Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction

The final paragraph of this Very Short Introduction, a paragraph which I didn't bother to finish reading, as its few sentences stood no chance on making good of the great disappointment that is this little book, begins, "To be human is to feel emotion: to compete, loathe, destroy, and fantasize." Gaskill's conception of human emotional life sheds more light on Gaskill himself than on any supposed truths about humanity: this is perhaps a sketch of some of the driving forces of Western patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist history, but to reify these impulses and present them as the core of some sort of a banal and dubious "human nature" or "human experience" is to commit precisely the sin that Gaskill's little book goes to great lengths to point out as the downfall of feminists and spiritualists: to read the past through the unreflective ideology of the present.Gaskill sets up his VSI as the final hearing on witch trials: he evaluates the evidence and renders his verdict on the various readings of these phenomena that have preceded him. Indeed, "the evidence," so far as this VSI is concerned, is essentially limited to records of judicial hearings and proceedings from the Early Modern Period. Though Gaskill gives a cursory nod to the fact that these records of hearings and proceedings, themselves the products of officialdom, cannot capture the reality of the situations to which they refer, he nonetheless goes on to infer reality from them, and from them exclusively; it should come as no surprise that the reality Gaskill infers forthrightly champions officialdom and negates the possibility of traditions of dissent and resistance in the process. Because officials made no mention of these traditions, they must, after all, have never existed in the first place. Everything is as it says in the file; the records simply need to be consulted.Where does this lead us? "Misogyny," Gaskill informs us, "was a negative mutation of the more positive concept of patriarchy.... Seventeenth century men didn't hate women, but the notion that female willfulness threatened society quickly surfaced in times of crisis. Women's bodies were considered inversions or corruptions of the male ideal, their constitutions unstable, their desires menacing." Later, "Ultimately, witches were pursued because they were *witches* [italics in original], not because they were women." Gaskill invokes David Harley, who cautioned historians to distance themselves from their own epistemic frameworks and "to hear the explanations offered at the time." Gaskill affirms that "what matters is the [people of the period's] experience and what this meant — their subjectivity." Apparently, not a single of these supposed historical realists can see the fact that the radical turn toward subjectivity in the postmodern era determines entirely their objective notion of historical subjectivity, which, at any rate, is not something that can be recovered from positivist readings of the documentary evidence offered by officialdom. Today, one finds no shortage of misogynists who do not consider themselves misogynists; a great many of these people will assure you that, in fact, they "love women." To embrace subjectivity as the sole location of "meaning" is to embrace the delusion of the postmodern; Gaskill projects precisely this contemporary delusion backwards in history.As the little book comes to its painful close, Gaskill turns to discuss witch beliefs and persecution in contemporary Africa. After describing some vile realities, he says, "These cases impose limits on the relativism of the Western social scientist.... In September 2009, a UN official identified witch-hunting as 'a form of persecution and violence that is spreading round the globe,' affecting millions. We should sustain our disgust, and condemn the religious beliefs of the witch-hunters, however sincerely held." Gaskill suspends the whole fiction of his social-scientific objectivity in the face of contemporary horror (once that horror is officially condemned, at any rate), but in regard to the European past he writes about, he suspends his judgement and admonishes his readers to do the same: "We tend to see witchcraft as a delusion, a non-existent crime, because we reject its mechanics. This is why many believe executed witches to have been innocent.... Surely, some early modern people must have *tried* [italics in original] to kill with magic.... Seen in context, was attempted murder by witchcraft not a crime, just as a woman devoted to Satan was apostate even if she had never actually met him?" It seems that poor Dr. Gaskill has neglected to sufficiently "bracket" his British colonial past: when discussing his own European forebears, he forbears judgement and cautions his readers to keep in mind that they were not monsters, but rational, feeling human beings, but, in regard to atrocities in contemporary Africa, we must "sustain our disgust." I prefer to sustain my disgust in regard to the whole lot, Gaskill included.Structurally, the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and the "themes" are all themselves projected out of Gaskill's unreflective epistemological construct; though any number of specific incidents are referred to throughout, the effect of the structure of the book is to atomize these incidents so that no through-line emerges in regard to the historical record itself. Roughly half of the sentence-level transitions are effectively non-sequiturs. One can still read the thing and perhaps even come away better acquainted with certain facts, but—even given the limitations inherent to the treatment of material in a VSI—this book falls far short of providing a useful short introduction to anything other than one Dr. Malcolm Gaskill's inability to engage in critical thought.

A solid introduction to witchcraft. Those coming to the subject for the first time would do well to read Gaskill's short yet comprehensive book. Here he takes the reader through the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary worlds to explore the complicated yet fascinating world of witchcraft. Great for college students taking philosophy, religion and anthropology classes or for laypersons who want a reliable primer on the subject. Recommended.Readers would also like "Jenna's Flaw," a novel about Satanism and demonic possession in the Midwest.

The best feature of this book is that it manages to avoid the "woo factor" of "witchcraft." The book treats witchcraft as a human phenomenon that has existed in a diversity of cultures - Africa, Britain, North America - and different ages - Rome, medieval Europe and modern Africa. The author, Martin Gaskill, is a professor who has taught courses on witchcraft for approximately two decades, and, so, has probably had to learn to steer clear of the salacious details, while sticking to the fascinating actual truths of witchcraft.And the truths are fascinating without elaboration. Witches were parts of the community; they existed and thought that they were capable of magic; even if they had no occult powers, other people thought they might, and they capitalized on that belief; witches were hunted, books were written on witch-hunting, there were believers, fanatics, and skeptics; witches were burned. Fascinating stuff through and through without exaggeration.For me one of the best parts of the book was the matter of fact debunking of the "Burning Times":"Ewen's work demonstrated, among other things, that there were surprisingly few witch-trials in England, perhaps no more than 1,000 in the early modern period, only half of which resulted in executions. Archival research across Europe also produced downward estimates and differing timescales. The witch-hunt proper hadn't started in the 14th century, nor in the 15th, but in the later 16th century; some countries had ended their trials in the early 17th century, others didn't get going until much later. Chronologically, spatially, and statistically, there was little consistency. If by `witch-craze', we mean a coherent, coordinated pan-European campaign, it wasn't really a witch-craze at all. It was patchy, fragmented, unfocused, even random."And:"The only obvious way to reunite the data was to add up statistics. Just how many people had been tried as witches? Historians knew nine million was too high, but archival research brought them closer to the real figure. For much of the 20th century, it was believed that Scotland had executed around 7,500 witches, a figure suggested by H. C. Lea, an American historian inspired by Hansen: now this came down to 1,500. Poland's toll, calculated in the 1950s, was 15,000; less than one-fifth of that is probably nearer the mark.Numbers everywhere had been exaggerated. Today combined estimates for Europe, Scandinavia, and America vary between 90,000 and 100,000 trials in the period 1400 to 1800. The worst time overall was 1560 to 1630. Perhaps half the prosecutions took place in German territories, several thousand in Baden Württemberg alone. A sizeable proportion occurred in neighbouring states, especially Switzerland, where perhaps 10,000 people were tried. In the borderlands of Lorraine, there were 5,000 trials, although in the vastly larger kingdom of France, just 3,000. Scandinavia also had around 3,000 trials, as did the British Isles. Spain and Italy accounted for 10,000; Eastern Europe and Russia half that.The accuracy of these numbers matters, just as it matters for the millions who died in 20th-century genocides. To respect the dead, you have to tell the truth about them. And unless witch-hunts are precisely quantified, they cannot be precisely explained. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie once wrote: `of what use is an incorrect million for proving a correct idea?' Statistical errors had long been bound up with chronology and causation, principally the medieval and clerical character of the `witch-craze'; now that came to an end. From the ruins of Lamothe-Langon's fictions and various flimsy post-Enlightenment assumptions, a sturdier structure was raised by empirical historians. Like science, history has its paradigm shifts, and for witchcraft this was it.Let's look in more detail at what had really happened. First of all, medieval ecclesiastical courts, like their Reformation counterparts, prosecuted sorcerers and magicians. In 1465, a man was hauled before the bishop's court in Cambridge charged with possessing writings on the black art, inscribed metal plates, and a gilded wand. He said he had bought them for four marks, believing they would earn him an abundance of gold and silver. But this trial was a bit of routine administration, not part of a concerted drive against witches; indeed, although the magician's offence would have been seen as a diabolic delusion, this didn't make him a devil-worshipping rebel - the stereotype that was to emerge. There were many such impious fools."I was sold with that comment about "To respect the dead, you have to tell the truth about them." I contrasted the honesty and good faith of that comment with the effort to divert attention from the realities of the Inquisition in  God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World  by Cullen Murphy. My review of that book has this observation:"At times, Murphy's approach to history makes for silly anachronism; at other times, it makes for questions as to his sincerity. For example, Murphy tells us that notwithstanding "older estimates of the number of people put to death by the Inquisition range to upwards of a million; the true figure may be closer to several tens of thousands," before launching on a story about how arguments about body count quickly become pointless and distasteful because the commandant of Auschwitz insisted that he had killed "two million," not "three million," and thereby adding yet another example of "guilt by grammatical juxtaposition" to the well stocked inventory in his book.So, apparently, we aren't supposed to question Murphy's claim about "tens of thousands of deaths" because we certainly don't want to look like a Nazi. The problem, though, is that "tens of thousands" is high by several magnitudes of error. Murphy does not offer a citation for his "tens of thousands" figure, but Edward Peters says that the "body count" in Spain for the period between 1550 and 1800 was around 3,000. (Inquisition, p. 86.) If we generously add the approximate 3,000 deaths estimated by Murphy for the earlier, more active period when the Inquisition was founded in Spain , over the course of over 300 years, Spain - the most reviled Inquisition - comes nowhere near to the "tens of thousands" of deaths claimed by Murphy, who doesn't offer a citation to back his claim. In fact, though, 6,000 is still high by a factor of 100 percent; The number of executions according to Helen Rawlings The Spanish Inquisition was actually closer to 3,000! Also, Peters - a real scholar as Murphy concedes - points out that the Inquisition handed out a far smaller number of death sentences than comparable secular institutions. (Id.) The "body count" issue seems like one that is pretty important, providing the quality of "horror" for the Inquisition, yet all Murphy does is "hand-waive" about "tens of thousands" and tell a story about a Nazi, yet he offers no scholarly support for his "tens of thousands" number, and the actual scholars entirely, categorically and absolutely disagree with him."Notice the difference between a real historian and a polemicist? To a real historian, facts matter because "unless witch-hunts are precisely quantified, they cannot be precisely explained." Thus, when you look at a 50% acquittal rate and indictment rate of some thousands over the course of centuries, you lose the thread of meta-narratives based on a political campaign to terrorize women or a Catholic conspiracy to destroy the "Old Religion" or some other overarching grand unified theory. What you have looks like, well, crime, with punctuations of hysteria, just as America had its hysteria about kidnapped children in the 1970s - the milk carton kids. Our ancestors, in short, look a lot like us.The idea of the intolerant Burning Times as a club to beat up the Catholic Church is like the similar myths of the Inquisition. As Gaskill explains:"Reaction against reductionist histories of witchcraft has a precedent. In the 19th century, alongside rationalism grew romanticism and with it the idea that witches had been a real sect, benign, passionate, and persecuted - the women Margaret Murray raised to mythological significance in the 1920s. In Europe's age of revolutions, anti-clericalism, and secular statehood, the church was blamed for all sorts of cruel injustices including witch-hunting. This had been the main beef of the German lawyer Thomasius. Now Jacob Grimm, collector of the famous fairy tales, portrayed witches as wise women, an idea elaborated by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), who repackaged them as proto-revolutionary heroines battling feudal oppression. Historical novels, notably those by Sir Walter Scott, mixed fact with fiction. William Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches (1849) turned a well-documented 17th-century witch-hunt into a gothic romance. Fantasy and reality converged in the public imagination, just as they had while the witch-trials were still in progress."Another myth that Gaskill punctures is the idea of the continuity of witchcraft. This bit is almost a textbook case of anthropological research, except the study was commissioned by Himmler:"In the summer of 1935, a team of German researchers began to scour the nation's archives, hunting for early modern witches. Overseeing the project was Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, to whom witches were either persecuted religionists of the Germanic race or magical warriors fighting demons - a `black order' like the SS itself. Himmler hoped that the Hexensonderkommando would find millions of witches, but by the time work ceased in 1943, just 33,846 cases had been recorded. And what they revealed was that the witch's greatest enemies had been not clerical inquisitors but ordinary Germans."Fascinating.As part of the "A Very Short Introduction," this book meets the requirement of being short and to the point. It covers a lot of material in short order. I think that the author has managed to craft some nice, stylistically clever sentences; I listened to it as an audiobook and I wasn't bored, at least. I am not sure that I agree with everything the author says, for example, his willingness to treat modern witches as a somewhat ordinary religious movement raised my eyebrow, but, then, that undoubtedly reflects my bias. I am sure that partisan Wiccans would be outraged by the author's academic perspective on the history of witchcraft and the absence of millions, let alone hundreds of thousands, of women burned during the "Burning Times."If you want a good, interesting survey and introduction, you can't start in a better place.

Bought this book for a college class and it was very useful!!

Short, but packed with info I'd never known before.

A clear and concise overview of witchcraft; a very useful source for writing papers, and general knowledge on the subject.

I like it, but I can't love it. It's a useful summary of the social and political history of witches in Europe, America and Africa (to some extent - the book is too small to cover much of the phenomenon in Africa). Thinking about it, the book is probably misnamed.I've studied some Greek papyrology at postgraduate level, so I'm aware of some aspects of the ancient subject, although I don't profess any knowledge of it. We get examples there of magical papyri in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. The orthodox teaching is that the state religions involved official worship of the superi (the gods above), but individuals who didn't get anything from the (by the time of Alexander and then the Roman emperors oppressive) state developed an interest in magic, which involved individual communication with the inferi (the gods of the underworld, and dead ancestors, perhaps inspired by the Odyssey). (The original idea of early anthropologists was that magic was early and primitive then it turned into religion as it got more sophisticated, but the opposite seems to be the case - at least in modern magic - there doesn't seem to be any real evidence for it before Alexander, but maybe ancestor worship always involved magic.)This may not be good knowledge, but it gives me a benchmark by which I can judge the depth of Gaskill's approach, and my feeling is that his references to the ancient world are all rather superficial and useless. His summary of ancient religions begins and ends in Babylon.He talks of "early Christianity"'s abhorring magic, but before they were official, they had bigger worries, and I wonder if, by early, he means post-Constantine official Christianity?His dive into the difference between emic and etic is desirable and necessary but rather headlong, and needs to be a bit gentler in a book of this type and also a bit less brief. In this day and age of Richard Dawkins' acolytes' screaming the odds about everything, we need convincing explanations of the meaning of emic."The centrifugal pull of government maintains its integrity" p.13. Idiotic writing (my maths background means I know what he is trying to say), but there's not a lot of that kind of thing in the book.

The Very Short Introductions are a major educational resource. There are presently over 500 small books covering a very wide range of subjects. Although short, the Introductions are substantial in content. Everyone would benefit from reading these books to broaden their knowledge and understanding in diverse areas of life. Perseverance with some subjects may be required but be prepared to be surprised, enlightened and enriched.

An enjoyable read - not quite what I was expecting, this is much more a brief outline and analysis of the social implications and overall rejection of the witch caste than a history of the practices and machinations of what witches actually did. Still an enjoyable read, however.

Malcolm Gaskell is the leading expert for a true historiographical guide to witchcraft.

Both informational and eye opening, an excellent read,