Who Believes in Belief?

The "disenchantment of the world" remains a guiding metanarrative for many histories of the last four hundred years in Europe. There are those who continue to argue for what Keith Thomas called a general "decline in magic," even if they disagree about chronologies and causes.¹ Yet there is enduring evidence that magic never went away. In fact, the specialist literatures on modern illuminism, esotericism, Hermeticism, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, occultism, ritual magic, and Paganism are now so extensive that historians might struggle to identify a period of recent history when supernatural beliefs were not experiencing some kind of "revival."

Summarizing the evidence of recent sociological investigations, Jason Josephson-Storm has pointed out that belief in "paranormal" phenomena, including ghosts, witchcraft, or UFOs is the norm rather than the exception in many European societies today.² For both Josephson-Storm and Michael Saler, the process of disenchantment is inherently "self-refuting, producing the very thing it describes as endangered, animating occult revivals, paranormal investigations, and new attempts to spiritualize the sciences."³ Even for the authors most critical of disenchantment, decline remains the guiding meta-narrative, but one that must be supplemented with an understanding that decline always engenders revival.

I want to propose a more fundamental critique. Disenchantment itself depends on an under-conceptualized term: belief. Do historians today know what we mean when we argue that our ancestors "believed" in witchcraft, or when we claim that we do not? Is "belief" even the correct term for what we are talking about? Who among us believes in belief? And what are the consequences if we abandon belief in belief?

Belief is an impossible yet alluring historical subject. There is a persistent tradition in the study of magic that calls for scholars to believe in belief. As Stuart Clark argued over twenty years ago, historians have often struggled to believe that the protagonists of the early modern witch hunts really believed in witchcraft.⁴ Clark was not the only researcher to suggest that functionalist arguments about the social tensions—around labor, poverty, gender, family, and sexuality—that lay behind witch-hunting tend to direct historians' attention away from a fundamental fact: communities hunted witches because they feared witchcraft.⁵ This call to believe in belief can itself be traced back to Keith Thomas's arguments in Religion and the Decline of Magic about witchcraft as a "self-confirming" "system of thought." ⁶ More recent examples might include Thomas Water's survey of modern witchcraft in Britain since the eighteenth century, which argues that "[w]itchcraft is more like a religious faith than a scientific or common-sense theory of how the world works. It is an imaginative, uncanny and wishful way of thinking. . . a willed belief."⁷ This belief in the belief of others—as Bruno Latour has pointed out—is characteristic of a self-consciously "Modern" and Eurocentric worldview.⁸

But it is hard enough to truly understand what a living interlocutor "believes," let alone the beliefs of the long dead. And if there is danger in not believing in belief, there is just as much risk in reifying complex and often contradictory attitudes into coherent dogmas. Has belief in magic or witches ever been as systematic as the "Moderns" believed? On closer inspection, what historians have referred to as "belief" in magic often turns out to be belief-like, or belief-ish. More properly, anthropologists and philosophers might call many of the "beliefs" historians have studied "doubts," "aporias," or "aliefs"—terms which I explain below.

Has belief in witchcraft, for instance, really been a coherent system of thought, shared among diverse groups in European societies? Leaving aside the old debates around "popular" and "elite" cultures, it is worth simply noting that attitudes to witchcraft have often been self-consciously inconsistent. The anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada borrowed a phrase from the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni to summarize how the villagers in Normandy in the 1970s who she lived among talked about witchcraft: "je sais bien. . . mais quand-même" ("I know very well [that witchcraft...