Many people have been wrongly executed for practicing witchcraft — from ancient times to the present day. But were all of the accused innocent? Malcolm Gaskill addresses this question in the following excerpt from Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction.
In 2004, workmen digging in Greenwich, near London, uncovered a sealed stone bottle that rattled and splashed when they shook it. It was sent to a laboratory where X-rays revealed metal objects wedged in the neck, suggesting that it had been buried upside down, and a scan showed it to be half filled with liquid. Chemical analysis confirmed this was human urine containing nicotine and brimstone. When the cork was removed, scientists discovered iron nails, brass pins, hair, fingernail parings, a pierced leather heart, and what they believed might be navel fluff.
What had gone through the mind of whoever buried that bottle? Without a doubt it was a magical device, dating from the first half of the 17th century; less well preserved examples have been found throughout England. But whether it was intended as protection against witchcraft of the means to reverse a spell, we’ll never know. The heart-charm suggests other possibilities: perhaps love magic, or even that the user had wished harm on someone. Sticking pins in pictures and models is part of witches’ stock-in-trade. In 1962, parishioners at Castle Rising in Norfolk discovered human effigies and a thorn-studded sheep’s heart nailed to their church door. Presumably this was not just a blasphemous insult but a specific physical attack. If so, it belonged to an ancient tradition of popular maleficium — real in intent if not in effect, but hard to recover historically because of its covert nature.
We tend to see witchcraft as a delusion, a non-existent crime, because we reject its mechanics. This is why many believe executed witches to have been innocent. Yet we still punish those who attempt crimes but fail, and a legal distinction exists between mens rea and actus reus: the thought and the deed. Surely some early modern people must have tried to kill with magic; it would be incredible if they hadn’t. Seen in context, was attempted murder by witchcraft not a crime, just as a woman devoted to Satan was an apostate even if she had never actually met him? There was a lot of magic in our ancestors’ lives, and positive forces could be turned into negatives. Plus there is an exception to the rule that maleficium is hard for historians to recover: widespread counter-magic against malefic witches. The definition of witchcraft depended not on its inherent nature but on how it was applied. In 1684, one Englishman noted the irony that folk ‘often become witches by endeavouring to defend themselves against witchcraft’.
In the ancient world, too, aggressive magic was more than just something the virtuous suspected of the wicked: it was a recognized source of personal power, albeit unlawful if used against a blameless opponent. From Mesopotamia, not only do illicit antisocial spells survive, but descriptions of official ceremonies in which images of assailing witches were burned. Excavations at Greek and Roman sites turn up curses scratched on scraps of lead known as defixiones. Some contain cloth or hair; occasionally they were buried in graves to inflict a deadening effect on victims. An example from Messina targeted ‘the evil-doer’ Valeria Arsinoe; ‘sic