A Paean to Witches
I first read Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft 50 years ago, judging from a bookmark ripped from the corner of a now-defunct Philadelphia daily. I still have the same ratty Citadel paperback, the red backing turned pink and held in place with packing tape. (It’s now available from Kensington Publishing.)
Michelet was perhaps the leading historian of 19th-century France, a man who spent 30 years putting together a multi-volume history of his country – then turned out a book a year compiled from the leftover notes. Satanism was 1862’s contribution and, from all accounts, his most personal, decidedly eccentric, piece of work. For long is was also his only title in print in English.
What is history? That’s been a topic of academic debate over at least the last half century, during which time a trend developed away from chronicling the doings of kings and other big boys and toward finding out what the “real people” were up to.
Using this approach, Michelet was well ahead of the curve. Satanism and Witchcraft is a study of why and how the peasants of the middle ages (and later) turned to the Devil to relieve the misery of daily life. Beset by brutal and arbitrary feudal lords, who owned their bodies, their last hope was to keep some hold on their souls.
More surprisingly, the book is an extended paean to the place of women in the world, an enlightened view of feminism written at a time when women had fallen to their social nadir. Michelet also carries French anti-clericalism to its most extreme, excoriating the Church for legislating the degraded life of the masses, and its minions for their uncontrolled and implicitly sanctioned licentiousness.
Michelet is by no means a dry, “objective” historian. He takes passionate sides on all the issues, flailing those he sees as guilty, exalting the innocent. Despite occasional sentimentalism and florid asides, he’s saved from petty partisanship by two sterling traits – his mastery of primary sources and a magnificent style (delightfully rendered by translator A.R. Allinson). This is a book you can read for the sheer flow of the words.
Much of Part I reads like a novel, as Michelet invents a typical peasant wife who escapes her lonely humiliation through friendship with a local nature spirit. Later, however, this spirit grows in size and power to become a manifestation of the Devil, manipulating her into a feared witch-force and rival to the castle’s lady.
Later, turned on and turned out, she takes to the heath to plot her revenge, but with time matures into a respected wonder-worker of health as she gains knowledge of nature.
Now she has caught the Church’s jealous attention and must be put down – arrested, tortured and burned, but not before she has thrown her own belief in her judges’ faces, admitting to her power and consort with Satan.
Michelet here pits the life force of Nature against the death force of the Church. He does not exalt evil – far from it – but rather the human urge to salvage hope from the midst of despair. There’s some confusion as to what Michelet believes to be her imaginings, what her actual doings. I think, at bottom, he refuses to make the distinction. He documents a woman’s place, not her particulars.
Part II deals mostly with the most famous sorcery trials of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as those at Loudun (the basis of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon and Ken Russell’s fullest and most intense film, The Devils). Michelet ends with a horrifying study of Charlotte Cadiére, a naïve, possibly schizophrenic ecstatic who becomes the spiritual and sexual victim of a reprobate Jesuit. Again, Michelet takes sides, but the case he makes is all too miserably convincing.
No, this isn’t a book for everyone, and it’s certainly not a manual to comfort satanists. In the guise of an historical treatise, it’s an impassioned plea for the value of decency, for woman as spiritual healer, and for the unconstrained human soul.
by Derek Davis