The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic by Owen Davies

Author:Owen Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780199608447
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

6 The World of Popular Magic

Owen Davies

Although it is not always evident from the history books, the various European laws against witchcraft introduced during the early modern period were as much concerned with punishing magic generally as witchcraft specifically. Types of magical practice considered helpful by the general populace, such as unwitching, identifying thieves, detecting the whereabouts of stolen property, and resolving matters of the heart, were, as is noted in Chapter 3, considered pure evil by some theologians. While witches killed the godly on Satan’s behalf they did not damn the souls of their victims. Good magicians, however, insidiously seduced their clients to put their faith in human false promises rather than to trust in God’s judgement. This sinful path led to damnation. For the secular authorities, the popular influence of magicians and prophets also threatened to undermine the authority of the state, clergy, and medical profession.

In 1542, during the reign of Henry VIII, the first dedicated law against witchcraft and conjuration was introduced in England and Wales. As well as concern over witches, the statute punished those who resorted to ‘fantastical practises’ to find buried treasure, and those who took ‘upon them to tell or declare where goodes stollen or lost shall become’. The 1542 Act was repealed a few years later, and then in 1563 Queen Elizabeth I’s government introduced a more detailed law based on that of 1542, which included the crime of ‘intent to provoke any person to unlawful love’. When the 1563 law was revised in 1604 further magical crimes were added, namely entertaining evil and wicked spirits, and using corpses for magical purposes. This was the statute under which suspected witches and magical practitioners were prosecuted in England’s American colonies. In Calvinist Scotland, a witchcraft Act of 1563, which was not the same as the English statute of that year, made no explicit difference between the capital crime of witchcraft and beneficial magic. It was concerned with ‘the heavy and abominable superstition used by divers of the lieges of this realm’. The Scottish Act also criminalized those that sought ‘any help, response or consultation from any such users or abusers foresaid of witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy under the pain of death, which is to be executed against the user and abuser as well as the seeker of the response or consultation’. This harshness was unusual, though in practice few of those who sought ‘any help’ found themselves in deep trouble with the secular courts. Consulting magical practitioners was not a secular offence under most legal systems, and those prosecuted for providing unlawful magical services were usually treated less severely than those convicted of harmful magic and pact-making. This was the case under the Carolina code in the Holy Roman Empire. So, in 1582, the blacksmith and cunning-man George Kissling, of Ergersheim, Germany, was flogged and banished for the slander and extortion he had committed through his magical activities. Banishment was a common punishment for such crimes on the Continent.

In western Europe, however, relatively

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