mmm KINGS AGAINST WITCHES
Excerpt from the SECRET HISTORY OF THE WITCHES .... Copyright 2000 Max Dashu
A significant legend about early Germanic witches appears in the History of the Goths, written around 570 by a Gothic christian named Jornandes or Jordanes. It says that king Filimer, while conducting a survey of Gothic customs, discovered the existence among his people of witches called haliorunnae.
The king was hostile toward these haliorunnae, wrote Jornandes, and banished them to the distant reaches of Scythia in order to remove their influence from the tribe. This implies that the haliorunnae were well regarded by a significant number of Goths. The meaning of their title bears this out: the Gothic language itself named these priestesses after the "holy mysteries." [Baroja, Lea, Grimm, et alia] The existence of priestesses among the pagan Goths is borne out by a runic inscription at Pietroassa referring to the Guntaniovihalig, a holy treasure in their keeping. [Boyer, 625]
Jornandes' account claims that the Huns sprang from the halorunnae, fathered by evil spirits wandering the steppes. In spite of the pejoratives attached to the haliorunnae by rulers and christian recorders, the name survived in Germanic culture. The name appears in early medieval manuscripts as Alyrunae and Alarinas. [Grimm, 210] Folklore connected it with the witch-herb mandrake and cave-dwelling spinner goddesses.
Hungarian tradition preserved its own version of the Gothic rune-women, conflated with medieval faery-mistress themes. A 19th-century poem, "The Stag" by Arany János, gives its outlines. The beautiful chieftainess Ened had two sons, Hunor and Magwor. They hunted a stag which got them lost in the forest. There they saw the aliorunna dancing, feasting and doing magic. The brothers abducted these faeries, who held aloof for a time, but finally reconciled with them.
They became the ancestors of the Huns. After a time, the group that became the Magyars separated from the others in their wanderings. The legacy of the priestess-ancestors was that magic and beauty would pass down through the female line, but the boys would be stocky and bowlegged. Tradition assured Hungarian girls that because they were descended from these faeries, they inherited a certain superiority over the boys. [Z Budapest, personal communication, 10/6/95]
In the first century CE, Tacitus wrote that Germanic tribes attributed wisdom and magical powers to their mothers. This theme recurs in an account of the origins of the Langobards, dating from the mid-700s. It says that the Vinils drew lots on which of them should leave their overcrowded Scandanavian island. A third of them set out for the mainland. There they came into conflict with the Vandals, who demanded tribute from them. The Vinil leaders sought counsel from their mother Gambara.
She approached Frea, asking her for victory for her people over the Vandals. These had prayed to Wodan, who said he would give victory to the first ones he saw at sunrise. Frea told Gambara to have the Vinil women unbind their hair and arrange it over their faces like beards. They should then go with the men very early to the window where Wodan first looked out in the morning. They did so, and Wodan shouted, "Who are these Longbeards?" Frea answered, "To the ones you give a name, you must also give victory." Thus the Vinils prevailed, and ever since were known as Langobards. [Paulus Diaconus, in Grimm's Deutsche Sagen, #388, 390]
Czech Witches
The Czechs preserved a legend that witches governed their country before women were deposed from power. The three daughters of the first chief Krok, who founded a school of pagan wisdom, mastered this knowledge.
Kazi (also called Brelum) "knew the healing powers of various herbs and plants and the use of magic incantations and she treated the sick from far and wide." [Jirasek, 7] Teta (Tekta, Tecka) was a pagan priestess, a diviner who could locate lost or stolen things. Libushe, the youngest sister, was a prophetic sibyl with a vast knowledge of witchcraft. It was she who was chosen as the Czech leader at Krok's death in 690.
[Graphic: The Prophetess Libuse, painted by Karl Masek, 1893]
Libushe judged cases sitting on a rug-covered platform under a linden tree. A man who had lost a land dispute bellowed out a challenge to her authority, holding the Czech men up as an international laughingstock: "Where else does a woman rule over men, except here?" None of them spoke up to defend the priestess. She then called an assembly of the clans and told them to choose a duke whom she would marry. She warned her people that they were giving up compassionate government for lordship:
You did not appreciate the freedom that I gave you... You want a man, a duke who will take away your children to serve him, who will choose the best of your cattle and horses for taxes according to his whims. [Jirasek, 9-10]
The Czechs elected the man Libushe had chosen, directing them to follow her white horse to a field where Premysl labored at the plow. The new duke told the Czechs that he and his descendents would rule them with a rod of iron. Though he made harsh laws, Libuscha still retained great authority. One evening she fell into a trance and prophesied the rise of Prague, instructing the Czechs where to build its founding castle. She also foretold where various minerals would be mined: "The voice of the gods will speak through me/To show what is hidden deep down in the earth."
The old priestess often resorted to a deep riverine pool beneath a cliff. While "gazing into the swirling stream" Libushe saw troubling visions of the country's future because of that same mineral wealth. She prophesied villages in flames, battles of "brother against brother" as foreigners came to dominate the country. Libushe sent her son's cradle to the depths of the Vltava river, saying that it would reappear as an omen of Czech recovery from this conflict. Kazi died and was buried in a mound in southern Bohemia. Teta too was buried on a sacred hill. Then at last Libushe died. Her treasure remained hidden in the rock. [Jirasek, 12-17]
After Libushe's death, the women saw that they were no longer respected by the men, who heaped ridicule on them. The women took up arms, led by Libushe's chosen successor Vlasta. They built the maiden castle Devín, saying, "Let the women rule while the men attend to the fields!" Women came from all over, leaving their husbands to fill up Devín castle and swearing to be faithful to each other.
The men continued to mock, but Premysl was worried by recurring dreams of a male defeat. The men marched to Devín castle. The women rode out on horseback to meet them. Vlasta roused them with the knowledge that they would be slaves if defeated. Her companions Mlada, Svatava, Hodka, Radka and Chastava fought by her side. The men stopped laughing as hundreds of them were cut down. The rest fled into the forest.
This war went on for a long time. The women stuck together, sending out spies and laying traps for the men. A male party found Sharka tied to a tree, claiming that the amazons had taken her by force from her father and had placed mead and a bugle out of her reach. The men helped themselves to the wine and then drunkenly blew the horn. An army of women descended and killed them. (Sharka valley is named after this Czech amazon.) In the end, Vlasta was separated from her warriors and picked off, leading to the women's defeat and the razing of their castle. [Jirasek, 18-21]
In Baroja's version of this legend, "women had become so accustomed to directing affairs that they refused to submit to the rule of men again." Vlasta appealed to them to take power, declaring her own witch powers to be like those of the three sisters, and the women agreed with her. Baroja says that Vlasta gave them a potion to make them hate men and war against them, beseiging Premysl in his castle. [Baroja, 50-1]
The Czech Amazon legend directly connects witches' powers to female political sovereignty before written history. The tradition is a historical memory of shamanic offices held by women among the tribal Czechs, who opposed lordship, took women's part and were in turn supported by them. The theme of their struggle against Przemislaw speaks to this. The legend interprets witchcraft as a repository of female power which women used to resist male domination.
Baroja says that the women ruled for seven years before Przemislaw regained control of the government. The legend inverted the prevailing order of male dominance and violence toward women, portraying a female attempt at public power as a war against men by women who have magically become man-haters. It functioned as a justification for the suppression of women's political power during the Przemislad dynasty.
Celtic Legends of Attacks on Priestesses
Several centuries later, oral tradition in the Celtic west of Europe alludes to warlord attacks on priestesses. In many legends, hostility is directed at demonized forms of the crone goddess, but other myths refer directly to desecration of woman-led communal sanctuaries.
An medieval Irish legend presents Erne, "free from venom," as the leader of a company of women "who knew no art of wounding." This priestess is the guardian of magical talismans of the goddess Medb: "her comb, her casket unsurpassed, with her fillet of red gold." (A. Brown points out that the word here translated as "casket" is críol, the chalice of the goddess which later became the Holy Grail.) "Women not a few obeyed her will." These divine maidens live in "thick-wooded Rath Cruachu."
The warrior Olcai threatens the women and causes them to flee under the lake waters. The legend explained how lake Erne came to be named after a priestess of a forest sanctuary. [Condren, 70] In another version, a king carries off one of the maidens, prompting Erne and her women to go live in a palace under the lake.
Other stories of sexual attacks on holy women entered medieval French literature by way of Breton tradition. The Elucidation indicates that a wave of rapes and looting drove away the priestesses of holy wells, who provided drinks of the blessed water to all comers.
The maidens generally served well and gladly all those who wandered along the roads and came for food to the well. King Amangons broke this custom first, who was evil and wicked... he did violence to one of the maidens, against her will he violated her, and took away from her the golden cup and carried it off with him. Then he caused himself to be served out of it. Well ought misfortune to come to him. Therefore never maiden served nor issued from the well for any traveller that came there and sought for food... The other vassals of the court, when they saw their lord's behavior... all the others did violence to them and took away the cups of gold. Never any more from the wells did appear maidens, nor did they serve any more...
The legend indicates that the rapes were not isolated incidents, but a pattern of attack by aristocratic men that destroyed a social institution of priestesses at sacred wells. There is no dating this cultural sea-change, though it could well have resulted from the breakdown of inviolability of pagan shrines during christianization. As the old religion fell, the old taboos against violence in sanctuary were overridden, and new taboos came into being, such as those forbidding females to approach certain holy wells. Numerous Irish legends refer to christian monks barring women from wells.
But even in the 12th century, when this and other legends were written down as the Grail cycle, the tellers still imagined divine reprisals against those who blasphemed against the animist holy places. The waters dried up, plants ceased to sprout and flower, and the meadows and forests shrivelled away. The theme of the wasteland in Celtic literature grows from this violation of the life-nurturers and the goddess without whom nothing grows.
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Early Witch Hunts
Magicians, enchanters, conjurers of storms, or those persons who through invocation of demons throw into confusion the minds of men shall be punished with every kind of penalty.
--Breviarum of Alaric, 506 CE [H.A. Kelly, 49]The earliest written laws of the Germanic tribes reveal attitudes toward witches ranging from toleration or indifference to insults and death. In the earliest laws, economic and legal sanctions, where they existed, were more concerned with establishing safeguards against false accusations than in hunting down magical harm-doers.
But the accusation of sorcery was quickly becoming a social weapon. Several law codes show that to call a woman a witch was considered a defamation of character. Significantly, the name used is not native Germanic but rather an imported Latin term: stria, striga, strix, a word loaded with the baggage of Roman witch persecution. Condemnations of strie or strigae occur in several law codes: the Lex Salica, the Pactus Alemannorum, and the Edictus Rotharii.
Around 670, in the northern Italian kingdom of Rotharius, a person who called a woman whore or witch (masca) faced trial by combat (with a male champion, if female). If the accusation was not "proven" by the trial of battle, the accuser had to pay compensation in the amount of the defendant's wergild (death-fine)--to the male guardian of the woman accused.
Around the year 600, the Alemannic laws imposed fines of 12 solidi on women who called other women striga or herbaria. Again, these Roman names signal a major shift in attitudes toward witchcraft in southern Germany. Roman methods of prosecution had begun to penetrate the Alemannic culture. A clause in the Pactus Alemannorum allowed for the torture of women accused as witch or herbwoman. [#33, from Von Franck's appendix in Hansen, "Geschichte des Worte Hexe"] But it still forbade individuals form seizing an accused witch and harming her.
There was no penalty for witchcraft in the oldest redaction of the Franks' Salic law. It levied a fine on persons who called a woman stria without being able to prove it. Some codexes read "witch or prostitute." [G. W. Hexe, 627] The same penalty faced those who taunted a man as hereburgius, "one who carrie[s] the cauldron to the place where witches meet." (Another redaction has strioportius, carrier for a witch.) [Lea 406, Lex Salica Tit. lxiv; Baroja, 59; Grimm cites the variant chervioburgium as cauldron-carrier for a witch; see also Russell, 69] It was not customary to accuse men of being witches, so insult was offered instead by claiming that they served the (female) witches.
New fines were added as penalties for poisoners, or those who cause a woman to abort or do harmful sorcery, including impotence magic with ligatures. [Cauzons, 72-3] A later passage imposed a large fine of 200 solidi, to be paid by a stria for eating or magically consuming another person. [Baroja 59-60] Here is the classic devouring-sorcerer met with in many cultures. The Salic law still treated such cases like other cases of personal injury and killings. The Ripuarian code treated killing sorcery like any other murder, with wergild compensation paid to the victim's kin. Most other codes of this early period don't mention cursing to death. [Lea, 406-9]
The witch's legal standing was further undermined as barbarian kings converted to the new religion. There are very early indications that the lordly class was using the sorcery charge against commoners and women. We have already seen sixth-century bishops passing laws against serfs who bewitch their lords' drinking-horns, and it's clear that some alarm had spread among rulers over their servitors' unseen powers.
The north Italian code Edictus Rotharii chided the belief in women consuming another person's innards, and forbade execution by fire of those accused, who all seem to have been at the bottom of the class scale: "No one should presume to kill the serf or servant of another as witch, which they call masca..." Such murderers are ordered to pay a fine, to be divided between the woman's master and the king. The code's author adds that to believe that a woman can consume a living person's innards is contrary to christian mind. [Lex Rotharii , cap 376 (Lea) or 379 (Grimm)]
While much has been made of this prohibition, the Rotharian law left a gaping loophole for lords who killed their own subjects as mascae, particularly female serfs and slaves suspected of rancor against their masters. No law code in Europe provided any protection for such peasant women from their lords. This license to murder remained a baronial privilege to the end of the middle ages, and longer in some regions.
Edictus Rotharii: #197. Man [husband] who has mundium of a girl or free woman, who calls her witch, has to give up guardianship to her relatives or to the king. But if he denies it, he is allowed to purify himself, and keep the mundium. #198. If he defames as witch a free girl in another man's mundium, he must pay him wergild according to her status, if he can't prove his allegation. [Geschichte des Wortes Hexe, Von Franck]
The greatest penalty for witchcraft, one that quickly gained currency across Europe, was to be burned alive in a ritual or symbolic purgation by fire. The earliest references to this form of witch-execution come from the late Roman empire, and it is in the regions most affected by Roman culture that we find the oldest mentions of it in feudal times--in Italy, Spain, and France. There the death by fire appeared during the first vigorous attempts to institute christianity as the official religion.
In France, a late recension of the Salic law ordered those who killed by incantations to be burned alive. [Lea, 408-9] The Visigoth kings began to burn witches after a long campaign by Spanish clerics to reintroduce the harsh imperial codes against pagans and "sorcery." Lea commented, "It is significant of the barbarian tenderness for human life, however, that the penalties were greatly less than those of the savage Roman edicts." [399]
Recared, the first Spanish king to convert to catholicisim, stripped the right to testify from witches and diviners and those who consult them. Egiza authorized the torture of slaves to get testimony against masters accused of such pagan activity. [Lex Visigoth iii 4, 10-11 has torquere, to wring out confessions.Grimm]
[Graphic: Rulers repressed pagans with public floggings, fines, land seizure and enslavement. Utrecht Psalter, early 800s]
Chindaswind penalized those who invoked pagan deities with public flogging and enslavement. Those convicted of harmful sorcery as well as those who "offer nocturnal sacrifices to demons and sinfully invoke them by impious prayers... will receive 200 lashes in public; they shall be shamefully shorn, and in this state, be forced to traverse the ten villages neighboring their homes, so that their example will serve as a correction to others." [Cauzons, 76]
Alaric II reintroduced the Justinian death penalty for worshipping "demons" in his Lex Romana Visigothorum (506) This code (vi, 2, 5) prohibited "maintaining the execrable pronunciations of the diviners, giving answers of health or sickness." Its reference to "the place where the arioli and ariolae were" suggests that the diviners could still be found in designated sanctuaries. [Grimm, 1317]
Chindiswint's laws also prohibited "consulting diviners, soothsayers and enchanters," apparently anxious that "servants and simple folk" were applying to such people to find out whether the king was well or about to die. [vi 2. 1 & 5, in Grimm 1317; Baroja 52] By 689 we read of Visigoth rulers burning Spanish sorcerers and Jewish astrologers. These seventh century laws passed into the Fuero Juzgo, the foundation of medieval Spanish law. [Lea, 399-400] It refers to the punishment of people holding night vigils and festivals with offerings and dances in the seventh century. [Backman, 95] F. Juzgo kept this repression current, prescribing 200 lashes, branding and public humiliation for diviners and "those who speak with the devils," as well as for those who consult them. [Canellada]
As Frankish kings embedded tough new penalties for sorcery in the formerly tolerant Salic law, the severe fines often meant that commoners who could not pay them were sold into slavery. Churchmen also decreed loss of freedom as the penalty for witchcraft. In 589 the Council of Narbonne condemned the carages / caraïos, diviners who were popular all over the south of France, to be whipped and sold as slaves. Anyone who consulted them was excommunicated and fined six ounces of gold. There was strategy in this; the churchmen enlisted the support of the secular ruler by designating him as the recipient of the fines. The bishops at Narbonne also agreed to penalize pagan loyalists who refused to work on Thursdays. Those who were free were excommunicated, but slaves received 100 lashes. Here again the Church preserved the class bias of Roman law. [McKenna, c 116]
In Italy, the Lombards also adopted this strategy of enslaving pagans. Those accused of "sorcery" were to be sold into slavery outside the province. The judge and other officials split the money from the human sale. As if this was not enough of an inducement to convict, the law took an extra precaution that indicates the reluctance of some officials to apply these repressive statutes. It levied huge fines on judges who refused to prosecute or condemn "sorcerers". The public was also subject to large fines for consulting or failing to inform on "sorcerers," or for chanting incantations themselves. [Lea 411, MTHW] These laws created a historical necessity for the people to outwardly submit to christianization, while retaining their old religion in secret.
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Women's Sorcery
Church and state both declared women inferior to men. Their movement and inheritance was limited. They had no legal standing except through male guardians. They had no recourse against philandering husbands, though men could cast off their wives on the pretext of adultery or barrenness. And husbands held other privileges over wives. By accusing them of infidelity or magic, Germanic husbands could literally put them through an ordeal, as legal, historical and folkloric records attest.
It was common knowledge that women were at a disadvantage in the patriarchal scheme of society, and expected that they would find ways to assert their own needs and desires. Older avenues of power were known to women from the wellspring of folk culture. Chanting over herbs and knotted cords, wearing amulets, giving herbal potions to be drunk, all were used in protective magic, love spells and luck charms. Such rites could also be used to repel unwelcome sexual advances. Popular opinion recognized these as effective.
Women were often suspected of preparing magical filtres for men to drink. Unhappily married women, concubines who hated their masters, young peasants hemmed in by the unwelcome attentions of ranking warriors, and many other women had reasons to perform rites hoping to decrease male desire or to deflect it. But such power was a threat to the authority of lords and husbands, and hit them where it counted.
Some of the first laws against witchcraft in feudal Europe took aim at women's influence in sex relations. They forbade ligatura ("knotting" or "tying") leading to male impotence. Frankish rulers amended the Salic law so they could fine those who bewitched men with knotted cords. [Lea, 409] This spell turns up in witch-persecutions for the next thousand years. The French called it nouer l'aiguillette: "to tie up the thong" or "to knot the breechclout," a clear metaphor for binding up a man's loins.
The spell of ligatura was considered so effective that churchmen adapted its otherwise rigid marriage doctrine to allow for it. Bishop Hincmar of Reims declared that couples might separate (something he otherwise refused to concede) when sorcery had prevented intercourse. Male impotence was one of the few factors that could invalidate a church marriage. [Hincmar Epist. 22 (PL 126, 151) in Kelly, 61; Lea MTHW, 162-70]
The subject of castrating witches has a two-thousand-year history, kept alive by anxious theologians and magistrates. Laws against ligatura and all sexual magic continued to appear regularly in the canons of the church and flowed easily into later demonological dogma. Witch-hunting inquisitors were still obsessed with impotence magic in 1486. So were secular judges in the 16th and 17th centuries, and canon lawyers in the 18th.
Ligatura figured among the pretexts for the earliest known use of the sorcery charge as a purely political weapon. It served one of the most ruthless members of the Frankish court, which was embroiled in violent intrigues, murders and wars.
Clovis, the king who had converted to christianity, divided his kingdom among his sons. One, Chilperic, was married to the commoner Audovera and also kept a concubine, Fredegonde. After Audovera bore him three sons, he repudiated her in order to marry the Visigothic noblewoman Galswintha, who brought a rich dowry. Chilperic set aside Fredegonde for awhile, but soon consorted with her openly. The proud Galswintha declared that she would return to her family. In 567, before she was able to leave, Chilperic had her strangled. [Lea, Cauzons, Baroja, 53]
Galswintha's sister, Brunihildis, who was married to Chilperic's brother, swore blood-feud against Galswintha's murderers. Meanwhile, Fredegonde had Chilperic's brother assassinated. When Brunihildis took over the rule of his Austrasian domain, Fredegonde tried to do her in as well, but failed. The two women feuded for 40 years. Chilperic was murdered in 584. At the age of 80, Brunhildis was at last overcome, tortured and dragged to death by horses. [Lea 410-11, Durants, 614]
Fredegonde, at last queen of the Franks, accused her enemies of magically causing harm to her kin. She used the sorcery charge to eliminate Mummol, the king's favorite. [Accounts of the accusation differ; Lea has it causing the impotence of her grandson, while Cauzons and Summers (Geography, 354-5) say it was causing her son's death by dysentery]
The queen had a number of Parisian women arrested and tortured. They were forced to say that they were witches who had killed many people and that Mummol hired them because he was doomed to die, to sacrifice the prince's live in order to save his own. Fredegonde ordered some of the women burned, others strangled, while still others were broken on the wheel. She denounced Mummol to the king, who had him bound and tried.
Under torture, the favorite wouldn't confess to killing the prince but finally said he had used unguents and brews to gain royal favor. The torture resumed. When Mummol was nearly dead, Fredegonde released him, confiscated his property and sent him off to Bordeaux in a cart. He died en route. Legal safeguards against false accusation had proved useless when the accusers were members of the ruling family.
The other sorcery trial instigated by Fredegonde involved the issue of succession to the throne. Having fought her way from concubinage to queendom, Fredegonde wanted to see her own offspring wearing the crown. In 578 she accused her stepson Clovis (by the king's first, royal wife) of killing two of her sons with the magical help of his concubine.
The old mother of the concubine was tortured into "confessing" that she had caused the young princes' deaths. Her quick retraction was ineffectual. She was gagged and burned, her daughter impaled. The torture-testimony enabled Fredegonde to get Chilperic's assent to his own son's execution. [Lea 110-11; Cauzons, 100-2]
In Spain, the Visigoths also outlawed ligatura and other sexual magic. Lawmakers feared that "certain women" were able to use herbal filtres to control their husbands so that they would not be able to accuse them of adultery in court, or to leave them, even if the women were having affairs with other men. [McKenna, 122] Once more, as with the Bohemian witches, the fear was that women would find magical ways to overcome social restrictions and assume privileges reserved for men.
Female sexual independence was harshly discouraged in other ways. Secular Bavarian laws imposed on obstetrical witches the same penalties we have seen elsewhere assigned to "sorcerers": heavy scourging and enslavement:
VIII 18. If any woman gives a drink so that she causes an abortion, if it is a maidservant, let her receive 200 lashes, and if it is a freedwoman, let her lose her freedom and be assigned to slavery to whomever the duke orders. [Rivers, 141]
The penalty suffered by the bondswoman could easily be fatal, depending on the zeal of the men who flogged her.
The Alemannic laws of 700 fined "anyone who causes abortion in pregnant women." [XXXXVIII, in Rivers] In Spain, the Visigothic Forma Iudicum (654) ordered the death penalty for women who prepared abortifacient potions. A freewoman who sought to obtain the herbal drink was to be enslaved to whomever the king named, while a female slave was flogged with 200 lashes. [McKenna]
The near uniformity of these laws points to priestly pressure on rulers to criminalize previously lawful acts that were previously lawful, setting criminal penalties on canonical offences. Long before the Spanish and Bavarian laws were enacted, monks and bishops had declared war against women's traditions of birth control.
Copyright 2000 Max Dashu
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