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The above discussions of various scholars should be enough to get someone started on an understanding of the Standard School of interpretation. Most other historians and researchers – Robbins, Rose, Ewen, Levack, Thomas, and so on – differ in detail but not in kind. True, the Devil, as it's often said, is in the details, and most of these scholars make a point out of disagreeing with each other in the areas where they do differ. Many of their mutual criticisms are valid, and are worth considering. But this is probably a very good place to make some summary observations, and then move on.

First, it is often thought – by specialists and non-specialists alike – that Paganism in Europe died out very early and very quietly, perhaps by the end of the fourth or fifth century. There could, then, be no real "survivals" into periods later than that. Thus, Medieval Witchcraft – and, even more to the point, modern Wicca – could not possibly be a Pagan remnant. But this is simply not so. Ramsay MacMullen has written a powerfully reasoned and meticulously documented book on the subject (Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries) in which he proves, quite conclusively, that the European conversion to Christianity was nether quick nor painless, but prolonged, brutal, and violent. His logic and data, coming from an entirely different direction, support the present study in almost every detail.¹ MacMullen traces the rise of Christian temporal power, at the expense of Pagans, up until the eighth century. Much of the research on this website picks up the story with the publication of the Canon Episcopi, about a century after where MacMullen leaves off; after fighting the war for nearly eight hundred years, it is scarcely surprising that the Christian denunciations of Paganism would not quickly die, nor is it surprising that the Pagans would still have pockets where they'd dug in their heels.

Second, there is the pervasive modern belief that the common people's idea of Witches was created by Christian theologians. The Churchmen are often held to have invented an image of Witchcraft which was then forced upon the minds of the people. This may or may not be true, or it may be true only in part. What is true, however, most assuredly, is this: the Churchmen's view of Witchcraft has been imposed upon the minds of modern historical scholars. Most scholars of the Standard School understand the words Witch and Witchcraft in exactly the way the Medieval Church wanted them to. If Witchcraft did have any sort of reality independent of the ecclesiastical definitions of it, these scholars view that reality as entirely irrelevant to their subject – and quite candidly admit as much. (Recall Trevor-Roper's comment: "Such beliefs are universal, in time and place, and in this essay I am not concerned with them." He's not the only scholar to say such things.) The Standard School, the Medieval demonologists, and modern extremists such as Montague Summers, all use exactly the same definitions of Witchcraft. They disagree only on how much of it actually happened.

Third, this definition – what these historians mean by the word "Witch" – is very different from what modern Witches mean by the word. The conclusions the historians draw about the existence or history of Witchcraft, as they view it, will not apply to Witchcraft as modern Witches view it. Today's Witches should not, therefore, take at face value any scholarly conclusions concerning the supposed non-existence or non-history of Witchcraft. The scholars are talking about a wholly different phenomenon.

Fourth, quite a lot of the imagery within Witchcraft did come from pre-Christian and non-Christian, Pagan sources. The idea of the Inquisition having invented Witchcraft out of wholecloth is simply not true. Nor do very many of these historians claim there to have been no Pagan survivals. They are simply unconcerned with these survivals, and view them as something very much other than Witchcraft, even while admitting they contributed to the "cumulative image" of Witchcraft.

Fifth, many people – including a few historians such as Cohn and Midelfort – believe torture to be sufficient to explain all of the confessions and other statements made by accused Witches. It is not necessary, they say, to believe any of these statements, nor any other eyewitness report of anything real going on. Yet many other historians – such as Notestein, Trevor-Roper, and Macfarlane – recognize that there were, indeed, many such statements that seem to have been made entirely freely, completely without torture or any threat or torture. Eliade writes the confessions were "not always obtained by torture," and most definitely implies some of these should be taken to indicate some of the actual beliefs of the accused.² Most historians are mystified by these confessions, and generally write them off to hysteria or madness; but whatever their cause, the common notion of all confessions being completely ascribable to torture is simply false.

Sixth, some scholars, such as Alan Macfarlane, define Witchcraft as an internal power, something innate to the Witch. Yet as Midelfort shows, the essence of Witchcraft, as defined by the Churchmen whose writings they're studying, is the pact, the agreement by which a Witch promises to attempt evil deeds in exchange for powers which are granted by the Devil. What upset the Church so much is not the evil deeds, not the harm supposed to have been caused by the Witches, and not even the Sabbat itself – all of which was maintained by some of the theologians to be ineffectual, illusory, or harmless. In fact, these theologians objected to helpful Magic just as strongly as they objected to harmful Magic. No, what upset the Churchmen was the pact. The true importance of this will become apparent as this study progresses; it deals with a willingness to see divine power resting in places other than Yhvh.

Finally, the scholars of the Standard School are not studying the history of Witchcraft. They're actually studying the idea of Witchcraft in the minds of the Medieval Churchmen – where that idea came from, how it evolved, what sources contributed to it, how and why it led Christendom to torture and kill so many innocent people. Things these historians are not studying include the idea of Magic, Pagan survivals, folk customs, or related concepts, in the minds of the common people – and most especially, they are not studying these ideas in the minds of the people who were accused of practicing Witchcraft. For the most part, what the historians are studying is the cause and functioning of irrational persecution. The thoughts in the minds of those persecuted are seen as irrelevant to the study of the minds of the persecutors.

This odd blindness was rather forcefully pointed out by Carlo Ginzburg. Writing about previous efforts, Ginzburg says, "We are struck above all by the fact that, with very few exceptions, these studies have continued to concentrate almost exclusively on persecution, giving little or no attention to the attitudes and behavior of those persecuted."³ Ginzburg has spearheaded a very different approach to history, an approach sometimes called "microhistory," which concerns itself with the lives and thoughts of individual persons, rather than with sweeping social changes. Or, more accurately, those sweeping social changes are viewed as resulting largely from the actions and thoughts of common people, and understanding those actions and thoughts is thus seen as central to understanding the larger picture.

To Ginzburg, the beliefs and actions of those accused of Witchcraft are a legitimate and valuable field of study. In The Cheese and the Worms, he documents the cosmology and beliefs of a sixteenth-century Italian miller, a member of the middle class, not educated at the universities, but intelligent and thoughtful nonetheless – and charged with heresy by the Inquisition. This fellow had a worldview very much at odds with the ideas which the Church was trying to write upon the alleged blank chalkboard of the common mind. Ginzburg has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that at least some of the common people were quite capable of thinking things very much other than what the Church wanted them to think. Thanks to Ginzburg, it is no longer possible to imagine otherwise.

In the late 1950's, Elliot Rose could write, "There is no reason to doubt that... witches regarded their god as the Devil... Who else did they suppose he was?"⁴ Rose assumed Christianity was, by the Medieval period, dictating all religious thought, and no accused Witches could have formed opinions, or obtained imagery, from anywhere else. If the Church told a group of people that they were worshipping the Devil, then, Rose insists, that's who they must have believed they were worshipping. But with Ginzburg's work, it is no longer tenable to simply assume the common people believed exactly what the Church told them to believe – even on such issues as the nature of Witches, Satan and Yhvh, good and evil. Of course, the mere existence of Jews, Moslems, and Christian heretics and schismatics in Medieval Europe should have hinted at this to any observant historian. Moslems, Jews, and heretics certainly didn't think simply what the Church wanted them to.

The ability to think things other than the Church's ideas is one necessary precondition to a possible historical Witch-sect, as modern Witches understand that term. But it is certainly not sure proof. Ginzburg has, however, come very close to supplying such proof. Two of his books – The Night Battles, and, even more so, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath – document the existence of pre-Christian (or, at least, non-Christian) Pagan fertility cults, surviving into the fifteenth century, right under the noses of the Italian Inquisition. Ginzburg's approach is to look for clues to the actual thoughts of people accused of Witchcraft. There are things appearing in trial transcripts which the judges and lawyers didn't understand, didn't want to hear, and didn't find interesting or appropriate. These are probably items of honest, unforced testimony. To be sure, the sects Ginzburg describes differ in many important ways from modern Witchcraft. But they are recognizably related; and this opens a very wide door that the Standard School had seemed to lock shut.

Ginzburg writes, "Extremely rare, in truth, have been the attempts to approach these documents with the analytical instruments supplied by the history of religions and folklore – disciplines which even the most serious among the historians of witchcraft have usually given a wide berth, as if they were minefields. The fear of yielding to sensationalism; incredulity regarding magical powers; bewilderment when faced with the 'almost universal' character of beliefs such as animal metamorphosis (as well as, naturally, the non-existence of an organized sect) – these are some of the reasons adduced to justify a drastic, and ultimately sterile, restriction of the field of inquiry."⁵ (On the "almost universal" beliefs, recall again Trevor-Roper; the basis for the common people's religion is exactly the stuff ignored by most scholars.)

The sect documented by Ginzburg called itself the Benandanti, which means, "good-doers," or "those who do well." They existed at least until the sixteenth century, in the Friuli region of Italy. Another very similar sect, called the Calusari, was documented extensively by Gail Klingman (Calus: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual). This sect existed until the late twentieth century at least, and may be still extant. The similarities which these groups bear to each other – and the level of commonality which both groups have with modern Witchcraft, as well as with the Pagan substrate upon which almost all scholars agree Medieval Witchcraft must have been built – is truly striking. With Ginzburg, we can see a fertility cult surviving at the time of the Inquisition, one which the Inquisition actually viewed as a sect of Witches; with Klingman, we see a very similar sect surviving even up until the present day.

After examining the evidence represented by the Benandanti and the Calusari, Murray's ideas no longer seem so outrageous. Yet the criticisms of her have been so violent as to lead many of the unwary to think her work is completely without worth, and her entire thesis – the central idea of which is the survival of Pagan religious sensibility and practice – has been utterly disproved. But even after criticizing Murray in rather harsh terms (her work has "countless and appalling errors"), Eliade says, "at least one of her critics, J. B. Russell, recognizes that Murray's book has the merit of emphasizing the persistence of pagan folk practices and beliefs centuries after the introduction of Christianity."⁶

Because so much nonsense and misrepresentation has been written about her work, Murray needs to be approached afresh. Even a historian of religion as brilliant as Eliade seems to misunderstand Murray's theory. He writes, "the central point in Murray's thesis was that the Inquisitors viciously misinterpreted an archaic fertility cult as adoration of Satan." So far, so good. But Eliade goes on: "Now it is a well-known fact that, from the eighth century on, popular sorcery and superstition were progressively equated with witchcraft, and witchcraft with heresy. But it is difficult to understand how Murray's fertility cult could have developed into a secret society pursuing exclusively destructive goals..."⁷ If Eliade understood Murray's position, it's not at all clear why he would see this as an inconsistency in Murray's theory, since it's not actually part of Murray's theory at all. Murray did not claim the Witches to have been "pursuing exclusively destructive goals;" indeed, this is one of the features which she claims as among the Inquisitors' misrepresentations. Murray's claim is that it is an error to see Witchcraft as "pursuing exclusively destructive goals;" this was the view of the Medieval Church, and it is the view currently being perpetuated by modern scholars, but it is demonstrably wrong.

The most detailed criticisms of Murray are from Rose and Cohn. If the criticisms from Rose and Cohn can be addressed, nearly all of the important objections to Murray's work will have been answered. Most other scholars have simply copied their statements – often with a very embarrassing level of credulity. For example, Cohn's most damaging and extensive criticism deals with claims of Murray having omitted important passages from the texts she quotes, passages which, Cohn says, show Murray's interpretation to be untenable.⁸ Even Ginzburg accuses Murray of "textual manipulation" – referencing Cohn for this – and of believing too much of the nonsense in the transcripts.⁹ But Murray does not omit the passages Cohn indicates. Murray's book is arranged thematically, and the "omitted" passages are dealt with in other sections where they are more appropriate to her systematic analysis of the data. She does deal with the objections Cohn raises. One is forced to wonder if Cohn read her book all the way through.

For some reason, no one has noticed Cohn's misrepresentation of Murray's data. It often seems as if the majority of Murray's critics have never actually read her works, as if Rose and Cohn had absolved them of the necessity for doing so. It is significant that, in summarizing Murray's argument, Eliade does not quote Murray herself at all. Instead, he presents a depiction of Murray's ideas as written by Rose, one of her most vociferous critics!¹⁰

Eliade's use of a hostile witness to present another scholar's theory seems unconscionable. But this is exactly the technique any scholar must use in piecing together the actual history of Witchcraft. Only the testimony of hostile witnesses has survived. This is true even of writers such as Ady and Gifford, Weyer and Scot; they disapproved of the accused Witches themselves, even though they insisted these miserable wretches should not be punished for impossible crimes. In examining that testimony, this is one of many factors which must be kept in mind: accurate or not, fantasy or reality, Pagan or heretical, what the Churchmen described were things the Churchmen themselves disapproved of.

And these are the witnesses believed by most modern scholars.

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¹ The major exception is that MacMullen does not attempt to follow the imagery of Diana.

² Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976, p73.

³ Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath Pantheon Books, New York, 1991, p1-2.

⁴ Elliot Rose, A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in the History of Witchcraft and Diabolism, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1989 (reprint), p198.

⁵ Ginzburg, p11.

⁶ Eliade, p73; reference is to Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Cornell University Press, Cornell, 1972, p37.

⁷ Eliade, p73; emphasis his.

⁸ Norman Rufus Colin Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons, Basic Books, New York, 1975, p110ff.

⁹ Ginzburg, p8-9.

¹⁰ Eliade, p72.

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