Secondary Elaborations: Realities and the Rationalization of Witchcraft

On the occasion of its reissue in paperback, it is still too soon to gauge whether Edward Bever’s Realities of Witchcraft will spark the cognitive revolution in witchcraft studies its author intends.¹ In its scope, length, and ambition, Bever’s study deserves comparison to such generation-defining tomes as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) or Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997). If Realities does not quite live up to the promise of such comparison, this has less to do with faults in Bever’s erudition (which is quite astounding) than with his single-minded pursuit of a singular thesis: that viewed from a neurobiological perspective, witchcraft was real. His foregrounding of the realities underlying the European witch-trials—real behavior, real effects, real experience—usefully disturbs our standard understandings of the topic. Bever insistently raises important questions, but he also insists on answering those questions in ways that attempt to foreclose further discussion.

Realities might be better compared not to Clark’s or Thomas’ work but to books like Marvin Harris’s Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1975) or H. Sidky’s Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs, and Disease (1997), studies that seek to reduce three hundred years of witch-trials and demonology to a range of misunderstood natural causes: ecological determinism, Tourette’s syndrome, ergotism, the psychotropic effects of solanaceous alkaloids. Bever is a much better scholar than Harris or Sidky, and unlike them or their many imitators his arguments rest on extensive, careful archival research in the criminal records of early modern Württemberg. But he shares with these authors a horror of culture, and indeed of history as usually understood—for there can be no history (except on the geological timescale of Darwinian selection) of innate, universal human neurological structures. Bever goes very far indeed to make witchcraft and magic “real” in noncultural ways, even dipping into fringe literature on the parapsychological forces underlying the efficacious use of dowsing rods (234): better an unexplained but nevertheless psychophysical force than a traditional folklore, however well attested. If not for his overweening ambition to effect a total reorientation of the study of magic and witchcraft, Bever could have written an important book. Ultimately he provides not the scientific theory of witchcraft and magic he aims for but rather a scientistic manifesto against the twin evils of postmodern constructivism and rationalist dismissal.

The book is divided into four long sections of between one and three chapters each, plus a methodological introduction and a brief conclusion. Part 1, “The Reality of Maleficium,” extends the argument of Bever’s pioneering article relating witchcraft to the “psychosocial factors in disease.”² Malefice was real in two senses: “Suspects really did express ill will in various ways, and […] these expressions of ill will really could have caused the harms intended” (3). Interpersonal hostility causes stress, and stress causes or encourages disease and even sudden death (by ventricular arrhythmia): accordingly, early modern Württembergers quite rationally feared the harmful magic of witches. Although Bever overstates this argument in worrisome ways to be discussed below, it will likely remain the primary legacy of Realities: suitably qualified, his plea for the possibility of an objectively harmful witchcraft is both plausible and provocative.

Part 2, “The Realities of Diabolism,” takes on a grab bag of experiences and effects: the subjectively real encounter with the devil in pact-narratives; the similarly subjective experience of flight and sabbat brought about by a wide range of real neurophysiological or psychochemical causes (trance, out-of-body experience, ergotism, scopolamine-induced hallucination); the objectively real effects on the mind, and thence on health and well-being, of spells and ritual magic; the objective reality of a tradition of shamanistic initiation underlying the sabbat-motif. This is the least convincing section of the book, replete with theoretical and historical problems to be examined below.

Part 3, “The Realities of Beneficent Magic,” explores divination and healing magic. As in part 1, Bever’s central argument here is that such rites were practiced because they worked, and he offers a number of convincing interpretations: the divinatory technique...