Esoteric Coffeehouse

Everyone remembers the witch hunts of the 1500 and 1600s as an ugly chapter of Western history. Thousands of so-called witches were burned, drowned, or tortured in an attempt to get rid of what the Inquisitors called ‘devil worship’. Today, we rarely believe that the witches were in league with the devil. In fact, during the early 20th century, scholars thought that witchcraft itself was a complete invention of the witch hunters (1). Even when some reality to the phenomenon was admitted, witch beliefs were dismissed as the matter of ‘female hysteria’ or peasant superstition (2).

Beginning with the 1960s and 70s, scholars began to consider witchcraft as more than a fiction of the Inquisition, and concentrated on analyzing its meaning for the peasant society (3), (4). Yet even this attempt was marred by a tendency of dismissing witchcraft as pure imagination.

If most scholarship believed witchcraft had no reality to it, there was one early dissenting voice: Margaret Murray, who maintained in 1926 that witchcraft was real, and that it actually represented a European-wide pagan religion dedicated to a horned god identifiable as Janus or Cernunnos (5). The medieval civilization was thus divided into the true Christians and the pagan “secret society” that adopted Christianity only as a facade. In an era of rationalism, numerous scholars rejected Murray’s work as pure fantasy (6).

Murray may have used her imagination to embellish the facts, but this does not necessarily mean that the whole phenomenon of witchcraft was imaginary. However, it was not until Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark studies that scholars began to really consider this possibility.

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