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Deep Time WItchcraftad
Deep Time WItchcraftad
Introduction
Stephen Mitchell
Nocturnal histories: witchcrafi and the shamanic legacy of pre-Christian Europe took the
form of a series of brief introductory presentations followed by lengthy open discussions at
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, over four days in August
2009. The academicfieldsrepresented were intentionally diverse, and included archaeology,
religion, anthropology, literature, history and folklore. Our discussions of witchcraft and
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Folklore & Mythology, Warren House, Harvard University, 12 (Juincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, School of Geosciences, St Mary's, Elphinstone Road,
Aberdeen AB243UF, UK
University of Bristol, School of Humanities, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 ITS, UK
Keble College, Oxford 0X1 3PG, UK
Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Snorresgade 17-19, DK-2300
Copenhagen S, Denmark
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, 52, Rue du Cardinal
Lemoine, 75005 Paris, France
Cardiff School of History and Archaeology, Humanities Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff CFIO 3EU, UK
Durham University, Department of Archaeology, South Road, Durham DHl 3LE, UK
Department of Archaeology, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Box 226, Reading RG6 6AB, UK
Department of Archaeology, University of York, King's Manor, York YOl 7EP UK
Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56126 Pisa, Italy
http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/084/ant0840864.htm
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shamanism, set against the backdrop of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Carlo
Ginzburg's 1989 Storia notturna (translated as Ecstasies: deciphering the witches' Sabbath),
made clear that although there are important areas of convergence and mutual learning,
our knowledge of each other's disciplines and methodologies were not entirely equal. The
familiar divisions between those whose methods are largely empirical and those whose work
tends to be principally analytic and interpretive did, of course, begin to emerge, but one
point that struck me was the degree to which the archaeologists were not merely familiar with
textual sources, but had also often trained in philology and other relevant disciplines. Nonarchaeologists, although willing to use archaeological findings, were reluctant, it seemed, to
tread as readily across this disciplinary boundary. Overcoming the still palpable intellectual
atomism brought about by the prejudices (and abuses) of earlier generations no doubt has
a long way to go, but there was a willingness, eagerness even, among our group to push
harder at lowering those walls, while at the same time, respecting the very real differences
that exist between separate academic disciplines.
Our conversations encompassed everything from the lessons of regional episodes to grand
synthesising schemes. With such a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds and specialisations,
it would presumably be unrealistic to hope that there should have been many moments of
consensus, yet I sensed that two such areas did precipitate out of our discussions, one
touching on methodology, the other on a possible venue for future synergy. In the first
instance, the subtext of the most interesting moments for me was that, whether our primary
'texts' consist of charms or potsherds, understanding our mission as one of recontextualising
'lived lives' should be paramount. Our principal goal, whatever our academic allegiance,
should be to understand cultural monuments within reconstructable performance contexts.
The second point that emerged was that from among the many periods and places
represented by the specialists at the meeting, the situation in medieval Scandinavia, due
to the unusual nature and richness of its textual and other sources of information, its
geographical location and its connections to adjacent cultures, represents a unique case, a
tradition-rich area that may hold unparalleled promise for future interdisciplinary efforts.
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happens when rituals are unfinished; triggers to spiritual fluorescence; trauma as memory
and the curation of stress; the reactivation of latent knowledge; ritual as the constitution of
ideas; that vernacular traditions can remember rightly even when they distort; the force of
the suppressed, and released, voice; the dead as active subjects in all cultures but our own;
industries dedicated to the dead; in ancient perception, spirituality should not be limited to
humans. Above all, to what extent should we try to tame the strangeness of this data, risking
flattening its complexities under the normalising freight of academic discourse? We also
need to be aware of how spirituality evolves, and that what we're looking at may be moving.
I think that alongside new collaborations and budding research projects, for every delegate
the discussions also generated ideas for potential PhD dissertations, and it may well be that
the positive effects will also be felt long afterward by others who were not present at the time.
As a veteran of many conferences in the standard format, I believe one is usually doing well
to come away with even one genuinely new idea or inspiration for research. It is a tribute to
the Radcliffe experience that this time my notes - more than 30 pages - were full of them.
In the most positive sense, it was unlike anything I have done before.
Having spent several days discussing witchcraft at a cool academic remove, it proved
salutary to end by encountering its realities more directly (Figure 1). Under expert local
guidance a visit to the Rebecca Nurse homestead in Danvers (formerly Salem Village, the
site of the infamous witch hysteria of 1692) allowed us to stand in the parlour where
frightened people were threatened not so long ago with horrible pain and death, persecuted
for nothing more than perceived deviance in ideas or behaviour. The quotation used as a
publicity tag-line by the curators of the site cut straight to the quick, as it should: 'Oh God
help me, I am an innocent person'.
Figure 1. Seat ofjudgement. The reconstructed high seat in the meeting house at Salem Village, site of the witch trials
famously evoked by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible.
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systems, economies and social structures, and which were equidistant from the
geographical centres of witch trials and often indeed comprehended within the same
kingdom, behaved in very different ways. Some took up witch-hunting with fervour, while
others avoided it. Most instinctively expected workers of destructive magic to be female,
some expected them to be male, and yet others accused both sexes, with a preponderance
of one sex. The attributes and activities attributed to witches also varied very significantly
from place to place. The overall stereotype of a demonic religion was taken up easily in
some but not in others, and the trappings and targets of witchcraft showed a similar variety.
The main hypothesis of Carlo's book is that ancient belief-systems underpinned these
differences.
What this seminar demonstrated collectively is that there is very good evidence for that
hypothesis, and that the Anglo-American scholarly world, at least, needs now to reckon
more with it. In addition, the archaeologists present have shown that material data can be
used to carry out a study of ancient traditions of belief going back far before the beginning
of written records, let alone in more recent periods for which those records are few and
difficult to interpret. These are very important lessons, to which specialists in many aspects
of the European past, from deep prehistory to the boundaries of the modern period, must
now pay better attention.
the coming of the kirk. All three of the witches discussed make reference to figures of
animal masculinity; two (Marioun Grant and Andro Man) to a stag, which in Andro's dittay
arises out of the snow (as if from an underground entrance) and one, in Issobel Gowdie's
confession, to elf bulls who frighten her by bellowing noisily at her and who appear to guard
the entrance to the realm of the fairies. All three dittays also concern fairies themselves, and
in particular the powerful figure of the Queen of Elphame, with whom Andro Man claims
a procreative sexual relationship. The women have less to say about her perhaps because
she is a figure of male fantasy and desire rather than a kind of aspirant woman's avatar.
The Queen of Elphame and her male votaries or victims is also very widely referenced in
the ballad literature collected by Francis James Child; the latter tends to present her as an
intensely sexual but dangerously devouring figure, one who exemplifies the power of wild
nature, in a manner in keeping with the trial records. However, both Marioun and Andro
also refer to a personage they call Christsunday, a more enigmatic figure whose name might
be a Christian screen around the word 'sun', or a genuinely hybrid Christian-pagan figure
interpreted by the courts as diabolical.
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they continue to offer something of value that can be rescued for heuristic or classificatory
purposes despite the necessary reconstruction. This is a process that Jonathan Z. Smith
called 'the rectification of categories,' best undertaken through interdisciplinary discussion
rather than by one scholar. Unlike the sciences, the humanities may discourage collaborative
research or theorising; when archaeology meets the study of religion, two models tend to
clash. Nocturnal histories generated a genuinely collgial approach to its own problems,
particularly as we considered terms and categories. This was the rectification of categories
in action.
My last observation has to do with the seminar's perspective on the dead. A re-surfacing
question in my own work might be, in poetic form, 'Who are the dead and what do they
want?' I asked this question at our seminar in the hght of my own experience in 1992
of the long-delayed Puritan funeral of Ceorge Jacobs, Snr., hanged as a witch 300 years
earher, whose remains could neither be properly honoured with a Christian burial nor,
as it turns out, entirely forgotten by his community of Salem Village in the Colony of
Massachusetts. The subjectivity of the dead is something that is often strangely lost in
scholarship on antiquity; by this I mean that the dead are often construed as moveable
pieces on a board game, 'objects' of our superior gaze, as much artefacts as a bronze axe
or a wheel rut, construed as acting in mono-dimensional, ideologically simplistic ways. We
tend to treat them almost as extensions of their historical landscapes rather than as agents in
tension with their own societies and belief systems, agents whose actions were as complexly
motivated or self-contradictory as our own. Furthermore, these individuals, whether or
not their names are lost, still exert a charismatic imperative through the evidence that we
continue to discover, even as we ourselves prepare to join them one day. 'The dead are not
dead' as the Senegalese poet Birago Ishmael Diop wrote. As scholars, we do not transcend
history or mortality. Without explicitly being stated, this was very much the assumption of
the seminar, and it was a welcome intellectual foundation for our work together.
within a specific discursive framework with limits under constant challenge and negotiation.
Science and art as well as religion can serve as examples of other such discursive domains.
Religious traditions over time show vast variations in themes and modes of expression, not
necessarily variations compatible with the Christian concept of religion. Local conceptions
and understandings of religion also provide theoretical models of reality, however simple
or sophisticated their proponents. Illiterate social strata have too often been assigned
to collective categories like 'folk religion', 'folk belief, magic and popular culture. Such
tendencies towards homogenisation of despised classes generate two problems: they ignore
differences between vernacular groups and they imply a rough simplification of religion in
everyday life and disconnect it from an understanding of religion as a local theoretical model
of the word in all its respects.
It is the individuals' conceptions and expressions of a transcendental reality (i.e.
independent of human experience, but within the range of human knowledge), which give
rise to the different material we study. This is the basic material for the history of religions,
the very empirical point of departure for our academic activities; but the concept of religion
means that our target is not the expressions themselves but the worlds of conceptions they
hide. The history of religions therefore always has a meta-theoretical character as it departs
from a cluster of academic theories that in their turn deal with (or cover) other emic theories
of reality.
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story, carried by the names of people, spirits or places; this guides the chanting of the story to
an audience. Pictorial symbolism, as used in an oral tradition, uses only a limited, specialised
vocabulary. Fundamentally different from phonetic writing, pictography has its basis in its
relationship with oral instruction.
Iconographie and pictographic schemes of this kind assume religious belief, refer to it
obliquely, but do not state it. For this reason, instead of it being seen as a failed form of
writing, it should be regarded as an extraordinarily effective aid to memory, i.e. to what
is already known. The relationship between the pictograms and the words does not lie
where the theorists of writing seek to place it (between signs and phonetic values), but
rather between the sequence of the pictograms and the structure of the text. However like
archaeology, but unlike text, the actual abstract beliefs, of the kind we sought at this seminar,
are never directly conveyed to outsiders, that is ourselves.
recording rituals. Both Gatharina Raudvere and Diane Purkiss stressed the need to recognise
and come to terms with these problems. Garlo Severi and in a sense Kimberley Patton too
presented anthropological perspectives on ritual. Severi's work on native American images
as transmitters of knowledge, and the use of picture-writing to record chants allows me to
revisit with new eyes the ancient European iconography that has long been a major focus of
my research. But perhaps the most powerful evocation of ritual perception was provided by
Patton, whose work on the Salem witch trials was both rigorously researched and movingly
told, reminding us sharply that all of us are concerned with human minds and their capacity
for healing and harming, the latter most graphically represented by the fate of Rebecca
Nurse and George Jacobs. Our visit to Salem Village was a fitting and sobering finale to
four rich days of scholarly debate.
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for the little traditions, the persistent practices that survive major political, ideological and
social changes (e.g. 1955). It is by interrogating the evidence for local patterns of belief that
we might fruitfully examine the long term continuities from prehistory, but also the changes
in belief and practice over time (e.g. Carver 2009), and seek out the triggers of this spiritual
multiplicity exploring how and why overarching changes and pressures (ecological; social
religious; political) stimulated and affected patterns of belief at local and regional scales.
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shape-changing, although they do refer to other pagan beliefs and practices amongst the
Baits, including ones interpreted as 'shamanic'. This is certainly an area that will yield
potentially important and exciting new information on the nature of religious conversion in
European society; it is being pursued through projects such as 'The Ecology of Crusading'.
Witchcraft may open a window into the soul, revealing an anguished demand for alternative
ritual, but not a consciously conserved version of ancient practice. People do not go to the
stake to defend their version of prehistory. They express their retaliations of mind in terms of
the contemporary materials to hand, which may include garbled memories of the past. This
suggests a less specific system of reference to deep time than that supposed by James Frazer
(1922) and Robert Graves (1961), and perhaps even that of Carlo Ginzberg's thesis (1991).
For me, the structure of pre-literate knowledge is largely decomposed, like archaeological
strata; but like strata, the causes of its variation may still lie partly in the prior geography of
distant prehistories (Carver 2009).
Does this mean that there is to be no meeting between pre-Christian thinking and the
documentation of the witch trials? One priority, clearly, is to know and understand the
local prehistory better, so there are stronger comparisons to bring to the table. It is by no
means excluded that the components of the idea-fossils we find will come into better focus
by virtue of us all working together with objects, sites, stories and records. One day we may
discover a place, or a set of objects, in which history, ethnology, legend, and inquisition
coincide with a good quality archaeological sequence; then we may see rather more clearly
the connections between past and present that we feel should be there.
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