European Witchcraft

Around the year 906, Regino of Prüm copied into his canon law the passage now called the Canon Episcopi: women who believe they ride at night with the goddess Diana across vast distances. The early church did not burn them — it called their flights dreams and delusions.

Five centuries later the tone curdled. The Malleus Maleficarum — the Hammer of Witches, printed in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer — systematized accusation, torture and confession. It became the second-best-selling book in Europe for two hundred years, after the Bible.

Then came the trials. At Pendle in 1612, ten souls were hanged on the testimony of a child. In 1662, in Scotland, Isobel Gowdie confessed freely and in astonishing detail: flight through the air, the Queen of the Fairies, feasts and dances — her own words survive, unprompted by torture.

Behind the hunts stood an older, quieter craft: the cunning folk. Village healers who charmed warts, found lost cattle, mixed herbs by moonlight and were paid in bread and wool. European witchcraft was, before anything, a technology of survival.

In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, arguing the trials had destroyed not heretics but an organized pagan religion surviving from pre-Christian times. Historians have largely refuted her — yet her hypothesis remade the modern imagination of the craft.

In 1899 Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, gathered from Italian stregheria: the story of Aradia, daughter of Diana, sent to earth to teach witchcraft to the oppressed. A century later it seeded entire traditions.

The Canon Episcopi, the Malleus, Gowdie's confession, Murray, Leland — all are public domain, all readable tonight in the digital archives. The old craft asks one thing of its students: read what was burned, and remember.