Witchcraft Reader sans Klaniczay

I recently needed to quote Gabor Klaniczay’s paper on The decline of witches and the rise of vampires, and decided to refer to the edition in Darren Oldridge’s The Witchcraft Reader. I then found out that a second edition of this anthology of witchcraft papers was published in 2008, and that Klaniczay’s paper is no longer in it.

Having now had the chance to look at the second edition, I can see that Oldridge has not only replaced some of the papers in the first edition but has also thoroughly reworked the introductory texts. In particular, the general introduction has changed quite a lot, as Oldridge apparently no longer feels the need to explicitly distance current research from previous efforts like those of Margaret Murray or ‘reprints of eccentric but still popular publications like Montague Summers’ History of Witchcraft’. Instead he simply introduces the reader to ‘the magical beliefs that saturated pre-modern communities’ and ‘the interaction between ordinary people and educated demonologists and lawyers’, before confronting the present-centredness (‘the tendency to explain the past in terms that relate mainly to the present’) and moral judgements with which the subject is frequently approached.

Of particular interest here is part nine of the book, the one dealing with the decline of witchcraft. In the first edition it contained Brian P. Levack’s The decline of witchcraft prosecutions, Klaniczay’s paper, and Owen Davies’ Urbanization and the decline of witchcraft: An examination of London. In the new edition Klaniczay’s paper has been replaced by The decline of the witchcraft pamphlet by Marion Gibson and Witchcraft after the witch trials by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra. I suppose that by doing so, a more general picture of the decline is drawn than in the original.

This, however, means that the word ‘vampire’ no longer is in the book. Whatever one may think of Klaniczay’s theory – Peter Mario Kreuter reiterated his critique of it at the conference in Vienna – it has established a link between beliefs in witchcraft and revenants or posthumous magic, cf. e.g. the volume 5 of The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, that might lead to more research on the connection. This link now is no longer evident from Oldridge’s anthology.

But there is plenty of interesting reading anyway, and I find it well worth quoting the view of 17th century witchcraft sceptic Friedrich Spee as mentioned by Oldridge in his general introduction: ‘the threat of appalling and secret conspiracies requires the highest standards of justice from those who seek to defeat them. If the crime ‘is difficult to prove then there is need for stronger, not weaker proofs’, and ‘if it is hidden and shrouded in shadows, then there is need for more light, not less, in order to illuminate it’.

What's in a name?

I suppose I haven't given it much thought, probably because I'm just used to the word, but I recently noticed that in a modern standard dictionary you probably can't find the word revenant. Of course, I have chosen to use that word because it was the word used by Calmet, and because it's also used in the English translation of Calmet. Furthermore, it's meaning is much more precise than the words otherwise used in English like ghost and apparition: It is a dead person who has come back to the living, usually to haunt and molest them.

However, I also notice that the English Wikipedia uses the word in a narrow sense, mainly referring to medieval revenants from Britain and quoting William of Newburgh and Walter Map. Darren Oldridge on the other hand uses the word in reference to revenants from a larger area and a much longer period of time:

'The idea that the spirits of the dead could return to the living was common in medieval and Renaissance culture. Physical resurrections like the "unnatural marvel" at Melrose Abbey were less frequent, but reports of wandering corpses - or "revenants" - appeared occasionally in the British Isles, France and Germany in the pre-industrial age, and were widespread in central Europe as recently as the 1920s. (---) The physical return of the dead continued to be reported and discussed seriously by European churchmen in the later Middle Ages, and it featured in learned texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.' (Strange Histories, p. 57)

In my native tongue, Danish, we have words like genganger and genfærd, which both have a meaning similar to revenant, i.e. someone who "walks again" or "has returned to walk the earth". Consequently, I find that when writing in English revenant is a fitting word for the whole spectrum of dead people who are claimed to return to haunt the living.

Observing, understanding and participating

Montague Summers obviously had a firm belief in witches and vampires, whereas modern scholars take on a more phenomenological approach, like e.g. David Keyworth who writes in the introduction to his Troublesome Corpses:

“And while it can be argued that perceived reality is no more than a shared consensus, a social construct that results from a collective belief in a particular world-view, authenticated and maintained by the participants involved and the world-view that was prevalent at the time, I do not personally believe that corpses can arise from their coffins to feed upon the blood of the living.” (p. 9)

Keyworth refers to Berger and Luckmann’s famous (or infamous, if you like) and highly influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966) which is e.g. known for its view that Haitian voodoo beliefs are as “real” as the Western belief in neuroses and “libidinal energy”. Unfortunately, I only own the book in a Danish translation, so I can’t quote the relevant part of the book.

Darren Oldridge, whom I have quoted and referred to before – on vampire beliefs and observations, and on the rationality of our ancestors in general - on the other hand finds that it is essential that we try to understand the rationality of the strange histories of the past.

A marriage between the phenomenological approach and the attempt to understand is in my view beautifully described by Michael E. Bell in the prologue to Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. Describing a class he attended during his education, he writes of folklorist Wayland Hand:

“My epiphany came the day Wayland told us about the disappearance of giants from Europe. This was not a rapid, catastrophic event like the extinction of the dinosaurs. It was, rather, a more lengthy demise with the final death blow administered by the Industrial Revolution. As Wayland talked about the giants, I noticed that he stopped looking at us, and his eyes seemed to focus somewhere beyond the windowless walls of our Bunche Hall classroom. His voice, naturally soft, grew softer. He spoke about how Christians stigmatized the giants as devils, in league with Satan. He described how industry’s widening circle of smoke and clamor finally pushed the giants from their homes. His voice dropped to a near whisper, and I’m sure I saw tears well up, as he described how the giants shrank, deeper and deeper into the forests and caves. Demonized, and no longer able to find refuge, the giants vanished. When Wayland concluded, it dawned on me that he wasn’t talking only about giants no longer appearing in the folklore record. He was describing the extinction of a species. I thought, this is incredible: Wayland Hand, a meticulous, reasoning scholar – a professional folklorist – actually believes in giants.” (p. XI-XII)

Bell himself feels compelled to divide himself into two identities: The rational, observing scholar, and the guy who can suspend his disbelief to “participate wholeheartedly, without reservation”. (p. XIII)

Personally, I would be careful in stating my own approach to understanding the background of magia posthuma in such terms, but I suppose that a true understanding requires that you attempt to come as close as possible to viewing the investigated phenomena through the eyes of the observers, in casu peasants, Austrian military personnel, Catholic priests, medical scholars etc.

In fact, this is also what Keyworth attempts to do: “Indeed, I will follow what Robert Darnton in The Great Cat Massacre (1984) called ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnographic’ history, and try to understand the situation from the participant’s point of view, not just cite the official version of events as evidenced by the historiographical sources, and take a non-judgmental, empathetic attitude towards the experiences and intentions of participants involved in the events described, given the cultural context of such traditions.” (p. 9)

No doubt, it can be hard and also very unpleasant to try to intellectually “participate” in events involving revenants, diseases, and the exhumation, examination and destruction of corpses, but as Oldridge has pointed out, “it is the very strangeness of these ideas – from a modern perspective – that makes them worth looking at.” (Strange Histories, p. ix)

The Historical Context of Vampire Beliefs

I have written a few posts (The rationality of the strange past, Strange cover and Strange Histories) about Darren Oldridge's book Strange Histories, and I have mentioned that Oldridge refers to the Medvedja vampire case from 1732. He elaborates a bit on this subject in his contribution to an anthology called Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil edited by Peter Day and published by Rodopi, Amsterdam, in 2006. The text is pretty short, just 11 pages, and is entitled "Dead Man Walking": The Historical Context of Vampire Beliefs.

Here Oldridge again discusses the historical construction of belief, as he asks the question: "If perfectly rational, well-educated people could accept the existence of roaming corpses three hundred years ago, why is the same idea inconceivable today?" To answer this question, he borrows the concept of a system of belief from the antropologist Clifford Geertz: "the framework of beliefs, expressive symbols, and values in terms of which individuals define their world, express their feelings, and make their judgments." As a system of belief constitutes the framework within which the facts of the world are perceived, and as it also changes over time, our concept of rationality and "common sense" will change depending on our "historically defined standards of judgments." Oldridge gives a number of examples and also shows how certain phenomena can be either interpreted within a framework where the existence of revenants is accepted or within the framework of scientific medicine, where they are not.

As for our own 21st century system of belief, Oldridge puts it like this: "We live in a culture that does not permit corpses to stir; and this basic assumption has condemned vampires to the realm of fiction."

I'm pretty surprised to find that Oldridge states that in the Medvedja vampire case, "the doctors concluded that several of the bodies [of suspected vampires] posed a threat to the living," as I don't remember a statement of this kind in the Visum & Repertum report. The military doctors (if we can call them doctors?) were certainly surprised by the apparently uncorrupted state of the bodies, but in my opinion they did not agree with the local people on the reality of the revenants.

Considering the sleep paralysis which is the term frequently used to describe the state of supposed victims of e.g. vampires, Oldridge writes that 'sufferers also report visual hallucinations, often in the form of a threatening figure standing at their bedside,' a phenomenon that would seem to be better described by a 'system of belief' within which such figures exist, than by the 'system of belief' of modern medicine. Oldridge doesn't discuss this interesting aspect, but as he says:

"The point of these observations is not to 'explain away' vampire beliefs in terms of modern science. On the contrary, it is to suggest that prior assumptions often determine our understanding of what we see. (...) In a world that believes in demons, 'the hag' presents clear evidence of their power; in a society that does not, it needs to be explained in terms of other acceptable ideas, such as the psychology of sleep disorders. The social construction of belief is most obvious when we step outside our own culture."

The book contains a couple of other contributions that may be of interest to readers of this blog, in particular Peter Mario Kreuter's The Name of the Vampire: Some Reflections on Current Linguistic Theories on the Etymology of the Word Vampire. There is also a nice and short overview of the genesis of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Elizabeth Miller.


I couldn't resist showing the above scene from Mario Bava's Italian horror film Operazione paura from 1966 (in English known under various titles like Curse of the Living Dead and Kill Baby Kill). Curiosly, in this film the local people do not want the bodies of the dead disinterred, in fact, they don't even want to discuss the subject for fear of the revenant of a little girl that haunts the place. As you can see, the authorities and men of modernity, including the doctor at the left who has been called upon to examine the bodies, discuss the system of belief of the local people. As outsiders they meet the local people in a way similar to how we read the 'strange histories' of the past, but as it goes, the good doctor can not escape the terrifying 'system of belief' that determines how the local people live and act.

Strange histories

"In 1723, a team of doctors examined corpses disinterred from a Serbian graveyard, and decided that several of them were vampires. A number of the bodies were swollen and red-faced. The corpse of one woman was 'quite complete and undecayed': her lungs, liver and spleen were as 'fresh as they would be in a healthy person,' and new fingernails had formed on one of her hands. For modern pathologists and eighteenth-century physicians alike, it appears that the facts do not speak for themselves. The physical evidence of death may not change, but what it means depends largely on the intellectual context in which it is placed."

This passage from Darren Oldridge's Strange Histories (Routledge, 2007) obviously concerns the exhumation and autopsy of the 20 year old Stana at Medvedja in 1732 (not 1723). Although it is one of only a few direct references to vampires, the book does contain a lot of material directly or indirectly relevant to anyone interested in Magia Posthuma. It is however very much a book on the role of history and the historian. Oldridge, a lecturer in history from University College Worcester, who is also known as the editor of The Witchcraft Reader, aims to show the reader how history can help to give us another view of our own beliefs and common sense. Our predecessors were, even at their most bizarre, in fact rational and common sensical in their thoughts and views of the world. But their cultural context was unlike ours, and for that reason they interpreted facts unlike we do, they asked other questions, and found their answers using the information they had.

Oldridge underscores this by analysing the arguments and thoughts that led people in the middle ages and in the renaissance to accuse people of witchcraft and to believe in the existence of revenants and werewolves. The book contains numerous examples that show how logical and very concrete the matters were dealt with by the experts of that day and age. In some cases theologians even drew conclusions that the modern day reader will agree on, but for very different reasons and with very different arguments that led to other - 'strange' - conclusions.

The reader interested in vampires and Magia Posthuma will probably enjoy Oldridge's explanation of Catholic and Protestant views on the theology of revenants. In general, the book is well written for the lay reader who has no prior knowledge of the subject. There are notes at the end of the book for anyone interested in looking more into the subject.