Change and Power.

Authority and orthodoxy 

“Worrying about witchcraft did not cause the decline of the Roman Empire, any more than it caused the Protestant Reformation, European wars of religion, English civil war, or the rise of African independence movements. And yet each of these events was accompanied by increased persecution of witches, a livid symptom of social and political turmoil. 

This is partly what makes witchcraft such a good peephole for historians and anthropologists. Far from being an end in itself, the study of witchcraft is a means to get at something else, something hidden or intangible. Some witchcraft scholars are interested in the state: not just polities and institutions, but dynamic relationships between households, communities, councils, and courts – micro and macro in urgent and endless reciprocity. From here they can survey the changing reality of power, and witchcraft is all about Change and Power. 

The centrifugal pull of Government maintains its integrity : the regulation of conduct upholds authority and keeps order. Religion has long been of utmost importance here; orthodoxy and loyalty go hand in hand. (Secular-minded readers in the UK take note: blasphemy was not fully decriminalized until July 2008, and the monarch remains ‘Defender of The Faith’.) 

The Greeks and Romans condemned religious error, called deisidaimonia by the former and superstitio by the latter. Both cultures suppressed excessive fear of spirits and consequent devotion to unorthodox (e.g. Egyptian) gods and cults. 

The fact that the power of daimones, to use the Greek term, might be directed against personal enemies intensified official hostility. Such practices were not only antisocial : they usurped the right of The State to settle disputes and inflict punishment. 

This concern formed a template adapted and applied repeatedly in the Christian era, most famously in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries amid intense political and legal centralisation. 

The advance of respectable magic – what we might call ‘science’ – accentuated the contrast between orthodox and unorthodox practices. At first, political and judicial authorities permitted sages to communicate with higher powers, while suppressing magical mayhem stirred up by vengeful plebs. 

But the distinction grew fainter, legal intolerance of magic more pronounced. 

According to the historian Livy, in the 2nd century BC some 5,000 Romans were executed for the crime of veneficium, the literal meaning of which – poisoning – had moved closer to maleficium : inflicting harm using magic. Then, in 33 BC, a nervous Senate banished all sorcerers and necromancers to protect public virtue and the viability of the state. Magic, specifically the fear of magic, raised vexing questions that remained unanswered in later periods. 

What was the relationship between magician and spirit? Was it some kind of pact, and, if so, did this constitute a false allegiance or, worse, heresy or treason? Should magic itself be punished, or only its destructive effects? How might one distinguish natural from preternatural phenomena? Were daimones good and bad, as Socrates had implied, or just bad – the opposite of gods? 

Imperialism tests political strength. The periphery can threaten the centre, destabilizing national identity and undermining confidence. By encapsulating the ‘other’, witches help to ground vague fears and foster unity. 

Romans came to see witches as ruthless and lawless criminals, blaspheming, murdering, and messing with nature. Horace told of witches lurking in graveyards, offering libations to ghosts, and concocting a potion from a young boy’s liver – horror stories that struck a chord in a nervous society (although the poet himself was sceptical). 

Colonisation also brought Romans face to face with terrifying magic. Like English settlers shocked by ‘devil-worshippers’ in 17th-century America, legionaries on campaign swapped tales about their enemies’ maleficent blood-rites. Tacitus describes the assault in AD 60 on the Isle of Anglesey, where British warriors and their witch-like women made a last stand. As the Romans crossed the water, they saw ranks of druids ‘lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth horrible imprecations’. Momentarily the troops froze but pushed on to lay waste the sacred groves where, it was alleged, human sacrifices were performed. 

Ahead of Wittgenstein, the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler called words ‘an attempt to grip or dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as a shadow’. 

Witchcraft is particularly shadowy, maddeningly ungrippable. Its definitions are varied, its meanings relative. Our separation of religion and magic would have meant little to the ancients. Instead, they observed a distinction between, on the one hand, their own orthodox religion and magic, and distasteful foreign equivalents on the other. 

But the Roman definition was constantly changing, and by the late imperial period (3rd to 5th century AD), the threat posed by superstitio – fashionable but false religion – to civil society was fusing with the image of the nocturnal hag, and with the concept of maleficium, as reflected in a legal code of 297. 

The philosophers, priests, and legislators of the Christian era inherited these ideas, and were to complicate and muddle things up even more.”