For this
Halloween, I wanted to do something special. I’ve already talked a bit about
the history of Halloween, but now I’m going to delve into the history of witchcraft.
To be clear, this is not about Wicca or any kind of Neopaganism. Rather, this
is about the beginnings of how Medieval Christianity perceived witchcraft, and
the connection to mythology.
The witch
trials in Europe reached their peak in the 16th and 17th
centuries, most especially after the tumult of the Protestant Reformation,
which Martin Luther (inadvertently) kicked off in 1517. However, this witch
fervor is not spontaneous. It had been brewing for a while. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer Against the
Witches) was published in 1487, which was (sadly) one of the more popular
manuals for dealing with not just the question of witchcraft, but how to deal
with them.
I need to take a moment to point
out that the Catholic Church officially banned the Malleus. Their position was that witchcraft didn’t actually exist,
and that those people who believed they were witches had been deceived, and
need to be taught what was correct to bring them back to the truth.
Even with the Malleus, the question of witchcraft was not new. The idea of
witchcraft had been around for hundreds of years, likely from the earliest days
of Christianity. We look now to the Canon Episcopi:
“It is also not to be omitted that some unconstrained women,
perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and
openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with
the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of
the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her
commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights.”
This
passage has a lot going for it. First, that women have been “seduced” into “believ[ing]
and openly profess[ing].” This clearly indicates not that witchcraft is real,
but that people have been deceived into believing it is real. The full text of
the canon goes on to elaborate on the idea of being deceived into believing in
acts of witchcraft having an effect on the physical world. So, yes, the
Catholic church, through Canon Law, denounces that witchcraft actually exists.
It is only an illusion and deception, a trick of the devil to lead people
astray. At its worst, it is regarded as a form of heresy, which needs to be
recanted, or excommunicated, but not destroyed.
More
fascinating (to me) is that we have a clear mythological connection. The Roman
goddess Diana is mentioned by name in a document hundreds of years after the
Christianization of Rome. Why her, specifically? Why not Jupiter (Zeus) because
of his many affairs and challenge to the sovereignty of God? Why not Venus (Aphrodite)
and her promiscuous ways? Why not Bacchus with
his drunken orgies and self0sacrifice in mockery of Christ? Why not simply talk about all the pagan gods instead
of singling Diana out?
Before we
can get into the specifics, we need to know that Diana is the Romanized version
of the Greek goddess Artemis, and she maintains many of the same aspects and
attributes in the Roman version. So we have a basis to understand the idea more
fully, but I’m going to refer you back to my previous writings on
Artemis to better understand her nature. I’m going to be referring back to
those conclusions.
Diana,
given her nature, has always been a focus for women. It’s only natural since
she is a goddess of childbirth. Moreover, she limits herself to female
attendants, which explains why the Canon
specifically mentions “a countless horde of women . . . to be summoned to her
service.” So she is an icon of strength to women. But this still isn’t enough.
Again, Venus would also suffice, as would many of the other pagan goddesses, so
we have to delve deeper.
Diana, as
goddess of the hunt, lives outside of society, already making her a target.
This makes her at once wild and independent. She exists outside of normal rules
governing society, making her an enemy to established order. The idea of women,
acting independently for their own desires would have been viewed as something
aberrant, even dangerous to the early Church. People were expected to follow
the rules and act with humility. Living outside of the rules of society and
acting independently was a form of rejection of Christian teachings.
While Zeus had numerous affairs, he
was also about civilization and the rule of law. Aphrodite was also a wild
goddess, but in becoming assimilated by the Romans, Venus was much more sedate,
and simply a goddess of romantic love, which was seen as a good thing that should
be restrained, but not chided. Diana’s wild nature was a danger in inspiring
women to cast off their established role in Christianity in favor of
independence away from society.
If these reasons were not enough,
we come to what is arguably my wildest theory, but one I think with merit.
Diana has sworn off sexual contact in order to remain an eternal virgin. This
in itself is not outrageous. Nuns and priests were expected to remain chaste
(thankfully the awful period where everyone was to remain chaste had passed
[how, exactly, did they expect Christianity to survive without giving birth to
a new generation?]). That’s no big deal. However, nuns and priests are servants
to the church, icons of what people should aspire to be by giving over their
entire lives to Christ.
That ain’t Diana. Moreover, Diana
is recognized as a central religious figure, not just some random woman who
decided not to have sex. She is as central and important in Roman paganism as
Mary is in Christianity. I think that the real danger of Diana is that she
would be seen as a parody or corruption of Mary’s divine virginity. Nuns are
expected to follow Mary’s example of purity and devotion to God and Christ.
Diana, however, is not about
service to others, but to herself. Her virginity is not about staying pure so
she could be an icon of virtue, of being worthy to give birth to one such as
Christ. Diana serves her own interests and lures women away from civilization
to get them to indulge in their own desires (possibly Sapphic). This would be a
greater perversion than the worship of other pagan deities, and would be seen
as something more corruptive, especially to women.
There’s not a lot in terms of
records regarding the continued worship of Diana in early Christian Europe, but
it’s not hard to see that there would be an appeal to women who wanted
something more than a life of humble obedience. I think the perpetual virginity
in the service of personal desires would have been a problematic and persistent
lure to certain groups, as well.