Witchcraft and Early Psychiatry

By
John J. Schwab, M.D.
March 2003 Meeting
Innominate Society

            To discuss witchcraft during its height in Western history, from the early 12^th century to the late 16^th century, we need to consider that it had ancient traditions based on agrarian life such as the use of magical influences to forestall demons and the use of prayer to increase the harvest. According to T.Ruiz, the rise of mysticism and heretical movements in the 12^th century and the witch craze in the 15^th century developed in significant historical and social contexts—specifically, the rise of the Western nation state, the breakdown of the medieval village community, the ending of feudal social structures and new social class relationships. In northern Europe, cities were emerging, urban life was developing and countryside was changing as new tools and farming techniques increased food production and population growth. Other societal changes included the development of the bourgeoisie, free labor, the accumulation of wealth and the new Western capitalism.

            Those changes that included the enclosures (restricting grazing on the common land), the demise of the village community, and the population increase, led to the “late medieval crisis” with its 14^th century famines, the “Black Death,” uprisings by the peasants and even the bourgeoisie and the Hundred Years’ War. The tumultuous changes in the social order and centralization of state power included dramatic changes in attitudes toward the poor from seeing them as the select children of Christ to being the undesirables and the unwanted.

            The ongoing social, economic and political developments produced changes in attitudes toward society and even the sacred. The results were radical transformations of the social order as feudalism was supplanted by the centralization of power in kingdoms. The changes in religion were often marked by outbursts of mystical and millenarian activities. Ruiz explained that religion there were shifts in the liturgies, doctrines and praxis that had immediate impacts on the Christian, Judaic and Islamic religions. Thus, in the late 10^th century, the Christian Church was beset by changes that weakened its authority and even belief. Also, it suffered from its involvement in the feudal structure and in the private affairs of the nobility. Often, ecclesiastical offices were sold to the highest bidder (simony), many priests and monks were illiterate, and the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity were ignored. Moreover, the papacy was politically corrupt. But, in the early 11^th century, powerful reform movements produced a restructuring of the Church and gave rise to new forms of piety along with mysticism and millenarian movements. There were violent clashes between the Church and the emperor, along with the beginning of the Crusades and the elaboration of heretical doctrines.

                        Then, in the early 11th century, the Protestant Reformation split the Christian Church and led to reform movements, including the Council of Trent that defined the new Catholic Church. The new religious emphasis of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation was followed by intolerance and increasing persecutions for deviance. Concurrently, the greater role of the universities and rise of scientific discourse influenced European thought and there was an increase in mysticism, sometimes marked by episodes of mass ecstasy, such as the dance mania, reminiscent of the Roman bacchanalia, and even episodes of mass suicid3e. Zilboorg maintains that these phenomena were produced by the “moral contagion” attributable to the breakdown of the social order. Also, the hysterical states that became manifest were epiphenomena, not causative factors.

            The increasing number of the mentally ill and the severity of their episodes with potential dangers to society produced an atmosphere of anxious intensity and combative religious fervor. Medical psychology turned to legal procedures. The result was, in Zilboorg’s words, “a darkness even greater than that which followed the breakdown of classical culture . . . a darkness full of turmoil and restless doom.” (P.143)

            Church officials and scholars lamented that there were not enough inquisitors and judges to avenge the many offenses against God. But, two Dominican Brothers, Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kraemer, helped the inquisitors by writing their infamous, Malleus Maleficarum or The Witches Hammer that became the popular guide for detecting, condemning and prosecuting witches. (Ruiz, p.33) It has three parts. The first contains many pejorative representatives of women, who are described “as being, by nature, easily seduced by the devil and with great propensity to evil.” The second presents lurid accounts of how women (witches) make men impotent, steal the genitalia and carry out other sexual misdeeds. And, the third outlines procedures for interrogating witches, bringing them to trial and punishing them.

            The Malleus was both a treatise on misogyny that was fundamental to the ‘witch craze” and also an authoritative set of instructions that shaped the treatment of women, especially old women, for the next 150 years. It articulated the anxieties besetting European society that were being increased by the social and economic instabilities of the age, and it gave clear directions for dealing with the perils that were so disruptive at a time when European society was in a persecutory mood. The “witch craze” was responsible for the painful deaths of 500,000 persons, mostly old women. Zilboorg states, “Never in the history of humanity was woman more systematically degraded. She paid for the fall of Eve sevenfold, and the Law bore a countenance of pride and self-satisfaction, and delusional certainty that the will of the Lord had been done.” (p. 162)

            Guaazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum described how people became witches. Making a pact with the devil was the important first step; it bound the person and her/his soul to the devil for eternity, a lifetime or a predetermined period of time. In return, the devil granted power, sex, wealth, wisdom and/or revenge to those who signed. The pact was written in blood and placed at crossroads. The terms were specific and have entered Western literature, as described by both Marlow and Goethe in their great works in Faust. The second step was the imprinting of a mark, usually of a bat or toad, on the body under the armpits, in the genital area or under an eyelid. Becoming a witch also involved abjuring one’s faith, casting away rosaries and scapulars, paying homage to the devil by make obscene gestures, promising to gain followers, undergoing a sacrilegious baptism, giving token to the devil and then entering the devil’s magic circle. Accusations of such acts and sacrificial ceremonies are the same as those that have been leveled against the oppressed of many faiths.

            Zilboorg has stated profoundly, “We must not forget, of course, that the whole problem of witchcraft, and the structure of clerical and temporal jurisprudence which it erected, was not the exclusive result of a miscarried psychopathology or of a psychopathological bent in theology. There was a restlessness in the body social and in the politic of Christian Europe; the Malleus was a reaction against the disquieting signs of growing instability about the social order. Hundreds of thousands of the mentally ill became victims of the violent reaction. Not all accused of being witches and sorcerers were mentally ill but almost all of the mentally ill were considered witches or sorcerers or bewitched.” (p. 153)

            The “witch craze” and its atrocities diminished gradually in the 16^th century and lessened greatly in the 17^th century as the result of several factors. The main one, the opening up of the New World, provided immigrants and merchants opportunities to gain a more profitable and freer life that they had in their often oppressed existence in Europe. Also, it offered religious freedom to many and, finally, it was an escape valve that could benefit those who left and those who stayed.

            In psychiatry, one great figure emerged who struggled against the prejudice, ignorance and hatred that were so prevalent. Johannes Weyer, born 1550 in North France, was a plebeian by birth who was known as a quiet, slow moving, methodically thinking man. He studied under Agrippa and studied medicine in Paris and then became Duke William of Cleves’ personal physician for 30 years. He was a scholar who made excellent descriptions of scurvy, hydropsy and occlusion of the neck of the uterus, and even invented a vaginal speculum. But, his major interest was in mental illnesses, and he initiated a revolution in medical thought—the humanization of psychiatry!

            Weyer’s masterpiece, for which he has been immortalized, is De Praestigiis Daemonum, an honored work of great scholarship. Weyer had anger and disgust for many of the judges of his day. He wrote, “It is highly unpleasant to see how people in order to kill errors are busy killing human beings.” In his famous book, Weyer pleaded for the “right and duty of medicine to intervene and, by means of rational observation and treatment, relieve the poor women who are called witches.”

            The last notorious witch trials were the well-known “Witches of Loudon” in France that Alduous Huxley described in his excellent 1948 novel The Devils of Loudon. It is unusual because a man, not a woman, was the witch who was burned. A second was the persecution of witches in Essex Shire, England about which Alan MacFarlane has constructed an important societal map. The English countryside was undergoing important social transformations in the 17^th century, especially with the enclosure movement that displace d the peasants, many of whom took to the roads in search of work. Many became unwanted beggars at a time when Essex authorities had increased their attacks on begging. There was no systematic torture of accused witches, but assizes were held and hundred of accused women were brought to trial, found guilty and hanged. In England, witches and heretics were not burned but their bodies could be burned.

            MacFarlane’s statistically clear picture of the social landscape of witchcraft in 17^th century Essex shows that witches were usually elderly women who could no longer conceive, but the accusers were evenly divided between men and women. Many accusers were in-laws of those they charged. The accused were in the lower classes and had been adversely affected by the economic shifts.

            Surprisingly, the last witchcraft terror in Western society was in the New World that had been free of those atrocities until the late 17^th century. In the small town of Salem, Massachusetts, there was increasing mistrust and fear of attacks by the Native Americans. The fear, sexual fantasies and tensions in the village focused on witchcraft. Unlike Essex, the Salem accusers were of lower socioeconomic status that those they charged. Scholars have postulated links between the repressed sexuality of Puritanical New England, the social conflicts, religious difference and the use of witchcraft to maintain the established social order and to punish one’s enemies.

            As has received little attention and for which I am indebted to my seventh grade grandson, William S. Stone, the Native American’s attacks had been increasing as they were losing their land to the white man. The result was the little known King Philip’s War, (1675-76) between the Puritans and the Wimpanoag Indians who were resisting efforts to being Europeanized. They feared they would be offending the ‘Great Spirit” by converting to Christianity and by needlessly slaughtering animals for the fur trade. Their Chief, Metacom, whose grandfather had helped the Plymouth colonists, had been derisively nicknamed King Philip. As the Puritan population increased and there were increasing conflicts, Metacom organized resistance to the Puritans. In 1675, King Philip’s War broke out, and on June 24 a massacre of the Whites began. Connecticut guarded its frontier but Rhode Island and Massachusetts were slow to react and suffered significant casualties. In Deerfield, Massachusetts on September 18, 1675 about 60 English were killed and the settlement was abandoned. But, by spring 1676, the Native American’s power waned and on August 1, Philip’s wife and 9-year-old son were captured. A traitor guided the English to Philip’s hiding place where he was surprised and beheaded; his head was set on a pole in Plymouth where it remained for a quarter of a century. The struggle with the Native Americans was over in southern New England but continued on the northeastern frontier until the spring of 1678. However, fear of another Native American uprising haunted the settlements on the New England frontier and contributed significantly to the Salem terror and witchcraft trials of 1692.

            The Salem trials are thought to have marked the ending of such terrors in Western society as the “witch craze.” But, wherein we assess the 20^th century with its wars, persecutions, genocides, ecologic catastrophes and economic upheavals, we again can see Ruiz’s “terrors of history” and the “survival of the past” that he has described. Finally, in this presentation of the witchcraft craze, we can see significant developments in psychiatry, sparked by the wonderful work of Johannes Weyer. After examining some of the women accused of witchcraft, he speculated, we now think correctly, that many were suffering from hallucinogenic amounts of belladonna and/or hashish. Also, his careful clinical work with some of the accused women enabled him to appreciate the power of the imagination and of fantasy. Weyer is now recognized as being the first physician in modern times whose interests were mainly mental diseased, and, in Zilboorg” words: “he thereby foreshadowed the formation of psychiatry, and stands out as the true founder of modern psychiatry.” (p.228)