Account for the continuing belief in magic and folklore in early modern European society.

A first major factor in accounting for the continuing belief in magic is the role that religion and the church played in early modern society. The church played a pivotal role in all people’s life and so one must not underestimate the influence it exercised over society. Religious belief was a fundamental grounding for subsequent beliefs and so if the Church recognised the existence of magic, even if it denounced it, then the people of Europe would have firm grounds to continue to believe in magic. Magic was also seen to bind people closer to the church so the church did maybe exploit the notion of it to bring the population closer to God. It is also known that despite being against magic in general, the church did indulge in certain magical practices such as having a quota of ‘magical’ objects under the altar. 

The pre-reformation church was steeped in magic and ‘acted as a repository of supernatural power, which could be dispensed to the faithful to help them in their daily problems.’ The services themselves were filled with ritual magic such as the transubstantiation. This led to communion being illegitimately used for magical purposes such as curing the blind or fertilising fields. This shows that belief in magic was an innate part of religious belief, not to be seen as something separate from it.

However to truly understand the role magic played within the church one has to look back to early medieval times and the legacy of the original conversion from paganism to Christianity. Belief in magic is a remnant of the previous pagan religion that covered Europe and it can be said that in order to convert the masses an emphasis was put upon the magical powers of saints and also the superiority of the Church’s magic over their pagan magic. Thomas writes that some elements of pagan magic would also have been assimilated into Christianity so not to pose too big a conflict. This shows that the Church encouraged belief in magic right from its beginning so despite the reformation the belief was so ingrained it would take several hundred years before it declined significantly.

Belief in witchcraft can also be attributed to the Church to an extent. A witch was one that practised maleficum (harmful deeds) and also diabolism, which linked them directly to the devil via a pact. The church taught that the devil did exist and therefore it was not implausible, in early modern Europe, to believe that people had made pacts with the devil and were therefore witches who used the devil’s powers to cause harm. It was this link to the devil that caused the mass executions of people believed to be witches as they were heretics, which was a punishable crime. Each ‘witch’ was only executed when a confession had been made and although most were all extracted via torture it can be said that these confessions acted as evidence for the people living in early modern Europe that magic was indeed a reality.

Beliefs in witchcraft on the popular level were less complex than those held by the elite and were concerned more with day to day misfortunes that occurred in village life, rather than the act of diabolism and the ‘Sabbat’ which many intellectuals obsessed over. This means that amongst the general population, one can account for their belief in witchcraft as the people using it as a scapegoat on which to blame their misfortunes and to explain the unexplainable in terms understandable to the common man. As Kamen puts it ‘popular belief always assumed an unofficial solution to common problems.’ In Mainz in 1593 a local official wrote ‘the common man has become so mad from the consequences of crop failures that he no longer holds them for just punishment of God, but blames witches.’

Diseases such as cancer were not diagnosed as they are today and therefore in early modern society a seemingly healthy person dropping down dead was seen as a result of supernatural power such as a witch and not a natural cause. Therefore one can agree with Thomas when he says that diagnosing witches met a ‘genuine emotional need.’ It also helped to explain the inadequacies of medical practitioners if they could blame incurable complaints on a supernatural force.

Levak writes of another theory as to why society in the early modern period sustained belief in witchcraft, namely that all cultures are known to generate myths about people with peculiar powers as this is necessary to establish what the norms are. It can be said that the early modern European society is no exception to this and so belief in witchcraft and therefore magic is also sustained due to a psychological need for an abnormality with which to measure the norm.

        A different approach to understanding why beliefs in magic and folklore continue into the early modern period can be found by looking at the fact that the majority of the population lived a rural life.  This kind of life is governed by several uncertainties such as weather and is dependant on seasons which in turn led to folkloric beliefs that certain times or days were of more value than others. For example many believed it was bad to travel on certain days of the year. This could be passed off as mere superstition but there is some truth in the idea that some times of the year are better than others are if you live a rural life, for example the harvest has great importance. Thomas demonstrates this idea when he writes that the beliefs about the unevenness of time are ‘a natural product of a society, which was fundamentally agrarian in character and relatively primitive in its technology’.

        From the evidence that has been looked at, one can see that there are many factors that contribute towards the continuation of belief in magic and folklore in the early modern European society. In particular the church played a fairly important role in this due to the fact that it endorsed the belief in magic by using it itself at times and also confirming the existence of the devil for the people which led them to believe in such phenomena as witchcraft. The lack of scientific knowledge also contributed to the beliefs in magic as it was the only plausible explanation people could give to certain events and certainly one could say that magic was hard to distinguish from science in the early modern period.

To conclude, it can be said that magic and folklore were an important and relevant part of early modern society and it only began to lose its dominance with the emergence of a more rational, scientific way of thinking during the seventeenth century. However, as Thomas noted ‘if magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free.’ Indeed this is true as there are still pagan groups around in modern society that believe in magic so it is not surprising that these beliefs were rife in early modern society where technology and science were far less developed than today.

Bibliography

• Burke, P. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1994)
• Kamen, Early Modern European Society (Routledge 2000)
• Levack, B. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd Edn. (Longman Group ltd. 1995)
• Maxwell-Stuart, P.G. Witchcraft in Europe and the New World 1400 to 1800 (Routledge 2001)
• Sharpe, J. Instruments of Darkness: witchcraft in England 1550 to 1750 (Penguin Group 1996)
• Thomas, K. Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin Group 1971)

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Sarah E. Thomas.

21st November 2003

Account for the continuing belief in magic and folklore in Early Modern European Society

School of History

Rise of the West: European Society 1550 to 1789

Philip Riden

Word count: 1534

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