Pagan Witches Jenny jennyg@compuserve.com Wed Oct 14 09:47:19 1998 Starting in the next couple of days, I thought I'd begin a series of posts on Pagan witches. (I'm not *trying* to be provocative, Michael, I swear! <g>) A handful of witch trials actually do seem to preserve echoes of ancient beliefs, and so I'd like to focus on them for a bit.*p*But first, a word on methodology. If you study the trials, it quickly becomes apparent that most confessions are very, very similar. Witches throughout Europe confessed to essentially the same crimes, the same forms of heresy (worshipping Satan, selling their souls, etc.) How can this material tell us anything about ancient witchcraft? How do we know what parts are reliable, and what parts aren't?*p*The simple answer is, we don't. And historians have taken three approaches to this question.*p*Traditionally, historians have assumed that witch trials are useless for telling us what witches believed. Confessions are similar because witch-hunters forced them into conformity. Theology taught a standard demonology and lists of recommended questions guided new inquisitors. If a witch gave an "incorrect" answer, one that contradicted the standard demonology, the witch hunters tortured her mercilessly until she produced the "right" one. Ergo, there is no useful information to extract from these confessions.*p*Margaret Murray suggested a radically different approach. She accepted these confessions as essentially true, and then invented a hypothetical "Pagan" religion which might be able to produce them. Murray's thesis falls apart on a dozen fronts once you look at it closely, and today no one (except Neo-Pagans) puts any credence in her works. And even if you're not familiar with the counter-evidence, it's clear that her basic assumption -- torture is irrelevant and has no impact on confessions -- is an extremely poor one.*p*Today, scholars are trying out a third approach, one I like a great deal: look for anomalies. Look for trials that don't map to the standard demonology, trials where the witch said something that surprised everyone. If a witch says she worships Frau Holde, even though the witch hunter is trying to force her to say "Satan", then that's significant. *p*The basic theory here is, when a witch said what she was "supposed" to say, she was probably just parroting the standard demonology that the witch hunter put in her mouth. If she said something different, the odds are good that she's refering to genuine folklore. Historians today are also very conscious of the amount of coersion trials contain. The less, the better. This is the exact opposite of Murray's approach, which only uses trials that involved the maximum amount of torture and coersion.*p*So for the next few weeks, we'll look at some of those surprises that witches handed witch hunters. At Good-Walkers and Ladies from Outside, cunning shepherds and werewolves, Kresniks and Taltosok. We won't find anything resembling Murray's pan-European Witch Cult, but we will encounter a host of beautiful and ancient sects which survived the Christian conversion of Western Europe.*p*Jenny