The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton

Author:Ronald Hutton [Hutton, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, World, Body; Mind & Spirit, Witchcraft, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780300229042
Google: QDYuDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0747R8YSX
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:41:07.088000+00:00

Bloodsuckers, Wolf-riders and Ladies

In the Alps and Pyrenees, and the lands immediately south of them, a rich crop of folkloric motifs features in prosecutions for witchcraft, one of them certainly very ancient. This is the figure of the strix, the night-flying, child-killing female demon. By the Middle Ages, if not earlier, it was, as said, being merged with that of the human witch, and this composite directly underlay the formation of the early modern stereotype of the satanic witch. It has been shown how it appeared in the first trials which embodied that stereotype, in 1424, and how in the Pyrenees the word for that kind of demoness, bruja, changed into that for a witch; in Italy the same thing happened, as striges, the Latin plural for strix, became the standard learned term for witches, and gave rise to the modern Italian strega, meaning a witch. The persona remained with the name. When an Italian witch-hunter, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, wrote a book to justify his activities in 1523, he called it simply Strix.48 Among the characteristics of the stereotypical witch which he assembled was that of killing babies by pricking them with needles and sucking their blood. His principality of Mirandola was on the northern plain of Italy, near Modena; further south, at Perugia and Siena, women were also tried for this offence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.49 In northern Spain, likewise, the initial outbreak of accusations against child-murdering witches in the 1420s was followed by others, over a broader area, in the following hundred years.50 In about 1450 a Castilian bishop denounced the new concept of the satanic witch as a fantasy, and especially the belief that these bruxas got through chinks or turned themselves into animals in order to enter houses to suck babies’ blood.51 This belief underlay accusations of witchcraft in northern Spain until the end of witch trials there: it was the major spur behind the great Basque witch-hunt of 1609–14.52

Across most of early modern Europe, killing infants and young children was one of the most important crimes alleged against witches, and was, as said, fundamental to the development of the new idea of witchcraft; but this vampiric element, derived from the strix, was confined to the northern edge of the Mediterranean basin. It continued eastwards to the limits of Italy, in Friuli, where the witches fought by benandanti were said slowly to consume the flesh or blood of small children, so that they wasted away.53 As ancient Roman rule had done, and as the belief in dream warriors also did, this concept crossed the boundary between Italian and Slavonic linguistic zones, so that in the modern folklore of Serbia, the special crime of witches was to kill babies in this manner. During the witch trials in Croatia, women confessed to eating the hearts of children, and leaving them to die slowly. Croats also believed that witches, in the form of cats, sucked the blood of adults.54 The special characteristic of the modern vampire,

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