A CAULDRON OF CULTURES

Professor Ronald Hutton reveals how ancient civilisations helped shape early modern beliefs about witches and witchcraft

- Ronald Hutton

Most people will be aware of the notorious traditional superstition that a witch can be detected by throwing her (or more rarely, him) into a body of water. If she floats, then the water has rejected her, and she is guilty. If she sinks, then it has accepted her and, if she can be hauled out before she drowns, she is innocent.

Many fewer will know that the throwing of suspects into water is first recorded in the law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, almost 4,000 years ago. This is just one illustration of a broader truth: that the beliefs concerning witchcraft which underpinned the infamous early modern European witch trials, in which tens of thousands of people were executed, have ancient roots. Without understanding those roots, it is impossible to understand the whole history of attitudes to witchcraft in Europe.

It should be recognized at the start of such an understanding that in the modern world, the term 'witchcraft' has various different meanings and associations, some neutral or positive. The sense in which it is employed here is the one most commonly used in English until recent times, which is also the most negative and hostile, and lethal. It defines witchcraft as the use by human beings of uncanny power, of the kind traditionally classed as magic, to harm other people.

ALLIANCES WITH SPIRITS

The ancient Babylonians certainly believed in and feared such a power, and prescribed the death penalty for those thought to use it. They also developed a large number of spells to counteract it and had an associated belief in evil spirits operating in the natural world, who hated humans and wanted to harm them: entities for which Europeans would later adopt the word 'demons'. In Babylon, it was believed that wicked people made alliances with these spirits in order to torment and destroy their fellow humans.