Wisewomen II: "Unauthorized knowledge"
According to their male rivals! Folk healers in Spain, England, and Scotland.
The Spanish theologian Pedro Ciruelo had been educated at the university at Salamanca and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. His book Reprobación de Supersticiones y Hechizerías (“Condemnation of Superstitions and Sorceries”) was published in 1530, and became so influential that it was reprinted eight times between 1538 and 1628. [Smid, 283] Even as it denounces Spanish folk healers and diviners, and its bias against the healers is plain, the book gives us information about their practices.
Ciruelo admitted that the folk healers and other witches were “held to be very wise in our days in Spain.” He conceded that people considered them to be more effective medical practitioners than the university doctors. [Ciruelo, 63; Lea, 413] He chided the Spanish people for resorting to saludadores (”healers”) and ensalmadores (”chanters of verse/charms”). They used incantations “in order to heal sores, wounds, abcesses and other things that surgeons ought to deal with.” [Ciruelo, 67]
Ciruelo says that “many people, in order to be healed more quickly, seek out sorcerers...” [94-5] He says little about their herbal craft, aside from a few references to the “archers’ herb” used to cure or protect from rabies. But he describes how Spanish healers performed acts demonstrating spiritual power though imperviousness to fire (for more on this, see note at bottom) before undertaking cures:
And these people many times divine secret things about what has happened somewhere else, and also events that already happened to certain people and even things that will befall them. Some healers take a burning coal or iron in their hand and hold it for awhile, others wash their hands in burning water or oil, others put their bare feet on a bar of red-hot iron and walk on it; others go inside very hot ovens... [Ciruelo, 95]
The healer visibly wields power through these ceremonial demonstration, then transfers that power to others, healing their sickness or wounds by touching, breathing on, or rubbing saliva on them, as medicine people and shamans do in other parts of the world. These transmissions of vital force were judged especially effective for “the illness of rancor [rabia] in the heart.” [Ciruelo, 145]
Spanish healers were said to heal livestock with words or with a glance. Entranced healers blessed bread to be eaten for healing purposes, and it was kept “with more devotion than the bread blessed by the church’s priest on Sundays,” as Ciruelo observed with transparent jealousy. [Ciruelo, 94-5] While Ciruelo condemned healers’ “vain words and ceremonies,” he conceded that they did heal people. This was still unquestioned. The nature of the healers’ power—or rather its source—was at the heart of the controversy: Spanish peasants believed that it was blessed, and theologians insisted it was diabolical.
Another group of curers was called ensalmadores (”charmers,” “enchanters”). Blessings alone were deemed effective, in what might be called faith healing:
...there are some who presume to heal the sick with words only, without natural medicines... and there are certain words which they say over the wound or sore or abcess on such and such a day and hour...others along with the words put some other things on the wound or sore... [Ciruelo, 68-9]
Talismans of written words or symbols, sometimes called nóminas, were also widely used as protective charms. Women wore them in childbirth, and before. Many people hung them around the neck to prevent fevers and pains, as people did in the late Roman empire. They also tied them on farm animals and trees and vines. These talismans might be different shapes, triangular or square, and their writings had figures, or numerological signs. Often they were combined with herbs, for example, the hermit-healer Jacinto García put rue, rosemary, and hemp-agrimony into a talisman for patients to wear. [Smid, 302]
Where it was believed that the holy names written on them should not be opened or read, this may indicate the invocation of forbidden deities. Or it may have been meant to preserve the inscription’s mantic power. Some talismans contained Christian prayers, and magical applications of Catholic rites were in use. Ciruelo mentions praying seven psalms, fasting on bread and water, cycles of fasting and alms-giving, of prayers said at particular hours, and at certain points in lunar and solar cycles.
Regardless of their pagan or christian content, the theologian vehemently insisted that all the healers’ practices were devilish. He gravely admonished people to seek cures only through doctors and church-approved prayers (as French and Anglo-Saxon clergy had done many centuries before. [See Dashu 2016: 44-45; 53. Abbot Aelfric admitted that witches foresaw things and healed people, but attributed their power to '“the devil,” urging people not to “enquire from the foul witch” about health matters.] But the Spanish peasants disagreed with this. They said that they tried praying to god and the saints but this failed to cure them. The doctors failed them too. [Ciruelo 142]:
Many simple people...say, “We’ve already tried these things, we’ve gone to doctors and surgeons and have spent time and money on them and their medicines, and we’ve never found relief; in fact we’ve gotten worse. ... and we find that with enchantments and nóminas, in a few days we are healed at little cost, so why not...?
Ciruelo insisted that no one should use enchantments and nóminas since the Church had declared them “secret pacts with the devil in great offense to God.” (This notion of diabolical pact was dreamed up by scholastic theologians who Illness which could not be cured with the two methods approved by the church, prayers and consulting doctors, must be borne as the will of god. [Ciruelo 143. As Aelfric also said. (Dashu, 45]
Modern readers are accustomed to the claim that folk healers represented the depths of superstition and scientific ignorance, and that university doctors represented the pinnacle of medieval medicine. This article of modern scientific faith ignores doctors’ use of toxic substances such as mercury and lead, their resort to extreme purgatives and bloodletting, or their adherence to Galenism. Doctors were unaware of septic contagion from their hands and instruments; at the folk healers did ritual washings.
Ciruelo, a scientist as well as theologian, rebuked as superstitious those who attempted to treat rabies by eating bread blessed by healers—and went on to recommend his own approved treatment: anointing the bite of a rabid dog with its own highly infectious blood or its hair; or simply drinking warm milk! [Ciruelo, 99] The cures of leechcraft often harmed more than they helped, as the peasants pointed out to Ciruelo. The clergy’s concern about Spanish folk healers was not that they were ineffective failures as physicians but that their good results were achieved by forbidden means. They possessed, in Ciruelo’s words, “unauthorized knowledge”.
The Reproval of Superstitions and Sorceries shows how little progress the Spanish priesthood had made by 1530 in uprooting pagan beliefs and practices. Despite the repression, people still turned to healing witches for their ills. The theologian decried “many kinds of superstitions and sorceries, which are in these times openly done in our Spain, by the negligence and carelessness of the lord prelates and of both ecclesiastical and secular judges.” And it was to these potentates that Ciruelo directed his book in hopes of stirring up more effective repression of healers, diviners, dream-interpreters, weather-shamans, augurs, and astrologers.
Ciruelo had studied theology and science at the chief stronghold of witch-doctrine, the University of Paris. He transplanted to Spain the Parisian demonologists’ notion of pact with the devil, which he described as an “offense against God’s honor.” Ciruelo believed that witches’ power came from this alleged pact. He gave examples of the reasons people resorted to witchcraft: in order to have goods in the world, and for knowledge, riches, honors; and for good fortune in the hunt, at law, in the market and in love, and to heal or harm. Witches—brujas in Spanish, xorguiñas in Basque—know ways to achieve these things and also to attain trance and spirit-flight:
the art which the devil has taught to the brujas and xorguiñas, men or women, who have made a pact with the devil, who, anointing themselves with certain unguents and saying certain words, go by night through the air and travel to distant lands to work their sorcery...
Ciruelo described prophetic trances in which witches lose consciousness and fall to the ground as if dead, trances so deep that even though their persecutors whip and beat and burn them, they do not react. It seems clear that these accounts are borrowed from Dominican writings on witches’ use of flying ointments, which were much-repeated in demonological circles. But Ciruelo goes on in more detail about the trances of christian women, who were inspired to reveal
many secrets of sciences and other subtle and fine matters at which many marvel, not only the ignorant and simple, but also the well-educated. And some of these women are held to be prophets, because in their reasonings they cite many authorities of Holy Scripture, and give very strange interpretations of them outside the common opinion of the Catholic Church’s holy doctors. [Ciruelo, 37 (my emphasis)]
PROFESSIONAL RIVALRIES IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
Old wives and bairns make fools of physicians. —Scottish proverb
Early in the reign of Henry VIII, a 1512 Act of Parliament outlawed folk healers and herbalists, forbidding anyone but licensed physicians and surgeons to work in medicine. The bill was a victory for English doctors, who had been trying to outlaw folk healers for over a century. It required all practitioners of physic and surgery to be graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, or to obtain licenses from the bishop. [Chamberlain, Old Wives’ Tales, 58] Midwives were to be under supervision of bishops.
The science and conning of physyke and surgerie being exercised by a grete multitude of ignorant persons and that artificers as smyths wevers and women boldely and custumably take upon theim grete cures and thyngys of great difficultie in the which they partely use sorcery, and witchcrafte... [Statutes of the Realm, iii. 31, in L’Estrangel 11; Chamberlain, 58, gives “sorcerye, and witchcrafte”]
Passing of the 1512 law fell far short of eliminating the healers, and their defenders made themselves heard. In 1542 another Act of Parliament tacitly acknowledged their continuing medical practice, and even their effectiveness, writing in an exemption for “divers honest persons, as well men as women, whom God hath endowed with the knowledge... of certain herbs, roots and waters...” But the law did not allow the folk healers to charge money for their treatments. Those that did became liable to prosecution on this technicality. [Chamberlain, 59]
Even so, two witches, Margaret Neale and Elizabeth Clerke, were still listed among the medical practitioners of London and Norwich. [Green, n. 51] Around 1560, another source estimated that about sixty women were practicing medicine in London. Norwich records from 1570-1590 list ten women, some hired by the city itself, including a surgeon, a midwife and a spinster “that helped women.” [Green, 50 n. 35]
Folk physicians were automatically considered witches. The cunning-woman Mother Bungie, who “had some sight in physicke and surgerie,” was known as “the great witch of Rochester,” according to Reginald Scot, who called her “reputed among all men for the chief ringleader of all other witches…” [Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft III.1.2[ On her deathbed she denied that she was a witch.
As the century wore on, those who cured with charms, incantations, amulets and ritual came to be tried for witchcraft, not for unlicensed medical practice. In 1549, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered inquiries made in his diocese “Whether you know any that use charmes, sorcery, enchantments, witchcraft, southsaying or any like craft invented by the devil.” On the continent, the Inquisition was soliciting denunciations in the same way.
Ten years later, the archdiocese repeated its injunction, with a new clause indicating that these arts were especially likely to be practiced when women gave birth. [L’Estrange 11-12] In 1588, the episcopate at Lichfield made inquisition into midwives’ magical practices. In many English dioceses bishops searched out witches during their periodic visitations. In 1577, for example, inquiries were made in Worcestor diocese after known or suspect users of witchcraft, charms, enchantments, or unlawful invocations. [Summers, 119]
Significantly, the only licensing women could hope to obtain was through the bishop’s courts. This gave the priesthood greater opportunity to punish healers who did not fall in line with doctrine. In 1563, church wardens charged that Alice Prabury “useth herself suspiciously in the likelihood of a witch” in healing people and animals. Joan Warden of Stapleford told judges at Stapleford that “she doth not use any charms, but that she doth use ointments and herbs to cure many diseases.” [Horsley, 183]
Now midwifery, the last stronghold of women’s medicine, came under severe pressure. In 1584, midwives in the diocese of Chester had to take an oath in order to receive their licenses, vowing not to use “any witchcraft, charms, relics or invocation to any saint in the time of travail,” nor to add any “profane words” if they had to perform emergency baptisms, nor to practice any other kind of medicine than midwifery. [Chamberlain, 54. L’Estrange (12) shows this policing was going on earlier, in 1559.]
The clergy jealously surveilled and policed midwives to crush out their de facto role as priestesses of birth, those wise-women who for millennia had been singing invocations to bless newborns. It galled the priests to know that before a baby ever reached the baptismal font, it might have already been bathed in water from a holy spring while an old woman spoke verses of pagan antecedence. The Catholic priesthood had long included a “minor exorcism” of the devil in the baptismal rite.
According to the clergy—first the Catholics, then even more emphatically, the Protestant ministers—charmers practised “unwarrantable healing.” [MacPherson, find] What was the nature of this healing? It ritually invoked natural powers: water, fire, smoke, herbs, stones. The healer bathed the sick with herbs and blessed them, took their measure with cords, ritually brought them into contact with stones embodying spirit power. She practiced binding and releasing, stroking, pouring, and charming by spells. [Grimm, 1151]
Cathedral records at Durham show that women were being summoned before church courts for magical healing. In July of 1582, Allison Lawe from the village of Hart was accused of being “a notorious sorcerer and enchanter.” Church authorities forced her to do penance in the Durham marketplace and before various churches. They examined two other women on charges of “asking counsell at witches, and resorting to Allison Lawe for cure of the sicke.” [Denham Tracts, 1895: 332]
Alesoun Peirsoun of Byrehill became famous as a healing witch in Scotland. For sixteen years “she was coming and going to Saint Andrews in healing of folks.” As a teenager, she had become paralyzed on one side. She was healed by her uncle, William Sympsoun, who had spent twelve years with the Travellers. She said she had “learned her craft” from him after his death. (This transmission of powers from the ancestral dead is widely attested in Scotland and Ireland, as in Mongolia, Congo, and other parts of the world.) William showed her what herbs to use to treat various sicknesses and advised her about her cases. He warned her of the faeries’ coming, and recounted how they had carried him away “out of Middle-Earth.” (That is, the world of the living.) “And when we hear the whirlwind blow in the sea, they will commonly be with it, or coming soon thereafter.” [Fife, 72]
Over the years Allison spent time with the Queen of Elfame and the “good neighbors,” her dead kinsman among them. She “saw with them piping and merriness and good cheer,” and drinking of wine in goblets. She watched the faeries brewing salves in pans over fires and gathering herbs before sunrise, and learned to do the same. A man appeared to her dressed in green—the color of the faeries and of the ancestral dead—promising good for her if she was faithful. The next time he appeared, a great company carried her off to Lothian. She “saw with them piping and merriness and good cheer,” as they drank wine from goblets.
After this journey, said the healer, she suffered a stroke that took away the power of her left side, so that she lay in bed for twenty weeks. She explained the relapse of her paralysis as a punishment inflicted by the “good neighbors.” She had broken their taboo against talking about her dealings with the Court of Elfame. But they also promised to help her.
Among Allison’s large clientele was the bishop of St Andrews. He suffered from many ailments: fever, ague, heart palpitations, and diarrhea. She made a salve, rubbing it on his face, breast, stomach and sides, and prescribed ewe’s milk or wine with herbs, including anise. [Fife, 69-74] The witch’s enemies claimed that she transferred the bishop’s illness to his white palfrey, which died. He attributed his cure to the devil’s power, and refused to pay the healer. Instead he had her arrested and charged with witchcraft. [Baroja, 126; Davidson, 63] The main charge against her was “hanting and repairing with the gude nychtbouris and Quene of Elfame,” by her own confession. Allison Peirsoun was burned on May 28th, 1588. [Sir Walter Scott, 128-30]
A satirical poem by Semple calls Allison by the Latin titles of Saga and Phetanissa (Pythonissa). He describes her riding a horse to Elfame, and all across Britain, on Halloween, and on certain nights seeking out the “seelie wights” (good faeries). The curing rituals the poem ascribes to her come from folk traditions of herbs, knots, south-running waters, and healing stones laid beside the body. She is said to have placed four-leafed clover and nuts gathered on St John’s Eve “vnder ane alter of stane,” and harvested heather under a crescent moon. Semple clinches the witch stereotype, by including “Men’s members” in her list of enchantments, and describing her riding a horse to Elfame on Halloween. [Davidson, Rowan Tree and Red Thread, 52; Fife, 71-4]
Soon after Peirsoun was burned, the minister at St Andrews interrogated the herbalist Agnes Melville, asking “if she has skill of parsley, scallions, comfrey, wormwood, elecampane and cochlearie.” He accused her of using herbs to treat many people’s stomach problems. He also asked if she knew “the virtue of stones” and “south-running water.” Melville admitted that she recommending washing with the water. In 1603, the healer James Reid was burned for curing diseases with south-running water. [Fife, 75-6]
Some of the curative charms that turn up in Scottish witch trials follow formulas of great antiquity. Church authorities in Markinch, Fifeshire, prosecuted Janet Brown for healing with the ancient chant of “flesh to flesh, blood to blood, and bone to bone” (versions of which are found in Finland and the 10th century Merseberg Charm in Germany). Charmers employed a similar formula to stop bleeding, to cure animals and to relieve those who had been “over-looked” or bewitched, usually with christian formulas worked into the ancient rhyme. [Davidson, 53]
Healers employed the witchcraft of cords or strands in a variety of ways: to bind pains, to release them from the bodies of the sick, to tie on healing herbs, and for general blessings. One Scottish ritual called for the charmer to put a green string in her mouth while she pronounced a benediction, then tied it to the person’s right shoulder. [Campbell, 79] The midwife Bessie Dunlop received a lace from an emissary of the faeries, which she tied around birthing women to help their delivery. [Scott, 126]
Scottish healers often cured sprains by “casting the wresting thread.” The witch cast nine knots on a thread spun from black wool, softly repeating a charm with each knot: “Sinew to sinew, vein to vein, joint to joint and bane to bane.” Then she tied it around the sprain, again with a charm in a low voice [Grimm, 1233; Folklore Society, 144]
In 1613, a Shetlander recommended that his sick friend consult “ane woman in Delting, called Barbara Stovd, quha culd give him ane resting threid.” [Who could give him a wresting thread] They came to her before sunrise, and “she tuik ane woll threid and usit certane crossis and coniurationes upoun it... to be woone about his head nyne nyghtis, and then to be burnt: quhairby Garth got rest.” Stovd told the man she’d give him further treatment next Hallowmas. He became a regular patient of hers. [Folklore Society, 136 (find volume cite); see also this.]
In 1616 Stovd was tried for using witchcraft to make milk and butter come (probably singing while churning). Also tried that year was Katherine Caray of Orkney Island. She too healed sprains by casting the wresting thread, repeating the charm of “bone to bone, synnew to synnew, and flesche to flesche, and bluid to bluid.” She was said to wander the hills at sundown, meeting with the faeries. [Folklore Society, 55]
Healing rituals that turn up in other 17th-century Scottish witch trials include laying on of hands; stroking; brushing with straw; scooping sea water over patients, or washing them with water in which three stones had rested, and rubbing them with the stones; or taking the measure of sick people with the Mettye Belt. [Folklore Society, passim, find vol.] Around 1600 a woman (identified only as the wife of James Henrisone) was arrested for “meiting the belt.” She freely admitted doing so, steadfastly asserting that she used it only to cure. “She professed her ability to heal any sick person by this process if only she knew their names.” [Davidson, 48]
The witch hunts made it dangerous to practice this old art. In north England, Jennet Pereson was arrested and tried after an old farmer denounced her as a witch. Robert Duncan “haith hard saye that Jennet Pereson uses wytchcraft in measuringe of belts to preserve folks from the farye.” She was paid 3 cents and 6 cents for various cures and treatments. Elisabethe Gibson testified that Jennet healed her mother. Depositions to the ecclesiastical court of Durham (from 1565-1573) also show charmers treating “the farye.” [Or “fairy sickness.” Denham Tracts, 140]
The power of holding hot coals is described by the Comanche medicine woman Sanapia (Oklahoma, 1895-1984). Her mother and maternal uncle began teaching her at the age of fourteen, and gave her the name “Memory Woman.” “When she reached 17, her mother initiated her, pouring power into her mouth and hands, to make her an eagle doctor. They sat across a fire from each other in a secluded place, with the mother facing east. She smudged her daughter with cedar smoke, fanned and blessed her. She sang her own medicine song. Then she picked up an ember in her bare hand, handed it to Sanapia, and told her to rub it over her hands.
“I was sure scared then...almost got up and ran away. I was only a young girl at the time, you know. But, when I took them coals on my hand, inside and outside my hand I felt a chill... Oh, it was like chills in my hands. That has the meaning that power was in there... working in my hands. Felt like it would go up my arms even.”
The older medicine woman drew two eagle feathers across the initiate’s mouth, four times. One disappeared and went into her body. She also placed an eagle egg into her stomach. Then she painted her daughter with red on her face, arms, legs, and feet. She instructed her not to eat birds of any kind, because this was eagle medicine, nor to allow food to pass behind her while she was eating. Sanapia was active in the peyote religion and came into her own as a healer in middle age. She was a skilled herbalist, praying to Eagle, smudging with cedar, fanning and anointing, removing feathers from sick people’s bodies, and sucking out illness using a cow horn. [Jones, 1972]
Next up: Wisewomen III: healing and divination in Eastern Europe.
Excerpt from The Terror, Vol XIV of my series Secret History of the Witches. (See Series Contents here.) This as-yet-unpublished volume deals with the height of the European witch hunts, 1500-1700. ©1990 Max Dashu.
(Bibliography for citations will follow after all chapters are completed.)
One more bit from Smid's article, about an earlier writer, Martín de Castañega, who titled his opus "Tratado muy sotil y bien fundado de las supersticiones y hechizerias y vanos conjuros y abussiones, y otras cosas al caso tocantes, y de la possibilidad y remedio dellas"
(Detailed and thorough treatise about various superstitions, charms, futile conjurations and machinations and other such things as well as their remedy about superstitions, witchcraft and vain spells as well as machinations, along with other related things and the possibility and remedy of them”
This one is so well done. Vivid. Thank you/.