The Witch in the Western Imagination by Roper Lyndal;

Author:Roper, Lyndal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2012-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

FIG. 6.1. Frontispiece of Gottlieb Spitzel, Die gebrochne Macht der Finsternuß (Augsburg, 1687). (By permission of the British Library [8632.b.23])

FIG. 6.2. First page of Gottlieb Spitzel, Die gebrochne Macht der Finsternuß (Augsburg, 1687). (By permission of the British Library [8632.b.23])

FIG. 6.3. Page 433 of Gottlieb Spitzel, Die gebrochne Macht der Finsternuß (Augsburg, 1687). (By permission of the British Library [8632.b.23])

But what the children said does not seem to have derived from the lugubrious tracts of the Augsburg preachers alone. Maria was clearly fascinated by the old woman’s wand and its magical powers. Trials of witches almost never mention wands, but only diabolic powders and salves; and while witches can metamorphose into animals, they rarely produce animals and humans out of nothing. Demonologists also have little to say about wands, but they are mentioned in relation to contemporary magicians and treasure seekers, while the classical witch Circe bears a wand. Maria would certainly have seen pictures of the biblical Witch of Endor, depicted in seventeenth-century Bibles making circles with a wand.40 When Maria was baptized, the old woman, Anna Maria Christeiner, sprinkled her in the name of Belial, Mephistopheles, and Pluto.41 The reference to Mephistopheles almost certainly comes from the printed story of Faust, which was well known in Augsburg, and which had deep significance for Protestants: Faust, after all, originally studied theology at Wittenberg. Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, is entirely out of place, but was probably picked up from classical myth, perhaps at Maria’s school or through her brother, who would have learned Latin. (By contrast, when Elisabeth Christeiner was goaded by Maria in confrontation, she eventually said that the “Lugenteuffel,” the Lying Devil, was speaking out of the girl’s mouth, a usage deriving from the moralistic Devil books which provide a devil for every variety of sin.)42 In these late witchcraft cases, the basic outlines of the witchcraft story merged with the material of popular myth and story, as they took on more of the imaginative worlds of children.

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IN ANY ERA, the issue over which children’s testimony was most likely to diverge from the standard adult confession was sex. Children’s understandings of sex are different from those of adults, and develop in phases as the child matures. They can be jealous or appalled by the idea of parental intercourse, and obsessed with feces, or view sexual intercourse as sadistic. Because sex plays a different role in their imaginations, it also emerges in witchcraft confessions with distinctive meanings and associations.43

Central to women’s confessions was the story of their seduction by the Devil. Male witches also confessed to diabolic sex, with the Devil usually taking the shape of real women they knew: few men confessed to sodomitical intercourse with a male Devil. In contrast, children’s and adolescents’ confessions to sex with the Devil can be revealing, not only because they spring from a childish symbolic understanding of intercourse, but because they lack adults’ preformed words and narrative structures in talking about sex, so much so that when their confessions were standard, they could fail to persuade.

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