The Trial: A History from Socrates to O. J. Simpson

(#litres_trial_promo) less sanctified individuals faced serious risks. Demons were so malicious that they sought pleasure not for its own sake but only to lead humans to perdition. Magicians were especially liable to be outsmarted by creatures of the netherworld. Indeed, the mere act of invoking a demon meant that a sorcerer was making a deal with death and a pact with hell.

The stock of ritual magic, once the preserve of only the wisest Christians, was plummeting, and a series of events that occurred south of Paris in 1323 offered a vivid indication of how far it was to fall. They began when shepherds driving their flocks past a crossroads noticed two long straws sticking out of the ground and heard a distant miaow. Local inquisitors, summoned to the scene, began digging. It was not long before their spades hit a chest containing a coal-black cat and several vials of consecrated oil and holy water. Inquiries among local carpenters led to the arrest of one Jean Prévost, who explained that he had been trying to assist a group of Cistercian monks from the nearby abbey. They had hired him, along with a magician called Jean Persant, to help recover the abbot’s stolen treasury and the plan had been to disinter the cat after three days, skin it alive, make three thongs from its hide, and consume the contents of its stomach. Prévost and Persant anticipated that a demon called Berich would then point them in the direction of the thief. The scheme would have raised few eyebrows just a century earlier, but by the 1320s it was looking distinctly outré. The monks were collectively degraded and condemned to lifetime incarceration, while the defendants were burned to ashes. Persant suffered the additional discomfort of having the cat tied around his neck at the stake.

Similar prosecutions proliferated throughout the fourteenth century, but it was reverberations from the longstanding campaigns against heresy in southern Europe and Germany that finally gave the fears the distinctive shape that is nowadays associated with the witch-hunts. The papal Inquisition, though successful in shattering Catharism, had merely scattered many of its most fervent adherents, and as refugees had poured into Germany and the Savoy, a domino topple of dissent had begun that would set off anti-Catholic movements for centuries. Officials increasingly responded by linking their concerns about magical pacts with the allegations of sexual diabolism that the Church had long been levelling against its enemies, and during the mid fifteenth century all the cross-pollination finally bore fruit. In a series of trials across Burgundy and the Savoy, tortured defendants began to confess to a form of mischief so distinctive as to amount to an entirely new offence. They had, they now admitted, flown on beasts and greased sticks to huge assemblies at which Satan had manifested himself in the form of a lascivious creature such as a goat, dog, or monkey. They had repeatedly kissed his rear end. They had also prostituted themselves to demons, raised storms, cast spells against their neighbours, and performed acts against nature until cockcrow. It was a crime whose time had come.