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. Yet for today’s folklorist or oral historian, this context represents unknown territory. Without information concerning their social setting and underlying motivations, practices aimed at magical harm may appear as dark, mysterious, anti-social events completely divorced from normal, everyday social interaction and experience, or opposed to social integration and cohesion. In this chapter I draw upon over 300 narratives
The study of witchcraft accusations in Europe during the period after the end of the witch trials is still in its infancy. Witches were scratched in England, swum in Germany, beaten in the Netherlands and shot in France. The continued widespread belief in witchcraft and magic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France has received considerable academic attention. The book discusses the extent and nature of witchcraft accusations in the period and provides a general survey of the published work on the subject for an English audience. It explores the presence of magical elements in everyday life during the modern period in Spain. The book provides a general overview of vernacular magical beliefs and practices in Italy from the time of unification to the present, with particular attention to how these traditions have been studied. By functioning as mechanisms of social ethos and control, narratives of magical harm were assured a place at the very heart of rural Finnish social dynamics into the twentieth century. The book draws upon over 300 narratives recorded in rural Finland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that provide information concerning the social relations, tensions and strategies that framed sorcery and the counter-magic employed against it. It is concerned with a special form of witchcraft that is practised only amongst Hungarians living in Transylvania.
not be the immediate cause of magical harm, both because a demon actually effected the injury, and because the witch had no power to compel the demon to do her bidding, the extent to which witches were actually culpable for the injuries inflicted by demons in their name was questionable. The matter was further complicated by the fact that demons could act only with the permission of God. Hence, if demons acted merely in accordance with divine will, why should either the witch or the demon be blamed for the outcome? And why, too, should God have chosen to give the
-colonies often encountered behaviour that they found incomprehensible. Europeans were often welcomed home by Aboriginal people who considered them to be the ghosts of deceased relatives. Others witnessed ceremonies and dances designed to bring magical harm or simply remove the invaders. McNiven and I have identified a number of potential ritual responses, including the use of ochre, increased artistic endeavour
long as we do not linger on historical ‘facts’, such as acts of violence, but also concentrate on what Laura Stark calls ‘the narrative field which encoded and transmitted cultural thinking about magical harm’, this should be an advantage rather than a hindrance. The tension between narrative and practice is also noticeable within the discourse. Sabina Magliocco suggests using the label ‘folkloric witch
especially to women. As Nider observed, because women were thought less able than men to gratify their thirst for revenge through overt violence, they were widely believed to employ occult means. In his penitential, Burchard warned that some women, “filled with the discipline of Satan,” would remove turf from the footprints of unsuspecting victims “and hope thereby to take away their health or life.”24 In a canon devoted to the sins of women, the Anglo-Saxon penitential of Egbert also remarked upon the female propensity for magical harm, charging that If a woman works
medicus by others, depending upon their perspective and the result of treatment. Likewise, because magical power did not necessarily depend upon special knowledge, but could result from heredity, disposition, or individual aptitude, anyone with a generally bad reputation could, under the right circumstances, be suspected of causing maleficium. At the same time, though, this emphasis upon magical harm separated conceptions of malefici from those of strigae and the bonae res, and until the late Middle Ages, texts usually kept these categories reasonably distinct. In the
punishment. In the case of the heresy of witches, there is always evidence of the magical harm they have done to children, adults, and draught-animals, or the circumstantial evidence of their magical apparatus; and because of the damage these people have done to others and their property, the civil judge is able to inflict the death penalty .] THE FIRST METHOD OF PRONOUNCING SENTENCE Question 20: [ If the defendant is found to be entirely innocent – which means she has not confessed, no evidence against her has been produced in court, and she has never come under
of the game” as a goddess, kill baptized infants, work black magic, and feast upon oxen which their mistress then magically restores to life.75 To determine how much of this is real, Visconti marshals evidence and arguments, both for and against. On one side there is the testimony of the accused witches themselves and of witnesses who have seen these women abroad, the evidence of undeniable magical harm, and the undoubted power of the devil to do marvelous things. On the other, there is the testimony of canonical authorities and numerous respected churchmen, the
give communion to the people are always enjoined to take the utmost care [to make sure] that when they give communion to women, [the women] open their mouths very wide, stick their tongues right out and push their veils out of the way. The greater the care taken over this, the more this method will identify more witches. [ Sacramentals are used in innumerable superstitious ways. Wax images and aromatic substances are sometimes put under the altar cloth. These are then hidden under the threshold of a house in order to cause magical harm to anyone crossing over