Europe's inner demons

POSTSCRIPT: PSYCHO-HISTORICAL SPECULATIONS

In recent years various attempts have been made, above all in the United States, to adopt a psycho-analytical approach to the material of history; but these attempts have been largely confined to interpreting the behaviour and personalities of dead individuals. There is another possibility. I believe, and have believed for the last thirty years, that in so far as the insights of psycho-analysis can be brought to bear on history at all, collective fantasies or (in the widest sense of the term) social myths constitute the most fruitful field for their application.⁽¹⁾ In this admittedly speculative postscript I propose to apply them, with all due tentativeness, to the collective fantasy with which we are concerned.

For what we have been examining is above all a fantasy at work in history (and incidentally, in the writing of history). It is fantasy, and nothing else, that provides the continuity in this story. Gatherings where babies or small children are ceremonially stabbed or squeezed to death, their blood drunk, their flesh devoured — or else incinerated for consumption later — belong to the world of fantasy. Orgies where one mates with one’s neighbour in the dark, without troubling to establish whether that neighbour is male or female, a stranger or, on the contrary, one’s own father or mother, son or daughter, belong to the world of fantasy. And so does the Devil or subordinate demon who, in the guise of a monstrous tom-cat or goat-man, presides over and participates in some of these performances. Human collectivities, large and small, certainly are capable of grotesque and monstrous deeds — no century has proved it more abundantly than our own. Nevertheless, there is no good reason to think that these particular things ever happened: we have examined case after case, and have found hardly any where the accusation did not include manifestly impossible features.

The fantasy was not of equal importance, nor did it fulfil the same functions, at all stages in the long and complex story. Against the Christians of Lyons in the second century, and again against the Knights Templars in the fourteenth it was cynically and consciously exploited to legitimate an exterminatory policy which had already been decided on. When amateur inquisitors of fanatical disposition — men such as Conrad of Marburg, Alberto Cattaneo, John of Capestrano — wove them into the charges against the Waldensians or the Fraticelli, the effect was to intensify the persecution of a group that was already marked out for persecution. The great witch-hunt, on the other hand, never would have occurred at all but for the fantasy of a child-eating. orgiastic, Devil-worshipping sect. Admittedly, at that point other beliefs clustered around the central fantasy — beliefs about maleficium, about ritual magic, about witches who flew by night, about pacts, about incubi. But the witch-hunt reached massive dimensions only where the minds of the authorities were obsessed by the central fantasy itself. In the great witch-hunt that fantasy became, as it were, an autonomous force. The law was re-shaped to take account of it: in the form of the witches’ sabbat it became the core of a new offence, the crimen magiae. And on the charge of committing that imaginary offence, many thousands of human beings were burned alive.

This book has told, in detail, the story of how the fantasy operated over a lengthy period of European history. It has tried to describe the complex process of social interaction by which, with the passage of time, the fantasy became standardized and sanctified, a matter of consensus. But it is also natural to ask just where the fascination of such a fantasy lay. Clearly it represents a total inversion of social norms: the acts attributed to these real or imaginary out-groups were acts which were totally forbidden, which indeed were regarded with horror, as the quintessence of everything that human beings ought not to do. But perhaps we can be rather more specific than that.

The title “Europe’s Inner Demons” is intentionally ambiguous. It suggests, of course, that the groups which were demonized did not consist of inhabitants of distant countries but lived — or, in the case of the witches, were imagined as living — in the heart of Europe itself. But it is also meant to convey that for many Europeans these groups came to embody part of their innermost selves — their obsessive fears, and also their unacknowledged, terrifying desires. The nature of these endopsychic demons is indicated by the specific accusations brought against the demonized groups. Certain accusations have recurred again and again in the course of our story. Their meaning may become clearer when they are viewed in a broader context.

The theme of cannibalistic infanticide, for instance, is not confined to these accusations — it is met with also in the myth and folklore of Europe.⁽²⁾ It was known already in ancient Greece. Thus the Titan Cronus (whom the Romans identified with the god Saturn), being warned that he would be deposed by one of his own children, tried to swallow them all. But his wife Rhea saved the youngest, Zeus, who in due course forced his father to disgorge the other children and finally, after a mighty struggle, overthrew him. One of Zeus’s sons, Tantalus, cooked his son Pelops as a meal for the gods — but the gods, displeased, brought Pelops back to life and cast Tantalus into the lower world for punishment. The Germanic folk-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm include a number of variations on the same theme. In the original version of Snow White the wicked queen eats what she believes to be the lungs and liver of the small girl whose death she has ordered — though in reality the lungs and liver are those of a young boar. Snow White, of course, survives, and at her wedding watches the wicked queen dance in red-hot slippers until she is grilled alive. In the story of Hansel and Gretel the two children, sent from home, wander through the forest until they are captured by a repulsive hag who kills and eats children. Hansel is fattened for the purpose, but when the day comes Gretel pushes the hag into her own oven and leaves her to burn to ashes.⁽³⁾ In a Magyar variant three girls, driven from home, come to the castle of a cannibal giant and giantess. When they are about to be roasted and eaten, the youngest girl pushes the giant into the oven; after which his wife is knocked on the head and the girls take possession of the castle.

Now all these tales are inspired by the same preoccupation. Cronus and Tantalus are fathers intent on destroying their offspring. The wicked queen, the hag, the giant and giantess too are adults who try to destroy children, but in the end are destroyed by them. The common theme is generational conflict, between those who at present hold power and those who are destined to inherit it. And the means by which the adults try to retain power is, precisely, cannibalistic infanticide.

This surely throws a new light on our problem. We have already seen that cannibalistic infanticide belongs both to the traditional stereotype of the heretical sect and to the traditional stereotype of the witch, and that for that very reason it was relatively easy, given the appropriate circumstances, to combine the two notions. We can probe deeper now. It seems plain that both stereotypes draw on one and the same archaic fantasy. Psycho-analysts would maintain that the unconscious roots of this fantasy lie in infancy or early childhood. Psycho-analysts of the Kleinian school would argue, more specifically, that infants in the first two years of life experience cannibalistic impulses which they project on to their parents; and that the source of the fantasy lies there. Other psycho-analysts would advance different interpretations. It has been argued that many parents really do harbour unconscious cannibalistic impulses towards their children, and that the children are subliminally aware of the fact.⁽⁴⁾ It has also been argued that children themselves can harbour unconscious cannibalistic impulses towards a younger sibling — the baby brother or sister whom they see as an interloper or potential rival; and that in later life this intolerable, repressed desire, projected, can breed monstrous fantasies.⁽⁵⁾ Psycho-analysis, though a most fruitful aid in interpreting the world of fantasy, is anything but an exact science; and such matters are best left to professionals to debate. I shall limit myself to a more general hypothesis, which I regard as eminently plausible. It is, that the theme of cannibalistic infanticide, which has bulked so large in this book, owes part of its appeal to wishes and anxieties experienced in infancy or early childhood, but deeply repressed and, in their original form, wholly unconscious.^*

It is, fortunately, a simpler matter to interpret the theme of the erotic orgy. No great psychological sophistication is required to see that the monotonous, rigidly stereotyped tales of totally, indiscriminately promiscuous orgies do not refer to real happenings but reflect repressed desires or, if one prefers, feared temptations. And if, in pre-Freudian times, the inclusion of incest between mother and son, father and daughter, might have seemed to militate against such an interpretation, it will hardly do so now. When a real or imaginary outgroup is accused of holding orgies of this kind, it is certainly the recipient of unconscious projections.

The theme was known already to the pagan populations in the Roman Empire, but in the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages and the early modern period it took on a new meaning. In the “synagogue of Satan” and its successor the “witches’ sabbat”, the orgy is combined with a sacrilegious parody of divine service, eroticism goes hand in hand with apostasy. What in Antiquity had been imagined as a merely human debauch now came to be imagined as a ritual inversion of Christianity, carried out under the supervision, and with the participation, of Satan or of a subordinate demon.

It is easy to see why the notion of unbridled sexuality could so easily be combined with that of a cult in which Christianity was systematically repudiated and burlesqued. Christianity, whether medieval or post-medieval, Catholic or Protestant, has generally tended to exalt spiritual values at the expense of the animal side of human nature. The imaginary cult of a Devil who materializes as a tom-cat or a goat-man, and in that guise is kissed by or mates with his followers, male or female, would seem to be a clear example of “the return of the repressed” — the repressed in this case being human animality, distorted and made monstrous by the very fact of repression.

What is involved is not anti-clericalism — that was open, avowed and very widespread throughout the later Middle Ages. Nor is it intellectual agnosticism — that first appeared in the seventeenth century, and then only in very restricted circles. It is, rather, unconscious resentment against Christianity as too strict a religion, against Christ as too stern a taskmaster. Psychologically it is altogether plausible that such an unconscious hatred would find an outlet in an obsession with the overwhelming power of Christ’s great antagonist, Satan, and especially in fantasies of erotic debauches with him. It is not at all surprising that the tension between conscious beliefs and ideals on the one hand, and unconscious desires and resentments on the other, should lead some frustrated or neurotic women to imagine that they had given themselves, body and soul, to the Devil or to a subordinate demon. Nor is it surprising that these same tensions, operating in a whole stratum of society, should end by conjuring up an imaginary outgroup as a symbol of apostasy and of licentiousness — which is practically what witches became in many parts of Europe. In that case the tens of thousands of victims who perished would not be primarily victims of village tensions but victims of an unconscious revolt against a religion which, consciously, was still accepted without question.

It may well be that the entire story told in this book is ultimately understandable only in such terms as these. As far back as the records go, people had always been apt to imagine troublesome or eccentric old women as being linked in a mysterious and dangerous way with the earth and with the forces of nature, and as themselves uncanny, full of destructive power. But from the twelfth century onwards a new element appears — at first amongst monks, then amongst other literate elements in the population: the need to create a scapegoat for an unacknowledged hostility to Christianity. Perhaps the great witch-hunt became possible when the two resentments — the one avowed and widespread, the other unavowed and socially far more restricted — fused in a blind, terror-stricken hatred of a sect or society of witches that in reality did not exist at all.

The hypothesis at least deserves consideration. It might lead on to further insights. It might even prove possible to find out why the notion of erotic orgies around a monstrously erotic Devil became increasingly fascinating in the later Middle Ages, and reached its height only in the early modern period; and why it bulked so much larger in northern and central than in southern Europe.

That task lies outside the scope of this study, which is already vast enough. What began as an enquiry into the origins of the great witch-hunt has led in some unexpected directions and has produced some unexpected results. On the one hand various widely accepted notions have turned out to be baseless, while on the other hand various factors which have generally been overlooked have turned out to be of decisive importance. The story itself, I think, is now tolerably clear. But again and again I have felt that beneath the terrain which I was charting lay depths which were not to be explored by the techniques at my disposal. The purpose of these “Psycho-historical speculations” is to encourage others, better equipped, to venture further — downwards, into the abyss of the unconscious.