Malleus Maleficarum

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Malleus maleficarum, is a detailed legal and theological document (c. 1486) regarded as the standard handbook on witchcraft, including its detection and its extirpation, until well into the 18th century. Its appearance did much to spur on and sustain some two centuries of witch-hunting hysteria in Europe. The Malleus was the work of two Dominicans: Jacob Sprenger, dean of the University of Cologne in Germany, and Heinrich (Institoris) Kraemer, professor of theology at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and inquisitor in the Tirol region of Austria. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, in which he deplored the spread of witchcraft in Germany and authorized Sprenger and Kraemer to extirpate it.

The Malleus codified the folklore and beliefs of the Alpine peasants and was dedicated to the implementation of Exodus 22:18: “You shall not permit a sorceress to live.” The work is divided into three parts. In Part I the reality and the depravity of witches is emphasized, and any disbelief in demonology is condemned as heresy. Because of the nature of the enemy, any witness, no matter what his credentials, may testify against an accused. Part II is a compendium of fabulous stories about the activities of witches—e.g., diabolic compacts, sexual relations with devils (incubi and succubi), transvection (night riding), and metamorphosis. Part III is a discussion of the legal procedures to be followed in witch trials. Torture is sanctioned as a means of securing confessions. Lay and secular authorities are called upon to assist the inquisitors in the task of exterminating those whom Satan has enlisted in his cause.

The Malleus went through 28 editions between 1486 and 1600 and was accepted by Roman Catholics and Protestants alike as an authoritative source of information concerning Satanism and as a guide to Christian defense.

Witchcraft is the term usually applied to harm brought upon others through the use of supernatural or occult powers. The person engaging in witchcraft is called a witch, while the act of causing harm may be termed cursing, hexing, bewitchment, or maleficium. A belief in malevolent witchcraft has been found across many societies throughout recorded history. Sometimes witches are believed to act alone and at other times to operate in tandem with other witches, often as part of a conspiracy opposed to the moral norms of their communities. While witches are often a product of imagination, folklore, and fiction rather than reality, in many cases there have been people who have tried to curse others and who in some instances might consider themselves to be witches.

In many places those accused of witchcraft have been ostracized, punished, and sometimes killed. A prominent example of anti-witch persecutions were the witch trials that took place in Europe and the American colonies during the early modern period (the 15th to 17th centuries), at which time Christian Europeans commonly regarded witches not only as individuals who cursed others, but also as Satanists who gathered at witches’ sabbaths to worship the Devil. In the 21st century the persecution of accused witches can be found in various parts of the world, including much of sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea, and central India. These persecutions, often called witch hunts, may be fueled by communal tensions and other social problems.

Over time, the terms witchcraft and witch have also gained alternative meanings among English language speakers. A second, far broader definition uses the term witchcraft to describe a varied range of ritual practices intended to manipulate occult, spiritual, or supernatural power regardless of intent. In this sense, witchcraft can be used to harm or to heal, allowing there to be both bad and good witches. A third use of the term witch describes a woman who is regarded as being antisocial, rebellious, or independent of male power, a usage that can be employed in either a misogynistic or a feminist manner.

The fourth definition characterizes several modern religious groups, largely of 20th and 21st-century origin, whose practitioners actively refer to their traditions as witchcraft and themselves as witches. Typically, these practitioners draw heavily on the imagery and terminology historically associated with witchcraft in European cultures but invest it with new meanings. The largest of these new religions is Wicca, although the identity of the witch is also adopted by some modern Satanists and other esotericists.

The term witchcraft originated in the Early Middle Ages as the Old English term wiccecraeft. Prior to the 19th century the common understanding of the terms witch and witchcraft among English speakers was a negative one. In this context a witch was someone who drew on supernatural or occult power to harm others, engaging in what was often referred to using the Latin term maleficium.

Similar concepts were evident in many other parts of Europe, with terms roughly synonymous with the English word witchcraft including sorcellerie (French), Hexerei (German), stregoneria (Italian), and brujería (Spanish). As Europeans expanded across the globe from the 15th century onward, they encountered communities that also believed in individuals who harmed others through occult means. These communities often had their own names for this phenomenon, ranging from the Mapuche term kalkutun through to the Zande word mangu. In large part due to British colonialism and American cultural influence, at the start of the 21st century the English words witchcraft and witch are probably the best known terms for this phenomenon on an international level. However, given that these words carry considerable cultural baggage, it remains possible that future anthropologists might devise new terminologies for this cross-cultural belief in occult harming practices.

At its core, witchcraft is about harming others, although the nature of this harm varies, from making a person ill or even killing them to inducing crop failure, poor weather, infertility and impotence, or the death of livestock. Witches are thus malevolent figures. While it is important to acknowledge the significant cultural and historical variation in perceptions of harmful witchcraft, the recurring nature of these beliefs suggests an origin in human psychology, perhaps a shared desire to find a reason for misfortune.

A common belief about witches is that they bring about their intended harm through the performance of ritual acts, in English typically termed spell-casting. Often this relies upon a belief in what the anthropologist James Frazer termed “sympathetic magic”—the notion that invisible connections exist between separate things sharing some particular commonality, and that performing an act with one of these objects will exert an impact on the other. A recurring idea throughout many parts of the world, including Polynesia, Melanesia, South Asia, Africa, and North America, is that witches can harm a person by gaining access to their nail clippings, hair, or bodily waste. Another idea, found in parts of Europe, is that a curse can be enacted by making a doll or effigy of a person, into which pins can then be inserted.

Not all witches need to perform ritual acts in order to curse somebody, however. Especially common in West and Central Africa and Melanesia are various beliefs about witches who bring about harm simply through their thoughts or desires. A similar notion, particularly recurrent in North Africa and the Middle East, is that of the evil eye, the idea that an individual can curse another through the power of sight alone.

Some communities have believed that individuals make a conscious choice to practice witchcraft, but elsewhere can be found the belief that certain people are simply born witches and may have little control over their actions. A traditional belief among the Bangwa of Cameroon, for instance, is that witches are born with an extra organ that compels them to drain other people’s blood. Similarly, an idea recorded among the Nyakyusa of Tanzania is that each witch inherits a python living within their stomach, which drives them to consume human flesh. This association with particular animals can also be seen in other contexts. Among the Zulu of South Africa, a traditional belief maintains that certain types of witches ride naked upon baboons, while in early modern England, a common notion held that witches were assisted by familiars, demonic entities that took animal form.

The social identity of the stereotypical witch varies. In some areas, women are regarded as more likely to be witches; in others, that role goes to men, while elsewhere, neither sex is thought to be more prone to witchery than the other. Gender roles can also impact the way in which witchcraft is thought to be carried out. On Dobu, an island off the coast of New Guinea, 20th-century ethnographers recorded a belief that male witches performed their curses while awake, whereas their female counterparts ventured forth at night, in spirit form, to carry out their nefarious acts. There is also variation in the age of suspected witches. In some places, age does not appear to be a significant factor in the accusations, while there are many societies that have tended to believe that older people are more likely to be witches, as well as rarer examples where children are more typically suspected.

Although witches are generally perceived as being human, in many societies they are credited with fantastic abilities not shared by most people. The idea that witches can fly was found not only in early modern Europe (a period covering the 15th to 17th centuries) but also in parts of North America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Melanesia. In some cases they allegedly do so upon steeds; the aforementioned Nyakyusa for instance held to a belief that witches flew upon their pythons, while from early modern Europe there are accounts of witches riding upon broomsticks. In many places there are also accounts of witches being capable of transforming their shape. Inhabitants of Dang in Gujarat, India, for instance held to a belief that witches could take the form of tigers, while a witch who appears in the Metamorphoses, a 2nd-century novel by the Roman author Apuleius, can turn herself into a bird.

The ways that communities counter witchcraft and deal with suspected witches can vary widely. Sometimes, witchcraft has been seen as a minor problem that can largely be deflected with the use of amulets or other simple apotropaic procedures. If a person believes they have been cursed, they might turn to a ritual specialist who offers procedures to reverse the bewitchment and sometimes to identify the witch responsible, often through divination. In some cases the accused witch might then be confronted and expected to either lift the curse or pay compensation. Such situations need not escalate into violence.

At other times witchcraft has been seen as a major threat that requires a severe response. In many places methods for ascertaining whether or not a person is a witch can be highly dangerous for the accused. In parts of early modern Europe, accused witches were submerged under water, in the belief that the innocent might sink but that the guilty would float. In 19th and early 20th-century Central Africa, a common method for determining if a person was a witch would be to feed them poison; if they lived, they were considered innocent, while their death would be taken as a sign of their guilt. There are many cases across the world where confessions have also been extracted through the use of torture. The 19th-century residents of Dang repeatedly sought to elicit confessions by suspending the accused witch upside down over a fire, a process that sometimes proved fatal. Prior to the early 20th century, meanwhile, the Navajo of the American Southwest tied accused witches up and left them to starve until they confessed.

The notion that witches were not merely practitioners of maleficium but were also Devil worshipers emerged during the early 15th century. It was first apparent in trials that took place in the western Alps during the 1420s and ’30s but owed much to the influence of older ideas popularized in the preceding late medieval period. One such influence was the Roman Catholic allegation that rival Christian groups like the Waldensians, whom the church deemed heretical, had actively worshiped the Devil. Church propaganda had furthermore claimed that these groups often engaged in secret rituals involving nudity, incest, and cannibalism—acts that in the early 15th century were transferred to the new stereotype of the Satanic witch.

Another late medieval influence on this novel idea was the negative perception of ceremonial magic. The growing popularity of grimoire-based rituals among literate elites had increasingly worrying clerical authorities from the 13th century, particularly as some of these rites—which clerics labeled necromancy—relied on conjuring demons. Late medieval clerics increasingly believed that ceremonial magic always required a demonic pact and further conflated these elite rituals with the spells and charms widely practiced across all sectors of society. In turn, this contributed to the clerical perception that even simple acts of cursing required a demonic pact. A third influence on the new notion of Satanic witchcraft came from folklore, namely the long-standing belief that certain women traveled at night to a nocturnal revel with supernatural beings. This idea fed into the developing stereotype of the witches’ sabbath, the nighttime assembly where witches met to worship the Devil and take part in diabolic rituals.

From their origins in the Alpine region, these new ideas about Satanic witchcraft were probably disseminated through the Council of Basel (1431–49) and further promoted through 15th-century publications like Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (“The Anthill,” 1457) and Heinrich Krämer’s Malleus maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches,” 1486). Texts such as these helped to spread notions of witchcraft as a Satanic conspiracy across Europe’s literate classes, although not everyone was convinced, and from at least the mid-16th century these theories faced published critiques from the likes of Dutch physician Johann Weyer and English author Reginald Scot. Moreover, while these diabolist ideas became influential among elite classes, they were not always widely adopted among poorer sectors of society—and it was from the latter that the impetus for witch trials often arose. In various parts of Europe, such as England, Denmark, Norway, and Russia, the early modern trials reflected a continued emphasis on witches not as Devil worshipers but simply as malefactors who cursed others.