A Historical Introduction to the Christ Myth

A Non-Question: Who Really Wrote the Works of Shakespeare? 

eep inside the vaguely fascist edifice of the University of London’s Senate House is a room that the university authorities view with some embarrassment. It forms part of the library and is mainly used for seminars and evening studies. I spent many happy hours there myself learning how to read Anglo Saxon manuscripts. Before class began, I once took the opportunity to scan the spines of the books that line the room’s walls. They formed an incoherent collection relating to late Tudor literature, textual criticism, cryptology and William Shakespeare. I learnt from the professor who took our class that the books all belonged to a certain Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (d. 1914) who donated them to the library, with a substantial sum of money, on condition that they remained together in their original cabinets. The library was not too keen on the books but it wanted the cash so the deal was struck. 

You almost certainly haven’t heard of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence and neither had I until I found myself sitting in his room. So, why is the University of London embarrassed about him? Well, imagine if the library at Yale had a Graham Hancock Room full of books devoted to proving the existence of Atlantis. Or that Princeton accepted the Dan Brown Collection, containing the source material for the Da Vinci Code. That is how most academics feel about the life’s work of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence – for he set out to prove that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. 

In fact, you could fill a fair-sized library with all the volumes from the subgenre devoted to showing that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. It is not just Sir Francis Bacon who is fingered. Christopher Marlowe is the current culprit of choice, even though he died before most of Shakespeare’s plays were written. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was a blameless Tudor aristocrat who was no more capable of penning King Lear than I am, but several ‘researchers’ have produced books claiming that he did just that. There is even a special name attached to those who deny the blindingly obvious fact that Shakespeare wrote his plays. They are called anti-Stratfordians. 

Capacious though the output of the anti-Stratfordians may be, it has evinced little or no reaction from mainstream Shakespearean scholarship. Most critics do not want to give the harebrained idea any more exposure than it receives already. However, Professor Sir Brian Vickers, in the guise of a book review of the latest anti-Stratfordian tome, gave the whole lot of them a good blasting with both barrels in the Times Literary Supplement in 2005. And Professor Jonathan Bate (1958 –) devoted a chapter in his excellent book The Genius of Shakespeare(1997) to trying to understand the reluctance of so many people to give the Bard his due. It is worth mentioning that Vickers and Bate, eminent scholars that they both may be, agree on almost nothing apart from the absurdity of the anti-Stratfordians. Indeed, I would be reluctant to have them both of them around for tea at the same time in case their disagreement on the virtues of the First Folio descended into physical violence. 

Bate suggests there are three reasons why people are prepared to believe that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. The first is the lack of any original manuscripts. We tend to make a fetish of a certain kind of physical evidence and when it is not present, become unreasonably sceptical about everything else. As it happens, several documents signed by Shakespeare do exist but these not include any of his plays. 

The second reason is that most people do not have a sufficient background in the subject to properly evaluate the evidence. Anti-Stratfordians tend to be amateurs who have not read enough on Elizabethan theatre to see just how wildly implausible their ideas are. Let me give you an analogy. I can recognise the difference between a Yorkshire and Lancashire accent without very much trouble because I am English. I would never mistake an Irishman for a Scotsman. On the other hand, when I was living in New Jersey, I was frequently assumed to be Irish and had no idea that Californians sound different to Texans. Distinguishing accents isn’t something you tend to be taught. Rather you learn it by experience and by being immersed in a particular culture. It’s the same with history. If you have been studying a period for long enough, ideas like the anti-Stratfordians’ are as obviously incongruous as a baseball bat on a cricket pitch. 

The third reason that Shakespeare is frequently denied the credit for his plays is that after he died, he was deified. His reputation today is so stratospheric that it seems implausible that a grammar school boy from a small town in the Midlands could have achieved what he did. Much is made of the fact he never went to university or that he had bourgeois origins. Surely the man who reached such heights of greatness must have been born of the nobility or at least attended Oxford or Cambridge. The normality of Shakespeare’s life trips us up. He was a successful business man and professional actor as well as playwright whose career we can trace quite accurately. Furthermore, he was recognised as extremely gifted during his lifetime. It made him rich. 

Even though this article is about the theory that Jesus never existed, I have begun with this digression on Shakespeare to illustrate that there is nothing unique about any conspiracy theory. They are all made up of similar elements and thrive in the same environments. All three of the reasons Jonathan Bate suggested in his book for the popularity of conspiracies about Shakespeare are present in the Christ Myth. For instance, there is no direct contemporary evidence for Jesus and we do not possess the original manuscripts of any of the Gospels. Christ Myth theorists are amateurs to whom professional scholars pay little attention. And finally, Jesus is worshipped as God. But the problem is the same as with Shakespeare – how could a religion be started by a Galilean peasant whose message spread around the world. There must, say the conspiracy theorists, be another explanation. 

The similarities do not end there. The nature of the evidence brought forward by conspiracy theories is much the same whatever the subject. There is a false belief that we have relatively little contemporary evidence for the life of Shakespeare or Jesus. In fact, we know far more about both of them than almost any other personage of their times, barring military heroes and royalty. Likewise, the theorists tend to present contrived readings of the relevant texts, claiming they provide clues that simply do not stack up to careful analysis. Furthermore, the perfectly good testimony we do have for the orthodox view is rejected by the conspiracy theorist for bogus reasons. For Shakespeare we are told that all his fellow actors were in on the deception. While with Jesus, we are told we cannot trust any Christian text. In other words, the people most interested in both Jesus and Shakespeare, their followers and colleagues respectively, should be debarred from giving evidence. 

Introducing the Christ Myth Conspiracies 

Among the earliest efforts to debunk the Bible was a short tract called The Three Imposters written by an anonymous hack. It appeared in about 1700 purporting to be of medieval origin but was actually a seventeenth century fake. It created quite a stir among the intelligentsia of London. The three imposters in question were Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Although the author did not deny they existed, he claimed they were charlatans rather than men of God. Other sceptical works appeared through the eighteenth century, including David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757), Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 – 89) and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1794 – 1807). Although radical and owing little to the common piety of their time, none of these books suggested that Jesus never lived. Rather, they tended to reduce him to a man buffeted by the forces of history. 

The success of the natural sciences through the eighteenth century encouraged many thinkers to put other subjects on the same pedestal. It was thought that by adopting the methods of science, the humanities could emulate its success. The pioneer of scientific history was Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886), a German aristocrat who spent most of his academic career working for the Prussian crown. He laid down a very simple historical method. All historical materials were to be divided into two categories – primary sources and secondary sources. The former were to consist exclusively of eye-witness reports and contemporary documents. These, said von Ranke, were reliable and the historian should base his work upon them. Everything else was dumped into the secondary-sources box. According to von Ranke, this stuff was useless for history. The problems with this rigid approach are obvious, but the ‘scientific’ flavour of the method found favour in the nineteenth century. It was not long before it was used on the documents in the New Testament. The most famous book ever on the historical Jesus is called simply The Life of Jesus(1835). It was written by a German Lutheran professor called David Strauss (1808 – 74) and translated into English by the famous novelist George Eliot (1819 – 1880). Von Ranke’s methodology informed Strauss’s book on every level and he extremely concerned to pick out the eyewitness kernel from the New Testament. Even this book did not assert that Jesus was a myth, but it did lay a substantial amount of the groundwork by making now-traditional assertions about the unreliability of the Gospels. 

Von Ranke’s method was called source criticism and when applied to biblical studies became known as higher criticism. Before long, radical scholars based at the University of Tübingen and in Holland started to use higher criticism as a method of forwarding their political agenda against the Lutheran and Calvinist Churches. As the stakes was raised, later and later dates were proposed for the Gospels and Paul’s letters began to be ejected from the canon. Soon the higher critics had agreed that there was nothing in the New Testament that met von Ranke’s test of primary evidence. Jesus was lost behind an alleged veil of later Christian interpolation. Still, even as the twentieth century dawned, it was hard to find anyone who would seriously assert that he never lived. 

Hard but not impossible – especially if you extended your search beyond the confines of trained scholars. There were, as ever, amateurs ready to rush in where the experts feared to tread. 

The Origins of the Christ Myth

The earliest writer to definitely assert that Jesus never existed was a German called Bruno Bauer (1809 – 82). He was a theologian who lost his licence to preach due to his radical leftwing politics. His voluminous books were never translated into English but did catch the eye of Friedrich Engels (1820 – 95), the collaborator of Karl Marx (1818 – 83). In Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte und der Synoptiker (1841/42) and later works, Bauer suggested that the story of Jesus had been invented from the whole cloth by the evangelist, St Mark, who had then convinced everyone else of his Gospel’s authenticity. Any earlier references to Jesus were, according to Bauer, interpolations added to documents at a later date. Given the shortcomings of his thesis, it is no surprise that Bauer had little impact on mainstream scholarship. Even later supporters of the Christ Myth, like John M. Robertson, failed to find him convincing. 

In the late-nineteenth century, the term by which atheists preferred to describe themselves was ‘rationalist.’ There were several small societies devoted to the cause and also a publishing house, the Rationalist Press Association, which arranged for several books by German anti-religious writers to be translated into English. Among them was Arthur Drews (1865 - 1935), a professor of philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, whose book The Christ Myth (1911) probably gives us the earliest full length treatment of the thesis in English. Drews wrote that “he had hoped until lately that one of the historians of Christianity would himself arise” to champion the theory that Jesus never existed. He was disappointed and became the first in a long line of amateurs to offer his own ideas which real historians had no interest in promoting. 

Drews, together with the other early-twentieth century Christ Mythologists, based his work on the concurrent history of religions school best represented by The Golden Bough (1890) of Sir James Frazer (1854 – 1941). Frazer and his colleagues tried to find overarching themes that provided a universal framework for human mythology. It seemed logical at the time that this framework could also be used to explain the development of Christianity. Drews also devoted plenty of effort to attacking the traditional sources for the historical Jesus. The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (1912), incidentally translated into English by the rogue friar Joseph McCabe, contains almost all the same arguments about the references to Jesus in Tacitus, Josephus and the rest that are now scattered over the internet. It is remarkable how little Christ Myth arguments have developed over the last one hundred years. If anything, Drews is even more extreme, following the Dutch Radicals such as W. C. van Manen (1842 – 1905) in claiming that all Paul’s letters are forgeries. 

Arthur Drews was the main influence of Britain’s most important early Christ Mythologist, John M. Robertson (1856 – 1933). He was a self-taught journalist and radical politician who held a seat in Parliament for the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1918. While the rest of the country was fighting the First World War, Robertson published a two-volume exposition of his views on Jesus. The first, The Historical Jesus (1916), is an attack on contemporary liberal scholarship for not being radical enough. The second, The Jesus Problem (1917), sets out his own thesis that the Jesus of Christianity is actually a development of some sort of pre-Christian myth. One has to wonder what Robertson’s constituents made of all this literary activity when there was a war on. 

Over in the United States, the Christ Myth flag was being flown by the mathematician, William B. Smith (1850 - 1934). Smith added an additional weapon to the mythologists' armoury, that of reading new meanings into texts that appear to say something quite different. He deployed this method in his last book The Birth of the Gospel (1957), not published until some years after his death, which claimed that Christianity was a product of the Jewish Diaspora and had no real connection to ancient Judea or Palestine. Another American Mythologist was John Remsburg (1848 – 1919) whose book The Christ (1909) claimed that Jesus Christ was a pagan god and that Jesus of Nazareth was completely lost to history. 

The generation of Christ Mythologists represented by Smith and Robertson died out in the 1920s. They had based their work on theories from the history of religions school but scholarship itself moved on, leaving the Christ Mythologists high and dry. They looked like scientists who had based their theories on the ether while the rest of the world got on with discovering quantum mechanics. A few amateurs trudged on. In France, there has always been an anti-clerical party to provide a market for the Christ Myth. P. L. Couchoud’s The Enigma of Jesus (1924) was even translated into English with a forward by none other than Sir James Frazer (himself now something of a historical relic). Couchoud was a medical doctor whose qualification to write about Jesus was that, according to Frazer, he had “written an interesting volume of Oriental wisdom and poetry.” A later French effort, La Fable de Jesus Christ (1967) by G Fan, is notable only for using another standard part of the mythologist’s modus operandi – that of arbitrarily assigning late dates to the sources to impeach their reliability. 

Among English speakers, the torch was kept flickering by minor figures like Archibald Robertson (Jesus: Myth or History? (1949)) and H. Cutner (Jesus: God, Man or Myth? (1950)). The Christ Myth hit rock bottom in 1968 with the publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Crossby John Allegro (1923 – 88). Unlike all the other writers we have met, Allegro was no amateur which makes his book all the stranger. He was one of the scholars who had been instrumental in wresting the Dead Sea Scrolls from the hands of the bureaucrats who had been preventing free access to them. However, his long battle with officialdom took its toll and he became convinced that a conspiracy existed to keep the Dead Sea Scrolls out of the public eye. The other contributing factor to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was the hippy counter-culture of the 1960s with its emphasis on psychedelic drugs and sexual imagery. The book caused a bigger splash in the public imagination than many Christ Myth theories, but it destroyed Allegro’s academic reputation overnight. 

It was not until 1971 that the Christ Myth burst back into life with the work of a polite and erudite Professor of German from Birkbeck College, University of London, called George Albert Wells (1926 - ). In one sense, Wells is a return to the tradition of Drews and Robertson. He is a well read amateur with a fine prose style. Of all the Christ Mythologists, no other is quite so much of a pleasure to read. His atheist credentials are impeccable – he was chairman of the Rationalist Press Association and still gives talks to university humanist societies even now he is in his 80s. But as a proponent of the Christ Myth, he suffers from being almost too honest and has frequently changed his mind on key questions. 

For his first book The Jesus of the Early Christians (1971), Wells took advantage of his fluency in German to read the radical work of Drews, Bauer and others. He had access to all the books that had never been translated into English. The result was a restatement of the early-twentieth century argument that used pagan parallels and interpolation as its main planks. The book was released by a trade publisher and received critical reviews in some academic journals. None of his later works received the same sort of attention. 

Wells’s next book Did Jesus Exist? (1975), accepted some of the criticisms of his earlier work and was based on adopting the most radical possibilities among mainstream scholars. As it is often possible to find someone in the academy who will take an extreme view on one particular topic, Wells could construct his thesis from a mosaic of scepticism to produce the overall conclusion that Jesus never existed. That none of the scholars he based his case on would have agreed meant Wells was no longer being taken seriously by the scholarly mainstream. The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982) dumped the interpolations and pagan parallels in favour of Jesus as a Jewish myth. In it, Wells also launched a fierce attack on previous proponents of the Christ Myth, blaming them for its lack of acceptance. “The books by Fau, [William B.] Smith and Allegro,” Wells wrote, “do much to explain why serious students of the New Testament today regard the existence of Jesus as an unassailable fact.” Wells’s criticism of Smith could apply to almost any Christ Mythologist when he says “It is difficult to produce decisive evidence against scholars who insist on finding hidden meanings in plain statements.” 

For Wells himself, it was too late. He was already tarred with the same brush. The Historical Evidence for Jesus was published by Prometheus rather than a conventional publishing house and ignored by the review editors of academic journals. Nevertheless, he kept going. The Jesus Legend (1986) postulated that Jesus lived in 100BC but Wells dumped that theory for his next book. By the 1990s, he had dropped the Christ Myth altogether. When I met him briefly in 2003, he accepted that Paul knew that Jesus had been crucified by the Romans in Jerusalem. He also believed that the teaching of Jesus that we find in the Gospels had come from a real Galilean preacher. He just didn’t accept that they were one and the same person. I suppose that Wells has gone from believing that there was no historical Jesus to concluding that there were two of them. This is an improvement of sorts. 

The Contemporary Scene 

If G. A. Wells has fallen from the faith, the doyen of today’s Christ Mythologists is Earl Doherty from Canada. Through his book, The Jesus Puzzle (1999), and his website, he has attracted a considerable following among the internet’s atheist community. His work is critiqued in detail later on in this book and so I will content myself with noting that much of what he has to say has been prefigured in the early-twentieth-century works we have discussed in this introduction. Doherty has even accused G. A. Wells of not being radical enough, a position that Wells himself finds novel. 

Earl Doherty is not the only Christ Mythologist active today. Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy produced a surprise bestseller with their breathlessly sensationalist The Jesus Mysteries (1999). Their thesis, if we can dignify it with such a name, is based on the same pagan parallels that even most Christ Mythologists have decided to reject. Freke and Gandy never let their ideas become burdened by the facts, launching themselves on flights of speculation that no serious scholar would even countenance. Even amulet that they use as the picture on their front cover had been denounced as a fake over fifty years ago. The authors were aware of this inconvenient fact but chose not to mention it in their book. They have followed up The Jesus Mysteries with books firmly based on New Age mysticism which take them beyond the bounds of fringe scholarship. 

I cannot pretend that this brief survey of Christ Mythology is exhaustive. Recently, for example, Joseph Atwill has published his Caesar's Messiah (2005) which contains a theory that is far-fetched even by the standards of the Christ Myth. It has also become the foundation of a trashy novel in the same genre as Dan Brown called The First Apostle (2009) by James Becker. Nor can this article even touch on the array of atheist websites on the internet that have sprung up to promote the ideas of Doherty and Wells. However, there are three general themes which I think run through Christ Mythology throughout its history for the last century and a half. The first is that all its proponents, with very few exceptions, as not specialists in the New Testament but amateurs dissatisfied with the scholarly consensus. Christ Mythologists continue to blame real scholars of theological bias for not taking their ideas seriously and scholars continue to ignore them. The second theme is that the arguments against Jesus existing have not changed much. Indeed, the internet has probably revived the few that had thankfully passed away. Finally, the Christ Myth is and always has been a conspiracy theory. It is those who oppose it rather than those who support it who should rightfully be called sceptics. 

The Decline of Witch Trials in Europe

Preliminary considerations

(Citations should appear in the status bar when you pass your mouse pointer over the word [NOTE]. If you cannot see anything, you will need to adjust your security settings to allow Javascript to change the status bar.) 

lice Molland was sent to the gallows at Exeter in 1684 and became the last witch to be executed in England. Scotland closed its account with Janet Horne in 1722 while trials wound down across Europe. However, it would not be until 1782 that the last witch to be legally executed met her fate at Glarus in Switzerland. But by the late 17th century witch trials were already reasonably rare occurrences even in the same localities where, in the earlier part of that century, the greatest hunts had taken place. The crime itself was extinguished in France by royal edict in 1682, repealed in England in 1736 and abolished in Poland as late as 1776. However, the decline in trials and hunts did not necessarily presage a corresponding decline in the belief in witches just as their start did not correspond to any increase. Belief is a notoriously hard thing to measure, but almost all societies appear to have some tradition of witches and fear of magic has been nearly universal. The questions about witches in early modern Europe are not so much why people believed in them at that time and place, but why that belief manifested itself into the hunts and executions. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to examine the reasons that trials for the crime of witchcraft, from being relatively common before 1650, had, across Europe, become a rarity fifty years later and had died out altogether within another century. This rapid decline and then extinction is at least as puzzling as the widespread appearance of the phenomena in the first place at the end of the fifteenth century. Witch trials only became common during the Renaissance and the fiercest hunts took place in the 1620s and 1630s in German speaking areas. Contrary to popular belief, they were not a phenomenon of the Middle Ages. Although magical belief and practice were just as common during this earlier period, they did not often lead to trials, let alone executions. 

Until recently popular views of this subject were confused both by the agendas of rationalists who wanted to find examples of superstition and by neo-pagans seeking their own foundation myth. The “Burning Times”, when, according to the most extreme polemicists, nine million women lost their lives after dreadful torture, has become an essential part of neo-paganism’s self identity. They also had Margaret Murray to assure them that witches really were the survivors of the old religion that neo-pagans were continuing in the present day [NOTE]. Murray’s thesis of the existence of a pre-Christian fertility cult remains influential outside the academy but, despite seeming to have gained some support from Carlo Ginzberg’s work on the benandanti who do appear to have had some of the attributes of a religious cult, it is dismissed by noted modern authority Robin Briggs as having “just enough marginal plausibility to be hard to refute completely, yet is almost wholly wrong.” [NOTE]. This reassessment of the myth of the Burning Times has even reached neo-paganism’s own scholarship [NOTE] which is challenging the idea that the validity of their religion depends on its antiquity. Meanwhile, estimates of the total number of executions over three centuries has shrunk to about 60,000 or so [NOTE] which is of a similar order of magnitude to what the Jacobins managed in just three years of terror during the French Revolution. 

There is very little agreement about the reasons for the end of witch trials and the scholars have tended each to be an advocate for their own ideas based on the study of particular localities rather than trying a more synoptic approach to bring some order to the myriad of available suggestions. It is not even clear whether we are looking for some new causes that helped end witch trials or simply the absence of whatever it was that had started them in the first place. So, if we could identify the conditions that brought about the trials, the subsequent decline might simply be explained by their later disappearance. An example of this would be the religious confusion and violence of the Reformation that had largely worked itself out after the Treaty of Westphalia in the mid-seventeenth century. It has also been widely noticed that hunts tended to take place in areas and periods where central control had largely broken down or during interregnums between regimes. For example, the activities of Matthew Hopkins took place in the chaos of the English Civil War, the Great Hunt in Scotland in 1661 when English justices were replaced, and even the Salem of 1692 outbreak occurred in a temporary vacuum of authority. When control was restored, goes this theory, the witch hunts largely ceased. On the other hand, the original causes might long since have been removed without their effects likewise disappearing so that the decline of witch trials will be brought about by entirely different means. Examples frequently cited are the rise of secular rationalism or social trends that led to the discounting of devilry. It has been suggested that witchcraft simply became too old hat for the intelligentsia of the early Enlightenment to countenance and that they were wont to sneer at such outdated nonsense so as to reassure themselves of their own intellectual superiority. 

A good deal of recent work has concentrated on the social reasons for witchcraft accusations and has looked for the causes of both their rise and fall at a local level. For instance, Alan MacFarlane and Keith Thomas set out a complex web of interactions between vulnerable single women and other villagers motivated by guilt [NOTE]. They suggested that the full implementation of the Poor Laws sufficiently alleviated the situation so that the accusations ceased. While their careful research of depositions suggests they have accurately portrayed the mechanism by which social tensions manifested themselves, I do not think that they have explained why, at that particular place and time, it should be through witchcraft accusations. The era of the witch trials was one of great change and disruption but we must not forget that it was bracketed by the disastrous fourteenth century and the enormous social upheavals of enclosure and the industrial revolution. Any social explanation for witch hunts has to be specific enough to differentiate between the early modern period and those on each side of it, while also being general enough to apply to much of Europe over two centuries. The commonalties of witch beliefs are greater enough to make having lots of different social explanations for different environments unconvincing. For this reason I will be looking for general reasons for the decline that can be applied across Europe rather than seeking an individual cause for each locale. 

By a witch, I mean someone who is believed to have received magical power by some form of diabolical means. The diabolical source of this power is important because the mentality of most Christian intellectuals allowed only the devil as a source of supernatural power, except of course from God, and it led witchcraft to be viewed in much the same way as heresy. The connection between diabolism and magic is found in the documents of the Christian elite including, most famously, the Malleus Malificium(1486) of Kramer and Sprenger, but has an older provenance. The straightforward dichotomy between God and the devil was already present in late antiquity with the labelling of all pagan gods as demons but once they had been seen off, the church took a more sceptical attitude. Belief in magic was considered to be a sin but consequently actually practising it was nothing more than delusion. This attitude is very much an intellectual one and reflects the continuing rejection of most forms of supernatural belief by theologians even when witchcraft was accepted. That is to say that rather than believing in the innate potency of ritual magic or in nature spirits, they insisted that God and the devil were the only possible agencies for magical or miraculous power. This was not just a question of theology but also arose from the Aristotelian paradigm of natural science that had no room for spirits, magic or other such phenomena. We should note, however, that the word ‘magic’ was also used in medieval works like the Speculum Astronomiae of St Albertus Magnus to describe certain legitimate natural practices. Later, the hermetic systems that became popular during the Renaissance did allow for spirits and angels to be summoned so consequently their practitioners were always vulnerable to accusations of devilry. This ambiguity about what was and was not acceptable remained a feature of intellectual debate throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period with both sides using magic to make their own polemical points. In the late seventeenth century we find Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, representing learned science and theology, defending the belief in witchcraft against occultist and radical sectarian John Webster[NOTE]. Webster is keen to deny diabolic involvement in great part because he does not want his own ‘natural magic’ to be confused with witchcraft while Glanville and More are defending the mechanistic new philosophy which, like Aristotelianism, insists all magic must be supernatural - and that can only mean God or the devil. 

At a popular level, beliefs about the supernatural were far more varied and indeed, one of the only commonalties appears to be that they did not involve the devil, at least without prompting from educated interrogators. MacFarlane mentions that the devil hardly figured at all in the depositions to the Essex assizes and in other English cases, he makes few appearances even in confessions [NOTE]. Elsewhere, especially in confessions under torture, diabolic themes are much more prevalent. This seems likely to have been due to the use of torture, together with leading questions, causing the defendants to start echoing the more learned views of their prosecutors. Restrictions in space make a discussion of how witch trials started impossible here, but it seems likely that a key factor was the overlaying of the elite mentality of diabolism and its associated perversions onto the pre-existing magical beliefs and social tensions among the people. This had happened before with the heretics of the Middle Ages when much of what was believed about them came from ancient authorities rather than their actual activities. It was the combination of learned thought with real factors on the ground (as there really were heretics and people claiming magical powers) that turned deadly. 

Many, but by no means all, so-called witches seem to have been healers, wise women and cunning men who previously would have been of no interest to the higher clergy or secular legal authorities. If they were brought before any authority it would tend to be the local church court that would prescribe some penance like walking around the parish wearing sackcloth. The village healers indulged in a wide variety of ritual magic, healing or mediation with spirits but they had little or no idea of any theory attached to these actions. In other words, to the lower orders, magic was a question of practice while to the elite it was something that required explanation with the devil usually the only explanation available. 

The topography of the decline in trials and executions strongly suggests there were two distinct phases. The first phase, which takes place from the first half of the seventeenth century, is a large falling of in the number of accusations and a corresponding decrease in the proportion of capital convictions obtained. Thomas states that the large majority of executions in England had already taken place by 1620 [NOTE] and in Spain the Basque hunt marks the end of large scale prosecutions. Appeals heard by the Parlement of Paris after about 1610 show a large reduction in the number of capital sentences that were confirmed and after about 1630 an equally precipitous drop in the number of cases heard (even though all witchcraft cases at this time were subject to automatic appeal to Paris) [NOTE]. The pattern is repeatedly seen in almost all localities although the time scales are often different. The last hunt in Scotland took place 1661 – 2, large-scale scares continued to claim many lives in parts of Germany through the 1630s but became much rarer thereafter. This is not the end of the prosecution of witches - that continued even with sporadic outbursts of panic - but it is rather the normalisation of the crime as it fades into the background of early modern life. 

The second phase is the complete cessation or abolition of prosecutions for witchcraft and this tends to take place in the eighteenth century. It can either take the form of a gradual petering out; some form of legislative act such as Louis XIV’s decree extinguishing the crime after a poisoning plot panic; or the English Act of Parliament abolishing it in 1736 [NOTE]. Often, it had become impossible to secure a conviction before the crime itself was removed from the statute book. It seems extremely likely that in looking for causes we must treat these two phases as separate events to be handled individually and that consequently we will not find any single reason for the end of witch trials. 

Explaining the decline of witch trials and executions

Under Roman law, to achieve a capital conviction required a full proof consisting of material evidence, witnesses of good standing or a free confession. Torture could be used to extract a confession if sufficient partial proofs had been accumulated but the defendant had to repeat themselves after they recovered and then again in court. Even if they later retracted their confession they were not supposed to be put to the question again [NOTE]. English common law forbade the use of torture in criminal cases altogether unless with the permission of the privy council (effectively meaning only for treason) but had similar systems of evidences and proofs of witchcraft as codified by William Perkins[NOTE]. In the case of witches, material evidence was usually lacking, as the village healers did not go in for the kind of occult paraphernalia that characterised higher magic. It is also hard to see how the social interactions thought to lead to the initial accusation by Thomas and Briggs could give rise to witnesses able to say they had caught the witch casting a spell red handed, let alone flying through the air. That said, when a witness was produced before the dubious English judge Sir John Powell, declaring that the defendant had been seen travelling on her broomstick, his lordship is said to have dryly remarked that there was no law against flying (sadly the provenance of the story is doubtful [NOTE]). In short, to get a capital conviction if the proper procedures were followed was extremely difficult. 

That is not to say that one could not be punished in other ways where the proof was deficient and the grounds of suspicion that could lead to the application of torture were considerably wider. Simply having a bad local reputation could land someone in a lot of official trouble. This was due to an important reform in the legal system in the late Middle Ages when the accusatio was gradually replaced with the inquisitio. To modern ears this immediately summons up images of the Inquisition although it was secular rather than clerical courts and certainly not papal inquisitors that were responsible for the vast majority of fatal witch trials. When before the Inquisition, a confession and willingness to do penance was always supposed to be sufficient to avoid the death penalty for a first offence while no such leeway existed in most secular courts [NOTE]. Instead, iniquisitio was a method of legal proceedings used in all courts outside England which dropped the dependence on an accuser to bring a complaint. The accuser (who could be punished himself if the defendant was acquitted) was replaced by an inquirer whose role was slowly taken over by professional magistrates. This inquirer was expected to investigate matters brought to their attention or the subject of rumour, and was equipped with various powers to enable them to do so. Once they had a case it was presented before a court for consideration and sentence. Provided the procedures were followed and the magistrate was fair and competent, this was a huge improvement over the system of personal accusation and trial by ordeal that preceded it. 

But it is clear that during the great hunts the rules were not followed. Torture was liberally applied and the atmosphere was one of siege where it was felt the circumstances demanded extreme action. It is interesting to note that the Matthew Hopkins episode, where pseudo-torture such as sleep deprivation and ‘pricking’ was used, was the closest example to a full-scale continental witch hunt that occurred in England. The most prolific hunters tended to be lay magistrates and middle ranking clerics of some education while in the higher and appeal courts such as at Paris the conviction rate was much lower, mainly because the sense of panic was absent, torture kept to the statutory limits and evidence examined with a cooler eye [NOTE]. The actual abolition of torture took place too late in most jurisdictions to have had a significant effect on reducing convictions of witches [NOTE]. Neither was it the case that most senior judges denied the very possibility of witchcraft for if they had it is hard to see how they could have countenanced any executions at all. Rather, they were removed from the panic on the ground so they could take a more objective and professional stance. It was not just lawyers who could become more lenient as they became more expert in their subjects. In Geneva, when the devil’s mark became an accepted form of evidence, the city’s surgeons were delegated to carry out the examination. However, no doubt as a result of having seen a huge range of moles, growths and boils on patients of unimpeachable character, they simply refused to be drawn as to whether a particular lump was of diabolic or purely natural origin. This made a capital prosecution almost impossible and only one witch was executed after 1625 [NOTE]. 

So the reduction of witch trials from epidemic to endemic proportions requires little else than the assertion of central control over convictions to ensure the legal forms were being adhered to and that local courts could not execute people without sufficient evidence. This central control could be achieved either through allowing appeals to higher courts (or even making them mandatory) or else by ensuring the proper training and oversight of local magistrates. In particular, the strict controls over the use of torture had to be reinstated, notwithstanding the status of witchcraft as a crimen exceptum (an exceptional crime) in most states, and confessions achieved through torture treated with the necessary scepticism. In either case, this was extremely difficult during times of political upheaval, which explains the prevalence of hunts in the areas of the Holy Roman Empire most affected by the fragmentation of control up to the Thirty Years War and the same situation in France during the Wars of Religion. Although war itself distracted from witch trials as they were no longer the most pressing concern, the feelings of uncertainty and insecurity engendered by possible conflict could increase them. 

At first sight, the abuse of judicial process was not so prevalent in England and a crack down on the use of torture can hardly explain anything in a jurisdiction in which torture was not used. The reasons for the hotspots of witch prosecutions in Essex and Lancashire also remain a mystery now that the theory of proxy persecutions of religious minorities has been called into question. It is ironic that English witch trials faded at much the time that a king who was personally interested in them came to the throne. The North Berwick trials and his publication of Demonologie (1597) suggest that when he became James I of England, he would have been as concerned in his new realm as he was in his old. Perhaps the events surrounding the state opening of Parliament in 1605 focused his mind on more concrete threats to the royal person. The constant danger from Spain that was present during the rule of Elizabeth, as well as fears about the succession, might well have contributed to an atmosphere that encouraged trials. The ascension of James solved the later problem as well as closing off Scotland as a bridgehead for foreign invaders. While the lack of judicial torture in England made witch prosecutions more difficult, the use of juries of laymen probably had the opposite effect. Whereas in the higher continental courts, the entire trial process, including reaching a verdict, was in the hands of professionals, in England a conviction had to be obtained through a jury of commoners (although they were landowners and burghers) who were often more credulous than the judge. The judge did have a considerable ability to influence the juror and, as he was a professional travelling around the circuit, could considerably reduce the number of convictions. In the mid-seventeenth century guides like Robert Filmer’s An Advertisement to the Jurymen of England Touching Witches (1653) and reprints of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witches (1584) were used as guides to the evidence that took a much more sceptical line than Perkins’ effort. But the jury could also reach a verdict of guilty no matter what directions came from the bench as happened during the last successful prosecution in England in 1712 [NOTE]. 

Rationalism and the final end of the witch trials

By 1700, witch trials had become rare things across much of Europe although they remained reasonably common in Poland until 1725[NOTE]. When they did occur, they excited a good deal of interest and usually ended with the liberty of the witch. The position of even the lower judiciary was now that maleficia was extremely hard to prove and it was not acceptable to accept lower standards of evidence simply because the crime was so serious. But from time to time, for one reason or another, a conviction was achieved and the statutory punishment was usually death. There were ways around this, such as the judge in England’s last case personally and successfully petitioning for a royal pardon for the accused in 1712 but even ten years after that the Scots executed Janet Horne [NOTE]. 

Positivist historians have long looked upon the end of witch trials as victory for rationalism over superstition. Michael de Montaigne’s scepticism about reports of witchcraft and the veracity of confessions in his essay On the Lame (1588) is a popular example of Renaissance humanism. However, closer examination of the rationalists has frequently found them to be something of a disappointment for their champions who do not share their mentality. Learned sceptics are often advocates of a mystical or hermetic point of view and are seeking to defend magic from the taint of diabolism rather than claiming that it is impossible. The best known sixteenth century critic of witch trials, Johann Weyer, was a pupil of the great neo-Platonist magician Cornelius Agrippa as well as being a radical Protestant. In his De praestigiis daemonum (1583), Weyer was completely orthodox in his belief in devils and his condemnation of almost any kind of magical practice, but just did not think it was the kind of thing that old ladies got up to. His English contemporary, Reginald Scot appears at first sight to be more conducive to the views of modern sceptics, but on closer examination his thought also turns out to be almost entirely a function of his Puritan theology [NOTE]. A century later John Webster had a remarkably similar outlook as he too is a sectarian and defender of alchemy. The argument was between, on one side Aristotelians and their heirs, the mechanical philosophers, and on the other neo-Platonists and hermetists. As we have seen, it was usually the former, with what we might call the more scientific attitude, who defended belief in witchcraft. This causes a serious problem for traditional explanations for the end of witch trials as there is almost nobody whose particular bundle of motivations and beliefs are entirely comfortable to positivist sensibilities. There certainly is a rise in scepticism as Glanville and More (who was a mechanistic Platonist and thus demonstrates the impossibility of fitting anyone’s beliefs into a neat box) are both keen to combat it but, as far as the positivist is concerned, it is not always the right people being sceptics. Likewise, Cotton Mather manages to receive both execration and exoneration for his conduct in the Salem witch trials and later his work on smallpox immunisation. Even a bona fide freethinker like Thomas Hobbes thought that it was justified to convict someone of witchcraft if they had knowingly tried to carry out malefacia even if they were incapable of it [NOTE]. 

The pamphlet wars give us some idea of the motivations of both sides of the argument. Defenders of the belief in witches, such as Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici (1634), seemed more worried about atheists than the devil. Similarly, in Saducismus Triumphantus (1681), Glanvill did not appear to be so much concerned about witchcraft being a serious threat to life and limb, especially after his careful investigations revealed rather feeble examples, but instead that a denial of the witch was a big step towards the denial of all religion. Even a hundred years later John Wesley had much the same concerns saying “giving up witchcraft is in effect giving up the bible” [NOTE]. Clearly the intention of these writers is not the same as earlier demonologists like Jean Bodin. So, while Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) fits the bill as a the work of old fashioned cleric, seeing devils under the bed, convinced there is a vast diabolical conspiracy that justifies desperate retaliatory measures, many of the learned defenders had a much narrower interest. Ultimately it was these learned men, who simply did not care about old women and their muttered curses, who had to be won around for the prosecutions to stop altogether. What eventually defeated the likes of More and Glanville was the same thing that has invalidated so many of the last ditch defences conducted in the name of religion. There are always a few people who become fixated on a piece of doctrine and insist that the world will be imperilled by giving it up. This happened over the movement of the earth and is happening today over women priests. But once the dogma has in fact been dropped de facto despite the protestations of its defenders, it usually becomes clear that the terrible consequences of which they warned have not come to pass and a new generation has no concerns about amending the writ to conform with practice. Essentially, most people were able to see that the church could sail serenely on despite the loss of an occasional doctrine and that its problems were rather more fundamental than just a matter of believing in witches. 

While the contention of some scholars that there was a wholesale withdrawal of the elite from popular culture seems to me to be thrown into doubt by the enormous unifying effect of the English bible, it is true that certain beliefs can drop out of ‘high’ culture – especially when they become associated with vulgarity or lack of sophistication. In late seventeenth century England this happened to nearly all magical ideas as the New Philosophy became the in-thing. While actually understanding the scientific results of Boyle or Newton was beyond most people, anyone could attack the superstitions of peasants and thus reassure themselves of their membership of the intelligentsia. Just as the learned ideas about the devil were absorbed by the middling classes who then put them into practice by hunting witches, so the New Philosophy, percolating into the middle class consciousness, helped instil them with scepticism. Even those who were willing to accept the existence of witches in principle did not feel they could countenance any specific examples. As Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator in 1711 “I believe in general that there is and has been such a thing as witchcraft; but at the same time can give credit to no particular instance of it” [NOTE]. 

To actually abolish the crime required more than the belief that proof was difficult to obtain. The twin pillars of witchcraft were maleficia and the pact with the devil - both aspects needed to be dealt with. Witchcraft had to be thought impossible (in the case of maleficia) and irrelevant (in the case of the pact with the devil). Belief in magic was largely absent from the elite long before the existence of the devil himself was being denied although he was becoming a spiritual being whose abilities were far more limited than they had been in the past. He could not really do anything miraculous but only foster illusions in the gullible. Eventually, his power became merely the ability to tempt Christians into sin by mental suggestion and so his threat was but a moral challenge. It is also possible that the near complete lack of any solid evidence for devil worship finally began to make itself felt and that consequently fears of a fifth column in the midst of society faded but they would reappear from time to time, most recently in Orkney and Rochdale in the 1991. Neutering Satan and turning him into a more transcendent figure is often ascribed to Protestantism although Luther himself claims he suffered many physical encounters with the devil who threw excrement at him. Whatever the causes, the devil faded from view and this turned the question of what to do about his alleged disciples into a purely religious matter. 

The process was a drawn out one that should perhaps be studied in parallel with the decline of heresy and blasphemy as a crime against the state. This slowly faded as the eighteenth century wore on although there were isolated prosecutions, such as the La Barre case of 1766 in France made famous by Voltaire [NOTE]. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there might simply have been a change in the jurisdiction for witch trials from secular to ecclesiastical courts but during the seventeenth century heresy had gradually ceased to be seen as a crime deserving temporal punishment and the church courts could no longer expect the secular arm to carry out their orders. Even in countries which retained strong church courts, most especially Spain and Portugal, sentences became lighter as the eighteenth century progressed with a return to the medieval idea of penance and reconciliation rather than punishment. The stalemate that had ended the wars between Catholics and Protestants, coupled with the fostering of national over religious identity, meant the ideals of tolerance expressed as early as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) were finally implemented. This is not to say that atheism or devil worship were socially acceptable, but rather that if a man or woman minded their own business and kept their views quiet, nobody would hunt them down. Essentially ones private religion became a private matter and, as long as one did not cause a public disturbance, the public sphere had little interest. 

Conclusion

Witchcraft is an imaginary crime. It has, as Robin Briggs says, a hole in the middle which demonologists were able to fill with their speculations [NOTE]. They were then able to persuade others, including the actual accused, of the veracity of these ideas. As Briggs says, after Alasdair MacIntyre, a rational thought is one that coheres with the thoughts around it and, to the mentality of the demonologists and enough of those around them, their writings made perfect sense. We do not need to call them superstitious charlatans to say that they were wrong. A defendant, accused of a non-existent crime, should expect that any effective legal process will find them not guilty and in witch trials this is eventually what happened. It remained possible that someone could (and perhaps should) be convicted if, believing they have the power, they bewitched a person who then conveniently started to ail, but this will be a very rare case. 

Renaissance magicians never won their argument with the demonologists as they were both swept aside by the intellectual changes of the seventeenth century. The devil found himself relegated to the role assigned for him by Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) as a tempter who must rely on God to effect any real change. Milton also gives us an idea of the penetration of the New Philosophy, although he hardly approves of it, with his running joke about the configuration of the solar system and Raphael’s admonition of Adam for being too curious about the heavens. To the New Philosophers, the rhetorical purpose of a defence of witchcraft was completely different to that of the earlier demonologists, which shows how attitudes had already changed. Perhaps the decline of the trials taking place without the world being overwhelmed by devilry had made the issue seem less urgent. On the same note, once it became clear that most people were already sceptical about witches and this had not led to a collapse of the Christian religion, intellectuals had no further use for witchcraft except for English Tories who wanted to do a bit of Whig baiting. As moral and religious matters were assigned more to the private than the public sphere, a pact with the devil ceased to be a crime against the state and maleficia ceased to be anything at all.

Ecstasy Precursor Shows How to Reduce Alcohol Cancer Risk—And Curb Drunkenness

If you’ve ever had a hangover, you know how bad acetaldehyde’s effects can feel. The chemical, produced when the body breaks down drinking alcohol (ethanol), can make people nauseous and cause their mouths to dry and heads to ache. But most people get off comparatively lightly. Others have a mutation in the gene for the enzyme that normally cleans up acetaldehyde, and when they drink heavily they get more than hung over: They are over 80 times more likely to get mouth, throat and esophageal cancers than people with the normal gene and enzyme.

Now Stanford University researchers have found a novel way to pair two small chemicals to reduce this risk. But one of them, unfortunately, is toxic and also can be used to make the illegal and dangerous drug, ecstasy. So scientists are searching for a safe substitute that can take advantage of this powerful pairing approach, they report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Usually an enzyme called ALDH2 limits the harm acetaldehyde causes by quickly converting it to acetic acid, vinegar’s key ingredient. About 560 million Asians have a mutation in the gene for ALDH2, however, and this mutated enzyme does not work. So acetaldehyde builds up. The result is that such people get more intoxicated and their faces flush strongly when drinking. Acetaldehyde is also ranked as a group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and when it stays in the body longer it raises the cancer risk for these people. “I carry this mutation,” says Stanford University molecular biologist Che-Hong Chen. “So do many of my friends.” Last week, he noted that “now it’s Chinese New Year and everybody’s drinking. If you go to Taiwan you see a lot of red faces, and they continue to drink a lot. That’s actually very dangerous.”

Chen is part the Stanford team, led by Daria Mochly-Rosen, which found that a chemical called safrole can recruit a completely different enzyme to the breakdown task, replacing the ineffective mutant. Chen compares acetaldehyde with a foot, and enzymes to shoes. Normal ALDH2 is a well-fitting shoe but mutant ALDH2 is a broken shoe that cannot fit the acetaldehyde foot at all. The body does make a related shoe, an enzyme known as ALDH3A1, but it is normally much too large to hold acetaldehyde within it. Adding safrole, however, is like stuffing the toe of this new enzyme shoe with paper. This keeps acetaldehyde snugly inside ALDH3A1, giving the enzyme time to break down the alcohol product and move it to its vinegary destiny.

Chen and Mochly-Rosen tested safrole alongside another compound called Alda1, which makes ALDH2 work twice as fast. They gave them to “wild-type” mice with fully working ALDH2 and to mutant mice with a defective version of the enzyme. Some mice got one or other of the two compounds, some received the combo and some were given nothing. The scientists then gave the wild-type animals alcohol equivalent to a human binge-drinking session and the mutants about two thirds as much.

Over the two hours after taking the double-compound “anti-cocktail” wild-type mice behaved almost as if sober. Levels of acetaldehyde and ethanol in the blood dropped. The mutant mice, as expected, were still lethargic several hours after drinking. They did, however, sober up more quickly with the double anti-cocktail than if they were given safrole or Alda1 separately, or nothing at all. Safrole appears to sit in the part of ALDH3A1 that normally acts as a dock for larger molecules, filling the space so the enzyme fits more snugly around acetaldehyde.

This is the first time a problem caused by one broken enzyme has been solved by a molecule working on a different one, notes Thomas Hurley, a biochemist at Indiana University School of Medicine and a specialist in enzyme structure. He says that figuring out that such substitutions can remove harmful compounds is “a critical observation”. As well as reducing cancer risk in Asians with the mutant enzyme, Mochly-Rosen’s team suggests the approach could be used to sober up people who end up in hospital after drinking too much.

They are quick to caution: Safrole cannot be used in people, in part because it is toxic and carcinogenic. Its sale is also restricted because a few chemical changes can turn it into MDMA, the active compound in ecstasy. Chen doubts MDMA itself would work, in case anyone is foolish enough to try it “The requirements for the fit are very specific,” Chen says. “It would also be very dangerous.” (Ten students and two visitors at Wesleyan University in Connecticut were hospitalized this past weekend, two of them in critical condition, after taking a version of MDMA.)

Mochly-Rosen’s lab is working to find other molecules that fit into ALD3A1’s dock, to produce the same acetaldehyde-reducing effect. Chen also underlines that the approach opens up a new general approach to resolve genetic problems. “There are so many other human enzyme or receptor systems where there is a similar situation," he says.