Maleficium, or the Witch Europe Invented

2026-11-05

Chiaroscuro woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien: naked witches crouch around a smoking jar in a forest, one rides a goat backwards through the sky, with bones and cooking forks scattered on the ground

The Witches’ Sabbath, chiaroscuro woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.

A social history of the European witch, from a tenth-century canon that called the night ride an illusion, through the Hammer of Witches, Salem and the Basque mountains, to the visionary peasants of Friuli and the scholar who invented a secret pagan cult. The witch was not a survivor of the old religion. She was a product of the new courts, the new presses and the new fears of her neighbours.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

— Exodus 22:18, King James Version (1611)

The popular picture is familiar. In the dark Middle Ages, priests burned millions of wise women, keepers of herbs and of an older faith, and the Church fed the flames for a thousand years.

Almost every element of that picture is wrong.

The great witch hunts were not medieval; they belong to the age of the printing press, the Reformation and Galileo, roughly 1560 to 1650. The dead were not millions but tens of thousands. The courts that killed most of them were secular and local, not inquisitorial. And the medieval Church, for most of its history, taught that the night-flying witch did not exist at all.

The thesis of this essay: the witch of the trials was not a remnant of the past but an invention of early modern Europe, assembled by theologians, lawyers and frightened neighbours. The tragedy is that it was so modern.

In the Halloween essay we followed the night of the dead and its masks. Here we follow the woman, and sometimes the man, who was said to ride through it.

[](#a-canon-that-said-no "Jump to this heading")A Canon That Said No

Around 906, the abbot Regino of Prüm compiled a handbook of church law for bishops visiting their dioceses. One passage, later known as the Canon Episcopi, describes “certain wicked women” who believe that at night they ride on beasts with Diana, goddess of the pagans, and a great multitude of women, crossing vast distances in the silence of the night.

The canon’s verdict is the surprise. These women are deceived. Their rides are “illusions and phantasms” sent by demons into the mind; whoever believes such journeys happen in the body is the one who has strayed from the faith.

For centuries this was the official position. The flight was a dream, the witch a deluded peasant, and the right response was penance and correction, not fire.

This is why the later witch hunts required intellectual work. Before Europe could burn witches for flying to the sabbath, its theologians had to explain why the Church’s own law said that no one flew.

[](#i-the-making-of-the-sabbath "Jump to this heading")I. The Making of the Sabbath

The work was done in the fifteenth century, chiefly in the Alps and the western Swiss lands, where trials for heresy slid into trials for a new crime. In the 1430s, a cluster of treatises and trial records described not lonely sorcerers but an organised sect: men and women who met at night, renounced Christ, paid homage to the Devil, and returned home to harm their neighbours.

That idea, the diabolical sect, was the decisive novelty. A village healer who cursed a cow was a nuisance. A member of a secret society sworn to the Devil was a traitor to God, and every confession implied accomplices.

From there it was a short step to the image that every later artist would paint: the sabbath, with its flights, feasts and goats. The canon’s illusion had become a crime scene.

[](#ii-the-hammer "Jump to this heading")II. The Hammer

Title page of the 1669 Lyon edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, with dense Latin lettering naming the authors and contents

Title page of the Malleus Maleficarum, Lyon edition, 1669. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, confirming the authority of two Dominican inquisitors in the German lands, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, to proceed against witchcraft. Kramer had met resistance; a trial he pursued in the Tyrol in 1485 collapsed amid local opposition.

His answer was a book. The Malleus Maleficarum, “the Hammer of Witches”, was written by Kramer, under his Latin name Henricus Institoris, and first printed at Speyer in 1486 or 1487. It argued that witchcraft was real, that it was a heresy, that women were especially prone to it, and that secular courts should prosecute it and punish it with death. The papal bull was printed with it, lending an air of approval that the Pope had never given to the book itself.

Sprenger’s role is one of the field’s quarrels. His name appears as co-author in later editions; some historians, following Wolfgang Behringer, argue that the attribution was added only in 1519, long after his death, and that Sprenger had in fact been Kramer’s opponent. Others, including the book’s modern translator Christopher Mackay, think the case against Sprenger’s involvement is weak. It is safest to say that the Malleus is Kramer’s book, whatever help he had.

How influential was it? Less than legend claims, and more than its critics would like. It was reprinted often, but many judges never cited it, and the Spanish Inquisition largely ignored it. It did not start the hunts. It gave them a manual, a vocabulary and a misogyny with footnotes.

[](#iii-the-age-of-burning "Jump to this heading")III. The Age of Burning

The worst decades came a century after the Malleus: roughly from the 1560s to the 1640s, in a band of territory running through the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, eastern France and the Low Countries, with fierce episodes in Scotland and Scandinavia.

The geography tells the story. Hunts flared where central authority was weak and local courts were free to use torture: the small prince-bishoprics of Germany, such as Würzburg and Bamberg, produced some of the largest panics. Where strong central courts reviewed cases, as in the Parlement of Paris in its later years, or the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions, executions were far fewer.

The mechanism was always the same. A misfortune, a quarrel, an accusation; then interrogation, often under torture; then a confession that named others. Each confession fed the next arrest. A chain reaction could consume a town in months.

[](#iv-how-many-died "Jump to this heading")IV. How Many Died

Here the popular picture fails most dramatically.

Nineteenth-century polemicists spoke of nine million victims, a number with no basis in any archive. Serious estimates are a hundred times smaller.

Brian Levack, in the standard survey The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, put the figure at around 60,000 executions in his first editions and lowered it to about 45,000 in the third edition of 2006, as regional research advanced. In the same revision he reduced his estimate for the German lands to 20,000 to 25,000, for France to about 3,000, and suggested Britain may have seen as few as 1,500. Ronald Hutton and most other specialists now work within a range of roughly 40,000 to 60,000 deaths.

That is not a small number. It is tens of thousands of people killed by their own communities for a crime that did not exist.

But the correction matters. The myth of millions turns real victims into a symbol and real history into a slogan. The truth is worse in a different way: the hunts were not a single, centuries-long holocaust but a series of local panics, many of them preventable, that neighbours and magistrates chose not to prevent.

[](#v-who-were-the-witches "Jump to this heading")V. Who Were the Witches

Roughly three out of four of those executed across Europe were women, though the proportion varied wildly. In some regions, such as Iceland or parts of Russia and Normandy, most of the accused were men.

They were rarely herbalists or midwives, despite a persistent modern myth. Midwives, if anything, were often among the accusers. The typical accused witch was older, poor, often widowed, sometimes quarrelsome, and long suspected by her neighbours before any court heard of her.

Nor were they pagans. The trial records show Christians accused by Christians. The “religion” of the witches existed in the minds of their judges, constructed from demonological books and confessions extracted by pain.

[](#vi-the-witches-advocate "Jump to this heading")VI. The Witches’ Advocate

The most remarkable figure in this history is a Spanish inquisitor.

Between 1609 and 1614 the Basque lands on both sides of the Pyrenees were gripped by panic. On the French side, the judge Pierre de Lancre conducted ferocious trials in the Labourd. On the Spanish side, the tribunal of the Inquisition at Logroño investigated the villages of Navarre, among them Zugarramurdi and Urdax.

On 7 and 8 November 1610, the tribunal held an auto de fe at Logroño before an enormous crowd. Of those accused of belonging to the “sect of witches”, eleven were condemned to the flames: six were burned alive, and five who had already died in the tribunal’s prisons were burned in effigy. Others were reconciled after confessing.

One of the three inquisitors, Alonso de Salazar Frías, a canon lawyer, had dissented. In 1611 he was sent to visit the affected region with an edict of grace. Over the following months his visitation handled about 1,800 cases, most of them confessions, many from children. Salazar cross-examined, compared testimonies, sent for the ointments and powders that witnesses described, and found that the stories contradicted each other at every turn.

His reports to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition concluded that there was no proof that any act of witchcraft had really occurred. The Danish historian Gustav Henningsen, who reconstructed the case in The Witches’ Advocate, made Salazar famous for one observation attributed to him: that there were neither witches nor bewitched until people began to talk and write about them.

The Suprema listened. Its instructions of 1614 imposed rules of evidence so strict that the Spanish Inquisition, so often cast as the villain of this story, effectively stopped executing witches. A sceptical bureaucrat had done what no saint had.

[](#vii-the-good-walkers "Jump to this heading")VII. The Good Walkers

If Salazar shows the machine of persecution grinding to a halt, the benandanti of Friuli show something stranger: a real popular belief that the persecutors could not understand.

In 1966 the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg published I benandanti, translated as The Night Battles. Reading the records of the Roman Inquisition in Friuli, in north-eastern Italy, he found peasants who called themselves benandanti, “good walkers”. Many had been born with the caul. They said that on the Ember Days, four times a year, their spirits left their bodies at night and went out to fight the witches for the harvest, the benandanti armed with stalks of fennel, the witches with stalks of sorghum.

They did not think themselves witches. They thought themselves the witches’ enemies, soldiers of Christ.

The inquisitors were baffled. Over decades of questioning, Ginzburg showed, they slowly pressed the benandanti’s accounts into the shape they knew, and the good walkers began to confess to attending the Devil’s sabbath. A living folk belief was translated into demonology until it disappeared.

Ginzburg’s book is important precisely because it is not Murray’s. He found a genuine visionary tradition, documented in a specific place, not a pan-European pagan church.

[](#viii-salem-1692 "Jump to this heading")VIII. Salem, 1692

Lithograph of a courtroom scene: a young woman in white raises her arms as lightning seems to flash across the room, a man lies fallen on the floor, while judges and spectators react

The Witch No. 1, lithograph by Joseph E. Baker, published by Geo. H. Walker & Co., Boston, 1892. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The most famous trials in the English-speaking world came late, and on the edge of the European world.

In the winter of 1692, in Salem Village, Massachusetts, several girls fell into fits. Accusations followed, then arrests, then a special court. Between February 1692 and May 1693 more than two hundred people were accused. Nineteen were hanged: Bridget Bishop on 10 June, and the rest on three days of mass execution, 19 July, 19 August and 22 September. On 19 September, Giles Corey, who refused to enter a plea, was pressed to death beneath stones, the only such death in the history of Massachusetts. At least five more died in the jails.

The key to Salem was “spectral evidence”: testimony that the accused’s spirit, or spectre, had appeared to and tormented the victims. It could not be disproved, because the accused’s body had been elsewhere. When respected ministers, among them Increase Mather, warned that the Devil could take the shape of an innocent person, the court’s foundation crumbled. Within a few years jurors and one of the judges, Samuel Sewall, publicly repented.

Salem killed fewer people than a single bad year in a German bishopric. It became famous because it happened in a literate, record-keeping colony that later became a republic proud of its liberties, and because Americans have kept retelling it ever since.

[](#ix-why-it-ended "Jump to this heading")IX. Why It Ended

The hunts did not stop because someone proved that magic was impossible. Most Europeans still believed in witches long after the trials ended.

They stopped because courts lost faith in their own procedures. Judges began to doubt confessions extracted by torture, to demand proof of harm, to treat spectral testimony as worthless. Central courts overruled local ones. Physicians offered melancholy and hysteria as explanations. Salazar’s caution, multiplied across a hundred tribunals, did the work.

The last legal executions in western Europe came in the eighteenth century. In Britain, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 abolished the crime of witchcraft itself and replaced it with the offence of pretending to magical powers, a reversal that turned the witch from criminal into fraud. That act will matter in the next essay.

[](#x-the-cult-that-never-was "Jump to this heading")X. The Cult That Never Was

In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe with Oxford’s Clarendon Press. Her argument was bold. The witches of the trials, she said, were real members of an ancient fertility religion, the “Dianic cult”, which had survived Christianisation in secret. The “Devil” of the confessions was a man in costume playing the cult’s horned god.

The idea was not entirely new; nineteenth-century writers such as Jules Michelet and Charles Leland had suggested something like it. But Murray gave it scholarly form, and later the authority of an Encyclopaedia Britannica article.

It did not survive the archives.

As historians from the 1960s onward studied whole runs of trial records, the cult vanished. Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), found very little evidence that accused witches were either devil-worshippers or members of a pagan fertility cult. Norman Cohn, in Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), showed how Murray had used her sources selectively, quoting the fantastic parts of confessions as fact and silently omitting the impossible ones. The confessions she read as ethnography were, very often, the products of torture and leading questions.

The witch-cult thesis is now rejected by historians of the trials. Yet it had an afterlife far larger than its scholarly life, as we shall see.

[](#xi-the-witch-in-the-studio "Jump to this heading")XI. The Witch in the Studio

Painting by Goya: three figures in tall pointed hats float in a dark sky carrying a naked man, while below a man covers his head with a white cloth and another lies on the ground, with a donkey nearby

Vuelo de brujas (Witches’ Flight), oil on canvas by Francisco Goya, 1798. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Artists gave the theologians’ witch a body.

Hans Baldung Grien, a pupil of Dürer working in Strasbourg, produced in 1510 the chiaroscuro woodcut that opens this essay: naked women of every age around a vessel exhaling a column of vapour, one of them flying through the air on a goat. It was printed only a generation after the Malleus, and it is not a work of piety. It is erotic, grotesque and fascinated, made for collectors rather than for courts. Baldung returned to witches again and again.

Three centuries later Goya turned the same image against its makers. Witches’ Flight (1798), now in the Prado, shows three figures in the tall pointed hats, the corozas, that the Inquisition placed on the condemned, lifting a naked man into the night. Below, one man hides under a sheet, unwilling to see. Goya moved among enlightened reformers who mocked the old witch trials, among them the playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín, who would later publish an annotated, satirical edition of the 1610 Logroño account. In Goya’s witches the horror is not in the sabbath but in the credulity that imagines it.

Between Baldung’s fascination and Goya’s irony lies the whole arc of the hunts: the image born with the printing press, and the image turned against the persecutors by the Enlightenment.

[](#xii-what-the-witch-was "Jump to this heading")XII. What the Witch Was

So who was the witch?

She was, first, a neighbour: an old woman with a sharp tongue and a bad reputation, blamed for a dead child or a sick cow. She was, second, a theological construction: a member of a diabolical sect, assembled from treatises like the Malleus. She was, third, a legal product: the person who emerged from the interrogation room with a confession and a list of names.

She was almost never a priestess. The witch-cult that Murray imagined, the pagan religion hiding in the forests of Europe, is not in the documents. What is in the documents is fear, and the machinery that turned fear into death.

The witch of the trials was not a survivor of an ancient religion. She was an invention of early modern Europe, made by its courts, its presses and its frightened villages. The tragedy is that it was so modern.

And yet the story does not end at the stake. In the twentieth century a retired civil servant would read Murray, take her cult at its word, and give it a future. That is the subject of the next essay, on Wicca, and the long Gnostic thread of hidden knowledge runs beneath both.

--

Chamber of Reflections

Home