Bad Reasons: Elites and the Decline of Magic

Why did European elites come to reject magic and witchcraft? The question has been posed as long as there have been witchcraft historians to ask it. Already in 1865, William Lecky opened his study with the observation that there was "no change in the history of the last 300 years more striking or suggestive of more curious enquiries" than this change in elite attitudes. "At present nearly all educated men" treat magic, witchcraft, and miracles "with an absolute and even derisive incredulity, which dispenses with all examination of the evidence."¹ How to explain the change? Like much of witchcraft historiography, the question proceeds from the understandable, yet methodologically problematic, premise that witchcraft beliefs are false—but with a twist. Social historians have long grappled with the issue of witchcraft's "obvious" falseness; it has supported the ascription of a whole host of ulterior motives for witch-hunting, from state-building to woman-hating.² As a false belief, witchcraft was always a vehicle for the expression of other things.

By contrast, the discovery of the "truth" does not seem to call for extrinsic—let alone cynical—motivations; falsehood must have been detected and exposed on intrinsic grounds alone. Several such intellectual reasons have been advanced—Hugh Trevor-Roper, for instance, credited the philosopher René Descartes for forging "a rival [mechanical] faith," which broke the system of witch-beliefs "at its centre."³ Lecky already pinpointed the key difficulty with this approach some hundred years earlier: if one were to ask "why it is that the world has rejected what was once so universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick [. . .] is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the question."⁴ The types of answers expected—that these beliefs were tested "scientifically" and found lacking—have not held water. Their demise, as Ian Bostridge put it in 1997, cannot be attributed to "the discovery of a previously unrecognized, if commonsensical, truth."⁵ Here, too, Lecky was ahead of the curve: "if we ask what new arguments were discovered during the decadence of the belief, we must admit that they were quite inadequate to account for the change."⁶ The chronology simply does not fit; skeptical voices had never been absent and were, for a time, easily enough refuted.⁷ Indeed it is even possible to argue, as Michael Hunter has recently done, that when Enlightenment thinkers finally came to reject magic, they did so not "for good reasons but for bad ones."⁸

Even so, the belief that the Western world, or at least its well-bred ruling classes, rejected witchcraft and did so on intrinsic, intellectual grounds is deeply rooted in contemporary culture in ways that are hugely revealing of modernity, both as a "disenchanted" intellectual construct and as a lived experience. Witchcraft's defeat has, for instance, underpinned the arguments of free speech absolutists who have argued that the truth will inevitably win out (with more and better speech). "Men feared witches and burnt women," as US Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis put it in 1927, and "it is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."⁹ Witchcraft beliefs, located safely in the past and aligned with reactionary forces, have lent support to progress narratives that, from the nineteenth century onwards, depict an ongoing struggle in which reason triumphs over superstition—or, more polemically, science over religion.¹⁰ (Contemporary advocates of the "warfare of science" thesis criticized Lecky for underestimating the influence and importance of the witchcraft skeptics.¹¹) This type of light-versus-darkness dualism—surely itself Christian in origin—saves the phenomena by presenting all that is offensive about the present as holdovers; relics from the past, which will be cast out by those "thinking the future thought of the world."¹² As Helen Cornish notes in her contribution to this Forum...