The cover to the first English edition. | |
Author | Éva Pócs |
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Country | Hungary |
Language | Hungarian English |
Subject | Hungarian history History of religion |
Publisher | Akadémiai Kiadó, Central European University Press |
Publication date | 1997, 1999 (translation) |
Media type | Print (Hardback and paperback) |
Pages | 186 |
ISBN | 978-963-9116-19-1 |
Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Hungary written by the Hungarian historian Éva Pócs. The study was first published in Hungarian in 1997 as Élők és holtak, látók és boszorkányok by Akadémiai Kiadó. In 1999, it was later translated into English by Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb and published by the Central European University Press.
Building on the work of earlier historians such as Carlo Ginzburg and Gabór Klaniczay, both of whom argued that Early Modern beliefs about magic and witchcraft were influenced by a substratum of shamanistic beliefs found in pockets across Europe, in Between the Living and the Dead, Pócs focuses in on Hungary, using the recorded witch trial texts as evidence to back up this theory.
The reviews published in specialist academic journals were mixed, with many applauding the fact that information on Hungarian witchcraft was being brought to a wider English-speaking audience. Conversely, some reviewers claimed that Pócs' argument was largely unconvincing and lacked sufficient evidence to support it, with criticisms also being aimed at Pócs' writing style and the quality of the English translation.
In gathering the data for her book, Pócs noted that she made use of "several thousand pages of records", all of which pertained to the Hungarian witch trials of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. This included published documents relating to "approximately two thousand witch trials", and several hundred further documents which were unveiled in the course of Pócs' research by her team, who included fellow academics Gabór Klaniczay, Katalin Benedek, Ildikó Kristóf and Péter G. Tóth. [1]
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In his review for The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Andrew Sanders of the University of Ulster noted that Pócs' "examination and analysis are folkloric rather than anthropological", and that as a result, "the great majority [of case studies in the book] are examined in insufficient detail and contain inadequate information to answer the kinds of questions likely to be posed by anthropologists." Furthermore, Sanders argued that "the main problem of the book could be poor translation from the original Hungarian. At times the discussion is difficult to follow or to understand, because the account is ambiguous or contradictory and the meaning is unclear". Believing that Pócs went into "bewildering detail" over her categorisation of the different kinds of Hungarian magical practitioner, Sanders finally remarked that the book could have been improved with a "more careful translation and/or presentation" and the inclusion of an index. [2]
Bruce McClelland, 2001. [3]
Valerie Kivelson of the University of Michigan called Between the Living and the Dead an "intriguing book" in her review that was published in the Slavic Review journal. Noting that Pócs had set herself a "ambitious, broadly defined project", Kivelson felt that the work had both "strengths and weaknesses". Believing that the sources which she used were "rich and fascinating", containing "vivid testimony and lurid imagination", Kivelson felt that the work provided convincing evidence to support Carlo Ginzburg's theories regarding shamanistic survivals. Nonetheless, Kivelson did have some criticisms, for instance noting that "A more systematic study of Hungarian witchcraft trials and the villages and towns that produced them, even a brief summary of Gabor Klaniczay's work on the subject, would have added force to the argument", whilst she felt that the amount of space given over to categorizing the different types of magical practitioners was "dizzying". [4]
In his review published in the History of Religions journal, Bruce McClelland remarked that in his view too much attention had been paid to the third type of witch by Pócs, leaving him wanting to know more about "the village witch and, to some extent, the more ambiguous figure of the healer-sorcerer". Moving on, McClelland argues that "Pócs is at her best when examining the Hungarian testimony for possible homologies between the witches and sorcerers of central and southeastern Europe (in particular, Romania and south Slavic regions) and those of western Europe", but he also felt that Pócs could have discussed the effect that the tensions between Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity might have had on Hungarian views of witchcraft. Further noting that he would have liked to have seen "a closer comparison between several of the Hungarian folkloric figures Pócs identifies as lurking behind the images of witches in the trial narratives and similar figures she notices in the folklore and mythology of neighboring cultures", he also laments that "any political role that gender may have played in the general system of witchcraft and sorcery is not investigated." [3]
T.O. Beidelman, 1999. [5]
Writing in the journal Anthropos, T.O. Beidelman lamented that despite the huge amount of source material that Pócs had to work with, "No account whatsoever is provided to set these witch-hunts and trials (and thus the data at hand) into any kind of historical, cultural, or social contexts. We gain no idea of just what kind of materials may be found in these accounts, who transcribed them, or how these transcriptions may or may not relate to what actually occurred and just who believed what." He argues that Pócs "displays little sense of proper historical procedures" in her method, and that she also "has little concern for any anthropological, sociological, or psychology theory", remarking that ultimately the work is "essentially [a] folkloristic, neo-Frazerian account content to describe a large aggregation of terms, beliefs, and practices mainly with the aims of comparing them to materials from elsewhere in Europe... and of tracing the possible origins of such ideas and customs to earlier beliefs and customs of the pre-Christian or even prehistoric past." He furthermore criticised the style of writing, claiming that it was "rambling and discursive", to the extent that it became "the most serious weakness of this volume". He similarly criticises the translation into English, asserting that it "reads poorly". On a more positive note, Beidelman accepts that the "main value of Pócs's book lies in her making available a broad and detailed array of terms, beliefs, and customary practices of early Hungarian witchcraft and associated supernaturalism" that are otherwise unavailable to English-speaking scholars. [5]
Witchcraft or witchery broadly means the practice of and belief in magical skills and abilities exercised by solitary practitioners and groups. Witchcraft is a broad term that varies culturally and societally, and thus can be difficult to define with precision, and cross-cultural assumptions about the meaning or significance of the term should be applied with caution. Witchcraft often occupies a religious divinatory or medicinal role, and is often present within societies and groups whose cultural framework includes a magical world view.
A witch-hunt or witch purge is a search for people labelled "witches" or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic or mass hysteria. The classical period of witch-hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America took place in the Early Modern period or about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, resulting in an estimated 35,000 to 100,000 executions. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century. In other regions, like Africa and Asia, contemporary witch-hunts have been reported from Sub-Saharan Africa and Papua New Guinea and official legislation against witchcraft is still found in Saudi Arabia and Cameroon today.
Magical thinking in various forms is a cultural universal and an important aspect of religion. Magic is prevalent in all societies, regardless of whether they have organized religion or more general systems of animism or shamanism. Religion and magic became conceptually separated with the development of western monotheism, where the distinction arose between supernatural events sanctioned by mainstream religious doctrine (miracles) and magic rooted in folk belief or occult speculation. In pre-monotheistic religious traditions, there is no fundamental distinction between religious practice and magic; tutelary deities concerned with magic are sometimes called hermetic deities or spirit guides.
The Witches' Sabbath is a term applied to a gathering of those considered to practice witchcraft and other rites.
In European folklore and folk-belief of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, familiar spirits were believed to be supernatural entities that would assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic. According to the records of the time, they would appear in numerous guises, often as an animal, but also at times as a human or humanoid figure, and were described as "clearly defined, three-dimensional… forms, vivid with colour and animated with movement and sound" by those alleging to have come into contact with them, unlike later descriptions of ghosts with their "smoky, undefined form[s]".
The benandanti were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches (malandanti) in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.
A folk healer is an unlicensed person who practices the art of healing using traditional practices, herbal remedies and even the power of suggestion. A folk healer may be a highly trained person who pursues their specialties, learning by study, observation and imitation. In some cultures a healer might be considered to be a person who has inherited the "gift" of healing from his or her parent. The ability to set bones or the power to stop bleeding may be thought of as hereditary powers.
Witch-phobia and prosecutions for the crime of witchcraft reached a highpoint from 1580 to 1630 during the Counter-Reformation and the European wars of religion, when an estimated 50,000 persons were burned at the stake, of which roughly 80% were women, and most often over the age of 40.
Evidence of magic use and witch trials were prevalent in the Early Modern period, and Inquisitorial prosecution of witches and magic users in Italy during this period was widely documented. Primary sources unearthed from Vatican and city archives offer insights into this phenomenon, and notable Early Modern microhistorians such as Guido Ruggiero, Angelo Buttice and Carlo Ginzburg, have defined their careers detailing this topic. In addition, Giovanni Romeo's monograph Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell'Italia della Controriforma (1990) was considered pioneering and marked an important step forward in inquisitorial and witchcraft studies dealing with early modern Italy.
The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory which proposes that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian, pagan religion that had survived the Christianisation of Europe. According to its proponents, this witch-cult revolved around the worship of a Horned God of fertility whom the Christian persecutors referred to as the Devil, and whose members participated in nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath in which they venerated this deity.
Emma Wilby is a British historian and author specialising in the magical beliefs of Early Modern Britain.
The first historian to posit the existence of European shamanic ideas within popular beliefs of otherwise Christian Europeans was Carlo Ginzburg, who examined the Benandanti, an agrarian cult found in Friuli, Italy, whose members underwent shamanic trances in which they believed they battled witches in order to save their crops.
Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited is an anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist Loretta Orion and published by Waveland Press in 1995.
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Britain written by the British historian Emma Wilby. First published by Sussex Academic Press in 2003, the book presented Wilby's theory that the beliefs regarding familiar spirits found among magical practitioners – both benevolent cunning folk and malevolent witches – reflected evidence for a general folk belief in these beings, which stemmed from a pre-Christian visionary tradition.
Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night is a study of the arrest and trial of Chonrad Stoecklin (1549–1587), a German herdsman from the town of Oberstdorf who was accused and executed for the crime of witchcraft after experiencing a series of visions. Written by the German historian Wolfgang Behringer, himself a specialist in the Early Modern witch trials of Germany, Shaman of Oberstdorf was initially published in German as Chonrad Stoekhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte aus der frühen Neuzeit by R. Piper GmbH & Co. in 1994. It was subsequently translated into English by H.C. Erik Midelfort and published in 1998 by the University of Virginia Press.
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, then of the University of Bologna, and first published by the company Giulio Einaudi in 1966 under the Italian title of I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. It was later translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1983 with a new foreword written by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath is a study of visionary traditions in Early Modern Europe written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. First published by Giulio Einaudi in 1989 under the Italian title Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba, it was later translated into English by Raymond Rosenthal and published by Hutchinson Radius in 1990.
Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven is a sociological study of an American coven of Wiccans who operated in Atlanta, Georgia during the early 1990s. It was co-written by the sociologist Allen Scarboro, psychologist Nancy Campbell and literary critic Shirley Stave and first published by Praeger in 1994. Although largely sociological, the study was interdisciplinary, and included both insider and outsider perspectives into the coven; Stave was an initiate and a practicing Wiccan while Scarboro and Campbell remained non-initiates throughout the course of their research.
Thiess of Kaltenbrun, also spelled Thies, and commonly referred to as the Livonian werewolf, was a Livonian man who was put on trial for heresy in Jürgensburg, Swedish Livonia, in 1692. At the time in his eighties, Thiess openly proclaimed himself to be a werewolf (wahrwolff), claiming that he ventured into Hell with other werewolves in order to do battle with the Devil and his witches. Although claiming that as a werewolf he was a "hound of God", the judges deemed him guilty of trying to turn people away from Christianity, and he was sentenced to be both flogged and banished for life.