But why did people believe in witches and their counterparts? “It is perhaps safest to observe that a belief in witchcraft requires, or rests upon, an underlying cultural structure of belief in magical power—either Christian and/or folk and popular” (Carroll 301). Our modern American conception of magic in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is such that we believe that magic was seen as evil, as being Satanic in origin. When we think of magic in these times we envision witches being burned at the stake. This belief is greatly colored by our cultural past particularly in relation to the Salem witch trials. American culture is founded largely on Puritanism which did view magic as evil. Because of ethnocentrism we project our cultural biases onto other western nations which results in inconsistencies. The fact is that belief in magic was central to western culture and integral to its development. Christianity was founded upon magicians called saints and their magical acts called miracles. The Christian sacraments are magical in nature. What are Baptism, Confession, and Last Rites but the magical vanishings of sin and what is a priest performing the transubstantiation of Communion wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ if not an alchemist? The later Reformation and the consequent emphasis on humanism that shaped the Renaissance was likewise predicated upon magic. The ultimate point of the Reformation was to allow individuals to appropriate the Church’s magic for themselves in order to reach God on their own and save themselves while the thrust of humanism is to allow people to attain their fullest potential, to find divine power within themselves. Thus belief in magic and therefore in witches and wizards was a necessary component of medieval and Renaissance life.
Indeed, not believing in magic was not an option at the time. As the Church inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger argue in their book Malleus Maleficarum (1484), failing to believe in magic was a type of religious infidelity and thus heretical.
But this is contrary to the true faith, which teaches us that certain angels fell from heaven and are now devils, and we are bound to acknowledge that by their very nature they can do many wonderful things which we cannot do. And those who try to induce others to perform such evil wonders are calledIf God created devils and witches use magic to do the devils’ bidding then to disbelieve in the use of magic is to disbelieve in God. “In short, to doubt the existence of demons and their activities, ‘as do the epicurean Atheists’, was to deny the very existence of God” (Anglo 8). Witches are proof of God’s existence and by God you had better believe in them. The punishments for not believing in them could be as severe as the punishments for proclaimed witches themselves.
witches. And because infidelity in a person who has been baptized is technically called heresy, therefore such persons are plainly heretics. (2-3).
Since magic played such a central role in these times it is clear that it was not perceived as evil nor Satanic. The truth is that magic in itself was seen as value neutral, i.e. it was neither good nor evil. As noted, magic—like everything else in creation—came from God and to deny its existence or claim that it was evil was heretical for doing so denied the existence or benevolence of God. But like any of God’s creation magic can be perverted to serve evil ends. So what makes something evil in the first place? From the medieval Christian church’s perspective, particularly after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, anything not affiliated with it or sanctioned by it was evil (Schroeder). Magic use by non-Christians such as Moslems and Jews or other heretics—especially Reformists—was therefore witchcraft.
The Malleus Maleficarum was written as the 15th century was coming to its end. It seems clear that Kramer and Sprenger wrote it in response to the burgeoning Reformist sentiment that would come to fruition in the early 16th century. This point is driven home by the way they condemn the emergent “scientific” philosophy concordant with the Reformation that viewed belief in witchcraft as superstitious and fostered by the Church as a corrupt means of social control.
For certain writers, pretending to base their opinion upon the words of S. Thomas when he treats of impediments brought about by magic charms, have tried to maintain that there is not such a thing as magic, that it only exists in the imagination of those men who ascribe natural effects, the causes whereof are not known, to witchcraft and spells . . . in the very first place they are shown to be plainly heretical by many orthodox writers, and especially by S. Thomas, who lays down that such an opinion is altogether contrary to the authority of the saints and is founded upon absolute infidelity. (2).Indeed, the vehemence that sometimes informs the inquisitors’ polemic is such that it is difficult to tell which is the greater heresy: witchcraft or doubting the Church’s stance on it.
This position is philosophically problematic. If magic comes from God then it should follow logically that using magic brings one closer to God. How can the Church fathers therefore condemn others for using it especially when they use it themselves? This perceived hypocrisy is one of the very issues that motivated the Reformation. “The anger of the Reformers against Catholicism is readily understandable. The Catholic Church itself practiced magic: by producing effects on inanimate objects; inducing psychosomatic symptoms; and, above all, working miracles in the Mass with its music, words of consecration, incense, wine, and transubstantiation” (Anglo 9). From the Reformers’ perspective this hypocrisy was just another indication of the Church’s corruption.
This is not to suggest that the Reformers denied magic. They simply did not believe the Church had the authority to regulate it. The ultimate goal of the Reformation was to replace the Church with the individual, to make the individual responsible for his or her own spiritual salvation. This philosophy leads naturally to humanism, the belief that people can “fashion” themselves (to borrow a term from Stephen Greenblatt), that they are not born into their lots in life and that they can explore their potential.
Since man has no particular nature and is therefore the point at which liberty is total, the world of forms is subject to man. He is thus able to reach beyond it in the sense that he can degenerate into demonism as well as ascend towards the deity and the super-intellectual . . . His humanity consists not in a given nature, but in the fact that he can make himself, that he can choose. (Garin 90).Humanists are concerned with the possibilities of humanity and believe that people can achieve spiritual perfection. This is the ideology that underlies Hermeticism.
Essentially Hermeticism deals with raising the consciousness of the practitioner, allowing it to achieve a transcendent state which allowed the practitioner to manipulate the natural world. This magical manipulation is brought about through the understanding of “sympathies.” Everything in the universe is sympathetic to everything else; i.e. every part of the natural world has its corresponding part in the celestial and spiritual worlds that operate in sympathy with each other. What affects one part affects them all. As the character of Ulysses describes it in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Infixture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.
. . . But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny?
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth?
. . . Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows. (1.3.85-110).
The musical metaphor that Shakespeare employs here is apt; just as strings vibrate in sympathy when their neighbors are plucked so does the universe vibrate and harmonize in the Hermetic perception. After all, does not the phase of the moon in the celestial sphere influence the tides in the physical? Shakespeare, a consummate humanist, explores this idea of universal sympathies in many of his works, perhaps most obviously in Macbeth and King Lear, when eclipses occur and animals are frenzied when the natural orders of king over subject and father over daughters are inverted.
According to Hermetic philosophy a person can learn to manipulate this metaphysical system of sympathies consciously and in so doing raise his or her own consciousness and place within that system. In his De Occulta Philosphia the Renaissance occultist Cornelius Agrippa articulates how such a person could do so. According to Agrippa there are three types of “magic:”
First, natural magic, the manipulation of forces in the world of elements, mostly based on notions about so-called sympathies . . . Second, mathematical magic, operations performed on the basis of insights into mathematics and its subdivisions (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and mechanics) . . . Third, religious magic, rituals of magic intended to establish contact with inhabitants of supercelestial worlds—that is, spiritism. (Johannisson 252-53).Agrippa’s perception of magic expresses the holistic view of Hermeticism and in many ways anticipates modern theories of quantum mechanics.
In her pioneering research into Hermeticism in the Renaissance and its influence on the development of modern science Frances Yates examines the core texts of the philosophy, the Corpus Hermeticum, those supposedly written by the so-called Hermes Trismegistus. During the Renaissance this Hermes was believed to have been an Ancient Egyptian priest, “almost contemporary of Moses, a Gentile prophet of Christianity, and the source—or one of the sources with other prisci theologi—of the stream of ancient wisdom which had eventually reached Plato and the Platonists” (Yates 234). In this body of work, the origins of humanity are described. Just like the Adam of Genesis,
The Hermetic man in the "Pimander" [the most recognized work of the Corpus] also falls and can also be regenerated. But the regenerated Hermetic man regains the dominion over nature which he had in his divine origin. When he is regenerated, brought back into communion with the ruler of ‘the all’ through magico-religious communion with the cosmos, it is the regeneration of a being who regains his divinity. (235).It is this Hermetic man that the Renaissance humanists imagined as the ultimate fulfillment of human potential. It is no wonder that the Church, bound by its medieval—even draconian—mysticism, distrusted such Hermetic humanism and its Reformist antecedents. It called into question the value of the Church’s magic.
The old medieval image of an order of which man was a part was broken . . . Man can avail himself of ordered forms to sublimate things in God or to hurl them into the darkness of abnormality, the monstrous, and the chaotic. The controversy between true, natural magic and ceremonial magic amounted to this. True magic was defended because it was work which made use of the given forms in order to construct an ascending chain of Being. Ceremonial magic, on the other hand, was attacked because it was work which led into the abyss of sin and chaos. (Garin 91).It is at this point that the figures of the witch and wizard emerge. The wizard or magus epitomizes the values of Hermetic humanism. The witch however is the embodiment of the fears surrounding it particularly on the part of the Church. The witch is the perversion of those values. Of course it would be disingenuous to suggest that the dichotomous relationship between the witch and wizard was merely a matter of Reformation politics with Protestants viewing themselves as wizards and Catholics seeing those Reformers as witches. True, the Catholic church did portray Protestants as heretics and the medieval worldview conflated heretics and witches. But Protestants themselves made a similar distinction between witches and wizards. Daemonologie, written nearly a hundred years after the Reformation by the very Protestant King James, stands as a testament to that fact. The opposing attitudes regarding witches and wizards are the result of sweeping social changes occurring in western culture at the time of which the Reformation and the resulting emphasis on humanism is only a part, albeit a large one. The figures of the witch and the wizard are therefore totemic; they represent a confluence of various forces that are historical, religious, political and economic in origin.
Because Hermetic humanism was viewed from opposing positions it is only natural that the qualities that define witches and wizards should be dichotomous. The most obvious distinction between the two is gender: witches were predominantly female and wizards were predominantly male. This is a natural polarity in light of the patriarchal structures of most medieval and Renaissance societies. Since humanism suggests an inversion of the established social order, giving the individual precedence over the collective and—it would have appeared—the commoner over the noble, it would have seemed that a logical end result would be the overthrow of the male by the female. It is understandable then that a fear of such a topsy-turvy world would result in the demonization of the female. From the opposite perspective the proponents of Hermetic humanism in a patriarchal society would see the self-fashioned human as a paragon of their values so it only follows that the wizard would be male as a symbol of the perfection of mankind. Since magic usage is about displays of power it is expected that a man wielding such power in a patriarchal society would be viewed positively whereas a woman wielding the power would be a perversion.
In addition to the changing religious and social landscape there was also a changing economic landscape due in large part to two factors: the bubonic plague and the exploration and colonization of the New World. The plague wiped out anywhere from a third to half of the population of Europe. At this point in the late Middle Ages European nations were largely agrarian and as a consequence of the plague’s huge death toll there were fewer peasants to harvest crops. Peasant labor became a valuable commodity and feudal lords were placed in the position of competing with each other for it. Commensurately the peasants were increasingly able to set their own terms on wages and thus capitalism as the basis for a large-scale economy was born (Hilton 153-54). Expeditions to the New World further fueled the development of capitalism by creating a great demand for supplies and a need to market commodities coming from the New World. A merchant class arose to meet these needs, allowing former peasants to become wealthy and rise in social rank. Social anxiety caused by this shift is embodied in the figures of the witch and wizard. It is no accident that people accused of witchcraft tended to be relatively poor commoners whereas wizards were typically associated with the aristocracy.[1] Witches were those people who worked selfishly for their own personal gain and were rising above their ordained social stations. Wizards by contrast worked selflessly for the betterment of society as a whole.
Witches and wizards also represent changes in the European educational system. Coincident with the Reformation and the emergence of the middle classes was a corresponding rise in literacy and proliferation of literature, including the translation of the Bible and other sacred texts into the vernacular. The Church no longer controlled the word of God which was one of the bases of its power. While humanists rejoiced in the opportunities offered by readily available education such easy access to knowledge was viewed as dangerous from a medieval perspective. Again these conflicting attitudes are embodied by the witch and wizard. Both the witch and wizard were seen to possess similar knowledge but they came by this knowledge in very different ways. For the wizard,
it was theoretically possible to attract the power of a particular celestial body by engraving the correct image at the correct time on the appropriate gem—a recondite skill which could only appertain to the learned magus. But what of the witch? She, too, was deemed to operate largely through the exploitation of natural magic and was commonly accused of employing drugs to procure effects such as love and the recovery of health, or, conversely, poisoning and death. How did she master knowledge which cost the magus a lifetime of arduous study? Such abilities could not be innate. Instead they were attributed to demonic pacts. (Anglo 5).From a medieval perspective knowledge and skill that comes with little effort is not to be trusted. Combined with the threat of Islam (Muslims were widely regarded as practitioners of witchcraft) which promotes education particularly of women the persecution of witches and the exaltation of wizards became a means by which theocracies tried to maintain social control.
These various power dynamics regarding witches and wizards are seen in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Prospero, the primum mobile of the world of the play, is a dominant Christian male and an educated man of aristocratic birth. While it is his excessive devotion to his Hermetic studies that causes his overthrow as Duke of Milan it is his hard-earned mastery of those studies that allows him to reshape his world as he sees fit in order to restore natural order to it. He therefore is the consummate humanist wizard.
Moreover Prospero’s most famous speeches in the play reveal him also to be a consummate Hermetic philosopher. Hermeticism as noted is marked by a metaphysical awareness of the underlying structure of reality. The Hermetic philosopher is able to see past the constructs of the physical plane to the true Platonic forms beneath them. As Prospero says,
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherent, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.148-56).
In this most celebrated passage Prospero is doing more than commenting on the transitory nature of all things. He is offering a glimpse into the mists of reality. Reality, like the masque the spirits performed in the play, is “baseless” and “insubstantial.” It is an illusion lacking substance. Of course Prospero himself is an illusion, a figment of a playwright’s imagination, as he acknowledges here in the last line. Not only is this passage metaphysical it is also metatheatrical, breaking the fourth wall and reminding the audience that the reality in which they are engrossed is nothing more than a dream within a dream.
There has been a tendency historically to identify Prospero and his words with Shakespeare himself. This is understandable as the line separating the wizard and the writer is lightly drawn. “The magus believes that because nature is animate—not completed and finished—he can enter into it, operate on it, and manipulate it. Magic means using nature instrumentally, becoming more powerful. Magic is art, having the power to change and to transmute” (Johannisson 252). This is what a poet does as well and thus we are encouraged to view Shakespeare as a Hermetic magus. The portrayal is apt as Shakespeare was a self-fashioned man from relatively humble origins who was able to gain an education, wealth and influence through the opportunities presented to him by the era in which he lived. “Book, costume, powerful language, the abilities to enact the fancies of the brain: these are key elements of both magic and theater” (Greenblatt 330). Just as Prospero is artist Shakespeare was magus.
Prospero however, like Shakespeare, is a somewhat problematic figure. Just as the description of Shakespeare’s background gives him characteristics more associated with witchcraft Prospero’s actions sometimes border on that as well. The application of his magic is mostly devoted to tormenting the other characters and in his later famous speech in which he renounces his magic Prospero reveals that “graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth / By my so potent art” (5.1.48-50). As Stephen Greenblatt notes in his introduction to the play, “For the playwright who conjured up the ghosts of Caesar and old Hamlet, the claim does not seem extravagant, but for a magician it amounts to an extremely dangerous confession. Necromancy—communing with the spirits of the dead—was the very essence of black magic” (330). Furthermore Prospero’s power is derived from the ability to control spirits like Ariel whom Prospero calls a “malignant thing” (1.2.258). How are we to reconcile these facts with a perception of the wizard as a benevolent artist?
In context . . . ‘malignant’ probably refers to Prospero’s somewhat exaggerated accusation that Ariel is resistant to the magician’s orders, not that he is essentially evil, and the accusation itself evokes speeches from Ariel which develop the contrast between Prospero’s art—which the airy spirit does, in fact, obey—and the witchcraft of Sycorax, with which Ariel had refused to comply. Moreover, Prospero’s intellectual and spiritual self-purification has given him a degree of control over his spirits which is based not on supplication of these lower spiritual orders, but on the participation of the awakened human soul in the very highest levels of the cosmic hierarchy. (Mebane 181).It must also be remembered that Prospero’s actions are methodical and ultimately for a socially good purpose. As Greenblatt notes in his article “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne,” Prospero’s tormenting of others serves to arouse anxiety within them in order to reinforce social order: “anxiety, in the form of threats of humiliation and beating, had long been used as an educative tool” (113). Prospero is employing a socially accepted practice.
Despite how we may feel about Prospero’s moral values there is a clear delineation of him as a wizard as compared to a witch. Although the play’s witch Sycorax is conveniently dead at the outset of the play and therefore not able to interfere with its action the scant description we get of her clearly paints her as the witch. We are told that,
This damned witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Algiers
Thou know’st was banished. (1.2.265-68).
Algiers was and is a Muslim city. As we know the Christian church regarded Muslims as heretics which the medieval and Renaissance minds conflated with witchcraft. The fact that Sycorax was banished from a stronghold of infidel witches suggests that her witchcraft was so terrible that it was perceived as a threat even to other witches. Combined with the fact that Ariel her spirit servant refused to aid her in her magic suggests the extreme unnaturalness of it.
There is a tendency in contemporary Shakespeare criticism to ignore or downplay the magical elements of the play. Such criticism therefore does not identify Sycorax in relation to Prospero. It identifies her instead in relation to Miranda. “Sycorax is more than the justification for Caliban’s territorial rights to the island—she operates as a powerful contrast to Miranda” (Loomba 328). While it is possible to compare and contrast Sycorax and Miranda on the basis of feminine identity (woman to girl, mother-figure to daughter-figure, “whore” to virgin) such reduction of Sycorax to merely her sex/gender denies her the fundamental magical element so important to her character. When viewed in her entirety it becomes obvious that Sycorax is not a foil to Miranda but to Prospero.
Although Sycorax herself does not appear in the play her spirit is present in her offspring Caliban. It has been suggested that Caliban’s character serves to disempower his mother. “It is notable that the acknowledged, if evil, power of Sycorax is effectively undermined by the bestial stupidity of her son, rather as the power of Tamora is defused in Titus Andronicus and that of the Queen in Cymbeline” (Thompson 341). However the fact that Caliban lacks the magical power his mother supposedly possessed suggests that such power is ultimately as baseless as “this insubstantial pageant faded.” Moreover Caliban’s presence in the play serves to remind the audience of her. He comes to represent her in the play as the dark half of Prospero, as the flip side to his coin. It was fashionable at one time to view the play psychoanalytically and see Caliban as representing Prospero’s id desires and the cave into which Prospero sends Caliban in the end was seen as Prospero’s subconscious. There is a logic to this interpretation; Caliban after all has been placed into a similar situation as Prospero as deposed ruler and the centrality of Caliban to the play’s subplot parodies Prospero’s role in the main plot. Just as Prospero’s magic comes from his book (possibly a metaphor for the Bible) and is therefore founded on a mastery of language, so Caliban’s power comes from his mastery of language. As he says, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (1.2.366-67). Cursing of course is the province of witchcraft. It is therefore ironic that unlike Prospero’s book the “book” that Caliban comes to worship is not a book at all. Stephano tells him repeatedly to “kiss the book” (2.2.121), meaning a bottle of sack, in a profane parody of swearing an oath on the Bible. Caliban thus is constructed as an inversion to Prospero just as the inversion of the Renaissance wizard was the witch.
It is clear that witches and wizards are totemic representations of competing zeitgeists. The witch is a vestige of the medieval worldview, the personification of the fears aroused by the threats of an encroaching humanism. In The Tempest however the fact that Caliban and Sycorax are ultimately powerless suggests the powerlessness of the witch and if the witch is powerless then she poses no threat. Thus the medieval fears of humanism are shown to be baseless and foolish. The wizard by contrast is the embodiment of the promise of humanism, a progressive spirit wiping away the ignorant superstitions of the past.
Works Cited
Anglo, Sydney. “Evident Authority and Authoritative Evidence: The Malleus Maleficarum.” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 4: The Literature of Witchcraft. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.
Carroll, William C., ed. “Witchcraft and Prophecy: Discourses of Witchcraft.” Macbeth: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
Garin, Eugenio. “Magic and Astrology in the Civilisation of the Renaissance.” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 11: Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne.” Materialist Shakespeare: A History. Ed. Ivo Kamps. London: Verso, 1995.
---. “The Tempest.” The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition: Romances and Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Hilton, Rodney. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.
James I, King of England. Demonology: Includes News From Scotland, on the Death of a Notable Sorcerer. Ed. G. B. Harrison. San Diego: The Book Tree, 2002.
Johannisson, Karin. “Magic, Science, and Institutionalization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus. Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988.
Loomba, Ania. “From Gender, race, Renaissance Drama.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
Mebane, John S. Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
Schroeder, H. J., trans. “Medieval Sourcebook: Fourth Lateran Council: Canon 3 on Heresy 1215.” The Disciplinary Decrees of the Ecumenical Counci. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1937. Internet Medieval Source Book. Ed. Paul Halsall. Feb. 1996. Fordham University. 25 Apr. 2005. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/lat4-c3.html.
Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest.” The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition: Romances and Poems. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
---. “Troilus and Cressida.” The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition: Comedies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Thompson, Ann. “’Miranda, Where’s Your Sister?’: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelen. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
Yates, Frances A. “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science.” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol. 11: Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.
[1]The impression we have today of witches being burned at the stake is mostly false: that punishment was reserved for heretics. Although witchcraft was regarded as a type of heresy those accused of witchcraft were mostly commoners for whom hanging was the traditional form of capital punishment. This supposes of course that the alleged witches survived their trials.
