WISE WOMEN

© Anna Franklin 2005

Even after the coming of Christianity to Britain, the village wise women and cunning men cared for the bodies and spirits of those around them, telling their fortunes, treating their bodily ailments, dowsing their lost property, and physicking their farm animals. They were the midwives who brought new life into the world, and who laid out the dead at the end of life. Their natural magic, in harmony with the rhythms of life, centred and nourished the spirits of the whole community. They were honoured for their wisdom and knowledge: when they spoke, people listened.

Such men and women carried on the beliefs and traditions of the Druid priesthood and Saxon sorcerers, keeping the Pagan religion alive. The word Pagan is derived from the Latin paganus, simply meaning ‘person of the countryside’. The practices of wise women and cunning men had much in common with shamans and witch doctors around the world- a belief that we are surrounded by spirits and that we can commune with them, that the land is alive and must be honoured and cared for, that our actions affect the world around us and we must seek to live in harmony with it, that we are part of the ebb and flow of the seasons and must perform certain actions at the correct time. This Pagan legacy was apparent even into the early twentieth century, when fen folk still made offerings to Yarthkins (fairies) on rocks on the edge of fields, and images of the corn deity were ploughed into fields to return fertility to the land. While most wise women and cunning men wouldn’t have understood themselves to be Pagan, or welcomed the term ‘witch’, their practices certainly stemmed from the earlier beliefs of the Celts and Saxons.

There are reliable accounts of many hundreds of such people in Britain from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the Twentieth Century when every village seems to have housed someone with a magical reputation of some sort. George Pickingill (1816-1909) was a well known cunning man who practiced his art in the Essex village of Canewdon. He traced his ancestry back to Julia the Witch of Brandon, who had lived in a village north of Thetford in Norfolk. He was a simple farm worker, yet the whole locality was in awe of his magical abilities. Anyone who crossed him fell ill, and could only be restored to health by the touch of his blackthorn walking stick. It is reputed that he established nine hereditary covens in Norfolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Sussex and Hampshire, each with a leader that had proved his or her hereditary witch lineage.  Both Crowley and Gardener are said to have been initiated into one or other of these covens, and to have shared together what they had garnered of the old Pickingill rituals.

Also in Essex, from 1812 to 1860, nearby Hadleigh was the home of James Murrell, called Cunning Murrell, the seventh son of a seventh son. He had a magic mirror for locating lost property, a telescope for looking through walls and a copper talisman which could differentiate between honest and dishonest clients. On December 15 1860, Murrell predicted that he would die the next day, and the time of his death to the minute. True to his prediction, he died and is buried in an unmarked grave in Hadleigh churchyard.

The numbers of cunning men and women seem to have dwindled after the First World War, which changed the face of Britain forever, when men who had faced the horrors of the trenches were no longer impressed by the threatened evil eye of a cunning man.[i] According to Nigel Pennick, the last genuine cunning man was practicing in Cambridgeshire in the 1960s.[ii]

 These village shamans had many names including wise women, cunning men, blessers, witches, conjurors and currens. They didn’t use athames and magic swords (which are a Gardnerian introduction into the Craft from ritual magic) but scrying glasses, crystals, keys, shears, sieves, pitchforks, brooms, divining rods, wax, bottles, paper and anything that came readily to hand from kitchen or farm. Their three most important festivals were May Day, Midsummer and All Hallows, the three spirit nights when the denizens of the Otherworld roam the Earth.

THE BURNING TIMES

During the times of witchcraft persecution- the days we call The Burning Times- the wise women were the first to be accused of devil worship and evil magic. 

The Catholic Church initiated the Inquisition in the twelfth century for the purpose of eliminating non-believers, with the Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit Orders being most active in its prosecutions. Since the Church confiscated all the property of anyone convicted, you might think its motives were not entirely spiritual, and in this way it gained much of its great wealth. The Church recognised three classes of non-believers: heretics (the Cathars, Waldensians, Albigencians and Gnostic Christians); heathens (which meant all the old Pagan religions, included the old Greek, Roman and Egyptian Pagans), [i] and witches.  For the Church, the practice of witchcraft by women was always evil, defined as maleficium, or malevolent magical acts. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries Church lawyers merged this with ideas of demonology and diabolism to invent the notion that witches were devil worshippers.

In 1484, in response to reports that in the dioceses of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Salzburg many women were engaging in sorcery "to make the conjugal act impossible", Pope Innocent VIII wrote the Summa Desiderantes, a letter in which he associated witchcraft with evil done in villages, charms, conjuring, abortion, black masses and so on, maintaining that witches formed the church of the devil. The Pope- a father of many illegitimate children- so feared the influence of witches on his virility, that he appointed two German Dominicans, Jakov Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, to pursue witches. They wrote the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, which means "Hammer of Evil Doers" or "Hammer of the Witches".  Sprenger and Kramer demanded the death sentence for all witches who caused impotence. They wrote (quoting St Thomas Aquinas) that “woman is an imperfect animal, and always deceives.... All witchcraft comes from carnal lust which in women is insatiable." So popular was their book that it ran into nineteen editions and was a principle text for the Inquisition.

The real witch craze, however, lasted from about 1580-1660, and there are many theories as to why this seemingly insane panic spread across Europe during this period. Economic, political and religious unrest were all contributory factors. The splitting of the Christian church into Protestant and Catholic factions caused upheaval and uncertainty in many countries. In England, for example, under Henry VIII and his son Edward, Catholics were executed, while under the next ruler, Queen Mary, Protestants were executed. When she died and Elizabeth I came to the throne, Catholics were for the chop again. No wonder people were confused and frightened.

The majority of trials took place in the parts of Europe most disrupted by religious controversy. The areas most heavily affected included western and central Germany, Switzerland, south eastern France and Scotland. Disordered by economic and military crises as well as the disturbance of the Reformation, Lutheran Germany was probably the worst affected. A rash of pamphlettes and publications about demons and witches appeared- when people are frightened, they look for someone to blame. 

A German law professor first posited the theory that the persecutions were a Church led campaign against remnants of a pre-Christian religion in 1828, and Margaret Murray expounded this in the early twentieth century. She described a tradition of witchcraft that was centred on a horned deity called Janus, whom the church identified with the devil. Her theories are very unfashionable at the moment, and scholars are generally in favour of the notion that there is no evidence of any Pagan survival in Europe- despite the evidence of indisputably Pagan practices, ideas and beliefs, and contemporaneous reports. Gratian, an Italian jurist, wrote in 1140 in A Concordance of Discordant Canons that witches were women who believed that they rode on beasts through the air and travelled, on certain nights, to meeting places where they were presided over by the goddess Diana. He attributed witchcraft to the survival of pre-Christian beliefs.

Whatever the reasons for the witch craze, and they are complex, witches seem to have become the scapegoats of public fears. The worst excesses of the persecutions were in rural communities, where people were more superstitious and easily influenced. Mass accusations and prosecutions were not uncommon.  Nothing focuses a group’s attention and binds them together as much as a hate figure to revile and dread. In the twentieth century we had the Cold War, when people in the west were taught to think that the USSR was ‘the evil empire’ and the people of the east to think the west was the domain of ‘degenerate capitalists’ both defining enemies to foster an ‘us and them’ mentality. And what could be more frightening than powerful magicians in the employ of the devil himself working to bring evil into a community, with the Church the only hope of defence?

The gentle Christian Inquisitors asserted that in punishment of witches, "eternal damnation should begin in this life, that it might be in some way shown what will be suffered in hell”. Accused women were stripped naked and intimately probed by men searching for witch marks. Then there were three degrees of torture prescribed. The mildest included being tightly bound, fed salty food and denied water, being stretched on the rack until muscles tore, or being raped by the torturer and his assistants. In the trails, anyone who confessed at this stage was deemed to have confessed ‘without torture’ since these were considered minor measures.

The next level of torture, or Ordinary Torture, usually consisted of the strappado, binding the prisoner’s arms behind her back, tying heavy weights to her feet, and hoisting her to the ceiling, agonisingly dislocating her arms in the process. In 1608, a young German woman was hoisted up eleven times in one day without confession and was then tortured for a further ten weeks. Some torturers delighted in piercing the women with red hot skewers as they hung, or applying red hot brimstone to their genitals. In the Channel Islands, prisoners continued to be tortured even after sentencing to try to make them reveal the names of their accomplices. There, the rope was tied round the thumbs for hoisting, and then abruptly dropped so that the thumbs were torn off.

For those who still would not confess to working evil magic, there was the Extraordinary Torture.  Again, the victims were hung from the ceiling, but extremely heavy weights (as much as 660 lbs) were hung from their limbs in order to tear them off. Every bone in the body was usually broken by this procedure. It could be repeated up to four times before death ensued- with or without confession. Other procedures included the cutting off of hands and feet, immersion in boiling water, or metal boots into which boiling lead was poured.[ii]

If a person recanted her confession after being released from the torture chamber, she was taken straight back in; once accused there was little hope of escape. Figures for those executed for witchcraft range from 50,000 to 100,000, but there were probably many more lynched, drowned and tortured to death that are not recorded in these statistics.

A WAR AGAINST WOMEN

It is revealing to note that 80% or more of the accused were women. A Dominican father declared that any woman knew more magic than a hundred men. According to the Malleus Maleficarum "There are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft “and "a woman is by her nature more quicker to waver in her faith and consequently quicker to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft" . The authors prayed "Blessed be the Highest who has so far preserved the male sex from so great an evil" adding that women were weak in themselves, and could only perform magic in league with demons.[iii]

While any woman practicing fortune telling, midwifery or herbalism could be executed as a witch, male doctors, astrologers and alchemists were left unscathed- powerful women were something to be feared and put down. Female healers and the Church had always been at odds. The fifteenth century Council of Trent specifically forbade women from having anything to do with medicine, a profession they were not to be re-admitted to until the late nineteenth century. While male, university trained doctors were sanctioned by the Church, if any women stood before a tribunal accused of practising medicine or healing it was automatically assumed that she must have achieved any cure by witchcraft and she was put to death [iv] According to the Malleus Maleficarum "If a woman dare to cure without having studied than she is a witch and must die". If a woman was accused of healing a patient, the tribunal would call in a male doctor to pronounce on whether she had achieved her cures by witchcraft, and thus he was given the power of life and death over his female rival. Male doctors were trusted implicitly by the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum: "Although some of their remedies seem to be vain and superstitious cantrips and charms… everybody must be trusted in his profession." And lest we be too smug in reminding ourselves how attitudes have changed, a similar mindset still exists today, whereby the word of a doctor like Harold Shipman (who killed hundreds of his patients and got away with it for years) is never questioned, while any woman who queries her treatment is like to have the words ‘hysterical’ or ‘depressed’ penned on her medical records.

In particular, the Inquisition targeted midwives, as according to the Malleus Maleficarum “no one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives…the witch-midwives exceed all other witches in deeds of shame" If a baby was still-born or miscarried, they said the midwife had killed the child to steal its soul, and that female midwives dedicated new born children to the devil.  Preventing pregnancy or terminating a pregnancy was a capital offence.

 This persecution of women was made possible by a long history of anti-female philosophy in the Christian Church. For the Christian thinker, God was male, and thus the only true gender was male.[v] From the very beginning, they argued that women were inferior to men, as Eve was made from Adam’s spare rib, and being formed by a bent rib she was naturally flawed. Saint Thomas Aquinas (still an authority respected by the modern Catholic Church) proclaimed that every girl child is a defective male, conceived only because her father was ill, weak or in a state of sin at the time.

According to Christian mythology, women are responsible for the fall of humankind and its expulsion from paradise, since Eve was tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and persuaded her husband Adam to do the same.[vi] According to the Church, a midwife was guilty of sinning if she eased a woman’s pain during childbirth, since that suffering was imposed by Jehovah as a punishment on all women for Eve’s transgression. Clerics reminded Queen Victoria of this when she asked for chloroform in the royal labour ward.

Under Pagan Celtic and Saxon law, women could be priestesses, teachers, chieftains, property holders, healers and judges. Christianity stripped women of all these rights and left them as mere chattels of their husbands and fathers, who stood as responsible adults for women who, according to the Malleus, "are intellectually like children"; a belief that persists in some monotheistic patriarchal cultures to this day. Moreover, women were denied the role they had enjoyed in Pagan cultures as mothers and creators of life. Church scholars decided that the spark of life comes from the male sperm, and the woman merely serves as the soil in which it is planted.

             The Church felt that women were more carnal than men, as was clear from their many ‘abominations’; women menstruate, get pregnant and give birth, all evidence of the sexual activity which was reviled as sinful by the Church. The Malleus Maleficarum was very unambiguous in its references to women's sexuality as an evil force. A woman was said to be impure "during her monthly periods.” Tertullian called women the "devil's gateway". Like Eve, all women were considered temptresses, inciting men to seek the forbidden fruit of lust. If a woman was raped, it was considered to be her own fault. St Thomas Aquinas taught that women exerted an evil influence over men which caused them to have involuntary erections, and thus distracted them from contemplating God.

Bonaventure (d 1274), a famous Franciscan theologian, said that "because the sexual act has been corrupted (though original sin) and has become, so to speak, stinking and because human beings besides are for the most part too lustful, the devil has so much power and authority over them." St Thomas Aquinas ruled that Satan had particular control over human sexuality because "of the loathsome nature of the act of generation, and because through it original sin is transmitted to all men." Kramer and Sprenger believed that "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable." 

These respected Christian thinkers were afraid of the power of women, particularly their sexual power.

The motives of the accusers were not always spiritual. Dame Alice Kyteler was put on trial in Kilkenny in Ireland in 1324, accused of witchcraft. She was a wealthy woman, having inherited fortunes from her deceased husbands. The trial of Alice Kyteler was initiated by her stepsons who believed that they, not a woman, should receive all of their father's inheritance. Women without brothers or sons to share the inheritance accounted for 89% of the women executed for witchcraft in New England between 1620 and 1725. 

It is noteworthy that most of the women accused were middle-aged or elderly. For the Christian Church, the only acceptable roles for a woman were wife and mother, and a woman’s sole legitimate function was to reproduce. In such a society, any woman over childbearing age was considered useless and had no justifiable function. This made older women, especially the widowed and alone, an easy target for the witch hunters.

In Pagan lore, the image of the older woman is positive and powerful. We look to examples of elderly goddesses, the ones who are mistresses of witchcraft and magic, keepers of the secrets of life and death, such as the Celtic Anu who appears in my home country of Leicestershire as Black Annis. In Greek myth, the crone Hecate, the lady of the crossroad, is the goddess of witchcraft, a wise woman, a midwife, seer and shaman who travels the realms. It was she who helped Demeter in her search for Persephone.

Dictionaries describe the crone as an old, ugly, withered woman or ancient witchy female, or say that crone is a derogatory word for an old woman. It is a word derived from ‘carrion’ i.e. dead meat. In fairy tales the crone is always evil. However, this was not always the case. In previous ages, she was the respected elder, a woman with a lifetime’s garnered wisdom, incorporating that of maiden, mother, middle age and old age. She was the keeper of history, the fount of lore, the healer and midwife, the one consulted in time of trouble because her experience told her what to do. She was the Cailleach or veiled one, the coron or crowned one. She is the hag, another derogatory term now, but derived from hagia, which means ‘the sacred one’ (as in hagiography, the study of saints), or from heilig meaning ‘holy’.

In Japan, older people are honoured as ‘living treasures’. In our own society, with its heritage of patriarchal monotheism, old women are seen as useless. They (allegedly) have no sexual or maternal functions, and are only valid as grannies useful for the odd present or spot of babysitting. You only have to look at an evening’s worth of television adverts to see how older women are perceived- lacking in wisdom or insight, narrow minded, and more than a little ridiculous, while anyone under twenty is portrayed as worldly wise, sassy and knowledgeable. The inference is that we live backwards; we are born with knowledge and lose it as we age!

Today’s witches are trying to reclaim the title of Crone as an honourable and respected estate, in which an older woman is empowered to be herself: as wise, holy, rebellious, incorrigible, astute, funny, sexy, or irascible as she wishes.

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