Read Online Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler - Free Book Online Page B

urge to rehabilitate two oppressed classes—women, and the medieval peasantry,” but there was no evidence behind it.
    Next, Cohn took on the idea of witchcraft as the survival of a fertility cult. He wrote that Frazer’s The Golden Bough “launched a cult of fertility cults,” and in 1921, when Murray’s theory of the Dianic cult appeared, “the influence of The Golden Bough was at its height.” He was completely contemptuous of Murray. Because she was sixty years old when she put forth her theory, he was convinced that her mind was rigidly “set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould.” (In fact, throughout the book Cohn uses age as a reason to dismiss a scholar or an idea.) He argued—like many other scholars—that Murray could not prove the existence of an organized cult. But his main criticism was that she eliminated the fantastic features of the witch trial reports and gave a false impression that realistic accounts of the sabbat existed. If there are parallels between the descriptions of the sabbats and fertility rites, they are, he observed, meaningless. For him the sabbats were a complete delusion, a fiction. He rebuked such historians as Elliot Rose and Jeffrey Burton Russell for still being under Murray’s influence despite their criticism of her work; and he expressed dismay that Murray’s work had “stimulated the extraordinary proliferation of ‘witches’ covens’ in Western Europe and the United States during the past decade, culminating in the foundation of the Witches International Craft Association, with headquarters in New York.”
    Cohn’s main point was that no story with “impossible elements” should ever be accepted as evidence. “Nobody has ever come across a real society of witches,” he wrote adding:
    Taken as a whole, that tradition itself forms a curious chapter in the history of ideas. Over a period of a century and a half, the non-existent society of witches has been repeatedly re-interpreted in light of the intellectual preoccupations of the moment. The theories of Jarcke and Mone were clearly inspired by the current dread of secret societies; that of Michelet, by his enthusiasm for the emancipation of the working classes and women; those of Murray and Runeberg, by the Frazerian belief that religion originally consisted of fertility cults; those of Rose and Russell, maybe, by the spectacle of the psychedelic and orgiastic experiments of the 1960s. 10
    According to Cohn, scholars had simply been “grossly underestimating the capacities of human imagination.” He wrote that the many “fantastic” notions about witches had a long history in folk beliefs—that they practiced evil, that they changed shape and flew through the air—but were never significant until new Inquisitorial procedures began to investigate ritual magic. At that point, small-scale trials of individuals accused of consorting with demons took place. These were minor affairs, and most of the accused were priests. It was not until all parts of the “fantasy” were put together and believed by those in authority that the witch persecutions could really begin. For most peasants, witches were simply those—mostly women—who harmed by occult means. The other notion, that witches were members of a secret sect headed by Satan, came from educated Church leaders and Inquisitors when the Inquisitors themselves had become convinced of the reality of the sabbat and nocturnal flights. (Murray, as we have seen, never considered the nocturnal flights to be real, but believed them to be shamanistic visions similar to those reported by religious visionaries around the world.)
    At the end of Europe’s Inner Demons Cohn, unfortunately, adopted, whole hog, the most popular witchcraft religion of our day—psychiatry. The origins of witchcraft in the Middle Ages lie in our unconscious, he