The Role Of Witchcraft In The Late Middle Ages

Witchcraft through pagan beliefs has been around for centuries, pre-dating Christianity and many mainstream religions. The most common concept, however, comes around when the Western world describes it as acts against God and therefore evil, associating it with the Devil and Devil worshipping. Witchcraft is feared and resorted to when events are unexplainable. In the Late Middle Ages, three main texts arose that laid a foundation for the extermination of witches, known as the Witchcraft Documents. This fear instilled in the documents started a flurry of witch hunts and unreasonable trials to eradicate witches and to keep the world pure, starting in the medieval Protestant Europe, the ever popular Salem witch trials in the late 1600s, and until they died down mid-1700s (Scarre & Callow 2001) and only happened sporadically. The wrongful persecution of Wiccans, other pagans, and even non-practicing innocent people occurred mainly because of the affiliation to Satanism, and contemporary witchcraft is still stigmatized to modern day.
Probably the most well-known witchcraft document that started the witch hysteria, The Malleus Maleficarium, or “The Hammer of Witches”, is a witch hunt manual written in 1486 by German Christian clergyman Heinrich Kramer.
The treatise talks about the three elements of witchcraft, “the evil intentions of the witch, the help of the Devil, and the Permission of God.” (Russell 1972) The Malleus Maleficarium is prefaced with the Papal Bull of 1484 written by Innocent VIII, encouraging witch hunting because it was their duty as Christians. The third section of the book includes the details on detection of witches, how to conduct a step-by-step witch trial, and how to torture and execute
them. Another witchcraft document Formicarius by Johannes Nader in 1437. Specifically in the fifth section, “The Ant Hill,” Nader was the one of the first people that transformed the idea of witchcraft that magic was performed by educated males, to uneducated females, therefore emphasizing that anyone can perform magic if they devote themselves to the Devil (Bailey 2001). This document is the predecessor of The Malleus Maleficarium. After Christianity integrated witchcraft to be seen as heresy, the pursuit was on for anyone who seemed to be involved in the slightest. Not only did Christians lynch and burn accused witches, they also tried to exterminate the ones they couldn’t catch by doing vindictive things like creating Christian holidays on already established Pagan celebrations, such as Christmas on the pagan festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti on December 25 (Graydon 2003).