper, that neither Schmid nor her interrogators could really be bothered to go through the motions of constructing a convincing narrative, and the results are sketchy and dull. (All the same, there was nothing half-hearted about the eight months of vicious torture that Schmid endured, nor the calculatedly humiliating sentence of death by strangulation.)
And yet, the curious fact remains that only 60 years after Schmid's death, the witch was making a comeback. This time, though, she was no longer out making mischief in the milking sheds or the store room but was confined to the pages of story books. For when the Grimm brothers went collecting for their "Children's and Household Tales" they found plenty of witches ready to hand out poisoned apples and lock up children in gingerbread homes, prior to eating them. The difference was that this time around, all those food symbols spoke not of scarcity and starvation in small agrarian villages but of love and loathing in the bourgeois nursery. Instead of being a symbol of a spoiled harvest, the poisoned apple tells of a mother's fierce but ambivalent love for her child, and that child's simultaneous desire to consume her mother and spit her out. From being a sacrificial historical figure who helped agrarian communities cope with periodic losses and scarcities, the witch had become a potent cultural myth, whose job it was to get the bourgeois family through the emotional stresses of a difficult day and safely tucked up in bed at night.
Roper 's particular triumph is to find a way of bridging an anthropological analysis rooted in the kith and kin networks of the 17th century and a psycho-analytical one forged in the bourgeois household of the 19th. Previously there have been several ways of thinking about witchcraft, but they all seemed to lie defiantly in parallel. Now, thanks to Roper's patient and sophisticated work over more than a decade, we finally have a joined-up history of the witch.
