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Monday, September 19, 1692. About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was press’d to death for standing mute; much pains was used with him two days, one after another, by the Court and Capt. Gardner of Nantucket, who had been of his acquaintance: but all in vain.
-Diary of Salem witch trials judge Samuel Sewall

Pressing to death — peine forte et dure — was a brutal procedure that wasn’t technically a method of execution: courts used it to extract a plea from a defendant, since the law of the time (altered in the 18th century) would not allow criminal proceedings to get underway without one.

Procedure: stake a fellow down and start piling crushing weight on his chest for hours or days until he agrees to enter a plea and start the trial.

It was a manner of exiting the world quite a bit more unpleasant than hanging. But it came with one significant advantage: since the prisoner died without a capital conviction upon him, he could pass on his property rather than having it confiscated by the state. For Giles Corey, that was worth two days of agony.

PROCTOR: And Giles?

ELIZABETH: You have not heard of it?

PROCTOR:* I hear nothin’, where I am kept.

ELIZABETH: Giles is dead.

(He looks at her incredulously.)

PROCTOR: When were he hanged?

ELIZABETH (quietly, factually): He were not hanged. He would not answer aye or nay to his indictment; for if he denied the charge they’d hang him surely, and auction out his property. So he stand mute, and died Christian under the law. And so his sons will have his farm. It is the law, for he could not be condemned a wizard without he answer the indictment, aye or nay.

PROCTOR: Then how does he die?

ELIZABETH (gently): They press him, John.

PROCTOR: Press?

ELIZABETH: Great stones they lay upon his chest until he please aye or nay. (With a tender smile for the old man.) They say he give them but two words. ‘More weight,’ he says. And died.

PROCTOR (numbed — a thread to weave into his agony): ‘More weight’.

ELIZABETH: Aye. It were a fearsome man, Giles Corey.

-Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

Hard core, that Giles Corey.

Giles Cory pleaded not guilty to his indictment, but would not put himself on Tryal by the Jury (they having cleared none upon tryal) and knowing there would be the same witnesses against him, rather chose to undergo what death they would put him to. In pressing his tongue being forced out of his mouth, the Sheriff with his Cane forced it in again, when he was dying. He was the first in New England that was ever prest to death. (Source)

* Arthur Miller availed himself some dramatic license in The Crucible; among the more trifling was that the historical John Proctor was actually hanged a month before Giles Corey’s death.

Also On This Date

• 46 B.C.E.: Vercingetorix the Gaul

On this date in 1628 was burned in Bamberg (former) Burgomaster Johannes Junius, a civic official caught up in the frenetic witch-hunts of Bavaria in the Thirty Years’ War.

Fellow townspeople under torture accused him; Junius eventually did the same, copping to the stock stuff witch trials knew just how to use:

there had come to him a woman like a grass-maid … And thereafter this wench had changed into the form of a goat, which bleated and said, “Now you see with whom you have had to do. You must be mine or I will forthwith break your neck”. Thereupon he had been frightened, and trembled all over for fear. Than the transformed spirit had seized him by the throat, and demanded that he should renounce God Almighty, whereupon Junius said, “God help me”, and thereupon the spirit vanquished through the power of these words. Yet it came straightway back, brought more people with it, and persistently demanded of him that he renounce God in Heaven and all the heavenly host, by which terrible threatening he was obliged to speak this formula: “I renounce God in Heaven and his host, and will henceforward recognize the Devil as my God”.

After the renunciation he was so far persuaded by those present and by the evil spirit that he suffered himself to be baptized by the devil in the evil spirit’s name. The Morhauptin had given him a ducat as dower-gold, which afterward became only a potsherd.

He was then named Krix. His succubus was called Vixen (Füchsin). Those present had congratulated him in Beelzebub’s name and said that they were now all alike.

Etc.

What survives of him among the thousands of similar unfortunates is the illicit letter in his own hand describing those tortures in detail … a reminder (regrettably current) of the reality of crippled limbs and ripped flesh and the meager limits of human hardiness that surround a word like “torture”.

July 24, 1628

Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent must I die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and - God pity him - bethinks him of something.

I will tell you how it has gone with me.

When I was the first time put to the torture, my brother-in-law, Dr. Braun, Dr. Kotzendorffer, and two strange doctors were there. Then Dr. Braun asks me; “Kinsman, how come you are here?” I answer, “Through falsehood and through misfortune”. “Hear, you,” he retorts, “you are a witch. Will you confess it voluntarily? If not, we’ll bring in witnesses and the executioner for you”. I said, “I am no witch; I have a pure conscience in the matter. If there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious, but I’ll gladly hear them”.

Then the Chancellor’s son was set before me, who said he had seen me. I asked that he be sworn and legally examined, but Dr. Braun refused it. Then the Chancellor, Dr. George Haan, was brought, who said the same as his son. Afterward Höppfen Ellse. She had seen me dance on Hauptsmorwald, but they refused to swear her in. I said: “I have never renounced God, and will never do it - God graciously keep me from it. I’ll rather bear whatever I must”.

And then came also - God in highest Heaven have mercy - the executioner, and put the thumbscrews on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood spurted from the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.

Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up on the ladder. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end. Eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony. I said to Dr. Braun, “God forgive you for thus misusing an innocent and honorable man”. He replied, “You are a knave”.

And this happened on Friday, June 30, and with God’s help I had to bear the torture. When at last the executioner led me back into the cell, he said to me, “Sir, I beg you, for God’s sake, confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to; and, even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape, not even if you were an earl, but one torture will follow another until you say you are a witch. Not before that,” he said, “will they let you go, as you may see by all their trials, for one is just like another”.

Then came George Haan, who said the commissioners had said the Prince-Bishop wished to make such an example of me, that everybody would be astonished.

And so I begged, since I was in wretched plight, to be given one day for thought and a priest. The priest was refused me, but the time for thought was given. Now, my dearest child, see in what hazard I stood and still stand. I must say that I am a witch, though I am not - must now renounce God, though I have never done it before. Day and night I was deeply troubled, but at last there came to me a new idea. I would not be anxious, but, since I had been given no priest with whom I could take counsel, I would myself think of something and say it. It were surely better that I just say it with mouth and words, even though I had not really done it; and afterwards I could confess it to the priest, and let those answer for it who compel me to do it . . . And so I made my confession, as follows; but it was all a lie.

Now follows, dear child, what I confessed in order to escape the great anguish and bitter torture, which it was impossible for me longer to bear.

Then I had to tell what people I had seen (at the witch sabbat). I said that I had not recognized them. “You old knave, I must put the torturer at your throat. Say - was not the Chancellor there?” So I said yes. “Who besides?” I had not recognized anybody. So he said: “Take one street after another. Begin at the market, go out on one street and back on the next”. I had to name several persons there. Then came the long street (die lange Gasse). I knew nobody. Had to name eight persons there. Then the Zinkenwert - one person more. Then over the upper bridge to the Georgthor, on both sides. Knew nobody again. Did I know nobody in the castle - whoever it might be, I should speak without fear. And thus continuously they asked me on all the streets, though I could not and would not say more. So they gave me to the torturer, told him to strip me, shave me all over, and put me to the torture. “The rascal knows one on the market-place, is with him daily, and yet won’t name him”. By this they meant Burgomaster Dietmeyer: so I had to name him too.

Then I had to tell what crimes I had committed. I said nothing. . . “Hoist the knave up!” So I said that I was to kill my children, but I had killed a horse instead. It did not help. I had also taken a sacred wafer, and had buried it. When I had said this, they left me in peace.

Now, dearest child, here you have all my acts and confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and inventions, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through dread of the torture beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; be he ever so pious, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes, though he were an earl. If God send no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burned. God in heaven knows that I know not the slightest thing. I die innocent and as a martyr.

Dear child, keep this letter secret, so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden. . . . Dear child, pay this man a thaler. . . . I have taken several days to write this: my hands are both crippled. I am in a sad plight. . . .

Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more.

Junius adds, in the margin, a touching gesture towards posthumous healing by asking no bitterness be kept against his false accusers.

Dear child, six have confessed against me at once: the Chancellor, his son, Neudecker, Zaner, Hoffmaisters Ursel, and Hoppfens Elsse–all false, through compulsion, as they have all told me, and begged my forgiveness in God’s name before they were executed. . . . They know nothing but good of me. They were forced to say it, just as I myself was. . . .

Haan, Junius’s accuser, was also burned at the stake.

Their mutual inquisitor, Dr. Braun, was arrested in 1629 — tortured — confessed — and burned as well. (Source)

Also On This Date

• 1890: William Kemmler, only in America

On this date in 1600, Bavarians thronged to a half-mile-long procession in Munich for the horrific execution of the Pappenheimer family.

They were marginal, itinerant types: the father, Paulus Pappenheimer, cleaned privies (”Pappenheimer” would remain as Nuremberg slang for a garbageman into the 20th century, according to Robert Butts); the mother, Anna, was the daughter of a gravedigger. They wandered, begged, did odd jobs. They were Lutherans in a Catholic duchy.

So they were vulnerable to their extreme turn of bad luck. Fresh to the throne of Bavaria, young Catholic zealot Duke Maximilian I wanted a crackdown on the infernal arts, and when others accused the Pappenheimers of witchcraft, they found they had become the stars of a show trial.

Tortured into a spectacular litany of confessions, Anne Llewellyn Barstow, records,

they were stripped so that their flesh could be torn off by red-hot pincers. Then Anna’s breasts were cut off. The bloody breasts were forced into her mouth and then into the mouths of her two grown sons … a hideous parody of her role as mother and nurse …

Church bells pealed to celebrate this triumph of Christianity over Satan; the crowd sang hymns; vendors hawked pamphlets describing the sins of the victims.

Meanwhile, Anna’s chest cavity bled. As the carts lurched along, the injured prisoners were in agony. Nonetheless, they were forced at one point to get down from the carts and kneel before a cross, to confess their sins. Then they were offered wine to drink, a strangely humane act in the midst of this barbaric ritual.*

One can hope that between the wine and loss of blood, the Pappenheimers were losing consciousness. They had not been granted the “privilege” of being strangled before being burned, but in keeping with the extreme brutality of these proceedings, they would be forced to endure the very flames.

Further torments awaited Paulus. A heavy iron wheel was dropped on his arms until the bones snapped … [then] Paulus was impaled on a stick driven up through his anus …

The four Pappenheimers were then tied to the stakes, the brushwood pyres were set aflame, and they were burned to death. Their eleven-year-old son was forced to watch the dying agonies of his parents and brothers. We know that Anna was still alive when the flames leapt up around her, for Hansel cried out, “My mother is squirming!” The boy was executed months later.

Ouch.

The Pappenheimers’ appalling end, famous in its own time, hit modern bestseller lists with Michael Kunze’s work of popular history, Highroad to the Stake: A Tale of Witchcraft (Review).

Dr. Kunze was good enough to share his thoughts on the Pappenheimers’ milieu with Executed Today.

You present the Pappenheimers as a sort of “show trial” case; what makes a witchcraft show trial a compelling need for a German duke at the end of the 16th century? Why do you think witch persecution arises so especially in this period especially?

Towards the end of the 16th century the Middle Ages had been overcome. People no longer believed in a God taking care of every little thing in their lives. The world was no longer regarded a safe home, guarded by the Father in heaven. Religion had been replaced by reason. The kings, princes and dukes took over direct responsibility for their countries and citizens. They started to build modern states, rationally organized und fully controlled.

The main problem was that full control was difficult to achieve. The streets were in very bad condition, the countryside far stretched, the woods were dark, the villages far away. All kinds of crimes were committed, and when the police arrived the robbers, thieves and murderers had long disappeared. In time without photographs or identity papers it was difficult to trace them. The slow flow of information was also a problem.

That’s why the authorities tried to abhor criminals by show trials and spectacular executions. A witch trial was ideal, because people believed that all mischief and evil was induced by the devil. All criminals were more or less suspected of a deal with the devil.

What’s the biggest challenge we have in our time to re-imagining the world that witch prosecutors and “witches” lived in, or the biggest difference in mindset?

People in the 16th century were absolutely convinced that the devil was a real force trying to use humans to work against God’s intentions. They believed in a huge battle between good and evil, and those who changed sides and helped the devil were regarded as traitors committing High Treason.

At the same time the modern idea that everything that happens has an explainable cause made the authorities suspect the devil’s work behind every thunderstorm, not to mention deadly accidents. People were not more stupid than we are. It was the mixture of medieval superstitions and modern rationalization that led to the witch trials.

How did contemporaries of the Pappenheimers and Duke Maximilian think about this event?

It was indeed a monstrous case and quite an event at the time. The contemporaries did not doubt that 1) the Pappenheimer family had been instruments of the devil, and 2) that the brutal punishment had saved their souls. Duke Maximilian certainly regarded the execution as a means to stabilize safety in his country.

In researching the interrogations and trials in these cases, where did you get the sense that we still revert to “witch trial logic” in some modern cases? If so, when does it arise?

It’s obvious that we still interpret laws based on our beliefs and point of views. The judges involved in the witch trials thought they “knew” for certain that the devil can talk to people and make deals with them. They also believed that torture brings the truth to light. Isn’t today’s deal bargaining also a form of torture? After all the authorities tell the defendant that he will be severely punished if he does not confess. That’s what I call a forced confession. Yet it is done around the world.

Obviously, this execution is utterly horrific in its particulars. How typical would this sexualized theater — slicing off Anna Pappenheimer’s breasts, impaling Paulus Pappenheimer — have been for a witchcraft case at that time and place? How would this have been understood by witnesses, as opposed to “merely” burning or breaking on the wheel?

The point was to abhor by cruelty. People should see what horrors the criminals had to endure and tell it to everyone for years to come.

* Or, perchance, the wine was offered to revive them and protract their tortures.

Also On This Date

• 1747: Alexander Blackwell, who left them smiling

On July 2, 1706, Kimpa Vita, a Congolese noblewoman also known by her baptismal name Dona Beatriz, was burned as a witch in Evululu.

This remarkable woman claimed to be a medium for the spirit of Saint Anthony of Padua, a popular saint in the Catholicized Kingdom of Kongo, and attracted a mass movement in the midst of civil war and social breakdown in the proud Kongo state.

Executed Today is pleased to mark this occasion with an interview with Boston University Prof. John K. Thornton, author of The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706.

This is a very unfamiliar story to most, as you point out in The Kongolese Saint Anthony. So let’s begin with some orientation — the Kingdom of Kongo is in the midst of a ruinous civil war. Why?

The civil war in Kongo was basically a dynastic affair, that is, a battle between branches of the royal family for control over the throne. Kongo had a very highly centralized political structure, the king and his council had a lot of power not only over who held high office, but also who got what income, because a lot of income derived from holding office. So controlling the kingship and its related patronage was very important.

This story is very complicated, I try to lay it out as simply as possible in Chapter II of my book. To make matters short, by D Beatiz’ day it had two branches duking it out — the Kimpanzu and the Kinlaza, with Pedro IV, conveniently descended from both these families, as a sort of conciliatory figure.

And it’s a highly Catholic country. How did that come to be?

Pretty remarkable story.

Actually I think it’s the only real missionary victory that the Catholic church had in the early modern period. By that I mean that they spread the faith to a completely independent country and not just by conquest.

Officially, it was a series of miracles that both Catholic priests and Kongo elites witnessed in 1491 that led Nzinga a Nkuwu, the king of Kongo to become a Christian and be baptized on May 3, 1491 (my birthday is May 3, 1949 which I have taken to be a sort of sign that I should be studying Kongo).

However, it was Nzinga a Nkuwu’s son Afonso (ruled 1509-1542) that really established the church. Afonso provided for the funding of the church, created schools for teaching literacy and Christian religion for the nobility, had children educated in Portugal and returned to the country, and working with his own educated people and Portuguese priests also figured out how to blend the two traditions into a religion that was acceptable in the country. It’s no wonder the Church called him the “Apostle of Congo”.

The kings who followed elaborated and extended what Afonso started, especially by creating a network of schools all over the country. By and large Rome and Portugal collaborated and blessed the project, so the Pope allowed Afonso’s son Henrique to be the first Sub-Saharan African bishop in 1518, and assigned him to extend the church in Kongo (Henrique died in 1531). In 1596 the Pope made Kongo’s capital city the seat of the Bishop of Congo and Angola.

The Church grew again in the late sixteenth century when a series of kings named Alvaro (I and II, father and son, in particular) went a lot farther than Afonso had in Europeanizing Kongo. They gave the nobles titles of nobility in European fashion (Counts, Dukes and Marquis), the brought in relics from Europe (bones of martyrs, for example), established an embassy in Rome, renamed the capital city as Sao Salvador, and so on. The Kongolese ambassador to Rome, Antonio Manuel, who died in 1608 and is honored in a wing in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, left personal papers when he died now found in the Vatican archives. They show the sort of culture a person educated entirely in Kongo could show, in addition to a fascinating array of Kongolese administrative documents — the only ones we have. He also studied Carmelite mysticism, and had correspondence from many different people all over Europe. He was clearly at home among elite Europeans and was regarded by those who met him as a cultured individual in a period when extra-Europeans were not always seen that way.

The Jesuits established a college in Kongo in 1624 and it provided advanced education along European lines until it was close just about the time that Beatriz was active. Kongo had a library, in fact, though no trace of it exists any more, found on the second floor of the Jesuit college.

So in short, the answer is that the political elite of the country decided in the sixteenth century to make their country a Catholic one, and they took vigorous steps to make it happen.

They put teachers out all through the country, visiting priests from Europe constantly met these teachers in the rural areas, they were usually literate and possessed a good deal of knowledge of European culture, some had even lived in Europe. These schoolmasters were the soul of the church; they instructed the people (using a catechism in their own language after 1624), prepared them for the sacraments and led weekly prayers at places of worship, usually large wooden crosses erected at key points all around the country.

So there’s a religious penetration that on the face of it might seem to be a religion of colonization, of foreign domination. But that’s clearly not the way most Kongolese thought about it.

It was never a religion of conquest, and for that reason, the Kongos managed to make it their own without feeling they were abandoning or being forced to give up something. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries foreign visitors often commented on how proud the Kongos were, of their country, their language, their food and the like, thinking that they were the best people in the world. “Congo arrogance” was a common epithet that the Portuguese who built the colony of Angola on Kongo’s southern border used to describe them.

And it’s still very true today. I go to Angola quite a bit and have been to Mbanza Kongo twice. You can feel and hear that pride even now. During the colonial period (roughly 1885 to 1975 in that area) the Portuguese tried very hard to replace indigenous languages with Portuguese and to erase African culture in a systematic way, especially after 1926. But the Kongos simply refused to be erased: they continued their language secretly, kept their special foods and taught their children that they were still the best. It worked.

Today in Angola, you see in so many places that Portuguese is the language of daily life — even street kids shout at each other in Portuguese in Luanda and the land east all the way to Malange. But in Mbanza Kongo and elsewhere in the north, the language of daily life is Kikongo, the ancient language of the country. Their pride has been a problem for Kongo, too. In 1992 a lot of them were massacred in Luanda, partially for political reasons that are very complicated, but also I think because other Angolans resent this pride. But enough on that.

Anyway, the Kongolese were proud to be not just Christians but Catholics. The Portuguese tried to invade Kongo from Angola several times, first in 1622, then again in 1657, and finally in 1670. Each time they were decisively defeated. On the other hand, the Kongos were also unable to invade Angola, as they were repelled there also, first in 1580 and again in 1665 (when the famous Battle of Mbwila was fought on the border between the two domains of Angola and Kongo).

This led to great hostility between Kongo and Portugal and especially its governors of Angola. Portuguese were massacred in the wake of the 1622 invasion and after the Battle of Mbwila in 1665, and by the 1670s they had been effectively forced to leave the country, trading their only with Africa servants called pombeiros who represented their interests. (Priests were an exception).

Yet this history didn’t impact on the way Kongos saw themselves as Catholics. King Garcia II (1641-1661) famously wrote a letter in which he proudly stated that they obeyed the Pope, vicar of Christ on earth, even though the Portuguese, whom they hated, had introduced them to the religion. Indeed, the only thing that we see in the correspondence of Kongolese kings that they do say good about Portugal was that it introduced them to the religion.

The idea of a Catholic Kongo was reinforced when Kongo made an alliance with the Dutch. This took place in 1622 in the aftermath of the failed Portuguese invasion. Pedro II, the king, sent a letter to the Dutch States General proposing an alliance in which the Dutch would send a fleet to attack Angola by sea, and Kongo would send an army by land. The first attempt to do this in 1624 failed, in part because the Portuguese went out of their way to conciliate Kongo, but the second attempt, in 1641, succeeded and for a time the Kongo-Dutch alliance (joined by the formidable Queen Njinga of Ndongo-Matamba who was also at war with Portugal) nearly drove the Portuguese out of Angola.

The Dutch hoped to use this opportunity to also convert Kongo to the Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church and they even had special literature designed to convert Catholics who spoke Portuguese to Calvinism. But Garcia II would have none of it, and had the books burned (it was the seventeenth century after all), and forced the ministers to leave. He wrote a letter to the Dutch Estates General protesting the attempt and in it he made the statement I summarized in the paragraph above.

Kongo tried to make contact with Dutch speaking Catholic countries in the aftermath of the third failed Portuguese invasion in 1670. It seemed like a good compromise though the Dutch never did come back to Angola to fight, and the Catholic parts weren’t part of the Dutch program.

So, that’s background — now, who is Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita?

She was the daughter of a noble Kongo family from the region right around Kibangu, a flat-topped mountain that lays some distance east of the capital of Mbanza Kongo (on a clear day you can see that mountain from Mbanza Kongo).

She seems to have had spiritual gifts even as a youth, and had dreams of playing with angels and visions and the like. Not surprisingly, she turned to religious pursuits, becoming a nganga Marinda, a spiritual person whose role the Catholic missionaries did not like, but was widely accepted in the Kongo as legitimate. She was probably too spiritual and independent to be married, since she had two failed marriages by the time she began her prophecy.

Her movement combines both a religious renewal and a national restoration. Should one think of her as a religious person whose cause happened to have political implications, or someone who’s very intentionally trying to alter the balance of power? Is it even right to separate the secular and the religious dimensions?

I think Beatriz was trying to end war as much as anything else. This was at the height of the slave trade: thousands of people were being exported annually to Brazil, to the Spanish Indies, to Suriname, and some even to South Carolina.

The slave trade was one of the byproducts of war (along with death and destruction), and because slavery was lucrative, it helped to continue the wars in a vicious cycle. As Beatriz understood it, the solution was to end the civil war and restore the kingdom. None of the pretenders to the throne seemed able to do that.

She thought that he had sent Saint Anthony do to that, and he had come to earth and chose to be incarnate in her. It harmonized with Kongos’ belief that they were God’s chosen people (he had created Kongo himself, sending his angels to create the rest of the world), and he would intervene to set things right.

And who exactly are her followers?

Beatriz had followers from all ranks and walks of life. Pedro IV had her burned, but his own wife Hipolyta became a devotee. Pedro was intrigued by her message himself. A number of the top contenders also were either tempted or became her followers. The most notable of her followers was Pedro Constantinho da Silva, one of Pedro’s generals who saw allying with her as a chance to become king. Along with the political guys was a great mass of peasants, who really hoped for a better time and thought that Beatriz’ movement could restore the kingdom.

It was the politics of her movement that got her in trouble. Once Beatriz threw herself in with Pedro Constantinho she was doomed because the other contenders became her enemies. It was Pedro IV who managed to capture her, and he had her burned as a heretic and witch. Before she went over to Pedro Constantinho, Pedro IV had been very interested in her mission and protected her.

Dona Beatriz rejects or alters a number of religious practices we might think of as essentially Catholic, like the iconography of the cross, but she’s not doing it in the name of rejecting Catholicism — she’s doing it in the name of Saint Anthony of Padua. Was there simply a pent-up need for renegotiating the way the faith worked for Kongolese? If so, did it happen in some other way after she was executed?

I think she was concerned that Christianity was too European, and one of the things she chided the missionaries about was that they did not represent any black saints.

She had direct revelation from God on her side, she died every Friday and spent each weekend in Heaven conferring with the Heavenly Father about the affairs of Kongo and so what she got there was pretty much undeniable. From these sessions in Heaven she learned the stories about Jesus being born in Nsundi, baptized in Sao Salvador and Mary being a slave of a Kongo marquis. There was probably a lot more richness to these stories that our accounts tell us.

Kongos were pretty sure, I think, that God was an African and their pride also gradually placed stories in Africa, so in this way Beatriz was confirming what people believed or wanted to believe. After her death, we find a lot of art objects, particularly crucifixes, in which Jesus is shown as an African (his features are African) and is wearing a cloth with a specifically Kongo design. Cecile Froment has recently competed a wonderful Ph.D. thesis at Harvard on this art which I think will really demonstrate how much the Church in Kongo incorporated Kongo concepts. I don’t know if Beatriz’ movement inspired this art directly, but her movement and the art together represent what many people were thinking.

An aside here. From Afonso’s time onward, there was a desire to make an independent Kongo church under its own bishop and with its own clergy. They had the educational resources to support this, so they felt they should. Alvaro II entertained ideas that he could control such a church, that the king was “vicar of his kingdom” and could appoint clergy at will. This wasn’t canonical and the church didn’t support it, even going to far as to try some of those who advised him on this through the Inquisition. But even when Kongo got its own bishop in 1596, the kings of Portugal managed to get control of appointment and put Portuguese in there.

This was the cause of endless conflicts between the kings and the bishops, particularly because of the hostility between Portugal and Kongo over Angola. Finally, a compromise was worked out. While the bishop ended up residing in Angola, and he refused to ordain many Kongolese, the priestly needs of Kongo were to be met by missionaries, who weren’t really there to spread the faith (it had already spread) but to perform the sacraments that an ordained priest could. Because Portugal didn’t want Kongolese clergy, and Kongo didn’t want Portuguese clergy, the compromise was to chose Italian clergy who were from neutral states (mostly Florence, but others as well). These priests came from the Capuchin order, a strongly Counter-Reformationist order that wanted to purge Kongo’s Catholicism of its local elements in the name of purifying the faith. That didn’t go so well, and the struggle over just how Kongo the church could be was waged along these lines.

Beatriz came into this struggle on the Kongo side. While not denying the Capuchins their place as priests, she contended with them over the theological questions. She lost this round, mostly for political reasons and not theological ones. Maybe the African Jesus of Froment’s thesis was the theological victory of Beatriz or at least her followers.

She occupies the ruined former capital. What’s the significance here? Had she remained unmolested, what trajectory might her movement have been on?

I think that messianic religious leaders like her in a politically charged environment don’t have much chance unless they are very astute or their supporters are strong. Of course occupying the capital was vital. It had been abandoned in 1678 and was in ruins, yet it was the very symbol of Kongo. The kings were all buried there, the cathedral was there. Holding the city was in effect restoring the kingdom and presumably ending the civil war.

She could only have remained in power if she had stayed with Pedro Constantinho and if his forces had been enough to protect her and to fend off the inevitable attacks that the other two primary contenders, Joao II of Bula and Pedro IV of Kibangu, would mount. Pedro ended up beating both of these two, first Pedro Constantinho in 1709 and then Joao. So with Pedro Constantinho as patron she could not have survived.

She also made the political mistake, which we can only put down to overconfidence or naivete, of going back home to her parents who lived in Pedro IV’s domain to have her baby. Having the baby also upset her, and made her feel guilty since as a saint she should not have done this.

But let’s be a bit speculative and say that Pedro IV didn’t capture her, or he decided to follow her and put distance between himself and the Catholic clergy who were obviously opposed to her. What might have happened? Perhaps he would have re-founded the church in Kongo with a new relationship to Rome, and decided to have Kimpa Vita and some sort of apostolic succession from her ordain priests and bishops. These would clearly have been drawn from the schoolmasters who ran the church in Kongo anyway. A good number of them did become Antonioans and they would have created a new church. It would have had some of its own new traditions, like the stories that Beatriz told about Jesus’ birth in Nsundi and baptism in Mbanza Kongo, or the descent of kings and the like. These might have been written since the chruch was literate and perhaps formed a new scripture. And perhaps they might have found, in time a way to reconcile this with Rome, but maybe not. It would have been an independent church as we see all over Africa now.

What exactly leads to her execution? Cui bono?

Her execution was done following her capture as described above. She was tried in a civil not an ecclesiastic court under Kongo and not church law. Kongo law prescribed punishment for witchcraft and heresy and those were the charges against her.

We don’t know what happened in her trial since the record has not survived (my dream is to find it, since there probably was one once, and who knows, it might have been sent to the Inquisition in Portugal or Angola). But all we know is what the Italian priests, Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca told us, and they were not invited to the trial (fine by them; they didn’t want to be too closely associated with the results). They questioned her about her beliefs, and da Gallo’s account of that inquiry is our basis for knowing what she believed. But they could do no more on that end than hear the result. They were happy for it since that’s what they wanted too.

Her movement isn’t destroyed by her execution. What happens over the next 2 1/2 years before the Battle of Sao Salvador? And what happens after that battle: What was Dona Beatriz’ immediate legacy? Was she remembered, was her name invoked? What became of her followers?

We know the movement remained very strong in Mbanza Kongo after her death, and that Antonian prayers were shouted out by the defenders of the city in 1709. But there is not documentary mention of them further after that. But don’t read too much into this, since the documentary record becomes very, very quiet after 1710 or so — we just don’t have any details about it from any source. In fact, until I discovered a kinglist written in 1758 (I think by a Kongo) we weren’t sure how long the reigns of the kings were for the next fifty years or even what order they ruled in. It is possible that the movement survived even there.

We also know that the movement had very strong bases in the southwest part of Kongo, in lands belonging the the Kimpanzu faction that had been headed by Suzanna de Nobrega. This faction was not involved in the war in 1709 and thus would not have suffered the inevitable persecution that took place in Mbanza Kongo.

But Manuel II, the king who followed Pedro IV after his death in 1718, came from that faction and region. He had abandoned the Antonians to join Pedro, and perhaps he also suppressed the movement back home. We have a couple of letter from him, written early in his reign and dealing with ecclesiastical matters, but the question of Antonians doesn’t come up in them.

After my book was published, Simon Bockie, a librarian at Berkeley and an excellent ethnographer of Kongo (he’s a Kongo himself) wrote a critical review. He claimed that I had not made use of abundant oral traditions that he had heard in his youth about Kimpa Vita in writing my book and thus I had written an account based on only the testimony of her enemies.*

I had searched published sources in French, Portuguese and Kikongo for traditions that I could relate to Beatriz when I did my research, and I did make as much use of these as I could when I wrote. But at the time I had not been able to do research in Mbanza Kongo and so had to let that aspect go. When my wife, Linda Heywood and I went to Mbanza Kongo in 2002, we specifically asked about traditions concerning Kimpa Vita (as she is usually called today) and were taken to a man who claimed to be the local expert on her. He asked us if we wanted to hear the tradition in French, Portuguese or Kikongo (Mbanza Kongo is very near the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and probably half the population is trilingual). We said Kikongo, which he proclaimed to be the right answer. He then went into a half-hour or maybe forty-five-minute discourse on the question. He had some interesting things to say. First, I noticed that he gave dates in his account, but he stated them in French. Likewise, he mentioned the names of the missionaries and the Christian names of Kongo kings in French also. I thought this was strange and concluded that he had received a “fed back” tradition, meaning that he had combined what he might have known from oral sources, such as his parents or elders, with written sources that drew on the movement which was described in French at least as early as 1953.

I might have easily concluded that both his traditions and those Bockie heard as a youth were simply feed back stories made to surround an event known only from modern historical reconstruction. You can hear such a tradition and have no idea that it is of modern creation, since you might not know its sources and even the one telling you might have heard rather than read it. Personal elaboration around a few set facts is a common point of oral tradition, and thus explaining things one receives from tradition or even from books can be expanded this way.

But having said that I was very intrigued by other elements in the story which were purely Kikongo. The most important was the very significant role played in the story I heard in Mbanza Kongo by Beatriz’s mother (ngudi andi Kimpa Vita), to the point where much of the inspiration of the movement was in fact from the mother, and moreoever, the mother continued the movement after her daugher’s death.

The traditionalist went on to link modern religious movements through the descent of this mother. Was it possible that the movement did live on? I can’t say. I do know that several independent churches claim Kimpa Vita as their founder, or claim to be heirs to her message, most notably some branches of the Kimbanguist church (founded in the 1920s by a prophet named Simon Kibangu) and the Bundu dia Kongo, a rapidly growing church founded by Mwanda Nsemi in the 1960s. It could be true, or it could be simply propaganda of these movements, also fed back into tradition.

Was it unusual that this movement was led/instigated by a woman? Or would that not have been consequential to her followers and opponents?

The movement was led by Saint Anthony; D Beatriz was only his earthly form. Why he chose a woman is harder to say.

Did it make a difference that he did? Probably. Beatriz realized that the woman/man thing was a problem. When Pedro’s soldiers arrested her they challenged her, asking how Saint Anthony, who was a man, could have a baby. Her only answer was that she didn’t know, only that it had come from Heaven. She certainly was attentive to women; for example, she could make the barren bear children, and women were among her close followers.

I don’t think, though, that we should read too much into the sex issue. There were also a number of very powerful women in Kongo at her time: Queen Ana Afonso de Leao all but ruled the southeast, and Queen Suzanna de Nobrega ruled the southwest. Although Joao II ruled Lemba, everyone knew that his sister, Elena was the real ruler of that territory. There were provisions in Kongo law allowing women who reached a certain political level to have male concubines and treat them more or less as men treated female concubines.

Finally I confess that I didn’t do as much as I wanted to or could about the question of women and females in Kongo life when I wrote the book, and sacrificed some analytical asides in the interests of narrative. I tried to remedy this ever so slightly in an dense and technical article I published in the Journal of African History, called “Elite women in the Kingdom of Kongo”, not for the faint-hearted, that addressed the question of female power. I had also addressed female power in the life of Queen Njinga, who ruled in the Kimbundu speaking area south of Kongo, in another article some twenty years ago, and I hope to write more about women in the future.

Has there been a reclamation or rediscovery of her in the postcolonial period? How does Dona Beatriz/Kimpa Vita read in Angola now?

As long ago as 1996 there was an official decision to erect a statue to her somewhere in the country. There is an image of her, drawn by Bernardo da Gallo from life, on the cover of my book, so it wouldn’t be hard to do. This would be the “book” D Beatriz Kimpa Vita, with the full apparatus of scholarship, as opposed to the “tradition” Kimpa Vita, supported by the oral traditions and independent churches. It will be interesting to see how these two versions, my book, and Kongo pride run into each other.

* Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1998), pp. 645-647, in which Bockie writes,

As a child growing up in the Lower Congo listening to tales from our oral history, I heard many times about the exploits of Kimpa Vita, who was still remembered after 250 years as a major cultural heroine … It was something of a shock to find that Thornton has chosen to present his account almost exclusively through the eyes of her enemies and killers … there remains no convincing Kongo voice or presence in this book.

Also On This Date

• 1822: The audacious Denmark Vesey

On this date in 1749, an aged subprioress of the Unterzell nunnery was beheaded and burnt in Wurzburg for witchcraft … and for the principle of witchcraft.

Maria Renata Singer (or Singerin — here’s her German Wikipedia page) had been a reclusive denizen of the convent for half a century.

A dying nun accused her of working black magic, and everything snowballed in the usual way: other nuns got into the act, often in the throes of exorcism. Confinement and interrogation (torture is not recorded) eventually induced her to confess to having been a witch for more than 60 years. (Details of the unfolding procedure here, in German.)

On this morning 260 years ago, her sentence — moderated from burning alive — was carried out: Singer’s head was struck off and mounted on a pole, and her body burned to ashes.

Witnesses reported seeing a vulture appear when the body was burned.

Nothing so remarkable, really, in the annals of witchcraft. Nothing except the date. Witch-burnings in 1749! Voltaire was in his fifties. Thomas Jefferson was alive. Wurzburg itself hadn’t seen witchcraft executions since the madness of the Thirty Years’ War.

But even in the Age of Enlightenment, the benighted world got its licks in. And in this instance, the case of the witch-nun of Bavaria was bulletin-board material in an unfolding public debate over witchcraft.

Scholars and theologians were burdening the mid-18th century printing presses with treatises on the legitimacy of witchcraft persecutions. Singer herself, when first confronted with the accusation, had not simply denied it: she had denied there was any such thing as a witch.

That same year of 1749, Girolamo Tartarotti’s influential Congresso notturno delle lammie skewered witchcraft jurisprudence.

Tartarotti’s work fit into a growing critique naturally animated by the rationalist spirit of the times.

Partly through Singer’s execution, the witchsniffers’ intellectual defenders mounted their last defense.

Jesuit Georg Gaar, who had been Singer’s confessor before death, preached a sermon at her cremation “praising the wise severity of laws against these crimes, and speculating that this might be God’s warning against the men of our time who do not believe in witches, or magic, or the devil, or God. Father Gaar plainly thought himself, and told the people, that they only needed to read the evidence from Unterzell to be persuaded of the justice of the sentence and the truth about witchcraft.”

Tartarotti reprinted this sermon with a critical commentary. But some theologians (and not only Bavarians) were ready to go to bat for the traditional superstitions.*

According to Brian Copenhaver, writing in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (January, 1979):

The rigorist Dominican Daniele Concina [Italian link -ed] argued that God permits witchcraft “for the greater confirmation of faith,” and he disposed of the skeptical sections of the Canon episcopi as a forger’s work. In a variation on Pangloss’s reasoning about noses and spectacles, Benedetto Bonelli deduced the reality of witchcraft from the existence of laws against witches.

As another critic of Tartarotti fretted, “Does not the denial of the existence of demons open the way and lead directly to the denial of the existence of God?”

Interestingly, Tartarotti accepted the reality of “magic” while denying the existence of witches, ascribing the latter’s survival as folklore to incomplete Christianization. While (see Copenhaver once again) this tack could be read as a tactical choice of moderation on Tartarotti’s part to achieve the pragmatic end of eliminating witchcraft trials, it put him in the crossfire between more rigorously rationalist intellectuals and the likes of Georg Gaar.

This angle of Tartarotti’s, especially given his simultaneous interest in the occult, has led to his work’s subsequent adoption as an antecedent to the still-popular if academically disreputable theory that underground sects of pagan practitioners really did persist in Europe, and were the true targets of witch-hunts like the one that killed Maria Renata Singer.

A lengthy 19th-century treatment of the case is available in German in a public domain Google books entry here.

* Conversely, a German scholar sneered at the backward prejudices of “the common rabble, especially in our beloved Bavaria.”

Also On This Date

• 1621: Bohemia's "Day of Blood"

On this date in 1611, the pathetic figure of a former priest — his body shaved to expose Devil’s marks, a noose about his neck — was conveyed to the secular powers to be tortured one last time, then hauled through the streets of Aix-en-Provence and burned to ashes.

Witchsmellers were thick on the ground in pre-Thirty Years’ War France, as elsewhere.

In our scene in the south of France, we find a characteristic entry in this horrible catalogue.

Parish priest and lothario Louis Gaufridi, having seduced a local teenager, found himself in hot water when she contracted the trendy disorder of demonic possession and started raving about the times she went with the cleric to see Black Sabbath.

Other inmates at the convent to which Gaufridi’s paramour had been conveyed were soon in on the act, indicting him for cannibalism, exotic sexual perversions, and — of course — devil-worship.

Gaufridi’s denials were overcome in the usual way, with the support of doctors who filed a report scientifically vouching that the infernal powers had laid their mark upon the subject. The priest soon saw the wisdom in copping to the charges, and not only his torture-adduced confessions (which he vainly attempted to repudiate in court) but the veritable original contract specifying the terms of his demoniacal servitude was produced for magisterial consideration.

I, Louis, a priest, renounce each and every one of the spiritual and corporal gifts which may accrue to me from God, from the Virgin, and from all the saints, and especially from my patron John the Baptist, and the apostles Peter and Paul and St. Francis. And to you, Lucifer, now before me, I give myself and all the good I may accomplish, except the returns from the sacrament in the cases where I may administer it; all of which I sign and attest.

I, Lucifer, bind myself to give you, Louis Gaufridi, priest, the faculty and power of bewitching by blowing with the mouth, all and any of the women and girls you may desire; in proof of which I sign myself Lucifer.

That’s right. He did it all for the nookie.

(That, and to “be esteemed and honored above all the priests of this country.” Thomas Wright, in his omnivorous and freely available chronicle of European witch trials, remarks that these two attributed motives suggest “the reason why Gaufridi was persecuted by the rest of the clergy.” And oh, but the ladykiller — or rather, the reverse — still starred in the fantasies of the possessed years after his death. (French link))

Gaufridi’s execution immediately freed his erstwhile lover from her satanic affliction. Madeleine de la Palud, however, having officially established herself as susceptible to the penetrations of the Evil One, would remain suspect in the eyes of the inquisition for the 60 years remaining of her life. She twice faced witchcraft charges herself.

Also On This Date

• 1315: Enguerrand de Marigny, on Montfaucon

On this date in 1676, two sisters were beheaded in Stockholm in one of Sweden’s most famous witch trials.

The great Swedish witch hunt of 1668-1676 was at its crescendo, having spread from the provinces to the capital. Here was repeated pattern by now familiar — children accusing adult women of taking them to witches’ sabbaths, and various and sundry infernally-inspired offenses against the civic order.

Brita Zippel (or Britta Sippel) was a natural magnet for accusations. Born well-off but fallen into poverty, and hot-tempered (as we shall see) besides, she had already survived two previous witch trials.

Her sister Anna remained a member of the town’s elite, but her status proved no use to her when suspicion fell on the family. Rumors and accusations snowballed over a period of months — that the sisters kidnapped children; that they committed arson; that both Anna’s wealth and Brita’s poverty proved their diabolical affiliations. That Anna Zippel and her business partner Anna Mansdotter made money selling medicines to the rich and powerful hardly decreased suspicion. The children who drove all this really made the most of the limelight — fainting spells, supernatural tales, the whole nine yards.

While the well-heeled Annas maintained a dignified stoicism during their trial — which only served to condemn them — Brita gave rein to all her furious indignation — which only served to condemn her. Anna Zippel defended herself calmly. Brita threatened witnesses, attacked her sister, and poured invective on her persecutors. Same result.

Their contrast in demeanor continued to the scaffold itself.

Shaking her chains, threatening her confessor with her posthumous vengeance, and cursing her onlookers, Brita required the offices of five men to wrestle her to the block for her beheading. (She went first because of the scene she was making.) Anna Zippel followed quietly, and then (quieter still) Anna Mansdotter, who had managed to commit suicide in prison but whose corpse still suffered the same fate of decapitation and burning.

These first witch-hunt victims in Stockholm were not the last, but they would presage the collapse of an enterprise that had consumed some 200 lives over the preceding eight years. According to Witch Hunts in Europe and America,

[i]n the spring of 1676, the court of appeals in Stockholm began investigating cases directly, rather than simply examining the records local officials forwarded. This resulted in the appointment of yet more royal commissions, but these were completely dominated by skeptical Stockholm officials. Turning the pressure on the accusers, the commissions gained several confessions from child accusers stating that they had made the whole thing up. The witch-hunt quickly collapsed, and four accusers, including a boy of 13, were executed.

Of no direct relevance, our dalliance with Scandinavian witchery offers a pretext to excerpt Benjamin Christiensen’s freaky (and censored) 1922 silent classic Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages.

Also On This Date

• 1818: Alexander Arbuthnot and Richard Ambrister

(Thanks to historian and witchcraft expert Louise Yeoman for this guest post on an obscure and once-forgotten “witch” whose human tragedy all but leaps off the page. This post was originally an article prepared for the National Library’s now-defunct journal Quatro. Her work has appeared in many more high-falutin’ places than this here blog, and she is a co-creator of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.)

On the trail of Anna

If you look in Christina Larner’s Sourcebook of Scottish Witchcraft, you won’t find Anna Tait. That’s because she was one of many accused witches whose names were unknown to the compilers of the sourcebook. The details of Anna and almost a hundred others were recorded in a National Library of Scotland Advocates manuscript, which was overlooked many years ago when the huge edition of Scotland’s Privy Council records was in preparation. In the closing years of the last century, the editors of the Privy Council volumes carefully combed the holdings of the National Archives of Scotland for their material. What they didn’t realise was that a single volume of the Register of Commissions for the years 1630-42 had escaped them. In it were hundreds of records of Privy Council commissions to try criminal trials.

In it was Anna Tait.

I first came across Anna and Adv. Ms. 31.3.10 when my friend and fellow researcher Dr Michael Wasser of McGill University, Montreal showed it to me in the Library’s North Reading Room. Michael was (and still is) a historian of crimes of violence in 16th-17th century Scotland, and he was instantly aware of the significance of the manuscript. Almost the first thing he pointed out to me in it was a remarkable story of family tragedy. Out of hundreds of records, this one tale of domestic misery, horror and a woman’s life stood out. It stood out to the clerk who wrote the volume too. A commission is normally a bare record of who is accused of what crime and who is to try them. But the commission to try Anna contained harrowing detail. Almost straight away I agreed to transcribe her commission and to edit it for Scottish History Society. Why was it so remarkable?

Anna Tait ‘alias ‘Hononni’, was in the Scots of the original ‘thrie several times deprehendit putting violent hands to herself at her awne hous,’ in Haddington in 1634. In other words, she was caught trying to kill herself.

In 17th century terms suicide was one of the most heinous acts one could commit. It was like witchcraft, considered to be a particularly odious crime against God’s law and it was punishable by forfeiture of the entire goods of the victim and by a dishonourable burial in unconsecrated ground. What drove Anna to such terrible lengths?

The rest of the commission made the reasons clear. When Anna was apprehended for attempted suicide, she told a terrible tale of adultery, poisoning, domestic murder, unwanted pregnancy, botched home-abortion and death. Here is this part of the commission slightly adapted and with the spelling modernised.

She was for that cause, upon the 18th of December, taken and committed to ward within the tolbooth of the said burgh where being demanded and examined why she put hands to herself, she answered that the intolerable trouble of her mind, which she conceived for the murder of her first husband called John Coltart, nolt driver [cattle drover], and for the murder of her daughter, moved her thereto.

Confessing plainly that about 28 years ago, she being married to the said John, ane aged man, before the marriage she had sundry times committed fornication with William Johnston, her present husband, and that within the time of the marriage she had likewise committed adultery with him. To be quit of her first husband, she consulted with the Devil for his destruction, and that the Devil having directed her to make a drink of foxtrie leaves [foxglove leaves], she did the same, and gave it to her husband to drink who within three hours departed this life.

Concerning her daughter, she confessed that the daughter being with child, and she [Anna] having a purpose to murder the infant in the mother’s belly, at last she consulted with the Devil. He gave her direction to buy wine and to mix it with salt and give it to her daughter to drink, which she having drunken, she shortly thereafter departed this life.

So far, so sadly comprehensible, except for the inclusion of a character whose presence might seem unnecessary to modern readers — The Devil. The Commission finally proceeds ‘upon the 8th of December instant; she had carnal copulation with the Devil in her own bed, and that upon the 11th of December the Devil came to her bedside, gripped her by the hair of her head and did nip her cheek’. Suddenly a classic case of domestic murder and family tragedy is turned to that strangest of all 17th century phenomena to the modern mind: a witchcraft accusation. This was not just a case of three in a marriage, but three plus the Prince of Darkness. However, this wasn’t a strange notion to 17th century people. Where two, three or even just one person were engaged in works of wickedness, it went almost without saying that Satan was somehow present too. Anna was tried not as an adulteress or a murderer but as a witch – the commission was the licence to the magistrates of Haddington to try her, but where was her trial?

Records of such witchcraft trials held in local, rather than central, courts rarely survive. Whilst I was working on the commissions, I happened by chance to be helping someone with a totally different enquiry. Dr John McGavin was researching records of early modern Scottish drama. We discussed his research on poet and minister James Melville and Melville’s account of a dramatic performance in St Andrews. Hearing that John was soon going to be searching through the Haddington Burgh records in the National Register of Archives, I asked him if he would keep an eye out for Anna and any other witches he might happen to spot. To my delight, I soon had an e-mail from John telling me that her trial records were in the Haddington burgh court book.

Researching witchcraft cases can be an intense mixture of horror and delight for a historian. On the one hand to find unexpected light on a unique case is a matter for rejoicing. On the other hand, the details I found in the court book were even grimmer than those of her commission.

Anna had tried several times to hang herself using her own head-dress (her curch). When she was taken into custody, her suicidal behaviours became even more extreme. She attempted suicide again, both by trying to cut her own throat and then ‘when your hands were bound and your feet maid fast in the stocks, no other meanes being left to accomplish your devilishe designes, ye knocked your heid to the wall and stocks, wherby thinking to dispatch your self.’ The court book went into more detail, it claimed that Anna had sex with the Devil in the form of a black man and in the form of the wind and had made a covenant with him. Shape-shifting was a not uncommon piece of Scottish popular belief about Auld Nick, but on top of it were overlaid the sinister assumptions of European theories about demonic pact. One didn’t just meet the Devil according to the demonologists, one had sex with him, took his mark and swore one’s soul away to him. Anna was explicitly accused of all three actions.

The trial also gave more personal information about Anna to add to that from the commission. Taking both sources together we can say a little about her. She had married her first husband John Colthard, the cattle drover, 28 years ago at a place called ‘Furd Kirk’ in England in 1606. Cattle drovers went far afield in the course of their work and Anna had obviously travelled too. Interestingly enough she was accused of having made an appointment to meet the Devil at ‘Ellerslie’. The only places of this name are to be found over in the West of Scotland and not near her home in Lothian. Given 17th century spelling this may also have been the little Lanarkshire village of Elderslie, famed as the birthplace of William Wallace. Whichever it was, Anna’s world clearly stretched well beyond the confines of Haddington.

Age of marriage could be quite late in 17th century Scotland, so Anna was probably about or just under 50 years of age. Her second husband William Johnston was a miller who had lived at Winram, nearby Anna and her first husband. The proximity had assisted their illicit affair. Millers and cattle drovers could be prosperous members of an early modern community, so it is likely that Anna too had some standing in her community to keep up. She was probably very far from the stereotypical portrait of an accused witch as a poor begging woman going door to door looking for alms.

At sometime in her life Anna had acquired the alias ‘Hononni’, a Scottish variant of the English ‘Hey nonny no!’ a popular nonsense refrain in songs. It was an ironically jolly nickname for someone whose life was characterised by murder, tragedy and despair. We find the name of her beloved daughter too –- Elizabeth Johnston who died from the botched abortion. The records of this are chilling

The said Elizabeth, being as ye confessed with child (to whom, few but yourself knows and neither will ye reveal the truth of it), and apparently being loath to let it be known to whom the child belonged, she and ye sought all means to kill, to murther the child in her belly, that it might not come to light who was the father thereof, or how it was gotten, whether in adultery or incest, or what other unlawful way.

To that effect ye consulted with diverse of your confederates fra whom, ye got sundry feall [evil] counsel and by their advice, administered feall drinks to your daughter. But these not doing your turn and all other means failing you, ye went to your old maister the devil … who gave you advise to buy ane mutchkin of white wine, and mix a pint thereof with salt and minister the same unto your daughter, and it would do your turn. The which cruel and devilish counsel ye willingly obeyed and fetched the wine, mixt with the same with salt and gave it to your daughter to drink. By which she presently swelled and shortly thereafter both she and the child died.

In token wherof, you have confessed that the devil gave you as much money in true and real turners [small copper coins] as would buy the said mutchkin of wine and salt. And this deed only of all the devilish and abominable actions has most troubled you, and been the greatest cause of your desire to murder yourself.

In trying to cover up her daughter’s unwanted pregnancy, Anna ended up killing her child. Blaming herself for Elizabeth’s death, Anna no longer wanted to live. She tried repeatedly to kill herself. When it was put to her that the Devil had advised her do all this and that she had become a witch, it seems she barely bothered to defend herself. After all, even though she might have wanted to avoid the shameful death of being strangled and burned at the stake, at least it would have the virtue of ending her life. When the court asked whether she wanted anyone to speak in her defence, she answered ‘none but God in heaven’.

To modern eyes, Anna’s situation seems clear-cut. She had done some terrible things and for very understandable human reasons she wanted to die. Even in 21st century Scotland we would insist that, at the very least, Anna should go to jail for murdering her first husband and that she should be prevented from killing herself. Yet in 21st century Scotland, Anna would have been able to obtain a divorce from her first husband and her daughter would have been able to obtain an abortion (whatever you think of that). So the whole catalogue of tragedy might not have happened at all, or then again, perhaps it might. Was Anna a victim of a society which stacked the cards against women through its interpretation of the Bible or was she the sort of callous person who might have murdered a spouse despite all the advantages of a modern legal system? After all, the murders of spouses still occur. These are questions the historian can only raise and cannot answer.

Even in today’s society, however, a female criminal who had committed crimes of violence comparable to Anna’s would be unusual. To a 17th century society she was such a paragon of horror that the Devil had to be invoked to explain her conduct. In a society which stressed a woman’s subordination to her husband and saw her only rightful adult roles being those of a wife or a mother, Anna was a monster. To her community, she was not only an attempted self-murderer but also an adulteress and the unnatural murderer of her husband, daughter and unborn grandchild. By confessing to witchcraft, she had just about collected the set of the most appalling crimes a 17th century woman could commit. To be regarded with such horror in contemporary society, a woman would probably need to be accused of a string of serious offences against children or young people.

However Anna’s case also raises the question of her mental state and how issues of mental disturbance and suicidal urges were dealt with in her society. Such a suicidal defendant in a modern case might be found unfit to plead, but how did Anna’s contemporaries see her mental distress? Anna was ‘trublit in conscience’ and this points to the beliefs which probably helped to seal her fate. Despair as to whether one was part of the Calvinist ‘Elect’ or whether one was going to hell was a perfectly respectable state in Early Modern Scotland –- even to the extent of repeated suicidal impulses. This can be seen from the diaries, books, letters and sermons of radical Presbyterians and Covenanters. It was a very common phase of the Calvinist conversion experience of the 17th century. Demonic or even suicidal temptations were an almost a normal complication of the road to heaven. To despair over committing terrible sins worthy of hell-fire was not seen as being mentally unstable but as being eminently sane. Any reasonable Bible-believing person might think that way.

So Anna’s despair may have made her seem more culpable, rather than less culpable, to her interrogators whose beliefs would be that in her agony she had done utterly the wrong thing and turned in absolutely the wrong direction. She had, in their minds, turned to the Devil and not to God. Instead of despair proving to be a half-way stage for Anna on the road to conversion and eternal glory, Anna, it seemed by her confession, had failed to choose eternal life and had instead perversely chosen the ultimate dead-end: Hell. This was an offence made all the more horrible, as heaven in its Calvinist form, was no doubt being held out to her every Sabbath in their local church. Perhaps the reason it was necessary to punish the despairing so emphatically was pour encourager les autres; to make sure that when people experienced despair, they would in the Church’s eyes make the right choice: that they would resist the temptation and intensify their piety until the threat was overcome.

Faced with the reality of burning large numbers of accused witches amongst whom they found the suicidal and the mentally disturbed, later generations of Scottish Privy Councillors increasingly doubted the wisdom of this approach. In 1662 in the midst of a nation-wide witch-panic the council issued commissions under strict orders that to proceed with executing a convicted witch, it must be found that ‘At the tyme of their confessions they were of right judgement, nowayes distracted or under any earnest desyre to die’. Almost 30 years after Anna’s death, Scotland’s elite were becoming sensitive to the issue of attempted suicide by witch-confession and the mental state of the accused. It came much too late to affect Anna and because of her murder confession wouldn’t have saved her anyway, but it shows a little how things moved on even in that relatively short time frame. For Anna there could only be one ending — execution. Because she had confessed she was not burnt alive [burning alive tended to be reserved for those who died ‘impenitent’ ie. they refused to confess]. Her sentence was as follows:

It was given for doom [sentence] by the mouth of William Sinclair dempster [pronouncer of sentence] that the said Anna Tait should be taken, her hands bound behind her back and conveyed by William Allot, lockman [executioner] of Haddington to the ordinary place of execution, and there wirried [strangled] to the death at ane post and thereafter her body to be burnt in ashes, desuper act.

Note on sources

The commission for Anna’s trial is edited from Adv.Ms.31.3.10, f.102v. Her trial records may be found in National Archives of Scotland, Haddington Burgh Court Register B30/10/13, fos.24r-26v. A calendar of the witchcraft commissions in Adv. Ms 31.3.10 (including transcriptions of Anna Tait’s commission and her trial records) has been prepared by the author for Julian Goodare (ed.), Miscellany XIII, Scottish History Society, forthcoming.

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(It’s Samhain — the ancient, pagan wellspring of Halloween. Thanks to Royelen for this timely remembrance of a completely undated witch-burning from Scottish folklore.)

A gurgling fountain at the property border announces a gentle place. The fountain has a small pond filled with friendly goldfish which swim your way. They are hoping for morsel of food but it feels like an appropriate welcome to a local herb shop.

The mission is to find a remedy for leg pain. For a few moments the pain can wait while the lemon thyme gets rubbed by fingers gathering up the smell for a delightful inhalation. And then there is the basil, the chocolate mint, the rosemary — and so it goes with rows and rows of little pots of tiny green plants, each fragrant in a unique way. Each creating its own sensation.

When sated with nasal stimulation, it’s time to enter the house. It causes no surprise when cheery sounding chimes ring as the door opens. Inside the walls are lined with shelves. Each shelf is filled with glass jars. Each jar has a different dried leaf. There are many jars. An herb shop employee is happy to help.

“Pain, long-standing muscle pain? In your leg. Uh-huh. It’s possibly a nutritional deficiency, you want to take calcium, two pills twice-a-day. You’ll know in two weeks if this is the cause.”

This knowledge, long forgotten and now denied by Western medicine, may have been the kind of knowledge that got Kate McNiven killed.

Scottish lore has it that Kate McNiven’s community of Monzie in Scotland first sought her out for her wisdom, maybe for her herb cures and curse-ending charms. Then, in the era of witch burnings, her community pulled her from her service and burned her to death. After killing her, Kate McNiven’s community made her a local legend.

Today we might assess Kate McNiven as a real witch based on the power of the curse she left behind — a curse which the generations passed down and which now comes to us across the Internet; a curse which leaves us the tale of a talisman known as the Inchbrakie Moonstone.

Though there are no official records, the curse is said to begin in 1615* when Kate was accused of witchcraft. Having been found guilty, word spread of her immediate execution by fire. A landowner of a nearby estate, having come upon the fire preparations, asked the gathered crowd to stop their execution plan. While he had no success, he did win favor from the named witch.

As the fires around her grew, Kate McNiven began her curse. The landowner of execution site was cursed, then the area known as Monzie was cursed, and finally she honored the unsuccessful estate owner who attempted to stop her execution. She threw from the fires a charm — a blue stone that had been around her neck — and told him that if he kept it close, he would always be blessed with sons and they would always be blessed with lands.

The legend goes that the cursing was successful. The landlord on whose land she died was not able to pass the property on. Monzie withered.

Of course, the land owner who pleaded her case kept the stone near as directed. As the legend goes it always was put on the fingers of the daughter-in-laws and heirs were always produced. Centuries of fecundity were enjoyed until one descendant made the mistake of allowing the stone to be moved outside of the estate. That was the end of the good run and proof of Kate’s powers as a witch.

Is the legend of the Witch of Monzie a romantic retelling of a woman’s death or is it a community reassuring itself that the executed woman was guilty of her crimes? Maybe both. Maybe more.

Swiss psychotherapy pioneer Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow tells us that Kate McNiven’s peers attributed to her what they could not accept in themselves. They found her untrustworthy and capable of doing strange things. For some reason, she of all people was chosen as the one to be the scapegoat. It may have been for no other reason than she didn’t point the finger at someone else. The people of Monzie did not fight for her release, and they likely felt relieved that the pressure was off of them. Their untrustworthiness and strange behaviors were not under scrutiny. For the moment, they were safe.

It’s easy to imagine Kate McNiven as Tessie in Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery”:,

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

* Not only the year but the century of Kate McNiven’s — or M’Niven, McNieven or Nicniven — execution is disputed. Sources report both 1615 (in the midst of King James’ witch-sniffing reign), and 1715 (which would make her one of the last witchcraft executions in Scotland).

But there is no original documentation — a University of Dundee archivist has confirmed this for Executed Today — and McNiven is not listed in Scotland’s witch executions database. She was promulgated in a 19th-century text, The Holocaust, or, the Witch of Monzie and could be entirely fictional. (Update: The myth dissected in comments.)

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On this date in 1622, Anne de Chantraine was burned at the stake for witchcraft in Waret-la-Chaussee, Belgium.

Our day’s heroine answers most prominently to fictional modern interpretations — about which more in a moment — but Anne de Chantraine was a flesh-and-blood person, at least for 17 years.*

In outline form, Anne is said to have faced the usual litany of sorcerous allegations and the usual ordeals to demonstrate guilt, with the usual result: confession, execution. Here in the opening years of the Thirty Years’ War coeval with the the conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, one cannot but suspect the fearful hand of endangered authority in witch-hunts. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that

this recrudescence of the witch-craze in the 1560s was directly connected with the return of religious war … It can be shown from geography: every major outbreak is in the frontier-area where religious strife is not intellectual, a dissent of opinion, but social, the dissidence of a society. … Thereafter, almost every local outbreak can be related to the aggression of one religion upon the other.

Anne de Chantraine’s environs fit the theorem.

The Walloon region of Liege at this point was governed by a Catholic Prince-Bishop of Habsburg stock, just as the Holy Roman Empire was putting down the Protestant stirrings in Bohemia that would initiate Europe’s epochal war and send armies to and fro through the Low Countries. Said Prince-Bishop, name of Ferdinand of Bavaria, would win renown as a zealous persecutor of the diabolical in his realms.

Alas for Anne.

She’s a bit better documented among Francophones (see this biography in French, for instance, full of sensual details like the gorgeous red hair, a spurned lover accusing her, and the rough play of medieval torture; there’s also a brief roundup in German here), but worldwide, she’s a literary character of some consequence — most notably, perhaps, through the work of Belgian author Francoise Mallet-Joris: her 1968 Trois âges de la nuit (translated to English as simply The Witches) presents Anne de Chantraine as the focal point of one of three vignettes reimagining real historical “witches” as persons struggling for spiritual growth.

Anne, in this version, does participate in (staged, not-really-supernatural) witches’ sabbaths, plus a lesbian affair with a fellow participant. Her seekings both godly and infernal (paralleled by lifestyles both monastic and hedonistic) fall short of satisfactory; in the end, exercising magic unto her own death is a form of self-actualization among fellow people who, unable to recognize her humanity, brutalize or ignore her.

Players of the long-running video board game Atmosfear (or Nightmare) will also recognize Anne de Chantraine as a recurring witch character. The series uses recordings (VCR tapes originally; DVDs now) played during gameplay; “the witch” is featured as the central character in Atmosfear III/Nightmare III:

(In the comment thread for this video on YouTube, the French actress Frederique Fouche drops in to confirm her part as the witch. According to this French interview, the role caused her to become an emigre in Australia.)

* Some reports say she was burned at age 17, others that she was arrested at 17, which would have made her 18 or 19 at her death.

Part of the Themed Set: Belles Epoque.

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