Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [55]
explanations, analyzing behavior (theirs and the witch’s), surveying the natural world and its unnatural disturbances, and trying to place behavior in a social, cultural, religious, and intellectual context. Witchcraft, far from being the first recourse of a superstitious people, was often the very last solution of the troubled and desperate.
Several skeptical voices raised their critiques within a Christian worldview that accepted the existence of the Devil, demons, and witches but questioned accounts of their activities. Despite the bad press the Spanish Inquisition has received over the years, skepticism defined its approach to witchcraft. Some Inquisition officials were skeptical of diabolical witchcraft in general, while others wondered whether some of the crimes such as sorcery or astrology contained within witchcraft statutes were really heretical at all, and thus not the Inquisition’s responsibility. In a meeting in Granada in 1526, for example, ten members of an Inquisitorial committee voted on whether they believed that witches really went to the Sabbath; six voted yes, while four voted that witches went only in their imaginations. The committee also concluded that whatever homicides witches confessed to were likely illusory, so that witches who made such confessions should not be handed over to civil courts. By 1614, skepticism was entrenched as Inquisition policy, and officials viewed witchcraft as a delusion.222
Other European skeptics struggled against legal and religious cultures that were committed to destroying witches. Reginald Scot, the English author of a treatise called The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), drew on the Old Testament to demonstrate that the witches described and condemned there were unlike the witches of his contemporary world. He was equally dismissive of some core beliefs about witches. He rejected, for example, the notion that witches copulated with the Devil, because, he pointed out, “the divell is a spirit, and hath neither flesh nor bones, which were to be used in the performance of this action.”223 Some skeptics argued that to ascribe so much power to witches and to the Devil was to denigrate the power of God. This was a position advocated by Scot, and shared by a Puritan cleric named George Gifford, who wrote two tracts on witchcraft in 1587 and 1593. Like his contemporaries, Gifford did not dispute the existence of witches, and he believed that witches should be punished severely, but he worried that allowing superstitions to flourish that credited witches with too much power overemphasized the power of the Devil.224
Skeptics also drew on contemporary medical and scientific ideas. A Dutch demonologist, Johann Weyer, argued in On the Illusions of the Demons and on Spells and Poisons (1563) that the women who were accused of witchcraft in fact suffered from melancholy, a disease that derived from an imbalance of the humors (specifically, an excess of bile) and that manifested itself with some of the symptoms now defined within a diagnosis of clinical depression. But melancholy could present itself in a variety of ways, not just as a depressed or subdued demeanor. Weyer described the odd behaviors and delusions one could find, including women who thought they were animals and imitated their sounds and actions; people whose fear of others made them tremble; and men so consumed by religious enthusiasm that they thought they were the Trinity. Weyer believed that melancholic old women were influenced by the Devil. Their condition made them despondent and prone to show lapses of faith in God, and thus all the more vulnerable to the attractions of the Devil. And then,