Austrian lk ic, uor
Foreword by Danu Forest author of Wild Magic
Praise for alPine Witchery
“This book is a delicious fusion of impeccable research, fine scholarship, and deep vision. Brunner effortlessly combines history with practice in a fascinating and compelling manner that will have you glued to every page. I could not put this book down; every chapter contains jewels of information that has opened a new and refreshing door onto an Alpine magical landscape that you will never forget. The inclusion of historical spells with instructions on how they can be replicated in a manner applicable to 21st-century practice is sheer genius. What you have in your hands is sure to become a classic of central European magical history and practice.”
Kristoffer
Hughes , Chief of the Anglesey Druid Order, author of The Book of Druidry
“An absolute treasure trove of historical magic, informed by a deep cultural understanding, this book is not to be missed. Rather than a dry recounting, the charms within are brought to life with suggestions for use today, as well as insights into the lives of those through whose words they were transmitted to us. An invaluable addition to any bookshelf, and certainly a work I will return to time and again.”
Moss Matthey , author of An Apostate’s Guide to Witchcraft
“Brunner presents an in-depth historic and practical study of ancient and syncretic traditions from a region that has remained largely unexplored by the English-speaking world. The citations and analyses of the records of witchcraft trials provide the history and context for the cultural experiences of the Alpine peoples. The examination of the similarities and differences in beliefs and actions throughout the region demonstrate the value of Brunner’s work,
including to researchers in the Germanic diaspora. The uses, spells, and magical instructions serve as useful guides for the modern practitioner of magical systems, Germanic or otherwise. This is an excellent resource that is poised to serve as a reference point for Hexerei practitioners anywhere!”
Robert Schreiwer , Heathen activist and manager of Huginn’s Heathen Hof
“This is a fascinating book exploring court evidence of Alpine witchcraft. It’s the most interesting witchcraft book I’ve ever read and is as likely to appeal to people interested in history and folklore as it is to practicing witches.”
—Nimue
Brown , author of Spirituality Without Structure
about the author
Christian Brunner (Boston, MA) has studied shamanic practices for more than forty years and naturopathic methods for almost thirty. These experiences encouraged his deep fascination for the Alpine lore and traditions in his native Austria. He has authored Mountain Magic and several articles for druid order journals, such as Touchstone, Druidenstein, and Trilithon. He is also a druid in the Order of Bard, Ovates & Druids. Visit him at ChristianBrunner.com.
© Sheridan Kahmann
Alpine Witchery: Austrian Folk Magic, Lore & Spellcraft Copyright © 2024 by Christian Brunner. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd., except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Edition
First Printing, 2024
Book design by R. Brasington
Cover design by Verlynda Pinckney
Interior illustrations by Llewellyn Art Department
Llewellyn Publications is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brunner, Christian, author.
Title: Alpine witchery : Austrian folk magic, lore, & spellcraft / by Christian Brunner.
Description: First edition. | Woodbury, MN : Llewellyn Publications, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024022846 (print) | LCCN 2024022847 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738777672 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738777702 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Witchcraft—Austria—History. | Trials (Witchcraft)—Austria—History.
Classification: LCC BF1584.A9 B89 2024 (print) | LCC BF1584.A9 (ebook) | DDC 133.4/309436—dc23/eng/20240814
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Printed in the United States of America
other books by christian brunner
forthcoming books by christian brunner
The Dark Side of the Wheel
Alpine Druidry
Bread Soup and Gr ner Veltliner
Amanita Mountain Magic
disclaimer
The information in this book is designed to provide helpful information on the subjects discussed. This book is not meant to be used, nor should it be used, to diagnose or treat any medical condition. For diagnosis or treatment of any medical problem, consult your own physician. The publisher and author are not liable for any damages or negative consequences from any treatment, action, application, or preparation to any person reading or following the information in this book. References are provided for informational purposes only and do not constitute endorsement of any books or other sources.
Contents
Foreword—xi
Introduction—1
Chapter 1: Who Were “the Witches” Anyway?—9
Chapter 2: Making the Old New—33
Chapter 3: Some Witchcraft Practice—51
Chapter 4: Healing Magic—65
Chapter 5: Weather Magic—97
Chapter 6: Livestock Magic—131
Chapter 7: Love and Jealousy Magic—159
Chapter 8: Curses and Binding Spells—181
Chapter 9: Spells for All Kinds of Situations—219
Conclusion: So Mote It Be—249
Appendix: List of Ingredients—257
Bibliography—263
Map of Impacted Cities
Foreword
DANÚ FOREST
I first met Christian Brunner at a druid event several years ago. Druidry and paganism events generally attract all sorts of folk and many threads of practice and tradition, but I realised quickly that here was someone with which I had a great deal in common. We shared a love of our ancestral lands and their deep, rich histories. The tribal Celt was strong in both of us, as well as the passionate historian. I immediately resonated with Christian’s search for authentic native practices and the restoration and healing of ancestral lines that can come about when we engage with this lore on an intuitive as well as an intellectual level. As a Celticist and scholar of folk magic and witchcraft, as well as a practitioner myself, I feel this research is crucial and a gift to modern practitioners, who may weave aspects of it into their work today, regardless of heritage. This can be seen as part of this great
healing and re-membering, literally a putting back together, of lost traditions within European magic, that none the less resides still in our very bones. The old ways still serve and may be reclaimed and reconditioned by any and all for a new era—new shoots on a vast tree with deep strong roots.
When Christian published his book Mountain Magic, I was delighted to review it and found it to be a rare treasure, full of insight and deep knowledge of a subject that until now has received sorely little attention from nonacademics despite its obvious appeal. I find myself delighted once again, this time to provide the foreword to this his new book, Alpine Witchery, drawn from the historical practices of Austrian magic, as detailed in the Alpine witch trials. There is so much in this book for the modern practitioner to unpack and apply today, as well as presenting a fascinating and detailed study of such a difficult aspect of European magical history. There have been numerous scholars working on the subject of the witch trials in Europe and Britain over the last decade or two. As our Western culture has become more secular, so an increased freedom to view this aspect of European history from numerous perspectives has evolved. Our main strands of evidence are held within the extensive court documents that accompany the trials throughout the various nations where they took place, as well as sometimes correspondence between high-status individuals and a selection of pamphlets and other materials published at the time that formed what we would consider now to be the press reports and contemporary commentary. Naturally these are sometimes rich in detail and can provide us with layers of social context and insight. However, as the voices of the privileged and those of relatively high status, they also have their limitations. It wasn’t until relatively recently that we have begun to explore these cases, and the individuals concerned, from a more egalitarian point of view,
trying to place our focus on the perspectives of the accused themselves rather than those in power over them. In switching our perspective in this way, we find the whole picture may be changed. Additionally, in applying some comparative studies as Brunner has done of magical and spiritual practices performed elsewhere and into the modern era, we may find many threads of similarity and common experience. These place both the accused and the practices they performed in a different context. We find an evolving continuum of magical folk practices and spiritual experience throughout Europe, with local and national nuance, none the less operating in a Christian-adjacent and sometimes syncretic way, alongside, but also separate to, the pervading Christian culture.
From a practitioner’s point of view, we must remember, as Brunner asserts, that what we think of as a witch today has changed from the view of them in the past. The term witch was originally associated exclusively with baneful or malicious magic, and witches were considered to be almost supernatural beings themselves, capable of acts of extreme magical power. Brunner points out the wonderful example of witches riding stovepipes into the clouds. A witch was not considered fully human in many ways; this was often attributed in the cases of those accused to their so-called pacts with the devil, the supposed source of their power. The devils of the witches as seen in the court documents could vary from case to case and region to region but are rarely consistent with the biblical Satan as we would understand him today. Sometimes he would be described as a “man in black” or as a shape-shifter with stag’s horns—these are suggestive of a coven leader or an initiatory costume perhaps, while at other times he appears to be of a far more malevolent clearly supernatural character.
Of course, many of the accusations against people were wildly false, but others do suggest that some practitioners at the time
did believe they were working for the devil in an act of rebellion against the injustice and inequality they experienced at the hands of those in power, or in vengeance against malicious neighbours. Others however, were practicing positive folk magic: healing, divination, and other spirit working practices, which had their roots in their local, non-Christian, animist worldviews. These people called on their local spirits and memories of the old gods of their regions. Their devils must be seen in those contexts: folkloric memories perhaps of old, if ever-evolving, cultic practice. We see this clearly in the Celtic lands where local spirits and fairies provided an alternative source of power to the Christian devil. These magical practitioners, healers, and diviners were called a host of titles, often specific to their region. In Austria, for example, as Brunner reminds us, we find the druidlike Gutuater and the hagazussa, the hedge-sitter, healer, and spirit worker. Sometimes these people would also fall foul of the accusation of witchcraft. The difference between these practitioners, and the ordinary person who was falsely accused, and the Hexe, the malevolent witch, was usually the accusations against them, rather than what they actually were and did.
In this book, Brunner picks through all these tangled threads and teases out the methods of these old magics, using the court cases of witchcraft themselves to provide instruction and insight. This is no mean feat in this immensely complex field. From these rich and often dark sources, he reveals spells and workings that could still be used today, and which reveal patterns of common practice spanning across Europe and into the United States, as well as spanning the centuries. Such a study is a gift to those working magically with these materials today and is also a fitting memorial to those working with these skills in centuries past.
Danú Forest, Glastonbury, Imbolc 2024
Introduction
As I type the first words of this book, I look up from my laptop and focus my eyes on the majestic Schafberg mountain throning over the village I visit every year, and where I have spent my summers since childhood. Its distinct shape sings of a moment in time when part of its peak thundered into the Mondsee lake on the other side of the mountain, flooding a late neolithic stilt house dwelling nestled in one of its bays. Nowadays about twelve feet under the surface of the lake, this structure was once home to a community of late neolithic people who dwelled there until this major section of the mountain tumbled into the lake, probably between 3,400 and 3,300 BCE.1
This is a very old and sacred area, and not by any stretch the only one in the Alps. It just so happens that this particular mountain, which caused the 1. Binsteiner, “Naturkatastrophe in den Alpen.”
demise of a prehistoric group of people, rises in my view as my glance wanders above the upper rim of my laptop monitor. If I was somewhere else in the Alps, there would be a very good chance that I would see an area with similar history and magic.
When I turn my gaze to the right, I can look down a valley shaped by glaciers during the last ice age, which left a beautiful lake in its wake. Its crystal clear water reflects the white chalk base rock of the area, rendering the lake turquoise. This place has drawn people for millennia, and it is known that this village was once inhabited by folk belonging to the Celtic culture.
But not only historical facts tell us about the age of the place and its past. A very old folktale speaks of how the hills between this valley and the Untersberg mountain next to the city of Salzburg, about twenty miles west, were formed. What we know now—that the collision between the African and European tectonic plates caused the massive movements of base rock that created the Alps— our ancestors could only attribute to one group of mythical creatures strong enough to move mountains: the giants. And thus, the story tells us:
A giant virgin one day decided to get up from her dwelling on the Falkenstein, a foothill of the Schafberg mountain, that has a hundred of feet high rock wall falling into the lake, shaved smooth by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. She put a few rocks into her apron and walked west to the Untersberg near Salzburg. On her way there, a few of the rocks fell through a hole in her apron, and today these are the hills one has to pass on the way from the village to the city. When she reached the Salzach river at the foot of the Untersberg, the Giant Abfalter, who dwelled
on that mountain, carried her over the river to bring her to his home.2
A few years ago, the Schafberg mountain stirred again. A landslide rumbled down near the Falkenstein, and rumour around the regulars’ tables in the village has it that a young mother with her baby in the stroller walked the path along the lake and barely made it out alive by running for her life.
Landslides, winter avalanches, sudden heavy thunderstorms with lightning and hail, and giants and other Otherworldly folk have always made surviving in the beautiful and serene Alps a dangerous task. The farmland is sparce, cattle on their high terrain pastures are exposed to the elements all summer long, and winters are lengthy and harsh, the snow often cutting whole villages off from the rest of the world for weeks at a time.
Like everyone else on this planet, folks dwelling in the Alps needed to somehow make sense of all these hurdles nature had thrown into their path since the beginning of time, and needed someone among them to negotiate with the spirits of the Otherworld. They needed a person knowledgeable in the arts of healing, and who could see into the future. Communities like the ones of the late neolithic culture may have had an archaic form of a shamanlike tribal member with those skills, and the Alpine Celtic tribes may have had a druidlike person in their midst, possibly called a Gutuater.
And then there was the hagazussa, the hedge-sitter, the old grandmother sitting at the edge of the forest that surrounded the dwelling, collecting herbs and communicating with the spirits of the dark, eerie woodland. In today’s German, this person is called Hexe. The witch.
2. Rohrecker, Druiden, Wilde Frauen, Andersweltf rsten, 22–25.
magic and Witchery Shamanism and druidry are described and delved into in my books Alpine Magic and soon-to-be-published Alpine Druidry and in countless other works from all around the globe. In this book, I dive deeper into the lives and practices of those who could be seen as the successors of the shamans and druids of old, focusing on the late mediaeval period to the early to mid-nineteenth century. This was when the witch trials in that region peaked, and therefore we are able to learn actual practices from court records from that era. Before that time, there practically weren’t trials held. If anything, some lynching of witches took place, but only a few were recorded.3
By roughly 1850, the Era of Enlightenment—through which a more evidence-based trial process was introduced—had replaced magical thinking with scientific thought. That more modern approach to dealing with accusations of witchcraft caused witch trials to fade rapidly not only in the Alps, but also in the rest of Europe.
Many of the old practices can no longer be performed in the way described in the court records from that time long gone; some call for objects that are no longer in use, while others call for items that are traditional in the Alps but nowhere else; some suggest procedures that are serious individual and public health concerns; and a few are quite simply illegal to perform. While I do suggest ways to adapt these spells for today’s world, my hope is to also shed some light not only on traditional witchcraft as it was practiced in that rugged mountain range in Central Europe, but also on the lives of the people involved—what motivated them, what they had to deal with, and how they managed their lives.
3. Byloff, Hexenverfolgung und Hexenglaube in den sterreichischen Alpenl ndern
the source material
One of the main sources for this book is the extensive work by Fritz Byloff (1875–1940), a lawyer, a professor for criminal law at the University of Graz, Austria, and an anthropologist. Byloff contributed to the Sources for German Anthropology, a collection of textbooks for university studies, with a booklet titled (translated) Anthropology from Criminal Trials of the Austrian Alpine Countries Under Special Consideration of the Sorcerer and Witch Trials from 1455 to 1850. This is a compilation of excerpts from handwritten documents found in court archives all over the Austrian lands from back then—some places are now under the governance of Italy and Slovenia. The textbooks were published in the 1920s and the original records were put into print format verbatim.
While I did not have to labour through cursive writing from centuries ago, I was presented with another challenge: these old court records stem from a time before the Brothers Grimm introduced a German grammar in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were they penned down phonetically, the defendants standing trial and the witnesses also spoke a variety of dialects. Going to school and doing my obligatory military service in Austria exposed me to these many dialects of the Austro-Bavarian language group within German, dialects spoken in this Eastern section of the Alps. I do admit that I barely understand the German the Swiss speak in the Western Alps.
Often enough when I worked on translating these court records into English, simply reading them was not enough. Sometimes they were so incorrect grammatically that their meaning in written format was completely misleading. The only way to understand the text was for me to read it out aloud. Let me give you an example.
In June 1662, Regina Pauman was interrogated during her witch trial in Paternion (Carinthia); she was accused of fornication with the devil, weather magic, and participation at witches’ sabbaths. She testified that she had heard from other witches, her companions, how men can become werewolves.
Now, the original text says “die s hn [ … ] bei ihren mietern liegen.” When translating this under the lens of modern German, this would translate to “the sons lie with their tenants.” The German word Mieter means “renter” or “tenant.” Yet, that does not make much sense. The sons of whom? And why the tenants? Not everyone even had real estate, not to mention enough to rent some out. But anyone could become a werewolf. And why would having sex with someone who rents a place from you be atrocious enough to then become a werewolf ? Aside from the other requirement, doing that on Good Friday. Having sex on one of the holiest days in the Christian year, the last day of lent, of fasting and generally withholding any pleasure, would certainly be regarded as quite sinful.
So, it was clear that simple translation of the written text did not yield a satisfying result. But reading the text out loud and adding the vowel structure of the Carinthian dialect to the mix led to the epiphany. What the recordkeeper penned down as Mieter, which sounds like the English word meter, the Carinthian Regina Pauman would have typically pronounced it like mee-ah-tah, with that extra ah sound before the t. However, this would be the Carinthians’ way of saying M tter, German for “mothers.” Now we are talking about incest on Good Friday, and that would definitely be atrocious enough to make a werewolf.
The trial led to a death sentence for Regina Pauman, and she was strangled on the pyre and then burned.
This is certainly an extreme example of the challenge to bring these old spells into the twenty-first century. Yet working through
this older form of my native language and knowing some of the places these trials were held from visiting them throughout my life, I felt a certain connection with Regina Pauman, Christoph Gostner zu Sexten, Mathias “Der Lauterfresser” Perger, and all the others mentioned in this book.
rediscovering home
About ten years into my own spiritual path, which I started by reading books about shamanism more than four decades ago at the age of sixteen, I eventually realized that my own homeland, the region where I grew up, had a lot of lore and traditions to dive into, learn from, and use in my practice. At some point, when I felt I had enough knowledge and understanding to do so, I began to share the information I had gathered and to a great extent used in my healing practice.
At that time, I had joined the global Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids and soon contributed to their monthly Touchstone magazine. Later on, I was asked to write some more in-depth articles about druid-relevant Alpine traditions for the Trilithon, the journal of the Ancient Order of Druids in America.
There are two things all these published materials, including my books, have in common. One is suggesting how to bring these Alpine customs and folktales into one’s individual spiritual practice, and the second is to let the world outside of this relatively small region know of these old and sometimes gnarly traditions.
Additionally, everything I have done in that respect—practicing druidry, working in a spiritual healing circle, researching, and writing—has all had one common thread: magic.
I realized that what I had done and thought about all those years was practicing some form of magic. And thus, all I needed was a little nudge to include proper witchcraft in my life. The nudge came
in the form of a druid friend handing me a book in Glastonbury, England. It was Graham King’s British Book of Spells and Charms. As I leafed through the pages, I thought to myself that I have access to and have read through a similar treasure chest of spells at home: Byloff’s work on the witch trial court cases.
There was no other way; I was compelled to combine my interest in magic, now extended to witchcraft, with what has become my mission: to inform the greater global community of what has been happening in that respect in my tiny home country.
You are holding the product of my path and this serendipitous moment in England in your hands.
CHAPTER 1
Who Were “the Witches” Anyway?
The first question is, “Who were the witches, anyway?” To answer that question, a few different angles need to be explored. Social classes during feudalism played an important role; faith and wars between different factions of the same religion did too; so did the evolution of the understanding of nature, of science, and of law; pandemics and climate change put pressure on everyone, but differently depending on privilege.
At the same time, this question cannot be answered without also dissecting what magic was in the four hundred years this book is covering. What was proper witchcraft, what was folk magic, and what was pure superstition? And what are the sources that give us enough insight to answer these questions?
Court records do.
Testimony of actual people, not only about what they did, but also who they were, their status in the community, their often difficult relationships with others, what they did and why—all that was scribbled down by the court recordkeepers. Much was pure accusations, and some of it never actually happened (e.g., that a certain member of the community was seen riding a stovepipe into the clouds). Yet hidden in these court records is a treasure chest of practices actually performed by what we would call witches. The beauty of these reports is that they are not one person’s particular practice (which can also be fascinating) as we would glean it from a grimoire, but a wide array of similar procedures witches did in the eras we will look at. That in turn allows us to be more confident that we are looking at an actual known practice rather than something made up on the fly to stop the interrogation or even torture.
The court records I will be investigating span from the midfifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. That is quite a long period and covers two major eras in European history. We will start at the very end of the Dark Ages—that is, at the beginning of the Renaissance—and end sometime during the Age of Enlightenment. Although “Renaissance” and “Age of Enlightenment” sound like heralding in a great transition into modern times, we must also look at the perilous and tumultuous times people were in or just came out of at this dawn of a new world and way of thinking in the fifteenth century CE.
The Hundred Years War had just ended. Parts of Europe were destroyed and completely exploited by the warring parties, throwing the commoners into dire poverty and leaving thousands upon thousands of widows, orphans, and disabled veterans in its wake.
Whoever hadn’t died in the war was now staring into the gruesome face of the deadly black plague. Whole villages, even cities, were emptied by this disease, leaving, among other devastating
societal impact, important work on the fields undone, work that would have fed those who had survived war and pestilence.
Time Table
To add insult to injury, the climate became rougher, and we are considering the time between the thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth century a “Little Ice Age” in Western and Northern Europe. With that climate change came threats like glaciers
encroaching high mountain villages and a lot more rain than usual for the valleys and lowlands. Violent storms with destructive hail became a frequent occurrence, destroying crops year after year.
As if that wasn’t enough, plights like a locust invasion in Styria added to the almost annual crop failures.
As the desperation grew, two things happened simultaneously: people went to the witches for help, or practiced folk magic themselves, and at the same time these very witches and folk practitioners were accused of causing all that damage.
can We trust court records?
When we talk about witchcraft between 1450 and 1850 CE, we cannot do so without addressing the numerous witch trials held during that four-hundred-year-long era. Aside from grimoires— books of spells one would keep for reference—and oral transmission from one generation to the next, court records are another source of information about the practice of witchcraft. However, unlike grimoires and teachings, court records also contain information about the circumstances regarding who the accused practitioners were, whom they healed or cursed, and why they performed their magic. Court records tell us of real places, friends and foes, and the intricacies of society back then.
But can we trust them? Can we trust testimony that was given under torture or to avoid it in the first place? Can we rely on witness accounts that were made for the sole purpose of causing peril for a rival or to save the witness’s own skin?
Some of what was penned down by the court can be taken at face value, and some we have to dismiss. Especially after the mid-sixteenth century, people were sentenced to jail, banishment, and death mostly based on completely abstruse charges, such as fornicating with the devil, flying on stovepipes, and falling out of
rain clouds upon returning from witches’ dances. These tall tales, which were often put into the mouths of the accused by trick questions as much as by inflicting horrible pain, are in juxtaposition to the accounts of actual magical practice, and it sometimes feels as if these testimonies on actual spells were done to divert the court from the more serious—albeit impossible—charges.
There is a vast number of differing reports on how many victims of the witch trials there actually were. So much so that it is almost impossible to state a final figure. And it is equally difficult to try to make sense of the brutality witches faced throughout the ages, and of the reasons behind this centuries-long persecution based on panic, bigotry, and zeal. What adds insult to injury is that so many of those who lost their lives weren’t even witches in the sense that they consciously and purposefully performed witchcraft. They were just people caught in a tight net of denunciation, revenge, and a better-you-than-me mentality.
In researching for this book, I found that there are too many variations of who were the groups of people who prosecuted witches, what drove them in their search for whatever they considered justice, and what the laws were on which they based their accusations. Faith, especially the often deadly tensions between the Christian factions of Catholicism and Protestantism, played an important role when it came to a country’s governing structure. In some countries, like in France, the judicial system was heavily centralized, while it was the opposite in the confusing conglomerate of duchies, counties, margraviates, and city-states of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations.
While the appellate courts in France reduced or kicked out roughly four-fifths of sentences by questionable local tribunals, single zealots in small German countries left behind piles of victims because nobody was there to check on judges and their courts. The
same counted for the Habsburg lands and their later empire, where jurisprudence could be considerably diverse even between neighbouring valleys. There were a few cases where higher courts and even the emperor stepped in because a judge or prosecutor went too far, but it was nothing like in France where all a person who got sentenced had to say was “I appeal to parlement.”4 Parlement was the name of the appellate court in Paris, France.
folk magic, Witchcraft, or suPerstition
When reading through the trial records, it becomes clear early on that the term witch (since these records are in German, that would be Hexe and Zauberer in the originals) was not used as a title the defendants standing trial would have ever used themselves. If anything, the people around them called them that. Yet in the records, the defendants were always either indicted with specific acts of magic (e.g., making weather, making people or livestock sick, spoiling milk and butter, witches’ flight [Hexenflug], etc.) or of being in cahoots or even fornicating with the devil; if nothing like that could be attached to an arraigned person, a wider net needed to be cast. Then, people were accused of performing “superstitions.”
It even went so far that folks were charged with believing in witchcraft. That alone could have been a death sentence, since everybody believed magic existed and knew about it, and was a surefire way to get rid of someone. In all that frenzy, however, the written records rarely accused them of “being” a witch.
Proper witch or not, there was a large number of spells and charms commonly known to almost anyone. Tapping with sticks on the surface of water to make rain was not the best-kept secret only known to witches, but to pretty much every farmer. And if
4. Monter, “Witch Trials in Continental Europe 1560–1660,” 42.
the farmers didn’t want to be seen doing that, nothing was easier than having one of the many beggars perform this type of magic for a piece of bread and a cup of milk.
While differentiating between folk magic and witchcraft might be viewed as hairsplitting, we do need to wrap our heads around the shifting borderline between the two, for having a moving and evermore inclusive border actually had an important ramification: it allowed authorities, especially during “witch panics,” to put to trial anyone who did what otherwise was considered completely normal—uttering profanity in passing, hanging up herbs to dry in the attic, or hitting the surface of a puddle with sticks. This was and still is simple folk magic, but by including that into prosecutable witchcraft, everyone and anyone could be accused of, and tried for, practicing. Because practicing folk magic meant that a person “believed in witchcraft,” that “false belief” was the actual crime.
But while people weren’t always indicted for these harmless practices, being known for performing them was used by the prosecutors to bring their cases to the attention of the courts. For example, it was popular to collect and then to dry St. John’s wort at the end of the summer solstice (St. John’s Day in the Catholic calendar). When a thunderstorm rolled in, some of the dried herb was thrown into the hearth to keep the family, livestock, and homestead safe. This was a common practice to avoid being hit by lightning. You didn’t have to be a witch to know or do that, and pretty much everyone did know and do it. That’s just simple and straightforward folk magic. And since it was so widely practiced, it wouldn’t have made sense to prosecute just that practice, because that would have led to widespread genocide and whole areas would have been devoid of human life. Yet if and when a person stood trial for other “witchy” behaviour—and that could have been simply walking around one’s premises at night without
obvious cause—using dried St. John’s wort as a protection against thunderstorms would be listed as an offense as well to make the case more airtight.
And what about hitting a puddle with sticks to make rain? Farmers needed to perform that every now and then when their crops were in danger of withering away in a drought. But better you weren’t seen doing that, because that kind of magic could easily get you into court, as we’ll see in chapter 5.
So, while this procedure could still fall under folk magic like burning St. John’s wort or even knocking on wood, where was the border between that and actual witchcraft? The point here is that the line was—and was probably purposefully kept—blurry so it could be shifted as needed to catch as many “perpetrators” as possible.
In the interrogation protocols listed in this book, there is no distinction between folk magic and proper witchcraft. It is often somewhat mind-boggling how the most simple folk magic brought people in front of judges, into torture chambers, and into the hands of the executioners.
the victims
With such a wide interpretation of witchcraft, literally anyone could get caught in that extremely wide net of the witch hunt. But obviously, not everyone did. The question is, therefore, who was prosecuted so obsessively, and why. While we often hear simple answers like “they were after women” or “to keep the Church in power,” it was, like anything in life, much more nuanced and therefore complicated.
Imagine weaving a piece of fabric on a loom. You have vertical threads strung on the frame and you push that wooden shuttle horizontally through those strings. Or, if you are a more mathematical
person, think of a matrix with rows and columns. In either case, you end up with hundreds of points—or nodes—where any of the vertical and horizontal threads or columns and rows intersect.
Let’s say the vertical and horizontal frames of the loom, or the top row and the far left column of the matrix, list different elements of one dimension each. One dimension describes the types of observable practices (and we will see that that could become rather absurd), and the other dimension lists the accused person’s demographics (gender, ethnicity, physical and mental disabilities, and, very prominently, social status). Where these two strings, these two dimensions, meet within the matrix shows one of the many combinations that could potentially cause a person to be tried for witchcraft.
But alas, two dimensions are not even enough. We have to also consider the many groups that could get you accused, and their specific interests and motivation. The other villagers, clerics, authorities, and defendants, just to name a few.
By now we already have a three-dimensional matrix (or a fabric cube), and a defendant could find themselves in the cross section of any of these three dimensions. And if you can still imagine that cubic matrix, you will notice that there is an almost infinite number of combinations that could entangle a person in that often deadly web. For example:
• A beggar (demographics) could have become a nuisance to the farmers (specific group with specific motivations) and is being heard complaining and cursing when being denied food and shelter (an observable practice of magic).
• A parish priest (demographics) could find themselves in a witch trial because the farmers were jealous (motivation) of the rich crops the parish’s fields yielded, and people also saw
the priest wandering around at night and heard him forbidding to ring the church bells when bad weather was rolling in (observable suspicious behaviour).
• A witch facing trial could denounce a castle lord (demographics), who was hated by his subjects for brutal tax collection methods (motivation) and for secretly calling that witch to the chambers of his daughter (observable behaviour of believing) to help her make the results of a slip of judgment with the stable boy go away.
All that is to say that there are hundreds and hundreds of scenarios that could get someone to become a defendant in a witch trial. And I haven’t even mentioned the fourth dimension yet: time. Over the centuries, what was considered suspicious and who was the driving force behind the accusations changed as well. I will go into detail about that shortly.
It would, however, be absolutely naïve to not approach the persecution of witches from the vantage point of statistics as well. To claim that all the possible scenarios happened equally often would be misleading. Certain demographics, but also certain motivations and observable behaviours, led to many more witch trials, verdicts, and executions than others. And I am convinced that it is that predominance of particular combinations that is the basis for statements like “they were after women.”
The majority of witch hunt victims were women. Patriarchy was the underlying culprit. But that “millions of women died on the pyres” because male clerics hated them for being women and because these men were afraid of the women’s powers does not seem to hold true. I won’t deny that this did happen on occasion, and the last thing I want to do is defend these zealous bigots mur-
dering wives and daughters in droves. But I also would like to paint a picture that seems to be closer to the truth.
The social status of a person appears to be one of if not the driving factor for being accused of practicing witchcraft. And when we talk about social status here, we can very confidently say that one class was disproportionally affected: the poor.
From that—and the court records show it plainly—we can establish that a poor male was more likely to be accused of and tried for witchcraft than a rich female of high social status, even if the woman was actually practicing magic and the poor beggar was just caught uttering a common jinx out of frustration.
Beggars and the Poor
An extremely important factor to consider when taking account of witch trials and executions is that there was no social net that took care of poor people in the period we are exploring. If you became so poor that you lost your home and you didn’t have any skills in a trade you could turn into a meaningful income, one of the very limited options you had was to beg. And who were the people mostly afflicted by these circumstances? War veterans, the disabled, and … widows. Meanwhile, in “normal” times, there were always some positions available for unskilled labourers at farms and at the courts of the nobles. The problem at this juncture was the enormous influx of veterans, widows, and the disabled.
Veterans
Many war veterans were recruited in their teenage years and learned no other skills than being a soldier. Others were wounded or maimed so they couldn’t perform their learned trades or jobs from their lives prewar and were not able to acquire any new skills. In a mostly agricultural and manufacturing society, physical labour
formed the larger part of anyone’s work life, and if your strength was all you could have offered were it not for a severe war injury, you were out of luck on the job market.
Widows
The social system back then was not set up to teach women about trade skills or being a merchant. Women were not expected and therefore not trained to make a living on their own. A woman’s jobs were being a wife, running the household, and rearing children. On a farm, working the vegetable garden and helping with livestock was added to the job description. But without a husband or household to lead, without a house, and without having the ability to work for a living, there was no food on the table and no safe place to rest one’s head for the night.
It is for this reason we can claim with confidence that the patriarchal structure of society was why so many women became beggars. Again, while this disenfranchised social class was the focus of the persecutors, it was not the gender itself that was the reason the overwhelming part of this particular cohort was women; rather, it was what the patriarchal system withheld from women that makes it look like women were the primary target.
The Disabled
In dissecting the classism leading to the witch hunts mainly in the Renaissance, I do not want to leave the physical and developmentally disabled completely out of the discussion. Having a physical disability—may that be from birth, from an accident, or from warfare—rendered anyone practicably unemployable in that epoch. So did having a developmental disability. With the latter, their unexplainable behaviour could easily become the “observable reason” for being accused a witch.
A good example for how mental illness could entangle you in a witch trial is the 1662 case against Regina Pauman in Paternion (Carinthia). Other than telling the court how she knew how people can become werewolves, she also denounced three companions named Leonard, Bartl, and Toni as having participated in witch dances with her. The three men, who were known to be developmentally disabled, were arrested and interrogated. In their testimony they gave to record that they did some witch flights as birds and had visited witches’ sabbath dances.
However, Judge Metnitzer, a farmer and apparently a man with some wisdom who knew Leonard and was aware of that man’s disability, recognised the testimony as a distorted memory of a farm wedding he, Metnitzer, had attended as well. There, the bride had been chosen to play the devil in a dance, because two flower ornaments on her bride’s wreath looked like horns. At some moment during the dance, a hawk swooped down on some chickens. These things had actually happened, they were just embellished and twisted in the minds of the developmentally disabled defendants. The judge had therefore disregarded Pauman’s testimony as a chimaera. We can assume the three men were set free as not mentally fit for trial or punishment.
No Social Net
As mentioned, the disabled, widows, and veterans often had no other means of survival than begging. In rural alpine Austria, that was not so much sitting at the village square and panhandling but travelling from farm to farm and asking for some food and a corner in the stables to spend the night. That was the social safety net. It was just commonly understood that the farmers would help the beggars out with some bread, maybe some bacon, and milk. We also need to remember that most everyone, especially in rural areas—
including the tradespeople, merchants, and even the priests—did some farming and had some livestock. Insofar, when we talk about a system where the “farmers” took care of the destitute beggars, pretty much anyone in the village who owned a house and at least some land around it would be included as a “farmer” here.
While that had been tradition for a while and more or less balanced, the perfect storm of adverse conditions at the end of the Dark Ages had toppled that equilibrium against the poor. Due to the Hundred Years War and the plague, many more beggars knocked on the doors than a century before. At the same time, the farmers had less than usual to give because of the small ice age limiting the yield of the harvest. This is how the beggars changed from charity cases to a nuisance.
Bringing back the three-dimensional matrix of circumstances that could cause anyone to be entangled in the web of witch persecution. At this point we have a large cohort defined by their social status (demographics) opposite a group feeling overwhelmed by climate change and a lack of skilled workers and therefore searching for a solution (motivation). Add to that the wide array of observable “witchy” behaviour and practice that the inclusion of folk magic in the crime of performing witchcraft allows, and we have the perfect storm for these poorest of the poor. Adding to that the inclusion of a new charge—some interaction with the devil— widened the net in which people could be caught tremendously.
A beggar knocking on the door of a farm and not getting any or enough food and therefore cursing the farmers for their unhelpfulness very likely ended up in front of the judge. It was that simple. The beggar wasn’t a witch; they might have just said something like Da sy der Rit sch tt (that the fever chills shake her), something they had heard someone else say somewhere, for it had become a widely used folk magic curse.
Folk Magic Practices
Begging was not the only opportunity for the poor otherwise out of options. Aside from actual witchcraft, there was of course this vast field of folk magic that could be made into money. All one had to do was not get caught. And as long as you worked for the benefit of the people hiring you, there was a good chance that they kept your services a secret and you were spared a trial. All you had to do was be carful of zealous clerics and other people doing the same as you and being jealous of your success.
Here, we are entering this enormous grey zone of questionable “skills” and the black market of talismans of various efficacy.
This, again, does not include the actual witches who, even though they would have not called themselves that, knew magic, divination, and herbal medicine. Some were caught and executed, like Mathias Perger, also known as Der Lauterfresser (the Liquid-Guzzler; he was said to have preferred sustaining himself with drink), who was such a vibrant personality there even exists a whole set of folktales, the Lauterfresser Sagen (Liquid-Guzzler tales), about his life and eventual demise on the pyre.
Some actual witches were caught and acquitted, like Christoph Gostner zu Sexten, in whose house the bailiffs found more than thirty grimoires but who could “prove” that he always invoked the Christian God in his spells and always performed his magic for the benefit of the community.
And some of the witches lived so remotely and secretively that they were almost more myth than reality, and therefore never caught.
These witches and their trials are all listed in this book, but let us have a look at the rather large cohort of charlatans and con artists. People travelling through the country selling snake oil, divulging
secret places where treasures were rumoured to be hidden, and performing simple folk magic like the almost proverbial smashing sticks onto the surface of puddles to make it rain. Everything and anything for a handful of coin.
One talisman and magical object that was in great demand and of which there was a vibrant market of counterfeits was the mandrake, the root of the Mandragora plant. It is a rare plant to begin with, and when it grows under certain circumstances—we will explore that in detail in the next chapter—it was believed to have even greater powers than its inherent psychoactive properties. Of course, that meant that people with guts and creative skills sold fake mandrakes whenever they could. In the town archives of Wiener Neustadt, once seat of the Archduke of Austria and Emperor of the Roman Empire of German Nations, there is a record filed under the number “55/4, 1571” stating that “a married couple from nearby Hartberg crafted, due to poverty and seduced by the evil enemy, items from turnips that looked like Mandrakes, and also sold these as Mandrakes.”5
Just selling that—not even performing any magic with it or at least pretending to do so—brought people in front of the judges, and one wonders if the delict was simply fraud or selling magical items.
These folks tried as witches were charlatans, scammers. They extorted money from people under false pretence. That they met some form of punishment seems fair, yet the extent of penalties they received was certainly far beyond their crimes. However, that could be said about most forms of punishment in these eras, where
5. Byloff, Volkskundliches aus Strafprozessen der sterreichischen Alpenl nder mit besonderer Ber cksichtigung der Zauberei und Hexenprozesse 1455 bis 1850, 14.
simple theft could cost you your hand if it didn’t break your neck on the gallows.
Let me just clarify that it was this classism, the scapegoating of the poor and powerless, that caused the death of so many who weren’t even proper witches but were either baselessly accused of performing magic or perhaps may have done some light folk magic that everyone did. Actual witches, folks who knew their magic and lived the life of a witch—whatever that entailed in any given era—were indeed among the ones suffering persecution, but there weren’t that many to begin with. Add to that that there were instances where these so-called witch doctors were deemed too important to the community that the populace didn’t reveal their identity to the persecutors. It also happened frequently that either the secular authorities presiding over the cases let the defendants go against the will of the clerics who had zealously hunted them down and delivered them to the courts. Neither was it unthinkable that nobility intervened because the proper witches were in fact the only ones who were able to help people with their knowledge and practice. The majority of the prosecuted cases, however, involved people who just were caught, or in many instances accused of without any evidence, performing acts of magic.
Judges and the laW
To wrap our heads around how this mayhem causing the demise of so many people was possible, we need to look at the legal landscape of these times. Before the “Constitutio Criminalis Carolina”—in short “Carolina,” the first German comprehensive set of civil and criminal laws put together by Karl V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations—much of the jurisprudence in the area in question was based on tribal laws such as the Lex Baiuvariorum (Bavarian Laws) and other Germanic Laws. The Bavarian
