Witchcraft

Use in the book

Instruments and apparent masters

Burton gives witches and magicians a dedicated subsection among the causes of melancholy. Its opening follows a discussion of what the Devil can do by himself and turns to what he can do through human “instruments.” Yet these instruments are not passive objects. Burton quotes Erastus’s claim that witches provoke harms the demon would otherwise not have committed, and presents revenge and desire as motives. In this argument, the human practitioner incites and the demon performs. The provocative comparison that the instruments may be worse than their master, “if it be possible,” concerns malice and instigation, not a claim that they possess greater supernatural power.

Burton then acknowledges opposition. Some deny witches altogether; others deny their harmful capacity. He places Weyer, Scot and several other writers under this broad heading, before setting against them what he calls the majority of lawyers, theologians, physicians and philosophers. His compressed list should not be expanded into an identical doctrine held by every named writer. The two denials are already different positions. The classical verse about laughing at magic terrors and nocturnal ghosts supplies a satirical gesture, while the subsequent catalogue supplies the contrary authorities.

Within the account he proceeds to give, the distinction between magicians and witches turns on service. Conjurers command “in shew at least.” The quoted explanation says that demons allow themselves to seem compelled by exorcisms and conjurations in order to keep their practitioners in impiety. Witches, by contrast, belong to the class that is commanded. Burton commends King James’s account here, then names further kinds without defining a complete system of mutually exclusive professions. His central explanation makes apparent magical mastery itself an instrument of deception.

The catalogue and its limits

The ensuing catalogue ranges from storms and compelled love to illness, impaired fertility, airborne journeys, changelings, protection in combat, and changes of appearance. Particular stories have particular forms of support. The enchanted cap of a Swedish king is a received northern story; Scheretzius’s flying-goat account is presented as his confident report of interviews and confessions. Burton’s citations and assertions show how he assembles his case. They do not turn these accounts into independently established events.

He also interrupts the catalogue with limits. Following Lipsius and Bodin, he denies ordinary magicians access to certain kinds of money, documents, judicial decisions and royal counsels. Bodin’s distinction between lesser and higher spirits reserves some effects to the latter. Burton then entertains, with “peradventure,” extraordinary figures who might seem to escape ordinary limits, only to call such impostors rare or nonexistent and describe their eventual abandonment by the Devil. “The vulgar sort” cannot perform these exceptional feats. The sequence is more qualified than an unbroken declaration that witches can do anything.

The argument returns to the book’s medical subject with the claim that practitioners can cause or cure diseases, including melancholy. Burton invokes Paracelsus’s reported experience of people “bewitched into melancholy,” Daneau’s testimony, a young man said to have lost his reason after eating a witch’s cakes, and a consultation in which an illness was judged partly magical and partly natural. The last distinction is especially revealing: magical and bodily explanations need not exclude one another within this historical account. The earlier discussion has already allowed a demon to act through a humour, making black bile the immediate bodily cause.

The subsection closes with a decisive qualification about the means. Spells, charms, characters and unintelligible formulas have no power in themselves; the Devil uses them to deceive his followers and keep them loyal. This is a claim about where the power lies, not a withdrawal of the preceding belief in demonic action. Its grammar names the ceremonial words and signs. It should not be silently enlarged into a claim that every substance in the earlier catalogue is physiologically inert. Love potions receive further, disputed explanations elsewhere.

Melancholy as an explanation of witchcraft

The discussion of old age soon changes the direction of explanation. Instead of asking how witches produce melancholy in others, Burton reports a theory in which melancholy helps explain what supposed witches believe about themselves. He associates the condition especially with old women who are poor, solitary and held in low esteem. Weyer, Porta, Molitor and others are then said to attribute everything witches supposedly do to imagination and melancholy. The circumstances named here matter: age, isolation, poverty and social contempt enter the account alongside bodily humour.

The disputed feats include harming cattle, flight, transformation, bodily transport, meetings and intercourse with the Devil. Sleep-inducing potions, natural causes and the Devil’s cunning appear together in the proposed explanation. Weyer’s formulation, as Burton gives it, is sharp: the women think they are witches and can do harm, but do not. The opponents do not deny that witches can be melancholy. They deny that corrupted imagination alone explains the deception and effects. The disagreement concerns the sufficiency of an explanation, not a simple choice between melancholy and the supernatural.

The later chapter on imagination develops more than one possibility. The “witch-ridden” sleeper supposes an old woman is sitting heavily on the body; Burton instead locates the disturbance in humours troubling imagination. Tales of witches’ journeys are attributed by the cited writers to imagination and the Devil’s illusions, with the marginal account leaving their bodies insensible. But another passage asks how one person’s forceful imagination might alter another person’s spirits, invoking bewitched children among its examples. Imagining an event and supposedly affecting another body through imagination are different claims, even though both belong to this chapter.

Feared bewitchment and natural explanation

Elsewhere, bewitchment is what the sufferer fears rather than the cause Burton accepts. One person fears all old women as witches and treats nearby people and animals as malificiated, or affected by witchcraft. Others suspect enemies and even their closest friends of bewitching, possessing or poisoning them. In the account of women’s symptoms, forespoken means cursed or bewitched. These descriptions present beliefs within a condition of distress; they do not establish the guilt of the people suspected.

Burton then proposes reassurance through explanation. In his judgment, people should be shown that these symptoms arise from “naturall and inward causes,” rather than devils, bewitchment or abandonment by God. Knowing the causes may help them avoid the effects or at least endure them more patiently. He subsequently explains some supposed apparitions through poor sight, fear, lack of sleep and inadequate diet, and commends Scot for exposing sleight of hand. The writer listed among opponents in the witchcraft controversy can thus become a useful authority in this local account. Burton’s explanation of these symptoms does not amount to a withdrawal of every demonic cause discussed elsewhere.

Healing and permission

At the opening of the second partition, the question becomes practical and theological. Reports of village cunning people and “white-witches” offer relief from bodily and mental infirmities. Burton rehearses claims for such cures and the Devil’s medical knowledge, then explicitly grants the premise for the next question: assuming these cures can be effected, is it lawful to seek them? He also says that God permits such effects. Divine permission for an event does not settle the separate question of whether the patient may lawfully seek the practitioner’s help.

The argument attributed to Paracelsus makes relief decisive: why should a person rescued from a ditch care whether the rescuer is friend or enemy? Burton answers this position through contrary authorities and the prohibition on doing evil for a good result. His conclusion refuses the cure on religious grounds even if the physical benefit is granted. The word white therefore marks a reputedly beneficial practice, not Burton’s moral permission to consult its practitioner. This is his historical theological judgment, not guidance about present-day medical care.

The same distinction returns in the love-melancholy cures. Burton first labels potions, bindings, signs and charms unlawful, records authorities who say a magically caused condition requires a magical remedy, and then reiterates that the practice is not permitted. In the jealousy discussion he again reports proposed potions, spells and charms for enforcing fidelity, before calling such devices mostly impious and absurd. Listing a remedy and recommending it are distinct acts in his writing.

Other settings

Love gives witchcraft language another range. Beauty itself becomes “a witch, a charm.” Burton introduces explanations of how beauty bewitches “as some hold,” then affirms the poet’s description of love’s power to change us. Heliodorus is reported to argue that “love is witch-craft”; Ficino supplies an account of attraction through repeated mutual gazing; Varius describes the influence of one eye upon another’s bodily spirits. These passages connect the language of captivity to proposed physical means of influence.

A different account follows in the subsection on philters. When Olympia sees the woman said to have enchanted Philip, she recognizes beauty, upbringing and accomplishments as the true charms. A literary speaker then boasts of kissing and embracing as her only philter, while the next passage reports Erastus’s statement that witches claim the power to compel love and hatred. The sequence gives different explanations of attraction, not a uniform assertion of an external witch’s intervention.

Witch can also be an insult. In the contrast between an admirer and an unsympathetic observer, the observer calls the woman “witch, divill, hag,” while the lover calls her an idol, angel and goddess. The passage displays opposed judgments of the same person rather than establishing that she practises magic.

The related controversy over intercourse with spirits is likewise a debate: Burton begins conditionally, “if those stories be true,” before giving denials and contrary testimonies.

Witchcraft language is not confined to the dedicated subsection. Boissard’s account of bewitchment-induced sleeplessness precedes Burton’s turn to ordinary causes such as heat, dryness and anxiety. In religious melancholy, witches and Apollo’s prophetic women enter a polemical challenge to supposed ancient predictions of Christ. That challenge concerns the authenticity and source of the claimed revelations; it is not a denial that people claim inspiration. Nor does it erase the preceding positive account of contemplation and “divine melancholy.” These local changes of subject and stance prevent a single formula from explaining every occurrence.

The final treatment of despair gives the vocabulary another argumentative role. “Witchers and Conjurers” appear within an imagined self-accusation: the sufferer thinks that he has given his soul to the Devil by “compact, band, and obligation,” a pact or binding undertaking. The reply turns to unwanted thoughts, resistance and consent. Burton distinguishes thoughts forced upon a sufferer from a settled will, and even allows for partial assent that is afterwards rejected. He also offers the assurance of pardon where sin has occurred, under the stated condition of repentance. The accusation belongs to the case being answered, not an established judgment that the sufferer has practised witchcraft.

Related entries

Melancholy, for humour, disease and disputed causes; Imagination, for internal images and proposed effects on other bodies; Spirits, for bodily spirits, demons and the limits of agency; Charms, for formulas, signs and their supposed efficacy; Philters, for love potions and competing causal accounts; Jealousy, for the rejection of magical fidelity remedies.

Related articles and topics: Fascination; Incubus; Characters; Ligation and ligature; Enthusiasm.

Places to read

1. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraph 2Figurative bewitchment by the desire for fame. The object of captivity is ambition, not a stated act of sorcery.
2. Democritus Junior to the ReaderControversialists have conjured up more spirits than they know how to lay. This is a related figurative use of magical practice for intellectual contention.
3. The nature and operation of spiritsDemonic action is explained through bodily humours. Burton leaves the precise mode, “obsession, or possession, or otherwise,” undetermined.
4. Of Witches and Magicians, how they cause MelancholyThe central sequence: human instruments, opposed authorities, apparent command and service, the catalogue of powers, its limits, disease reports, and the final denial of intrinsic power to spells and signs.
5. Natural causes and old ageMelancholy and imagination explain alleged witchly feats in one reported account. Its opponents reject imagination alone as sufficient.
6. The power of imaginationSeparate the witch-ridden sleeper, imagined journeys with demonic deception, and the proposed action of one person’s imagination upon another’s spirits.
7. Symptoms of melancholyFear of witches, surrounding people and animals deemed bewitched, and suspicion of enemies or close friends are reported as the sufferer’s beliefs.
8. Symptoms in women and their immediate causesForespoken means cursed or bewitched; the later explanation substitutes natural internal causes for feared bewitchment and divine abandonment.
9. Causes of apparent visionsSight, fear, sleep loss, fasting and contrived appearances enter the explanation; Scot is commended for exposing sleight of hand.
10. Lawful and unlawful means of cureBeneficial magic, white witches, and the distinction between a cure’s alleged possibility and the permissibility of seeking it.
11. Sleep and wakingReported magical sleeplessness is followed by ordinary bodily and emotional causes.
12. The range of loveConditional claims and opposed authorities concerning intercourse with spirits; a continuation for the Incubus and Spirits entries.
13. Beauty’s powerBeauty is a lodestone, witch and charm: a series of images for its attractive force.
14. Visual fascinationLove as witchcraft is connected with attributed theories of mutual gazing and bodily spirits.
15. Philters and other unlawful meansBeauty and accomplishment explain Philip’s supposed enchantment; literary boasting and witches’ claims follow as distinct kinds of evidence.
16. The lover’s distorted judgmentWitch as a hostile label in an observer’s speech, opposed to the admirer’s praise.
17. Remedies for love melancholyMagical means are catalogued within an explicit prohibition; the marginal loss of sexual potency is a distinct claim from the body’s discussion of love.
18. Prevention of jealousyPotions, spells and charms proposed by others to enforce fidelity are rejected as mostly impious and absurd.
19. Religious melancholyBeneficial contemplation, abused ecstasy, demonic prompting and disputed prophetic claims are distinguished across the sequence.
20. Comfort against despairThe sufferer’s alleged pact is followed by distinctions between involuntary thoughts, partial assent later rejected, settled consent and pardon.

In this edition

The original and modern columns preserve different layers of evidence. “Witches” remains “witches,” while the surrounding modern explanation clarifies such expressions as “in shew at least” as “at least in appearance.” “White-witches” remains visibly qualified by the reported name. “Witch-ridden” is retained beside incubus so that the later explanation can show how the sufferer’s belief differs from Burton’s account of its cause.

In the symptoms passages, “malificiated” becomes “bewitched” and “forespoken” becomes “cursed or bewitched.” In the despair passage, “Witchers” becomes “witches” and “band” becomes “bond.” These clarifications do not remove the framing verbs of fear, thought and reply that identify whose belief is being reported.

One important reading is provisional. The original prints ex parte, literally “in part.” The modern column reads an implicit or explicit pact, following the editor’s suggested repair to ex pacto. The interpretation suits the described relationship of service, but ex pacto must not be quoted as the wording printed in this source.

Another distinction concerns attribution. At the passage Burton names “Libanius”; the supplied editor identifies the related passage in Libavius’s work on bleeding corpses and describes Burton’s alterations. That identification belongs to this edition’s apparatus. The lexicon has checked the supplied passage and note, without claiming a new collation of Libavius or of every work in Burton’s extensive lists.

The modern rendering is useful for resolving historical vocabulary, but it is not a second independent witness to the truth of the reported events. In particular, clearer English does not change a quotation, confession, conjecture or attributed theory into Burton’s unqualified conclusion.

Beauty as a witch

Printed “witch” (English). Citation key: witch.

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording: witch

A personification of beauty’s captivating force, beside the images of a lodestone and a charm.

Source: original body

Bewitched by fame

Printed “Bewitched” (English). Citation key: bewitch.

Printed form, Source wording, Modern rendering: Bewitched

Captivated by the desire for reputation; a figurative use within the account of ambitious writers.

Source: original body

Layer: paired modern body

Aligned context: Bewitched by this desire for fame

Charmer

Printed “Charmers” (English). Citation key: charmer.

Printed form, Source wording: Charmers

One who employs charms, named among the overlapping kinds of sorcerer in the subsection.

Source: original body

Compact band and obligation

Printed “compact, band, and obligation” (English). Citation key: compact, band and obligation.

Printed form, Source wording: compact, band, and obligation

A pact or binding undertaking. Here it is part of the sufferer’s self-accusation, subsequently answered through the distinctions of unwilling thought and consent.

Source: original body

Also find under: band (exact attested component; English component; bond or binding undertaking in the sufferer’s self-accusation); bond (English component meaning; English component; bond or binding undertaking in the sufferer’s self-accusation)

Conjurer

Printed “Conjurers” (English). Citation key: conjurer.

Printed form, Source wording: Conjurers

One who summons or adjures spirits and appears to command them; the spirits’ apparent obedience serves their deception.

Source: original body

Enchanter

Printed “Inchanters” (English). Citation key: enchanter.

Printed form, Source wording: Inchanters

A practitioner of enchantment, named among the overlapping kinds of sorcerer; this list does not define a separate exclusive class.

Source: original body

Ex parte

Printed “ex parte” (Latin). Citation key: ex parte.

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording: ex parte

Literally “in part” in the supplied apparatus’s gloss. The printed phrase is retained; the modern column provisionally reads an implicit or explicit pact, following the suggested ex pacto.

Source: original body

Modern rendering: implicit or explicit pact

Edition note: provisional editorial emendation; not direct lexical translation

Layer: paired modern body

Qualification: The printed ex parte is glossed in part in the apparatus; implicit or explicit pact is a full-context rendering incorporating the conjectural ex pacto and surrounding modifiers.

Forespoken

Printed “forespoken” (English). Citation key: forespeak.

Printed form, Source wording: forespoken

Cursed or bewitched, as the distressed sufferers believe themselves to be.

Source: original body

Love as witchcraft

Printed “witch-craft” (English). Citation key: witchcraft.

Citation key, Modern rendering: witchcraft

Printed form, Source wording: witch-craft

An explanation attributed to Heliodorus, connected with attraction through eyes and other bodily openings; the surrounding accounts also invoke bodily spirits.

Source: original body

Layer: paired modern body

Aligned context: love is witchcraft

Magician

Printed “Magicians” (English). Citation key: magician.

Printed form, Source wording: Magicians

A practitioner of supernatural arts who appears to command spirits in Burton’s local division; apparent command need not be actual mastery.

Source: original body

Malificiated

Printed “malificiated” (English). Citation key: malificiate.

Printed form, Source wording: malificiated

Affected by witchcraft or sorcery. Here the sufferer regards surrounding people and creatures as bewitched and threatening.

Source: original body

White witch

Printed “white-witches” (English). Citation key: white witch.

Printed form, Source wording: white-witches

A reputed practitioner of beneficial magic or counter-magic, consulted for bodily or mental infirmities. The name does not imply Burton permits consultation.

Source: original body

Witch

Printed “Witches” (English). Citation key: witch.

Printed form, Source wording: Witches

A human practitioner credited with supernatural arts. In the central account, witches serve spirits; elsewhere witch is an insult or an image for beauty’s power.

Source: original body

Witch as an insult

Printed “witch” (English). Citation key: witch.

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording: witch

A hostile label in an unsympathetic observer’s description of a woman, opposed to the lover’s praise of her.

Source: original body

Witch-ridden

Printed “Witch-ridden” (English). Citation key: witch-ridden.

Printed form, Source wording: Witch-ridden

Oppressed in sleep as if ridden or crushed by an assailant. Burton explains this particular experience through humours disturbing imagination.

Source: original body

Witchcraft as a claimed cause

Printed “witch-craft” (English). Citation key: witchcraft.

Printed form, Source wording: witch-craft

Sorcery alleged to cause the condition for which a magical remedy is proposed. The cure discussion ultimately refuses permission to use it.

Source: original body

Witchers

Printed “Witchers” (English). Citation key: witch.

Printed form, Source wording: Witchers

An alternative plural for witches. It occurs in the sufferer’s imagined accusation of having given the soul to the Devil.

Source: original body