Free Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler Page A

the devil. Eliade argued that though this example gives no evidence for Murray’s horned god or for her organized system of covens, it was nevertheless, “a well-documented case of the processus through which a popular and archaic secret cult of fertility is transformed into a merely magical, or even black-magical, practice under pressure of the Inquisition.” Incidently, Norman Cohn dismissed the benandanti because their experiences were all under trance and therefore, to him, illusory.
    Eliade also described parallels in Romanian studies, significant because there was no systematic persecution of witches in Romania, no institution analagous to the Inquisition, and the “archaic popular culture” was therefore under “less rigid ecclesiastical control.” Romanian witches were reported to change their shape, to ride on brooms, and to fight all night at specific festival times until they became reconciled. The Romanian Diana was connected with the fairies, and the Queen of the Fairies came to be associated in name with Diana, Irodiada, and Aradia—“names,” Eliade wrote, “famous among western European witches.”
    Eliade concluded that “What medieval authors designated as witchcraft, and what became the witch crazes of the fourteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, had its roots in some archaic mythico-ritual scenarios comparable with those surviving among the Italian benandanti and in Romanian folk culture.” 12
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    Modern Wicca, while retaining the use of such terms as esbat, sabbat, and coven, bears no resemblance to the European witchcraft that the scholars have discussed. There are no beliefs in Satan, no pacts, no sacrifices, no infanticide, no cannibalism, and often not even any sex. Still, the theories of Margaret Murray were strongly influential in stimulating the revival of Wicca, and it can be argued that her work alone generated a number of British covens.
    In the last twenty years, the entire landscape of scholarship has changed. Scholars have made meticulous studies of trial records in scores of European communities. A good summary of current scholarship is Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe by Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow (2nd edition). Most scholars now put the number of people killed for the crime of witchcraft from the late fifteenth century through the seventeenth century at between forty and fifty thousand, not millions or even the one million figure I used in the first edition of Drawing Down the Moon. With an unknown number of others who “received a more random form of justice at the hands of their neighbors, through common assaults, lynchings and social ostracism.” 13 Scarre and Callow argue that it will never be possible to know with complete certainty how many people in Europe were prosecuted for witchcraft and how many suffered death, since records were not always kept, and even where they were, some were lost. But they still say a reasonable figure for executions between 1428 and 1782 is forty thousand. Other scholars put the figure at fifty thousand. The worst persecutions were in the 1590s, and during the period between 1630 and the 1660s. Some of the worst persecutions took place in Germany, with far fewer trials in Italy and Spain, “the heartlands of the Inquisition.” 14
    About 80 percent of the victims were women, although in some places (Moscow, for example) male victims predominated. Often the women were poor, and a large number were over fifty. Murray’s theory is given short shrift here, as is Jules Michelet’s thesis that witchcraft was a protest against repressive social conditions. Scarre and Callow also believe there is little evidence for the 1976 groundbreaking feminist work by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses, that argued that the suppression of witchcraft was the suppression of midwives and healers by the emerging male