The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life

Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic

by Edward Bever

Exploring the elements of reality in early modern witchcraft and popular magic, through a combination of detailed archival research and broad-ranging interdisciplinary analyses, this book complements and challenges existing scholarship, and offers unique insights into this murky aspect of early modern history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Occult, Religion, Witchcraft, Anthropology

649 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 2008

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the historiography of witchcraft and folk magic there is a long-running debate about whether those persistent beliefs constitute the remnant of some sort of pre-Christian pagan religious culture, or even shamanism, or whether they were simply folk imaginations from early European times that the Church took on and diabolized and formulated into pre-modern demonology.
I favor the former school and so does this volume, making the first real ballsy attempt to reconcile witchcraft and rural magic beliefs with shamanism and pre-Christian holdovers in the less accessible parts of Europe.
The basic argument of the supporters of the "witchcraft-as-remnant-of-ancient-shamanism" is this: ancient folk had cosmologies and ways of perceiving of and even manipulating the universe, what we call "shamanistic" these days. In the fringes of Europe like the Alps, Scandinavia, and the Baltics, with some sprinklings elsewhere, a lot of these old days survived, mutated, and became something else, with a little help from Christian cosmology over the first millennium. Germanic and Celtic deities and forces took on other names and attributes and were gradually subsumed into folk custom. Witchcraft, in its more benevolent forms of fertility wards, crop furtherance, and protection from evil magic users, is what these things evolved into much to the Church's chagrin, who promptly reworked their cosmological view to incorporate these beliefs and even evolve them further.
Bever embraces all of this tentatively and goes out of his way to treat these as actual things and practices and beliefs that people before the modern era very much thought were real and usable. In other words, what was really happening with these people?
Utilizing other disciplines including neurophysiology, plant hallucinogens, sleep neurology, psychosomatics and all kinds of science, Bever goes beyond what anyone has done before to try and offer some tentative theories as to what the hell was going on with these shamanistic folk beliefs. Endlessly fascinating, and a great start to what will hopefully be more similar scholarship!

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 'realities' to which Bever's title refers comprise the ritualized activities of early-modern magical practitioners both professional and casual, the social dynamics of the small communities which motivated those practices, and, in an exceptionally interdisciplinary turn for the field of social history, the psychological and neuro-physical processes that, through the viscerally real experiences and effects they generated, both informed and responded to practitioners' undertakings, thus phenomenologically justifying the entire edifice of the animist, magically-responsive worldview. While the prosecutorial concept of a global diabolic conspiracy appears to have been little more than a paranoid delusion cobbled together from learned elites' theological assumptions and misinterpretation of folk-practices, the specific acts of illicit magic for which individuals were interrogated and punished often had a basis in physical reality, and claims of harm caused through occult means were not necessarily slander or pure fantasy. By the same token, the eventual decline in formal accusations of malicious sorcery reflects real changes in individual behavior (especially that of women), conditioned by the environment engendered by the persecutions themselves, as well as the general amelioration of socioeconomic conditions, as the austerities and suffering of everyday life were major contributors to the kind of interpersonal stresses that might motivate maleficium. However, as Bever concludes, because the end of prosecutions for practicing magic reflected the dwindling of that very practice, the modern western world has likely been largely deprived of an entire psycho-physical adaptive apparatus that had been available to its forebears.

[Kim Daly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This researcher shows how witchcraft may work, and how it was received in Early Modern Europe. Excellent in its details about human psychology and relations.