Cover image: The Devil talking to a gentleman and a judge. Woodcut, 1720. Source: inews.co.uk
One might easily get confused by the variant terminology denoting men in connection with magic. It is a popularly held belief that a witch is inherently a woman and that men of the same status should be called differently, such as he-witches and man-witches, terms that began to be used in the 17th century.
Although these names did not really stick around, another term emerged during the Scottish witch trials around the same period: warlock. This appears to be the most agreed-upon version to refer to the male counterparts of witches. However, its use is not without controversy, as the term comes from the Old English word waerlogge meaning traitor, enemy – aspects not necessarily associated with witches.
Today, probably the most known and used terms are mage, sorcerer, and wizard; however, these words conjure up figures like Harry Potter and Gandalf, whose practice has totally different roots than that of the witches. It seems that there is no unanimity as to what to call witches who are not female, which makes it all the more difficult to penetrate the thickening mist surrounding the issue.
Interestingly, works on witchcraft, demonologies and influential thinkers during the witch craze did not create the witch–woman paradigm. In fact, there is much written evidence of men believed to be just as witchy as women. For example, as Alan Kors and Edwards Peters note in Witchcraft in Europe, Pope Alexander VI writes in a bull to the Inquisitor of Lombardy that “we have learned that in the province of Lombardy many people of both sexes give themselves over to diverse incantations and devilish superstitions in order to procure many wicked things.”
Witches were thought to be corrupted by copulation with the Devil, and it seems that men could be corrupted in the same way too, as witchcraft prosecutor Nicholas Remy claims: “He [the Devil] fabricates some fair and delectable body and offers it for a man’s enjoyment.” This goes to show that these people thought that men’s susceptibility to devilish practices was not linked with homosexuality.
In fact, these he-witches were considered to be manly enough – a point proved by Thomas Cooper in his 1617 work entitled The Mystery of Witchcraft, in which the author claims that men are cut out for witchcraft, since by creation they are to command and their ambitions, along with the Devil’s seduction, make them want to be masters of the supernatural. It is very interesting to see that while in the case of women it was their weakness and easily temptable nature that were emphasized to account for their corruption, in the case of men it is their superiority and power to control.
Even the atrociously misogynistic witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum (also known as The Hammer of the Witches) by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger acknowledges that men could also be witches and includes a full description of the type of witchcraft practiced by men. Terminology-wise, many argue that maleficarum (best translated to female witches) is the feminine plural noun of maleficum, although it is known that Latin prefers to use the male plural noun to refer to a group of both men and women. However, on reading further than the title, it is found that both forms of the noun maleficum appear throughout the text, as Lara Apps and Andrew Gow point out in their book entitled Male Witches in Early Modern Europe.
When it comes to witch trials, however, it is mostly the horrible fate faced by the accused women that is most remembered. When, in fact, as Brian P. Levack writes in his 2006 textbook on witch trials: “there was not a law that excluded men from trials since they were equally regarded as being able to use magic to affect others.” And they did face such trials too. While it is true that the estimated ratio of women and men accused of witchcraft in England is 90% to 10%, other areas show different demographics.
In Iceland, for example, it is the other way around, as 90% of the witches were actually male. Russia also shows surprisingly different numbers compared to the West, as the number of men tried for witchcraft accounted for 75%. The same goes for Normandy, Estonia, and Burgundy, where men accused of witchcraft outnumbered the women.
But if this is so, how come we rarely hear about male witches? Where did they go in history? It appears that retrospective focus is put so much on females that radical feminist Mary Daly coined witch hunts a “woman’s holocaust.” Even the famous Salem witch trials are mostly remembered to have been about women, when, in fact, among the 19 executed people, 6 were men. The tendency of respective studies is to either ignore executed male witches by considering them unintended casualties of the witch craze, or to declassify them by presenting them as completely different from women witches.
A commonly held view – also pointed out by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow in their aforementioned book – is that male witches differed from female witches in that they were not evil and did not practice diabolic magic. They are also considered to have been mainly accused because of their connection to female witches. The authors then go on to present two cases of male witches, namely that of John Samond from Essex and Chonrad Stoeckhlin from Oberstdorf, who stand against the declassification of male witches.
John Samond was first accused in 1560 of bewitching two people to death. After his indictment, he was tried multiple times for witchcraft until he was hanged in 1587. While it is true that his wife was also accused of witchcraft in 1572, John had a reputation as a witch long before his wife was considered.
Conrad Stoecklin was a respected horse wrangler and healer. His healing abilities and claimed supernatural visions made the villagers think he could see and find those who produced medical illnesses. Thus, he became a witch-finder and expert in how to “undo evil magic.” However, Stoecklin ended up being interrogated himself as the authorities believed that witches could only be recognised by a fellow witch. Stoecklin was tortured and subsequently confessed to the charges (pact with the Devil, attending the Sabbath, etc. – stereotypical charges against women) and was burnt at the stake in 1587.
These case studies show that men could be accused of maleficium independently of women and their trials could well fit the stereotype of women’s accusations. It seems, therefore, that there was not so much discrimination against men being witches as the witch craze is made out to be women’s history.
Today it seems that being a woman is the most important aspect of a witch, even though sex was not necessarily a factor at the time of the witch panic. The figure of the male witch has been slowly erased from history by being presented as anomalous to the pattern historians tried to find in witch trials. It is now time, however, to reinstate male witches in the created monochromatic landscape of witchcraft.
