MacMorrighan
October 21st, 2008, 09:05 PM
Author’s Note: This review constitutes my own opinion based upon several years of research and study; so it goes without saying that your mileage may vary!
A Critique and Review of Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief & Folklore in Early-Modern Europe, ed. by Kathryne A. Edwards. Sixteenth-Century Essays & Studies, Vol. 62. [Truman State University Press, 2002].
Wade MacMorrighan © 2007-08
When I first became aware of this book, I grew increasingly concerned that it might bear an over-riding agenda, due to the glowing reviews bestowed upon it by numerous Catholic Journals excerpted upon the Truman State University web-site;[1] a fear that is well-founded when considering the fact that it has been proven that the Catholic Church has had a hand in editing the Encyclopedia Britannica (among other academic works of reference) in an effort to mitigate their culpability during the Inquisition and suppression of paganism, as well as redacting several further works that were thought to present a “counter-Christian” thesis. For more on this, please consult the following resources by an important early twentieth-century atheist scholar, Joseph McCabe: "Lies & Fallacies of the Encyclopedia Britannica: How Powerful and Shameless Clerical Forces Castrated a Famous Work of Reference";[2] “The Columbia Encyclopedia's Crimes Against the Truth: How a Popular Reference Work is being used as a Weapon Against Free Culture and Twisted to fit the Purposes of Lying Obscurantists";[3] and "Rome's Syllabus of Condemned Opinion: The Last Blast of the Catholic Church’s Medieval Trumpet”.[4]
Joseph McCabe found that the Catholic Church was actively lobbying for, and succeeding in changing encyclopedias to reduce or omit any information controversial to the Catholic Church [eg. Dying-and-Rising deities]; in some cases with out-and-out censorship or even deceptive material; though, in most cases they employed a specious "softening" approach. It is believed that these mendacious tactics are still quite extensive in many contemporary reference works, and that they are continuing to go on unchecked, and unwatched!
Thankfully, however, I can rest assured that my initial fears noted for this particular review were unwarranted. What follows constitutes an appraisal and examination of each subsequent chapter-length article:
"Introduction: Expanding the Analysis of Traditional Belief", by Prof. Kathryn A. Edwards.
What a brilliant Introduction! (If only certain en vogue scholars would write similar introductions, and place their academic methodological quantifications into a proper perspective for their impressionable readership.) While the Ed. maintains that this book strives to be a work of general Historical-Anthropology (representing only one discipline, such as the work by Prof. Lederer, within this collection), she acknowledges that many diverse disciplines were incorporated to give the reader a general feel for the diverse applications often applied in historical quantification (when compared with the contributions by both Robin Briggs and H. C. Erik Midelfort, noted below, for example); so one may judge the veracity of a thesis for himself or herself based upon an author’s own substantiated or corroborated argument (even if a lack thereof).
Be that as it may, she favors the burgeoning academic discipline (as applied to medieval witchcraft-studies) of Historical-Anthropology, and even rallies the following plea to General Historians writing and teaching on the subject: "...this collection aspires to motivate scholars and other readers to reexamine the categories through which early-modern beliefs and perspectives are commonly approached." Let's hope that such scholars adopting either a psycho-analytical model (in terms of pathology) or a more prosaic approach will take her words to heart! Further on, in her Introduction, Prof. Edwards continues as she briefly address the extensive other-world beliefs of the era with which this work is concerned, as well as a few of the prevailing contemporaneous academic beliefs about the subject in general.
"Dangerous Spirits: Shapeshifting, Apparitions, and Fantasy in Lorraine Witchcraft Trials", by Prof. Robin Briggs.[5]
Lorraine denotes a specific region of northeastern France whose capitols (modern and antiquated, respectively) are: Metz and Nancy. It embraces a total of 5 counties, which in itself, is a relatively small demographic for any singular study of a more broad socio-historical event that seeks to extrapolate a synthesis which Prof. Briggs attempts to yield. However, the author rather strangely seeks out differentiations between British and French witchcraft-beliefs when his working thesis is an examination of the popular "beliefs" (ie. psychosis, in this instance) of medieval Lorraine, France! Albeit, in this district, it is worth noting that there remained nearly 400 men and women who were tried as witches between 1580 and 1630 ce (a span of only 50 years).
But, the over-riding agenda of this respective contribution is evident by its secondary-title, whereby all seemingly “fantastical” beliefs that are recounted in trial testimony are relegated to the status of mere fantasies, or as being purely imaginary. As a result, he has adopted a psycho-analytical methodological application (as per some of his scholastic coevals: Norman Cohn[6] and H. C. Erik Midelfort) with which to dismiss popular or folk belief-systems as a figment of the medieval imagination. Moreover, in adopting such a staunch, pathological (indeed Freudian) lens through which to view the testimony at hand he has interpreted the evidence as emerging from sexual repression: that is, accounts of Flying Ointment allude to (he concludes) a desire for masturbatory release;[7] shape-shifting and Familiar-encounters (despite the identical characters of these ubiquitous folk-beliefs, also found in native Japanese witchcraft-beliefs, for example[8]) is interpreted as signifying the libido; and the evidence for animal-witches slipping through small openings (such as key holes or window-cracks) are unequivocally accepted as archetypal metaphors for sexual intercourse because the home, Briggs alleges, was identified with the human body—a claim that is blatantly unsubstantiated throughout the present contribution!
However, if one were to supplant his use of the terms "fantasy" and "imaginary" with "visionary-experience" one would glean the current popular-thesis being advocated by scholars and research-groups today.[9] Due to Prof. Brigg's preferred methodological-system, he is able to virtually eliminate the mere plausibility for pagan survivals, whether in folk-belief or folk-traditions, despite evidence to the contrary in the existence of relatively "pagan" (or non-Christian) folk-spells for healing, as well as common peasant belief-systems centered upon shape-shifting, folk-deities, and soul-journeys, etc. By sharp contrast the vast majority of scholars writing available works (translated into English) from Continental Europe have since proven the existence of many pagan-themes or strands extent within early-modern beliefs and practices.
Be that as it may, many Anglo-American scholars tend to posit that an entire region or culture was irrevocably Christian at the moment that the King or ruling élite had been “converted”.[10] It has been otherwise proven that this is a relatively untenable position—such a thesis presumes that the mind of medieval peasantry constitutes a sort of blank “slate-board” onto which the ruling élite and clerics could freely write.[11] However the outstanding work of Prof. Carlo Ginzburg[12] (among many other specialists) has proven that authentic non-Christian belief-systems and practices did survive throughout the early-modern period in spite of Christianity’s attempted hold on European and British consciousness.[13]
Similarly to Briggs and other prosaic researchers, Norman Cohn also makes a habit of dismissing perfectly acceptable, and entirely uncoerced testimony from a variety of women who maintained that they underwent a visionary-experience and transvexed to a Sabbat; Cohn rejects such testimony, labeling them as senile old women (as if he has an insight into their mental-status and age that we cannot)![14] Sadly, the discriminatory tactics employed by Prof. Norman Cohn (chiefly ageism, sexism and mendacity, which he has also levied against Dr. Margaret Murray) has been largely adopted by Anglo-American academe in particular, and has seemingly gone unchallenged;[15] be that as it may, the late Prof. Cohn has had his prosaic thesis roundly questioned by only one brave scholar of note (immediately discounting, of course, contemporary Pagan researchers, and other freelance-scholars): Prof. Carlo Ginzburg, who was also a target of Cohn's mendacity.[16]
As a result of this forthcoming research now vindicating Margaret Murray's sullied credibility (see the applicable footnotes below), the hypothesis posited by contemporary Anglo-American scholars (eg. Ronald Hutton, Chas Clifton, and J.B. Russell, et al) pertaining to direct diffusion as the impetus for contemporary Pagan Witchcraft through Murray becomes more and more untenable as evidence for the New Forest Coven that indoctrinated Gerald B. Gardner (albeit circumstantial) is made available.[17] Even though Prof. Briggs favors a rather problematic psycho-analytical approach that has had an enduring impact upon modern British and American academia, it should be remembered that is only one of many applications that scholars have employed, as will be seen by the next contribution.[18]
"Living With the Dead: Ghosts in Early-Modern Bavaria", by Prof. David Lederer.
This is by far my favorite article in the book (constituting the three most “juicy” contributions in this collection), as it exemplifies the discipline of Historical-Anthropology at its best! Many Professors and scholars have long-since believed that an Anthropological approach to the witch-hunts have been long overdue, such as one Dr. J. H. Raichyk. Be that as it may, it is a discipline that is often maligned as irrelevant (at best!) throughout those "hallowed halls" of academia, despite the countless scholars who have been performing research on the topic since the very late 1980s (though, one will most likely not have heard about any of this, I'm afraid, if the only works one is familiar with have been written by contemporary Anglo-American scholars writing and teaching on the subject, such as Prof. Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, Chas Clifton of the University of Colorado, and Prof. JB Russell of the University of California, to name but a few of the more popular and presently en vogue writers).
Rather, like most eminent European scholars, Prof. Lederer (who is Lecturer in History at the prestigious National University of Ireland) contends that there existed strong pagan-themes and traditions coursing throughout the medieval witch-trials and popular-beliefs and practices of the native villagers. Instead of castigating the accounts of popular-beliefs as mere superstitions or invented hallucinations (as Cohn and Briggs, et. al. have done) he more aptly defines them as visionary-experiences.
Moreover, he raises Professors Carlo Ginzburg, Claude Lecouteux and Éva Pócs to standards of acclaim that they have generally not known throughout either Britain or the United States! As a result, he (along with the Editor, Kathryn A. Edwards) synthesize their material (noting Ginzburg, in particular) and relates that they have "analyzed the circulation and production of traditional religion in early-modern Europe on an even broader communal scale, as a religion that reflects the continuation of pre-Christian, Indo-European shamanistic belief-systems and its principles."[19] Sadly, Claude Lecouteux (Prof. of medieval civilization and literature at the world-renowned academic institution: The Sorbonne [Paris, France]) laments that Carlo's material has not made the impact that it should have.[20] But, how could it when certain prominent scholars tend to disregard its importance? Even Ronald Hutton is glibly dismissive of this material; however I suspect that this probably results from a knee-jerk reaction on Hutton's behalf, because Ginzburg blatantly acknowledges the methodological flaws, and other problematic habitual behavior (such as relative quantification) employed by some of the most often referenced British Historians that have written on this subject.[21] Even Prof. Éva Pócs has found unequivocal evidence for shamanic antecedents at the heart of European medieval witchcraft-beliefs, such as "soul-trips" and "journeys"; shape-shifting; Familiar-encounters; Sabbats held atop an axis mundi (usually a hill or mountain deemed entrances to the Other World or Faery Land);[22] belief in mediators between the living and the dead (the usual role of the priest-shaman); and the concept of European fate-goddesses preserved as spectral witch-figures, amid other data.[23]
Prof. Lederer also shows how extensive Éva Pócs’ findings ultimately prove to be by noting the analogous evidence between German-speaking Bavaria (an area that constitutes southern Germany and the Swiss Alps) with Hungary, whose people stem from a branch of the Finno-Urgian shamanic descendents.[24] While in the course of her own research Prof. Pócs has also found how ultimately extensive this Germanic evidence is in accord with the Hungarian data she has disclosed; data that also bears clear Nordic parallels between seiðr (“shamanism”) and the “Saint Lucy’s stool”[25] phenomenon, a stool or platform where one would sit in order to identify witches through an act of divination—these constitute a form of ecstatic practice that yields direct Indo-European antecedents with a form of European and Mediterranean initiatory or visionary-techniques that are chiefly predominated by women (eg. the Oracle at Delphi, Greece, sat upon a tripod/stool in order to prophecy[26]). Indeed, this relative method may be cognate with an earlier Indo-European shamanic visionary-technique whereby the Shaman would sit upon a stool or tower in order to engage in a state of trance, or to enter into the Other World.[27] This ubiquitous Indo-European technique (cf. the “thinking stool” of Irish folk-tradition where one’s daughter might be placed to locate lost items) may also be found in northern pagan ecstatic cults where Oðinn was believed to sit upon his throne (Hliðskjálf) and supernaturally survey the world—a visionary-tool that has been connected with the seiðhjallr platform[28] employed by the seiðkona (“shamaness”) in order to prophecy.[29] While, the Nordic sibyl (a seer-Priestess) was believed to prophecy while sitting upon a raised seat or platform.[30] Moreover, much like the St. Lucy’s Stool, Oðinn is philologically identified with his own visionary-platform or throne.[31] Even Saxo Grammaticus, commenting upon Denmark during his own life-time [around 1200 CE, during the High Middle Ages], noted that pagans (who were still extent) wishing to know the future destiny of their children would regularly consult three Priestesses (each serving as an oracle to the local fate-goddesses, respectively) which were found sitting upon a stool or platform.[32]
However, Prof. Ronald Hutton balks at the usage of any scholastic research as counter-evidence to his own preferred thesis, unless he first pre-approves it (despite the fact that he usually does not bother to test the veracity of his own assumed polemic).[33] So, as a result, he is forced to publicly censure both Professors Éva Pócs and Carlo Ginzburg as "generalizing too much" and for using the understood nomenclature of "shamanistic" or "shamanic" as quantifiable-relative terms.[34] According to Hutton, any term with the root-word "shaman-" can only be applied to the indigenous religious practices of Siberia and the areas of the Arctic north, or the outlying regions of Asia.[35] Philologically speaking, this is correct, because “shaman” is derived from the Tungusic term šaman, a noun and verb meaning “one who knows”.[36] But, this remains a relatively superficial polemic worth quibbling about. Be that as it may, this represents his sole reason for discounting such formidable research by the brunt of European academia (which almost seems racist, considering the fact that British academia has apparently isolated itself from the larger academic world encompassing, among others, Europe, Asia, Africa, and even India).
Indeed, upon even a cursory reading of Pócs' work, it must be asked if Hutton has read her material properly, or if he was merely accepting what a colleague may have told him and passed it off as established fact (which he's previously done in a misleading foot-note contained within his book The Stations of the Sun [Oxford, 1996]); of course, it has also been brought to my attention that Prof. Hutton has frequently pronounced judgments upon research based upon what he thought it would show, without first reviewing the data for himself.[37] After all, Prof. Pócs can hardly be accused of misusing the term "shamanism", nor of "generalizing too much", when her book (Between the Living and the Dead [Central European University Press, 1999]) does not veer from the confines of eastern Europe (specifically Hungary) upon translating more than 2000 witch-trials into English (by far the largest study to-date) in order to reach her synthesis alongside an established research-group; while it is within her Introduction where she makes it unequivocally clear that the term "shamanism" bears both a strict (Siberian) denotation and a generally understood connotation. Perhaps her only potential shortcoming is in failing to note the extremist and skeptical backlash imposed by American and (in particular) British academia, as her fellow European academic coevals have also not (for the most part) taken this level of skepticism into account.
Considering the corpus of European data on this topic, and his own book Shamanism: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination [Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001], one wonders how Prof. Hutton can remain so unyielding in his position. In his Shamanism he contends that one of the few popular shamanic-beliefs that he will allow for (as authentic) is the multiplicity of the soul.[38] This identical motif is also found within medieval witchcraft-beliefs, such as those encountered within the Germanic trials, as well as within the various medieval Sagas and other related literature preserving antiquated pagan belief-systems—this hypothesis has been proven by the research of the esteemed Prof. Claude Lecouteux.[39]
However, another facet of shamanism has often been over-looked: the shamanic crisis, where one undergoes either a near-death experience, or recovers from a long illness only to experience a shift in consciousness which is usually determinant of the Shaman’s vocation, allowing him or her to see spirits and traverse the axis mundi.[40] This experience was still extent in Britain as late as the early twelfth-century, for it was Saxo Grammaticus who noted in his The History of the Danes that one was regarded as most propitious in prophecy and of viewing spirits if one had undergone some long illness. Indeed, when we look at the medieval witch trials we note the theme of great illness preceding a visionary-encounter with great frequency. Two examples will serve to exemplify this thesis: In 1588 CE, during a strange fit of sickness, Alison Pearson was introduced to the faerie-folk by an Otherworldly “green man” (actually her dead cousin robed in the color of the fey), who requested that she be faithful to him; but, after her cousin vanishes from sight, he reappears with other men and women engaging in a Sabbat-experience of merry making, and persuades Alison to take part in their grand mirth. She also testified that the spectral countenance of her cousin taught her how to use herbal remedies to heal the sick before she was executed by order of the magistrates.[41] And, perhaps even more telling is the case of Scottish witch Isobel Haldane (from Perth), whom, in 1623 CE, testified that while she was sick in bed she was taken to a fairy hill where she learned how to heal the sick from the faeries or spirits which reside there.
So, it is apparent that Prof. Hutton’s present reservation and polemic to the contrary is currently in the process of collapse. However, one should bear in mind that European and Anglo-American academia is vastly different from a quantifiable vantage point. Consequently, Prof. Hutton sadly does not seem to fairly adjudicate his sources (for I note numerous discrepancies within his secondary-source citations that have essentially been ignored by him, and other data that directly counters his actual arguments when this omitted material is honestly taken into account), nor does he generally acknowledge the wider breadth of scholarship being performed on this subject throughout Continental Europe, thus misrepresenting history and the present nature of academia (which operates on a sliding scale) to his impressionable readership.[42]
"Reformed or Recycled? Possession and Exorcism in the Sacramental Life of Early-Modern France", by Prof. Sarah Ferber.
Describes, in detail, the folk-beliefs surrounding the Eucharist as an object not of reverence, but an innate charm of Ritual Magic; she also analyzes the ambiguous nature between the early-modern concept of death and possession throughout medieval France.
"Revisiting El Encubierto: Navigating Between Visions of Heaven and Hell on Earth", by Prof. Sara T. Nalle.
Here the author stresses the folkloric antecedents of this Spanish messianic leader—during early-modern Millennialism—as an aspect of his followers' own folkloric identities, but his own claims were quite modest by comparison.
"Worms and the Jews: Jews, Magic, and Community in Seventeenth-Century Worms", by Prof. Dean Phillip Bell.
Here the author argues that ritual magic was an important aspect of Jewish folk-life in medieval Worms [Germany], because it was a binomial differentiation between the Judaism and Christianity. As a result, Magic is thus conceptualized as a communal event, and ideally possessed of communal "values".
"Asmodea: A Nun-Witch in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany", by Prof. Anna Jacobson Schutte.
The fascinating story of a Nun who freely claimed that she was a witch!
"When Witches Became False: Séducteurs and Crédules Confront the Paris Police at the beginning of the Eighteenth-Century", by Prof. Ulrike Krample.
Here Prof. Krample notes the change of the “witch” from sorceriers to that of a seducteur, and the allegedly credulous people that were thought to be ensnared by the concept of wielding such "power". This, of course, was because—Krample argues—the "Initiate", if you will, now became part of a "gang", or a system of politically subversive social equality.
"God Killed Saul: Heinrich Bullringer and Jacob Ruef on the Power of the Devil", by Prof. Bruce Gordon.
An account of two German Ecclesiastes who believed that the Christian devil, during seventeenth-century Zurich might prove to be a better minister than they, and thus be a threat to their respective "flock".
"Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast... Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works", by Prof. Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre.
Raises some important demonological (and even theological) questions regarding the role of the Devil in early-modern European ideology. For example, how can witches circumvent the will of God by using his "creation" to engage in acts of malifica—that is, the use of herbs and other "props" in spells, being that these herbs, etc. were the purported "creation" of the Christian creator-deity?
"Charcot, Freud, and the Demons", by Prof. H. C. Erik Midelfort.
Here the psychoanalytical method is again underscored, as the author attempts to codify early-modern witchcraft/village belief-systems with a contemporary analysis, rather than seeking out earlier beliefs as the logical root for their more plausible impetus. Midelfort also poses the question as to how witch-beliefs may have ultimately influenced the constructs and evolution of contemporary psychoanalytical methods.
END NOTES:
1 http://tsup.truman.edu/
2 http://www.reformation.org/lies-of-encyclopeida-britannica.html
3 http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/encyclopedia_crime.html
4 http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/condemned_opinions.html
5 Consult the fascinating website of Prof. Robin Briggs that attempts to document the witch-trials documents of Lorraine, France: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/staff/robinbriggs/
6 Norman Cohn (author of the obsolete text, Europe’s Inner Demons) concludes that the documentation preserved by the Inquisitors retains nothing more than an elaborate fantasy or mass-hallucination, going so far as to dismiss with specious analyses the academic thesis that the records of the age preserve anything of pagan or shamanic antiquity, because what was recorded—according to Cohn—cannot be accepted as anything other than fictitious and delusional ramblings. Moreover, he was harsh with any scholar who found corroborative evidence that might counter his questionable polemic, at which point he would engage in an ad hominem attack, and other apparent Logical Fallacies—tactics that the vast majority of reputable scholars fervently disavow, going so far as to strongly urge Editors to cease publishing any material of an ad hominem (or alternatively fallacious) nature, etc. What I hope to present throughout this critique is just the sort of unequivocal substantiation that Cohn and his academic coevals would have preferred to dismiss out of hand, jealously guarding this data from their respective readership.
7 Of all these accounts this interpretation is the most improbable when one considers that Dr. Andre de Laguna—a Spanish physician from the sixteenth-century—found a jar of “Flying Ointment” that he employed on his own wife only to find that, after daubing the unguent on the woman, she immediately fell into a stupor where her dreams substantiated many of the non-diabolical accounts from the “witches’” confessions, or relative folk-religious experiences. While other pots containing a “Flying Ointment” have also been discovered scattered throughout the historical record, such as the ointment found amid the possessions of accused witch, Dame Alice Kyteler from Co. Kilkenny, Ireland, during the early fourteenth-century [Kuklin, Alexander (1999). How Do Witches Fly? A Practical Approach to Nocturnal Flights. AceN Press: pp. 8-9]. Moreover, the use of an “ointment” or a “potion” to “fly”—that is, engage in an “out of body experience”—is a ubiquitous shamanic motif extent the world over [Johnson, Kenneth (1996/1998). Witchcraft and the Shamanic Journey: Pagan Folkways from the Burning Times. Llewellyn: pp. 131]!
8 For more information on the wide-ranging evidence for this belief-system, please consult the excellent study by Prof. Carmen Blacker (then-Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Cambridge University): “Animal Witchcraft in Japan” in The Witch Figure [Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973] ed. by Venetia Newall. Here Dr. Blacker is able to trace the existence of the Familiar in Japan prior to the year 1500 BCE through ancient Japanese I Ching documents, as well as through an indigenous form of shamanism known as Ku! While the classic study of Prof. William Howells has found an identical Familiar-motif within extent Siberian shamanism (like their medieval witch and Germanic pagan coevals) as an alter-Ego or doppelganger [see his chap.: “The Shaman: A Ritual Spiritualist” in The Heathens, reproduced in Lehmann, Arthur C., James Meyers and Pamela A. Moro (2005). Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural (6th Edn.). McGraw-Hill Higher Education: pp. 160-7; and Prof. Claude Lecouteux (2003). Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters & Astral-Doubles in the Middle Ages. Inner Traditions]. Among the ubiquitous motives found in association with the witch’s Familiar—or “spirit-helper”—throughout England, France, Hungary and Japan (to name but a few countries) are: anthropomorphic and theriomorphic characteristics; the housing of a Familiar in a vessel (usually a bowl, kettle, or cauldron); the capacity for a Familiar to perform its master’s or mistress’s bidding (often causing harm or illness, healing the sick, diving the future, and locating lost goods, etc.); visionary-journeys to meet one’s Familiar (usually at a Sabbat or Fairyland ); the belief that Familiars were often of a hereditary nature; and the feeding of one’s Familiar (bread, milk, or blood are common), though breast-feeding one’s Familiar (often through a superfluous nipple, or some other “mark”) came to be a popular myth modeled, primarily, after women’s anatomy due to their perceived diabolical condition as a vessel for “sin” within the early-modern ecclesiastical imagination [on this latter conclusion, please consult the work of Historian, Anne Llewellyn Barstow, [I]Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. HarperSanFrancisco: pp. 141], etc. Moreover, Familiars, in the guise of so-called “spirit-helpers” are frequently observed in northern mythology when in the company of an evident shamanic-figure [Jøn, Asbjørn. “Shamanism and the Image of the Teutonic Deity, Óðinn”, Folklore, vol. 10 (April, 1999). Institute of the Estonian Language. <http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol10/teuton.htm> (Last Accessed: 7 August, 2008).]. But, shamanic Familiar-encounters throughout the mythology encompassing Continental Europe and the British Isles is also evident. This ubiquitous evidence can hardly be dismissed as coincidental or irrelevant!
9 On this current popular-thesis, consult: "Living with the Dead", in this collection; Between The Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early-Modern Age, by Prof. Éva Pócs [Central European University Press, 1999]; Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath [Penguin Books, 1992] and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century [The John Hopkins University Press, 1983], both by Prof. Carlo Ginzburg; Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters & Astral-Doubles in the Middle Ages , by Prof. Claude Lecouteux; and [I]Cunning Folk and Familiar Encounters: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic [Sussex Academic Press, 2006], by Dr. Emma Wilby (to name only five prominent authorities on early-modern witchcraft-studies).
10 Consult Prof. Ronald Hutton’s Witches, Druids, and King Arthur [Hambledon & London, 2003]: pp. 137 for this specious analysis.
11 For example, historians Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick (A History of Pagan Europe) show that the initial—and even the late—conversion of the European and British ruling élite was essentially of a political nature so that they could claim an alliance with Europe and the last vestiges of the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, even when the Christian conversion of the ruling élite was meaningfully adopted, it usually ended by new comers to the throne, and Paganism was joyfully reinstated over several centuries.
12 Prof. Briggs has dismissed the formidable work of eminent micro-Historian Prof. Carlo Ginzburg, marginalizing him relative to the bureaucratic notion of an alleged academic consensus, which charges that Ginzburg has "wildly overstated his position", as if brilliant, leading scholars must submit to the majority-rule of far more conservative and extremist colleagues [Robin Briggs, pers. comm.: 4 January, 2008].
13 For more on this consult Ginzburg’s, The Night Battles and Ecstasies. However, other scholars throughout Continental Europe have codified a similar argument to Ginzburg’s—taking it further—where numerous local sects have been located that were believed to: travel at night engaging in trance-fertility battles with witches or the dead, whom often represented the formers’ stand-ins (a ubiquitous leitmotiv found in Siberian shamanism and its adjacent or cognate religious systems throughout Europe and elsewhere [see: Asbjørn Jøn, Ibid.; and Howells, Ibid.]); trance-fertility battles that commence around the four Ember Days—days that are analogous in date to the so-called “Greater Sabbats” (or seasonal portals) of Dr. Margaret Murray’s schema; attending a Sabbat or banqueting with a Queen or goddess-figure; practicing magic (either removing or infrequently causing malificarum); existence of a “double” or alter-ego (usually appearing in an animal-guise, commonly known as a “Familiar” of “Power Animal”); trance or visionary-experiences are frequently reported; and most are thought to be born with an extra set of teeth, a sixth finger, perhaps a tail, or often a caul (a fetal membrane) that was believed to give them the ability to travel at night on soul-journeys, to shape-shift or to otherwise attain membership into these local ecstatic cults. Among those sects presently known to us that generally follow this ubiquitous pattern of behavior are: the Benandanti (Italy), Táltos (Hungary), Căluşari (Romania), Armiers (Pyrenees Mts. dominating northern Spain and southern France), Kresniki (Croatia and Slovenia), and the Burkudzäutä (Caucasus Mts., Iran), etc. These sects ultimately stem from an Indo-European expression of belief and ecstatic practice rooted in shamanism. In the case of the Căluşari, they are frequently noted for swearing an oath of secrecy and fealty to the cult; drawing a “magic circle” around a gathering of practitioners with a ritual-sword; out-of-body travel; oral teaching passed from the sect-leader on to new “Initiates”; members intercede between humans and faeries (ie. ancestral spirits, or clearly demoted folk-deities); ecstatic dancing; magical healing and fertility rites; and the ritual employment of herbs with magical properties. (This bears—in accordance with this author’s examination of the data—more than a striking resemblance to contemporary “Wica”!) The Căluşari also performed initiations in forests; but more importantly they literally invoked the Queen of the Faeries as their leader, who was usually named Arada or Irodada (the former being applied—at least phonetically—in a Gardnerian chant by Patricia Crowther, HPs.). This Romanian data, of course, may bear distinct parallels between this shamanic witch-cult and the traditional Italian witch-cult material subsequently disclosed by Charles Godfrey Leland in, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches [1899]. But, it was Prof. Carlo Ginzburg who found relatively substantive evidence for the codification of the Kresniki, Táltos, and Burkudzäutä, with (indeed noting especial emphasis on) the Italian Benandanti and the Romanian Căluşari, etc. [Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, pp. 159 and 165-6; see, also, Barstowe’s monograph: Witchcraze, which greatly supports this data]. For more information on the medieval Căluşari sect please consult Dr. Gail Kligman’s important book, Calus, Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Religion [University of Chicago Press]. Due to the fact that contemporary [I]Căluş dancers engage in spring fertility dances and dress remarkably similar to British Morris dancers during their Mumming Plays, they are thought to be culturally cognate with their presumptive British coevals. While, an exhaustive study of the Hungarian Táltos may be found in Prof. Éva Pócs’ important (albeit seldom cited) study, Between the Living and the Dead [Central European University Press]. Furthermore, while werewolves were also an established Indo-European fertility-cult throughout medieval Europe, it was not uncommon for members of these former ecstatic sects to invoke or conjure the aid of a benevolent spectral werewolf-figure (the werewolf was regarded as beneficial, and with admiration, up until the middle of the fifteenth-century CE).
14 For an overview on the problematic approach and research levied by contemporaneous British academe regarding witchcraft-studies, please consult the following brilliant article, “Collars and Scholars”, available at: http://esoterica.bichaunt.org/
15 This approach has had an enduring impact upon such scholars as Ronald Hutton and his obsolete—indeed, obscurantist—vitriol, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy [Blackwell, 1996] and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft [Oxford University Press, 1999]. Moreover, he continues to yield his unequivocal support to Prof. Cohn as late as 2003 despite full knowledge of the overwhelming counter-evidence to his extremist and atypical positions (cf. footnote 16, immediately below). For this final reference consult Prof. Hutton’s: Witches, Druids, and King Arthur [Hambledon & London], pp. 274, and 346 n.15.
16 For further evidence detailing Cohn's heinously flawed polemic and unmitigated slander directed towards Dr. Margaret Murray’s work, please consult the following sources: “Collars and Scholars” (cf. footnote #14); Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture [Fag Rag Books, 1978], by Arthur Evans; Drawing Down the Moon [Penguin Books, 2006], by Margot Adler; Wicca: The Old Religion in a New Millennium [Element Books, 1996], by Vivienne Crowley and an article by investigative freelance-journalist, Janine Farrell-Robert in subsequent issues of The Cauldron [2002], "The Great Debate: Margaret Murray and the Distinguished Professor Hutton", available on-line at the following web-site: http://www.vaccines.plus.com/Murray%20and%20the%20Professor.html.
17 For this evidence, consult: Wiccan Roots [Capall Bann, 2000] and Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration [Capall Bann, 2003], both by Philipe Hesselton. I am also grateful to Donald H. Frew for bringing to my attention the fact that there is no evidence that Murray’s writings (as well as those of Charles Godfrey Leland and Robert Graves) played any substantive role in the documented and doctrinal origins for contemporary (Gardnerian) Pagan Witchcraft as is generally assumed by both contemporary Pagans and scholars (eg. JB Russell, A History Of Witchcraft [Thames & Hudson, 1980/2007] and Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon). For this citation, consult his important article: “Methodological Flaws in Recent Studies of Historical and Modern Witchcraft”, Enthologies, 1 [1998], pp. 33-65. Moreover, aside from Cohn’s mendacity, Frew has found substantive evidence for the sustained practice of misrepresenting Margaret Murray’s writings and thesis for the express purpose of attacking it without justification (a tactic known as a “straw man argument”), such as in Ronald Hutton’s The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, and Dr. Jacqueline Simpson’s article, “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?”, Folklore, 105 [1994], pp. 89-96 . To read a copy of Frew’s article, please consult my web-site, where I have reproduced it with Donald Frew’s permission, in an effort to make it more widely available to the Pagan community: (Not yet available--I'm still setting up my site!).
18 For more information on Briggs’ problematic research, and approach, please consult this contemporary review of his work by Harvard-educated freelance-scholar, Max Dashú: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/briggs.html
19 Anne Llewellyn Barstow has come to an [I]identical conclusion, when she writes of this unequivocally analogous data (identified in the above footnotes)—even encompassing locally extent shamanism from Slovenia and Estonia—that we are “at the edge of a vast stratum of folk religion [paganism], ancient and possibly Europe wide, that underlies the trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are only the signals to alert us to what has been going on for centuries” [pp. 88]. I take her final sentence as another plea for the more extremist fringe of academia to take this data more seriously than what they have, and to ensure that it achieves a much wider notice and acceptance than the seeming conspiracy of silence that has unfortunately tendered it disposable by blatantly ignoring this wider-breadth of European academia, to the detriment of the discipline of History.
20 For this citation, please consult Prof. Lecauteux’s Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters & Astral-Doubles in the Middle Age.
21 Consult Ginzburg’s Ecstasies: Decipering the Witches’ Sabbath for this citation.
22 On the mountain as axis mundi (or “world pivot”) consult Dr. Carmen Blacker’s article, “Two Kinds of Japanese Shamans: The Medium and the Ascetic” [1975] in Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge, ed. by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin: pp. 207-11. Of course, one is also reminded of the ancient Greek (Indo-European, as well as ubiquitous) tripartite cosmology that acknowledged not only an Underworld (Hades) and a material plain (or “Middle Earth”), but also an “Upper World” situated atop Mt. Olympus inhabited by the gods. While the Mayans of Mesoamerica sustained an identical cosmological belief-system where caverns were deemed entrances to the Underworld, with mountains representing the “Upper World” (a fact edified by numerous pyramid-like Temples that were believed to intimate the surrounding mountains). For further evidence on this ubiquitous shamanic-theme consult Prof. David Lewis-Williams’ and Dr. David Pearce’s brilliant work, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods [Thames and Hudson, 2005]. On witches gathering atop mountains to attend the Sabbat, consult German anthropologist Wolf-Dieter Storl’s contribution, “The Witch As Shaman” [1998] in Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants [trans. Annabel Lee, 2003], by Claudia Müller-Ebeling, Christian Rätsch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. Inner Traditions: pp. 40-58. It is also germane to the discussion that one must recall the common European folk-belief denoting a hill as an entrance to the Other World—usually to some “Fairy Land”—where witches were believed to gather at each Sabbat; and many pagan deities are known to have been demoted as Faeries, and residing in hills, such as the Tuatha de Dannan of Ireland.
23 For more on this incontrovertible data please consult her highly acclaimed academic work, Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early-Modern Age [Central European University Press, 1999].
24 Evidence has also been found which seems to support an Indo-European codification between Germanic, as well as Finno-Baltic shamanic expression of belief and practice [see: Asbjørn Jøn, 1999].
25 Consult: Pócs [1999]; cf. “Természetfeletti Képességű Emberk—Tudósok És Közvetítők”. Folklór, 3. Magyar Néprajz VII. http://vmek.niif.hu/02100/02152/html/07/397.html [Last Accessed: 24 January, 2008]. Trans. by the present author: Wade MacMorrighan.
26 Consult: Broad, William J. [2006]. The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. The Penguin Press: pp. 36.
27 Simek, Rudolf [trans. Angela Hall, 1984/1993]. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Boydell & Brewer: pp. 281. Accounts of authentic shamans surmounting a respective “stool” may be found in Siberia where the shaman is suspended from a tree trunk while journeying to the Other World (sometimes this is for the practical desire to protect the Shaman while he or she is engaged in a trance, and not in control of their normal faculties), and the Machi shamaness of Chile who surmounts a tree trunk in order to prophecy [Diana Paxson, pers. comm.: 12 March, 2008]. This, of course, recalls the Greek practice at Delphi where the Oracle’s tripod would be situated atop a pillar that had been erected to the height of forty feet, or twelve meters [William Broad, The Oracle: pp. 62].
28 An important fixture in early Nordic divination; the term is generally translated as “shaman’s stool” [Dictionary of Northern Mythology, pp. 279].
29 Op. cit., pp. 152.
30 Jones, Prudence and Nigel Pennick [1995/1999]. A History of Pagan Europe. Barnes & Noble: pp. 151.
31 Dictionary of Northern Mythology, pp 152.
32 A History of Pagan Europe, pp: 150.
33 On this pedantry, see how he downplays the importance of Ginzburg’s material (as if Ginzburg’s material cannot stand on its own merit!), even going so far as to blatantly re-define what can and cannot constitute a “trance” or ecstatic-visionary experience, by labeling Italian Medieval accounts of individuals falling into a trance as “unusually intense dreams” when their witnesses frequently distinguished that they were not, in fact, merely dreaming or sleeping when they suddenly became “lethargic” and were unable to be roused into waking consciousness; however, Prof. Hutton does not usually bother to argue for his own specific counter-position upon rejecting a given thesis as, perhaps, unconvincing—a tactic that is known as “special pleading” throughout this ad hominem article he wrote castigating Don Frew’s own academic counter-point, in “Paganism and Polemic: The Debate Over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft” in Folklore [April, 2000]: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_1_111/ai_62685559 [Last Accessed: 5 December, 2007]. Frew was not extended the courtesy of a response. Upon examining both articles in question, Prof. Hutton was hardly arguing on the same grounds as Mr. Frew!
34 Consult Farrell-Roberts' discourse with Hutton for this citation.
35 However, it is evident within Prof. Hutton’s book The Shamans of Siberia that, despite his pretence to the contrary, he allows for a far more liberal definition of “shaman”; rather, this polemic remains only his [I]personal preference [Daniel Cohen (1996). “Review: The Shamans of Siberia, by Ronald Hutton and The Shaman, by Piers Vitebsky” in Wood and Water, Autumn 1996, no. 56. Available on-line, at: http://www.decohen.com/reviews/shamans_of_siberia.htm <Last Accessed: 2 June, 2008>]. Indeed, both Daniel Cohen and myself, yield to the same trepidation whereby Ronald Hutton’s extremist and atypical connotation may be adopted as the only viable definition by contemporaneous Pagans [Ibid.].
36 Eliade, Mircea [trans. Willard R. Trask, 1964]. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Princeton Univesity Press: pp. 4, and 495; Reid, Anna [2002]. The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. Walker & Company: pp. 5.
37 Donald H. Frew, pers. comm.: 29 February, 2008.
38 For a review of R. Hutton’s Shamanism, consult: “Hutton on Shamanism” [2006], by John C. Durham, http://bytrentplus.co.uk/hutton00.html [Last Accessed: 21 April, 2007]; and Timothy White’s critique, “Recapitulating Siberian Shamanisms: A Review of Ronald Hutton's Shamanism” in Shaman’s Drum, No. 75 [2007]. Throughout this present text Hutton apparently attempts to debunk the late Prof. Mercea Eliadé’s notion of the Shaman (here, he employs Sir James Frazer as his usual “whipping boy” when chastising a contemporary scholar for what he perceives as flawed methodology drawn from comparative methods). However, a valuable rebuttal is to be found in Bryan S. Rennie’s Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion [State University of New York Press, 1996]. Moreover, Timothy White has found that Hutton habitually castigates other authorities (with whom Prof. Hutton is in personal disagreement) for certain “transgressions” of which he [Hutton] is also guilty within the same polemical treatise [pers. comm.]. Indeed, I have noted, with astonishing frequency, identical behavior throughout his relatively premature and obsolete study, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles. This practice is a known Logical Fallacy (of which Prof. Hutton is evidently aware), which bears the name: Special Pleading. In so doing, we find that when one tenders an argument, he or she does not apply their principles consistently (frequently exempting himself or herself from having to follow the “rules” that they have imposed onto others). On “Special Pleading”, and other Logical Fallacies of note, navigate to the following website, which constitutes a professionally peer-reviewed academic resource, thanks to the outstanding work of Dr. J. Fieser and Dr. B. Dowden: “Fallacies: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy”. http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fallacy.htm <Last Accessed: 8 August, 2008>.
39 Consult Prof. Lecouteux’s aforementioned book.
40 Eliade, Mircea [1964/1992]. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Priceton University Press: pp. 25; 33-5; 38-43.
41 The Internet Sacred Text Archive. “Letters on Demonology & Witchcraft”, by Sir Walter Scott. Letter V: http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/scott/lodw05.htm
42 Consult the following article by Harvard-educated freelance-scholar, Max Dashú, for more information about the politicization of early-modern and medieval witchcraft-research in "Witchcraft Politics: Another View of the Witch-Hunts. (Response to Jenny Gibbons, Pomegranate, #5)"; it was initially published in the peer-reviewed journal, The Pomegranate: www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/witchpolitics.html; also consult the article, “Collars and Scholars”, linked in footnote #14; while, Dr. Emma Wilby laments that “British historians have not taken seriously” the consensus of early-modern witchcraft-belief as a visionary-tradition (ie. shamanism) drawn by Continental academia in her article, “British Shamanism: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft”, Circle, issue 98 [Spring, 2007], pp. 42-3. As an example of Dr. Wilby’s charge, consult Prof. Owen Davies’ mitigation of her analyses in his article: “Cunning-Folk: Recent Research”, Pentacle, issue 21 [Beltane/Summer, 2007], pp. 28-30. The reader is also urged to consult Dr. Wilby’s highly acclaimed book: Cunning Folk and Familiar Encounters: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic [Sussex Academic Press, 2006].
A Critique and Review of Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief & Folklore in Early-Modern Europe, ed. by Kathryne A. Edwards. Sixteenth-Century Essays & Studies, Vol. 62. [Truman State University Press, 2002].
Wade MacMorrighan © 2007-08
When I first became aware of this book, I grew increasingly concerned that it might bear an over-riding agenda, due to the glowing reviews bestowed upon it by numerous Catholic Journals excerpted upon the Truman State University web-site;[1] a fear that is well-founded when considering the fact that it has been proven that the Catholic Church has had a hand in editing the Encyclopedia Britannica (among other academic works of reference) in an effort to mitigate their culpability during the Inquisition and suppression of paganism, as well as redacting several further works that were thought to present a “counter-Christian” thesis. For more on this, please consult the following resources by an important early twentieth-century atheist scholar, Joseph McCabe: "Lies & Fallacies of the Encyclopedia Britannica: How Powerful and Shameless Clerical Forces Castrated a Famous Work of Reference";[2] “The Columbia Encyclopedia's Crimes Against the Truth: How a Popular Reference Work is being used as a Weapon Against Free Culture and Twisted to fit the Purposes of Lying Obscurantists";[3] and "Rome's Syllabus of Condemned Opinion: The Last Blast of the Catholic Church’s Medieval Trumpet”.[4]
Joseph McCabe found that the Catholic Church was actively lobbying for, and succeeding in changing encyclopedias to reduce or omit any information controversial to the Catholic Church [eg. Dying-and-Rising deities]; in some cases with out-and-out censorship or even deceptive material; though, in most cases they employed a specious "softening" approach. It is believed that these mendacious tactics are still quite extensive in many contemporary reference works, and that they are continuing to go on unchecked, and unwatched!
Thankfully, however, I can rest assured that my initial fears noted for this particular review were unwarranted. What follows constitutes an appraisal and examination of each subsequent chapter-length article:
"Introduction: Expanding the Analysis of Traditional Belief", by Prof. Kathryn A. Edwards.
What a brilliant Introduction! (If only certain en vogue scholars would write similar introductions, and place their academic methodological quantifications into a proper perspective for their impressionable readership.) While the Ed. maintains that this book strives to be a work of general Historical-Anthropology (representing only one discipline, such as the work by Prof. Lederer, within this collection), she acknowledges that many diverse disciplines were incorporated to give the reader a general feel for the diverse applications often applied in historical quantification (when compared with the contributions by both Robin Briggs and H. C. Erik Midelfort, noted below, for example); so one may judge the veracity of a thesis for himself or herself based upon an author’s own substantiated or corroborated argument (even if a lack thereof).
Be that as it may, she favors the burgeoning academic discipline (as applied to medieval witchcraft-studies) of Historical-Anthropology, and even rallies the following plea to General Historians writing and teaching on the subject: "...this collection aspires to motivate scholars and other readers to reexamine the categories through which early-modern beliefs and perspectives are commonly approached." Let's hope that such scholars adopting either a psycho-analytical model (in terms of pathology) or a more prosaic approach will take her words to heart! Further on, in her Introduction, Prof. Edwards continues as she briefly address the extensive other-world beliefs of the era with which this work is concerned, as well as a few of the prevailing contemporaneous academic beliefs about the subject in general.
"Dangerous Spirits: Shapeshifting, Apparitions, and Fantasy in Lorraine Witchcraft Trials", by Prof. Robin Briggs.[5]
Lorraine denotes a specific region of northeastern France whose capitols (modern and antiquated, respectively) are: Metz and Nancy. It embraces a total of 5 counties, which in itself, is a relatively small demographic for any singular study of a more broad socio-historical event that seeks to extrapolate a synthesis which Prof. Briggs attempts to yield. However, the author rather strangely seeks out differentiations between British and French witchcraft-beliefs when his working thesis is an examination of the popular "beliefs" (ie. psychosis, in this instance) of medieval Lorraine, France! Albeit, in this district, it is worth noting that there remained nearly 400 men and women who were tried as witches between 1580 and 1630 ce (a span of only 50 years).
But, the over-riding agenda of this respective contribution is evident by its secondary-title, whereby all seemingly “fantastical” beliefs that are recounted in trial testimony are relegated to the status of mere fantasies, or as being purely imaginary. As a result, he has adopted a psycho-analytical methodological application (as per some of his scholastic coevals: Norman Cohn[6] and H. C. Erik Midelfort) with which to dismiss popular or folk belief-systems as a figment of the medieval imagination. Moreover, in adopting such a staunch, pathological (indeed Freudian) lens through which to view the testimony at hand he has interpreted the evidence as emerging from sexual repression: that is, accounts of Flying Ointment allude to (he concludes) a desire for masturbatory release;[7] shape-shifting and Familiar-encounters (despite the identical characters of these ubiquitous folk-beliefs, also found in native Japanese witchcraft-beliefs, for example[8]) is interpreted as signifying the libido; and the evidence for animal-witches slipping through small openings (such as key holes or window-cracks) are unequivocally accepted as archetypal metaphors for sexual intercourse because the home, Briggs alleges, was identified with the human body—a claim that is blatantly unsubstantiated throughout the present contribution!
However, if one were to supplant his use of the terms "fantasy" and "imaginary" with "visionary-experience" one would glean the current popular-thesis being advocated by scholars and research-groups today.[9] Due to Prof. Brigg's preferred methodological-system, he is able to virtually eliminate the mere plausibility for pagan survivals, whether in folk-belief or folk-traditions, despite evidence to the contrary in the existence of relatively "pagan" (or non-Christian) folk-spells for healing, as well as common peasant belief-systems centered upon shape-shifting, folk-deities, and soul-journeys, etc. By sharp contrast the vast majority of scholars writing available works (translated into English) from Continental Europe have since proven the existence of many pagan-themes or strands extent within early-modern beliefs and practices.
Be that as it may, many Anglo-American scholars tend to posit that an entire region or culture was irrevocably Christian at the moment that the King or ruling élite had been “converted”.[10] It has been otherwise proven that this is a relatively untenable position—such a thesis presumes that the mind of medieval peasantry constitutes a sort of blank “slate-board” onto which the ruling élite and clerics could freely write.[11] However the outstanding work of Prof. Carlo Ginzburg[12] (among many other specialists) has proven that authentic non-Christian belief-systems and practices did survive throughout the early-modern period in spite of Christianity’s attempted hold on European and British consciousness.[13]
Similarly to Briggs and other prosaic researchers, Norman Cohn also makes a habit of dismissing perfectly acceptable, and entirely uncoerced testimony from a variety of women who maintained that they underwent a visionary-experience and transvexed to a Sabbat; Cohn rejects such testimony, labeling them as senile old women (as if he has an insight into their mental-status and age that we cannot)![14] Sadly, the discriminatory tactics employed by Prof. Norman Cohn (chiefly ageism, sexism and mendacity, which he has also levied against Dr. Margaret Murray) has been largely adopted by Anglo-American academe in particular, and has seemingly gone unchallenged;[15] be that as it may, the late Prof. Cohn has had his prosaic thesis roundly questioned by only one brave scholar of note (immediately discounting, of course, contemporary Pagan researchers, and other freelance-scholars): Prof. Carlo Ginzburg, who was also a target of Cohn's mendacity.[16]
As a result of this forthcoming research now vindicating Margaret Murray's sullied credibility (see the applicable footnotes below), the hypothesis posited by contemporary Anglo-American scholars (eg. Ronald Hutton, Chas Clifton, and J.B. Russell, et al) pertaining to direct diffusion as the impetus for contemporary Pagan Witchcraft through Murray becomes more and more untenable as evidence for the New Forest Coven that indoctrinated Gerald B. Gardner (albeit circumstantial) is made available.[17] Even though Prof. Briggs favors a rather problematic psycho-analytical approach that has had an enduring impact upon modern British and American academia, it should be remembered that is only one of many applications that scholars have employed, as will be seen by the next contribution.[18]
"Living With the Dead: Ghosts in Early-Modern Bavaria", by Prof. David Lederer.
This is by far my favorite article in the book (constituting the three most “juicy” contributions in this collection), as it exemplifies the discipline of Historical-Anthropology at its best! Many Professors and scholars have long-since believed that an Anthropological approach to the witch-hunts have been long overdue, such as one Dr. J. H. Raichyk. Be that as it may, it is a discipline that is often maligned as irrelevant (at best!) throughout those "hallowed halls" of academia, despite the countless scholars who have been performing research on the topic since the very late 1980s (though, one will most likely not have heard about any of this, I'm afraid, if the only works one is familiar with have been written by contemporary Anglo-American scholars writing and teaching on the subject, such as Prof. Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, Chas Clifton of the University of Colorado, and Prof. JB Russell of the University of California, to name but a few of the more popular and presently en vogue writers).
Rather, like most eminent European scholars, Prof. Lederer (who is Lecturer in History at the prestigious National University of Ireland) contends that there existed strong pagan-themes and traditions coursing throughout the medieval witch-trials and popular-beliefs and practices of the native villagers. Instead of castigating the accounts of popular-beliefs as mere superstitions or invented hallucinations (as Cohn and Briggs, et. al. have done) he more aptly defines them as visionary-experiences.
Moreover, he raises Professors Carlo Ginzburg, Claude Lecouteux and Éva Pócs to standards of acclaim that they have generally not known throughout either Britain or the United States! As a result, he (along with the Editor, Kathryn A. Edwards) synthesize their material (noting Ginzburg, in particular) and relates that they have "analyzed the circulation and production of traditional religion in early-modern Europe on an even broader communal scale, as a religion that reflects the continuation of pre-Christian, Indo-European shamanistic belief-systems and its principles."[19] Sadly, Claude Lecouteux (Prof. of medieval civilization and literature at the world-renowned academic institution: The Sorbonne [Paris, France]) laments that Carlo's material has not made the impact that it should have.[20] But, how could it when certain prominent scholars tend to disregard its importance? Even Ronald Hutton is glibly dismissive of this material; however I suspect that this probably results from a knee-jerk reaction on Hutton's behalf, because Ginzburg blatantly acknowledges the methodological flaws, and other problematic habitual behavior (such as relative quantification) employed by some of the most often referenced British Historians that have written on this subject.[21] Even Prof. Éva Pócs has found unequivocal evidence for shamanic antecedents at the heart of European medieval witchcraft-beliefs, such as "soul-trips" and "journeys"; shape-shifting; Familiar-encounters; Sabbats held atop an axis mundi (usually a hill or mountain deemed entrances to the Other World or Faery Land);[22] belief in mediators between the living and the dead (the usual role of the priest-shaman); and the concept of European fate-goddesses preserved as spectral witch-figures, amid other data.[23]
Prof. Lederer also shows how extensive Éva Pócs’ findings ultimately prove to be by noting the analogous evidence between German-speaking Bavaria (an area that constitutes southern Germany and the Swiss Alps) with Hungary, whose people stem from a branch of the Finno-Urgian shamanic descendents.[24] While in the course of her own research Prof. Pócs has also found how ultimately extensive this Germanic evidence is in accord with the Hungarian data she has disclosed; data that also bears clear Nordic parallels between seiðr (“shamanism”) and the “Saint Lucy’s stool”[25] phenomenon, a stool or platform where one would sit in order to identify witches through an act of divination—these constitute a form of ecstatic practice that yields direct Indo-European antecedents with a form of European and Mediterranean initiatory or visionary-techniques that are chiefly predominated by women (eg. the Oracle at Delphi, Greece, sat upon a tripod/stool in order to prophecy[26]). Indeed, this relative method may be cognate with an earlier Indo-European shamanic visionary-technique whereby the Shaman would sit upon a stool or tower in order to engage in a state of trance, or to enter into the Other World.[27] This ubiquitous Indo-European technique (cf. the “thinking stool” of Irish folk-tradition where one’s daughter might be placed to locate lost items) may also be found in northern pagan ecstatic cults where Oðinn was believed to sit upon his throne (Hliðskjálf) and supernaturally survey the world—a visionary-tool that has been connected with the seiðhjallr platform[28] employed by the seiðkona (“shamaness”) in order to prophecy.[29] While, the Nordic sibyl (a seer-Priestess) was believed to prophecy while sitting upon a raised seat or platform.[30] Moreover, much like the St. Lucy’s Stool, Oðinn is philologically identified with his own visionary-platform or throne.[31] Even Saxo Grammaticus, commenting upon Denmark during his own life-time [around 1200 CE, during the High Middle Ages], noted that pagans (who were still extent) wishing to know the future destiny of their children would regularly consult three Priestesses (each serving as an oracle to the local fate-goddesses, respectively) which were found sitting upon a stool or platform.[32]
However, Prof. Ronald Hutton balks at the usage of any scholastic research as counter-evidence to his own preferred thesis, unless he first pre-approves it (despite the fact that he usually does not bother to test the veracity of his own assumed polemic).[33] So, as a result, he is forced to publicly censure both Professors Éva Pócs and Carlo Ginzburg as "generalizing too much" and for using the understood nomenclature of "shamanistic" or "shamanic" as quantifiable-relative terms.[34] According to Hutton, any term with the root-word "shaman-" can only be applied to the indigenous religious practices of Siberia and the areas of the Arctic north, or the outlying regions of Asia.[35] Philologically speaking, this is correct, because “shaman” is derived from the Tungusic term šaman, a noun and verb meaning “one who knows”.[36] But, this remains a relatively superficial polemic worth quibbling about. Be that as it may, this represents his sole reason for discounting such formidable research by the brunt of European academia (which almost seems racist, considering the fact that British academia has apparently isolated itself from the larger academic world encompassing, among others, Europe, Asia, Africa, and even India).
Indeed, upon even a cursory reading of Pócs' work, it must be asked if Hutton has read her material properly, or if he was merely accepting what a colleague may have told him and passed it off as established fact (which he's previously done in a misleading foot-note contained within his book The Stations of the Sun [Oxford, 1996]); of course, it has also been brought to my attention that Prof. Hutton has frequently pronounced judgments upon research based upon what he thought it would show, without first reviewing the data for himself.[37] After all, Prof. Pócs can hardly be accused of misusing the term "shamanism", nor of "generalizing too much", when her book (Between the Living and the Dead [Central European University Press, 1999]) does not veer from the confines of eastern Europe (specifically Hungary) upon translating more than 2000 witch-trials into English (by far the largest study to-date) in order to reach her synthesis alongside an established research-group; while it is within her Introduction where she makes it unequivocally clear that the term "shamanism" bears both a strict (Siberian) denotation and a generally understood connotation. Perhaps her only potential shortcoming is in failing to note the extremist and skeptical backlash imposed by American and (in particular) British academia, as her fellow European academic coevals have also not (for the most part) taken this level of skepticism into account.
Considering the corpus of European data on this topic, and his own book Shamanism: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination [Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001], one wonders how Prof. Hutton can remain so unyielding in his position. In his Shamanism he contends that one of the few popular shamanic-beliefs that he will allow for (as authentic) is the multiplicity of the soul.[38] This identical motif is also found within medieval witchcraft-beliefs, such as those encountered within the Germanic trials, as well as within the various medieval Sagas and other related literature preserving antiquated pagan belief-systems—this hypothesis has been proven by the research of the esteemed Prof. Claude Lecouteux.[39]
However, another facet of shamanism has often been over-looked: the shamanic crisis, where one undergoes either a near-death experience, or recovers from a long illness only to experience a shift in consciousness which is usually determinant of the Shaman’s vocation, allowing him or her to see spirits and traverse the axis mundi.[40] This experience was still extent in Britain as late as the early twelfth-century, for it was Saxo Grammaticus who noted in his The History of the Danes that one was regarded as most propitious in prophecy and of viewing spirits if one had undergone some long illness. Indeed, when we look at the medieval witch trials we note the theme of great illness preceding a visionary-encounter with great frequency. Two examples will serve to exemplify this thesis: In 1588 CE, during a strange fit of sickness, Alison Pearson was introduced to the faerie-folk by an Otherworldly “green man” (actually her dead cousin robed in the color of the fey), who requested that she be faithful to him; but, after her cousin vanishes from sight, he reappears with other men and women engaging in a Sabbat-experience of merry making, and persuades Alison to take part in their grand mirth. She also testified that the spectral countenance of her cousin taught her how to use herbal remedies to heal the sick before she was executed by order of the magistrates.[41] And, perhaps even more telling is the case of Scottish witch Isobel Haldane (from Perth), whom, in 1623 CE, testified that while she was sick in bed she was taken to a fairy hill where she learned how to heal the sick from the faeries or spirits which reside there.
So, it is apparent that Prof. Hutton’s present reservation and polemic to the contrary is currently in the process of collapse. However, one should bear in mind that European and Anglo-American academia is vastly different from a quantifiable vantage point. Consequently, Prof. Hutton sadly does not seem to fairly adjudicate his sources (for I note numerous discrepancies within his secondary-source citations that have essentially been ignored by him, and other data that directly counters his actual arguments when this omitted material is honestly taken into account), nor does he generally acknowledge the wider breadth of scholarship being performed on this subject throughout Continental Europe, thus misrepresenting history and the present nature of academia (which operates on a sliding scale) to his impressionable readership.[42]
"Reformed or Recycled? Possession and Exorcism in the Sacramental Life of Early-Modern France", by Prof. Sarah Ferber.
Describes, in detail, the folk-beliefs surrounding the Eucharist as an object not of reverence, but an innate charm of Ritual Magic; she also analyzes the ambiguous nature between the early-modern concept of death and possession throughout medieval France.
"Revisiting El Encubierto: Navigating Between Visions of Heaven and Hell on Earth", by Prof. Sara T. Nalle.
Here the author stresses the folkloric antecedents of this Spanish messianic leader—during early-modern Millennialism—as an aspect of his followers' own folkloric identities, but his own claims were quite modest by comparison.
"Worms and the Jews: Jews, Magic, and Community in Seventeenth-Century Worms", by Prof. Dean Phillip Bell.
Here the author argues that ritual magic was an important aspect of Jewish folk-life in medieval Worms [Germany], because it was a binomial differentiation between the Judaism and Christianity. As a result, Magic is thus conceptualized as a communal event, and ideally possessed of communal "values".
"Asmodea: A Nun-Witch in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany", by Prof. Anna Jacobson Schutte.
The fascinating story of a Nun who freely claimed that she was a witch!
"When Witches Became False: Séducteurs and Crédules Confront the Paris Police at the beginning of the Eighteenth-Century", by Prof. Ulrike Krample.
Here Prof. Krample notes the change of the “witch” from sorceriers to that of a seducteur, and the allegedly credulous people that were thought to be ensnared by the concept of wielding such "power". This, of course, was because—Krample argues—the "Initiate", if you will, now became part of a "gang", or a system of politically subversive social equality.
"God Killed Saul: Heinrich Bullringer and Jacob Ruef on the Power of the Devil", by Prof. Bruce Gordon.
An account of two German Ecclesiastes who believed that the Christian devil, during seventeenth-century Zurich might prove to be a better minister than they, and thus be a threat to their respective "flock".
"Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast... Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works", by Prof. Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre.
Raises some important demonological (and even theological) questions regarding the role of the Devil in early-modern European ideology. For example, how can witches circumvent the will of God by using his "creation" to engage in acts of malifica—that is, the use of herbs and other "props" in spells, being that these herbs, etc. were the purported "creation" of the Christian creator-deity?
"Charcot, Freud, and the Demons", by Prof. H. C. Erik Midelfort.
Here the psychoanalytical method is again underscored, as the author attempts to codify early-modern witchcraft/village belief-systems with a contemporary analysis, rather than seeking out earlier beliefs as the logical root for their more plausible impetus. Midelfort also poses the question as to how witch-beliefs may have ultimately influenced the constructs and evolution of contemporary psychoanalytical methods.
END NOTES:
1 http://tsup.truman.edu/
2 http://www.reformation.org/lies-of-encyclopeida-britannica.html
3 http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/encyclopedia_crime.html
4 http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/condemned_opinions.html
5 Consult the fascinating website of Prof. Robin Briggs that attempts to document the witch-trials documents of Lorraine, France: http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/staff/robinbriggs/
6 Norman Cohn (author of the obsolete text, Europe’s Inner Demons) concludes that the documentation preserved by the Inquisitors retains nothing more than an elaborate fantasy or mass-hallucination, going so far as to dismiss with specious analyses the academic thesis that the records of the age preserve anything of pagan or shamanic antiquity, because what was recorded—according to Cohn—cannot be accepted as anything other than fictitious and delusional ramblings. Moreover, he was harsh with any scholar who found corroborative evidence that might counter his questionable polemic, at which point he would engage in an ad hominem attack, and other apparent Logical Fallacies—tactics that the vast majority of reputable scholars fervently disavow, going so far as to strongly urge Editors to cease publishing any material of an ad hominem (or alternatively fallacious) nature, etc. What I hope to present throughout this critique is just the sort of unequivocal substantiation that Cohn and his academic coevals would have preferred to dismiss out of hand, jealously guarding this data from their respective readership.
7 Of all these accounts this interpretation is the most improbable when one considers that Dr. Andre de Laguna—a Spanish physician from the sixteenth-century—found a jar of “Flying Ointment” that he employed on his own wife only to find that, after daubing the unguent on the woman, she immediately fell into a stupor where her dreams substantiated many of the non-diabolical accounts from the “witches’” confessions, or relative folk-religious experiences. While other pots containing a “Flying Ointment” have also been discovered scattered throughout the historical record, such as the ointment found amid the possessions of accused witch, Dame Alice Kyteler from Co. Kilkenny, Ireland, during the early fourteenth-century [Kuklin, Alexander (1999). How Do Witches Fly? A Practical Approach to Nocturnal Flights. AceN Press: pp. 8-9]. Moreover, the use of an “ointment” or a “potion” to “fly”—that is, engage in an “out of body experience”—is a ubiquitous shamanic motif extent the world over [Johnson, Kenneth (1996/1998). Witchcraft and the Shamanic Journey: Pagan Folkways from the Burning Times. Llewellyn: pp. 131]!
8 For more information on the wide-ranging evidence for this belief-system, please consult the excellent study by Prof. Carmen Blacker (then-Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Cambridge University): “Animal Witchcraft in Japan” in The Witch Figure [Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973] ed. by Venetia Newall. Here Dr. Blacker is able to trace the existence of the Familiar in Japan prior to the year 1500 BCE through ancient Japanese I Ching documents, as well as through an indigenous form of shamanism known as Ku! While the classic study of Prof. William Howells has found an identical Familiar-motif within extent Siberian shamanism (like their medieval witch and Germanic pagan coevals) as an alter-Ego or doppelganger [see his chap.: “The Shaman: A Ritual Spiritualist” in The Heathens, reproduced in Lehmann, Arthur C., James Meyers and Pamela A. Moro (2005). Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural (6th Edn.). McGraw-Hill Higher Education: pp. 160-7; and Prof. Claude Lecouteux (2003). Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters & Astral-Doubles in the Middle Ages. Inner Traditions]. Among the ubiquitous motives found in association with the witch’s Familiar—or “spirit-helper”—throughout England, France, Hungary and Japan (to name but a few countries) are: anthropomorphic and theriomorphic characteristics; the housing of a Familiar in a vessel (usually a bowl, kettle, or cauldron); the capacity for a Familiar to perform its master’s or mistress’s bidding (often causing harm or illness, healing the sick, diving the future, and locating lost goods, etc.); visionary-journeys to meet one’s Familiar (usually at a Sabbat or Fairyland ); the belief that Familiars were often of a hereditary nature; and the feeding of one’s Familiar (bread, milk, or blood are common), though breast-feeding one’s Familiar (often through a superfluous nipple, or some other “mark”) came to be a popular myth modeled, primarily, after women’s anatomy due to their perceived diabolical condition as a vessel for “sin” within the early-modern ecclesiastical imagination [on this latter conclusion, please consult the work of Historian, Anne Llewellyn Barstow, [I]Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. HarperSanFrancisco: pp. 141], etc. Moreover, Familiars, in the guise of so-called “spirit-helpers” are frequently observed in northern mythology when in the company of an evident shamanic-figure [Jøn, Asbjørn. “Shamanism and the Image of the Teutonic Deity, Óðinn”, Folklore, vol. 10 (April, 1999). Institute of the Estonian Language. <http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol10/teuton.htm> (Last Accessed: 7 August, 2008).]. But, shamanic Familiar-encounters throughout the mythology encompassing Continental Europe and the British Isles is also evident. This ubiquitous evidence can hardly be dismissed as coincidental or irrelevant!
9 On this current popular-thesis, consult: "Living with the Dead", in this collection; Between The Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early-Modern Age, by Prof. Éva Pócs [Central European University Press, 1999]; Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath [Penguin Books, 1992] and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century [The John Hopkins University Press, 1983], both by Prof. Carlo Ginzburg; Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters & Astral-Doubles in the Middle Ages , by Prof. Claude Lecouteux; and [I]Cunning Folk and Familiar Encounters: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic [Sussex Academic Press, 2006], by Dr. Emma Wilby (to name only five prominent authorities on early-modern witchcraft-studies).
10 Consult Prof. Ronald Hutton’s Witches, Druids, and King Arthur [Hambledon & London, 2003]: pp. 137 for this specious analysis.
11 For example, historians Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick (A History of Pagan Europe) show that the initial—and even the late—conversion of the European and British ruling élite was essentially of a political nature so that they could claim an alliance with Europe and the last vestiges of the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, even when the Christian conversion of the ruling élite was meaningfully adopted, it usually ended by new comers to the throne, and Paganism was joyfully reinstated over several centuries.
12 Prof. Briggs has dismissed the formidable work of eminent micro-Historian Prof. Carlo Ginzburg, marginalizing him relative to the bureaucratic notion of an alleged academic consensus, which charges that Ginzburg has "wildly overstated his position", as if brilliant, leading scholars must submit to the majority-rule of far more conservative and extremist colleagues [Robin Briggs, pers. comm.: 4 January, 2008].
13 For more on this consult Ginzburg’s, The Night Battles and Ecstasies. However, other scholars throughout Continental Europe have codified a similar argument to Ginzburg’s—taking it further—where numerous local sects have been located that were believed to: travel at night engaging in trance-fertility battles with witches or the dead, whom often represented the formers’ stand-ins (a ubiquitous leitmotiv found in Siberian shamanism and its adjacent or cognate religious systems throughout Europe and elsewhere [see: Asbjørn Jøn, Ibid.; and Howells, Ibid.]); trance-fertility battles that commence around the four Ember Days—days that are analogous in date to the so-called “Greater Sabbats” (or seasonal portals) of Dr. Margaret Murray’s schema; attending a Sabbat or banqueting with a Queen or goddess-figure; practicing magic (either removing or infrequently causing malificarum); existence of a “double” or alter-ego (usually appearing in an animal-guise, commonly known as a “Familiar” of “Power Animal”); trance or visionary-experiences are frequently reported; and most are thought to be born with an extra set of teeth, a sixth finger, perhaps a tail, or often a caul (a fetal membrane) that was believed to give them the ability to travel at night on soul-journeys, to shape-shift or to otherwise attain membership into these local ecstatic cults. Among those sects presently known to us that generally follow this ubiquitous pattern of behavior are: the Benandanti (Italy), Táltos (Hungary), Căluşari (Romania), Armiers (Pyrenees Mts. dominating northern Spain and southern France), Kresniki (Croatia and Slovenia), and the Burkudzäutä (Caucasus Mts., Iran), etc. These sects ultimately stem from an Indo-European expression of belief and ecstatic practice rooted in shamanism. In the case of the Căluşari, they are frequently noted for swearing an oath of secrecy and fealty to the cult; drawing a “magic circle” around a gathering of practitioners with a ritual-sword; out-of-body travel; oral teaching passed from the sect-leader on to new “Initiates”; members intercede between humans and faeries (ie. ancestral spirits, or clearly demoted folk-deities); ecstatic dancing; magical healing and fertility rites; and the ritual employment of herbs with magical properties. (This bears—in accordance with this author’s examination of the data—more than a striking resemblance to contemporary “Wica”!) The Căluşari also performed initiations in forests; but more importantly they literally invoked the Queen of the Faeries as their leader, who was usually named Arada or Irodada (the former being applied—at least phonetically—in a Gardnerian chant by Patricia Crowther, HPs.). This Romanian data, of course, may bear distinct parallels between this shamanic witch-cult and the traditional Italian witch-cult material subsequently disclosed by Charles Godfrey Leland in, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches [1899]. But, it was Prof. Carlo Ginzburg who found relatively substantive evidence for the codification of the Kresniki, Táltos, and Burkudzäutä, with (indeed noting especial emphasis on) the Italian Benandanti and the Romanian Căluşari, etc. [Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, pp. 159 and 165-6; see, also, Barstowe’s monograph: Witchcraze, which greatly supports this data]. For more information on the medieval Căluşari sect please consult Dr. Gail Kligman’s important book, Calus, Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Religion [University of Chicago Press]. Due to the fact that contemporary [I]Căluş dancers engage in spring fertility dances and dress remarkably similar to British Morris dancers during their Mumming Plays, they are thought to be culturally cognate with their presumptive British coevals. While, an exhaustive study of the Hungarian Táltos may be found in Prof. Éva Pócs’ important (albeit seldom cited) study, Between the Living and the Dead [Central European University Press]. Furthermore, while werewolves were also an established Indo-European fertility-cult throughout medieval Europe, it was not uncommon for members of these former ecstatic sects to invoke or conjure the aid of a benevolent spectral werewolf-figure (the werewolf was regarded as beneficial, and with admiration, up until the middle of the fifteenth-century CE).
14 For an overview on the problematic approach and research levied by contemporaneous British academe regarding witchcraft-studies, please consult the following brilliant article, “Collars and Scholars”, available at: http://esoterica.bichaunt.org/
15 This approach has had an enduring impact upon such scholars as Ronald Hutton and his obsolete—indeed, obscurantist—vitriol, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy [Blackwell, 1996] and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft [Oxford University Press, 1999]. Moreover, he continues to yield his unequivocal support to Prof. Cohn as late as 2003 despite full knowledge of the overwhelming counter-evidence to his extremist and atypical positions (cf. footnote 16, immediately below). For this final reference consult Prof. Hutton’s: Witches, Druids, and King Arthur [Hambledon & London], pp. 274, and 346 n.15.
16 For further evidence detailing Cohn's heinously flawed polemic and unmitigated slander directed towards Dr. Margaret Murray’s work, please consult the following sources: “Collars and Scholars” (cf. footnote #14); Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture [Fag Rag Books, 1978], by Arthur Evans; Drawing Down the Moon [Penguin Books, 2006], by Margot Adler; Wicca: The Old Religion in a New Millennium [Element Books, 1996], by Vivienne Crowley and an article by investigative freelance-journalist, Janine Farrell-Robert in subsequent issues of The Cauldron [2002], "The Great Debate: Margaret Murray and the Distinguished Professor Hutton", available on-line at the following web-site: http://www.vaccines.plus.com/Murray%20and%20the%20Professor.html.
17 For this evidence, consult: Wiccan Roots [Capall Bann, 2000] and Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration [Capall Bann, 2003], both by Philipe Hesselton. I am also grateful to Donald H. Frew for bringing to my attention the fact that there is no evidence that Murray’s writings (as well as those of Charles Godfrey Leland and Robert Graves) played any substantive role in the documented and doctrinal origins for contemporary (Gardnerian) Pagan Witchcraft as is generally assumed by both contemporary Pagans and scholars (eg. JB Russell, A History Of Witchcraft [Thames & Hudson, 1980/2007] and Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon). For this citation, consult his important article: “Methodological Flaws in Recent Studies of Historical and Modern Witchcraft”, Enthologies, 1 [1998], pp. 33-65. Moreover, aside from Cohn’s mendacity, Frew has found substantive evidence for the sustained practice of misrepresenting Margaret Murray’s writings and thesis for the express purpose of attacking it without justification (a tactic known as a “straw man argument”), such as in Ronald Hutton’s The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, and Dr. Jacqueline Simpson’s article, “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?”, Folklore, 105 [1994], pp. 89-96 . To read a copy of Frew’s article, please consult my web-site, where I have reproduced it with Donald Frew’s permission, in an effort to make it more widely available to the Pagan community: (Not yet available--I'm still setting up my site!).
18 For more information on Briggs’ problematic research, and approach, please consult this contemporary review of his work by Harvard-educated freelance-scholar, Max Dashú: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/briggs.html
19 Anne Llewellyn Barstow has come to an [I]identical conclusion, when she writes of this unequivocally analogous data (identified in the above footnotes)—even encompassing locally extent shamanism from Slovenia and Estonia—that we are “at the edge of a vast stratum of folk religion [paganism], ancient and possibly Europe wide, that underlies the trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are only the signals to alert us to what has been going on for centuries” [pp. 88]. I take her final sentence as another plea for the more extremist fringe of academia to take this data more seriously than what they have, and to ensure that it achieves a much wider notice and acceptance than the seeming conspiracy of silence that has unfortunately tendered it disposable by blatantly ignoring this wider-breadth of European academia, to the detriment of the discipline of History.
20 For this citation, please consult Prof. Lecauteux’s Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters & Astral-Doubles in the Middle Age.
21 Consult Ginzburg’s Ecstasies: Decipering the Witches’ Sabbath for this citation.
22 On the mountain as axis mundi (or “world pivot”) consult Dr. Carmen Blacker’s article, “Two Kinds of Japanese Shamans: The Medium and the Ascetic” [1975] in Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge, ed. by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin: pp. 207-11. Of course, one is also reminded of the ancient Greek (Indo-European, as well as ubiquitous) tripartite cosmology that acknowledged not only an Underworld (Hades) and a material plain (or “Middle Earth”), but also an “Upper World” situated atop Mt. Olympus inhabited by the gods. While the Mayans of Mesoamerica sustained an identical cosmological belief-system where caverns were deemed entrances to the Underworld, with mountains representing the “Upper World” (a fact edified by numerous pyramid-like Temples that were believed to intimate the surrounding mountains). For further evidence on this ubiquitous shamanic-theme consult Prof. David Lewis-Williams’ and Dr. David Pearce’s brilliant work, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods [Thames and Hudson, 2005]. On witches gathering atop mountains to attend the Sabbat, consult German anthropologist Wolf-Dieter Storl’s contribution, “The Witch As Shaman” [1998] in Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants [trans. Annabel Lee, 2003], by Claudia Müller-Ebeling, Christian Rätsch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. Inner Traditions: pp. 40-58. It is also germane to the discussion that one must recall the common European folk-belief denoting a hill as an entrance to the Other World—usually to some “Fairy Land”—where witches were believed to gather at each Sabbat; and many pagan deities are known to have been demoted as Faeries, and residing in hills, such as the Tuatha de Dannan of Ireland.
23 For more on this incontrovertible data please consult her highly acclaimed academic work, Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early-Modern Age [Central European University Press, 1999].
24 Evidence has also been found which seems to support an Indo-European codification between Germanic, as well as Finno-Baltic shamanic expression of belief and practice [see: Asbjørn Jøn, 1999].
25 Consult: Pócs [1999]; cf. “Természetfeletti Képességű Emberk—Tudósok És Közvetítők”. Folklór, 3. Magyar Néprajz VII. http://vmek.niif.hu/02100/02152/html/07/397.html [Last Accessed: 24 January, 2008]. Trans. by the present author: Wade MacMorrighan.
26 Consult: Broad, William J. [2006]. The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi. The Penguin Press: pp. 36.
27 Simek, Rudolf [trans. Angela Hall, 1984/1993]. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Boydell & Brewer: pp. 281. Accounts of authentic shamans surmounting a respective “stool” may be found in Siberia where the shaman is suspended from a tree trunk while journeying to the Other World (sometimes this is for the practical desire to protect the Shaman while he or she is engaged in a trance, and not in control of their normal faculties), and the Machi shamaness of Chile who surmounts a tree trunk in order to prophecy [Diana Paxson, pers. comm.: 12 March, 2008]. This, of course, recalls the Greek practice at Delphi where the Oracle’s tripod would be situated atop a pillar that had been erected to the height of forty feet, or twelve meters [William Broad, The Oracle: pp. 62].
28 An important fixture in early Nordic divination; the term is generally translated as “shaman’s stool” [Dictionary of Northern Mythology, pp. 279].
29 Op. cit., pp. 152.
30 Jones, Prudence and Nigel Pennick [1995/1999]. A History of Pagan Europe. Barnes & Noble: pp. 151.
31 Dictionary of Northern Mythology, pp 152.
32 A History of Pagan Europe, pp: 150.
33 On this pedantry, see how he downplays the importance of Ginzburg’s material (as if Ginzburg’s material cannot stand on its own merit!), even going so far as to blatantly re-define what can and cannot constitute a “trance” or ecstatic-visionary experience, by labeling Italian Medieval accounts of individuals falling into a trance as “unusually intense dreams” when their witnesses frequently distinguished that they were not, in fact, merely dreaming or sleeping when they suddenly became “lethargic” and were unable to be roused into waking consciousness; however, Prof. Hutton does not usually bother to argue for his own specific counter-position upon rejecting a given thesis as, perhaps, unconvincing—a tactic that is known as “special pleading” throughout this ad hominem article he wrote castigating Don Frew’s own academic counter-point, in “Paganism and Polemic: The Debate Over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft” in Folklore [April, 2000]: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_1_111/ai_62685559 [Last Accessed: 5 December, 2007]. Frew was not extended the courtesy of a response. Upon examining both articles in question, Prof. Hutton was hardly arguing on the same grounds as Mr. Frew!
34 Consult Farrell-Roberts' discourse with Hutton for this citation.
35 However, it is evident within Prof. Hutton’s book The Shamans of Siberia that, despite his pretence to the contrary, he allows for a far more liberal definition of “shaman”; rather, this polemic remains only his [I]personal preference [Daniel Cohen (1996). “Review: The Shamans of Siberia, by Ronald Hutton and The Shaman, by Piers Vitebsky” in Wood and Water, Autumn 1996, no. 56. Available on-line, at: http://www.decohen.com/reviews/shamans_of_siberia.htm <Last Accessed: 2 June, 2008>]. Indeed, both Daniel Cohen and myself, yield to the same trepidation whereby Ronald Hutton’s extremist and atypical connotation may be adopted as the only viable definition by contemporaneous Pagans [Ibid.].
36 Eliade, Mircea [trans. Willard R. Trask, 1964]. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Princeton Univesity Press: pp. 4, and 495; Reid, Anna [2002]. The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. Walker & Company: pp. 5.
37 Donald H. Frew, pers. comm.: 29 February, 2008.
38 For a review of R. Hutton’s Shamanism, consult: “Hutton on Shamanism” [2006], by John C. Durham, http://bytrentplus.co.uk/hutton00.html [Last Accessed: 21 April, 2007]; and Timothy White’s critique, “Recapitulating Siberian Shamanisms: A Review of Ronald Hutton's Shamanism” in Shaman’s Drum, No. 75 [2007]. Throughout this present text Hutton apparently attempts to debunk the late Prof. Mercea Eliadé’s notion of the Shaman (here, he employs Sir James Frazer as his usual “whipping boy” when chastising a contemporary scholar for what he perceives as flawed methodology drawn from comparative methods). However, a valuable rebuttal is to be found in Bryan S. Rennie’s Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion [State University of New York Press, 1996]. Moreover, Timothy White has found that Hutton habitually castigates other authorities (with whom Prof. Hutton is in personal disagreement) for certain “transgressions” of which he [Hutton] is also guilty within the same polemical treatise [pers. comm.]. Indeed, I have noted, with astonishing frequency, identical behavior throughout his relatively premature and obsolete study, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles. This practice is a known Logical Fallacy (of which Prof. Hutton is evidently aware), which bears the name: Special Pleading. In so doing, we find that when one tenders an argument, he or she does not apply their principles consistently (frequently exempting himself or herself from having to follow the “rules” that they have imposed onto others). On “Special Pleading”, and other Logical Fallacies of note, navigate to the following website, which constitutes a professionally peer-reviewed academic resource, thanks to the outstanding work of Dr. J. Fieser and Dr. B. Dowden: “Fallacies: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy”. http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fallacy.htm <Last Accessed: 8 August, 2008>.
39 Consult Prof. Lecouteux’s aforementioned book.
40 Eliade, Mircea [1964/1992]. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Bollingen Series LXXVI. Priceton University Press: pp. 25; 33-5; 38-43.
41 The Internet Sacred Text Archive. “Letters on Demonology & Witchcraft”, by Sir Walter Scott. Letter V: http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/scott/lodw05.htm
42 Consult the following article by Harvard-educated freelance-scholar, Max Dashú, for more information about the politicization of early-modern and medieval witchcraft-research in "Witchcraft Politics: Another View of the Witch-Hunts. (Response to Jenny Gibbons, Pomegranate, #5)"; it was initially published in the peer-reviewed journal, The Pomegranate: www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/witchpolitics.html; also consult the article, “Collars and Scholars”, linked in footnote #14; while, Dr. Emma Wilby laments that “British historians have not taken seriously” the consensus of early-modern witchcraft-belief as a visionary-tradition (ie. shamanism) drawn by Continental academia in her article, “British Shamanism: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft”, Circle, issue 98 [Spring, 2007], pp. 42-3. As an example of Dr. Wilby’s charge, consult Prof. Owen Davies’ mitigation of her analyses in his article: “Cunning-Folk: Recent Research”, Pentacle, issue 21 [Beltane/Summer, 2007], pp. 28-30. The reader is also urged to consult Dr. Wilby’s highly acclaimed book: Cunning Folk and Familiar Encounters: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic [Sussex Academic Press, 2006].