Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs & Disease (Review)
Jenny
jennyg@compuserve.com
Fri Oct  9 12:14:21 1998
_Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease:  An Anthropological Study of the European Witch-Hunts_ by H. Sidky*p*Books like this are the reason that historians get ugly when anthropologists write about historical subjects...*p*You remember all the stuff I've said about how much witchcraft studies has changed in the last twenty years?  How we've now got 20 times as much data as we did in the '60's, and how simplistic, blame-oriented explainations have been discarded in favor of complex social histories?  Well, someone neglected to tell Dr. Sidky this.*p*This book is a blast from the past.  All of its theories are Golden Oldies, theories popular back in the '50's and '60's.  The Evil Authorities (both secular and religious) are to blame for everything.  Witches were deranged drug-addicts who gave ridiculous confessions because they were so coked up on flying ointments that they couldn't tell fact from fantasy.  Ergot poisoning and mental/physical illneses explain everything.*p*How did this book happen?  Well first, Dr. Sidky relied primarily on out-dated research.  Most of the sources he cites come from the '50's and earlier, back when we didn't have a lot of information available.  He dismisses all modern research as the product of "mentalism", an excessive fixation on what people think happened, instead of what 'really' did happen.  In theory, this is an interesting point.  Unfortunately, in practice all it means is that Dr. Sidky rarely discusses counter-evidence.  He simply labels his critics 'mentalists' and assumes that that proves their theories are worthless.*p*Second, Dr. Sidky ignores all the new data revealed in trial record studies.  His theories are built on the 3% of data contained in literary sources.  And if you only look at that 3%, they sound reasonable.  However, the major innovation in this field was uncovering the *other* 97% of the data -- and finding that it contradicted the 3% we'd used before.*p*Dr. Sidky's theories ignore this evidence too.  He claims that the Burning Times were a deliberate pogrom inflicted on a helpless populace by evil religious and civil authorities.  Which completely ignores the fact that the trials were worst where central authority was weakest, not strongest!  That national and church courts had the lowest conviction rates, not the highest.  Etc., etc.  The bottom line is, his theories sound reasonable, but they don't do a reasonable job of explaining our data.*p*Third, Dr. Sidky shows little interest in or knowledge of historical methodologies.  That is, he doesn't know how historians arrive at their conclusions, and he doesn't much care.  A reputable historian would *never* assume that a witch-hunting manual was completely accurate.  Dr. Sidky does -- he takes them at face value, and never asks, did this author have access to accurate information?  Does he have an agenda or bias?  *p*One of the most painful examples comes from Dr. Sidky's discussion of the death toll of the Burning Times.  Dr. Sidky states that estimates of the death toll range from a low of 100,000 to a high of one million, and he cites a variety of 1970 and earlier sources to back this up.*p*Now, this is completely bogus -- as Sidky himself admits if you read his footnotes.  There he acknowledges that witchcraft historians estimate that between 40,000 and 60,000 deaths occurred.  But, he says, all estimates are 100% guesswork.  He blames the lower death tolls on the rise of Neo-Conservative politics during the 1980's.*p*What he neglects to mention is that all of his estimates come from a time when no one had bothered to count how many executions existed in the trial records.  When no one had studied the court records to see what percentage we had, and what percentage were missing.  His estimates *are* 100% guesswork -- but modern, lower figures are not.  Ronald Hutton didn't say that 40,000 witches died because he had a boyish crush on Maggie Thatcher.  He said it because he did a detailed study of trial evidence and found less than 15,000 executions, with approximately 30%-40% of records intact.*p*The worst part of this book is that it is completely and utterly non-historical.  Dr. Sidky pays *no* attention to chronology, geography, and the development of beliefs.  He presents a stereotype of the trials and then simply assumes that all places and times were like this.  *p*Two terible examples of this disdain for history:  1) Dr. Sidky hypoethesizes that the Black Death caused the Burning Times.  Which ignores the fact that the trials started about fifty years before the Plague and that the major crazes didn't arise until TWO HUNDRED YEARS later.  2) Almost all of his 40-page chapter on torture is devoted to stomach-turning descriptions of various devices.  Yet there is NO history in this chapter.  He never discusses why European courts began using torture (the Inquisition discarded trial by ordeal and replaced it with a modified version of Pagan Roman law, which allowed torture).  He never talks about the normal safeguards that limited its use, and how those safeguards were discarded as the panic grew.  He never mentions the interplay between theology and torture, the way that trials and scholasticism egged each other on.  A complex and important topic becomes one muddy, revolting blur, with no insightful points whatsoever.  (I'm sure none of us need to be convinced that torture was monstrous, and that it was vile to use it!)*p*As a historian, I found Dr. Sidky's contempt for my field profoundly insulting.  As a Witch...  ooh, this man made me want to take up cursing!  Historians are rarely polite to Neo-Pagans.  It seems like every book on the history of the Burning Times has to make one snide comment about us.  But few books are as deeply and consistently rude as this one.  Dr. Sidky holds Paganism (both modern and ancient) in utter contempt -- and points this out repeatedly.*p*Modern Witches are lunatics who "attempt to cope with the alienating conditions of industrial society by wearing imaginative costumes and performing contrived and fanciful rituals."  Ancient Paganism is irrelevant and disgusting -- "peasant mentalities or elementary village crudulities."  In fact, Dr. Sidky makes the mind-blowing assertion that it is UNETHICAL for witchcraft historians to examine Pagan elements in the trials!!  Doing so draws attention to the peasantry, the common folk, and makes people less inclined to blame the authorities.*p*Since Dr. Sidky despises Paganism, it's not surprising that he has extreme problems with the two major scholars who saw Pagan elements in the trials:  Margaret Murray and Carlo Ginzburg.  Murray's poor scholarship is easy to discredit, and Dr. Sidky does an adequate job of this.  *p*But what about Ginzburg, whose book _Night Battles_ is almost universally admired in the field of witchcraft studies?  Whose study of the "Good-Walkers" is held up as the epitome of micro-historical studies, a splendid and meticulously researched work?*p*Well, Dr. Sidky tries to discredit him -- and his efforts would be funny if they weren't so insulting.  First, Ginzburg is a mentalist so nothing he says matters.  Second, Sidky grossly misrepresents Ginzburg's theory, claiming that he was attempting to resuscitate Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult hypothesis.  Ergo, since Murray was wrong, Ginzburg is too.  Third, he claims that Ginzburg didn't use enough evidence, that his theory is based on just a few trials.  True -- but it only applies to those few trials.  Ginzburg didn't claim that all witches everywhere were Pagan, as Murray did.  He said that the Benandanti preserved Pagan beliefs -- and he used *all* of the trials that involved them, omitting none.  I also find it highly amusing that Sidky slams Ginzburg for using "little" evidence, when he himself ignores 97% of our data -- all the information gathered from trial record studies.*p*Ginzburg pops up in several other places, and Dr. Sidky consistently addresses his data in an unconvincing, even ludicrous fashion.  For example, after discussing flying ointments he speculates that maybe the Inquisition forced the Benandanti to take hallucinegins, and that was why they gave such weird confessions!  Man, I had a good laugh over that!  The reason the trials occurred was that a village priest overheard a Benandante boasting about his magickal powers.  And the Inquisition originally dismissed the confessions as nonsensical dreams and ordered the Benandante not to discussion such idiocy again. *p*In summary, this is an *awful* book!  The facts are bogus, the theories are lame, and the tone is insulting on five different fronts!  When I read, I note errors and faulty logic in the margins of the text.  And boy, I haven't marked a book up this bad since I read _Witchcraze_!*p*On a scale of one to ten, this is a solid one and a half.  (Sidky gets half a point in my count because he does manage to discuss the ergot-poisoning theory with some restraint.)  *p*Jenny