A Vicious Seed

In the sixteenth century, witch trials were a fact of life. Women were being hauled before courts across Europe. Confessions were extracted under torture. Executions followed. Into this world stepped Johann Weyer, who looked at all of it—the confessions, the trials, the executions—and said that these women are sick, not sinful. They are patients, not criminals. And the men putting them on trial ought to know better. This episode brings you a story of religious belief and scientific inquiry at the dawn of the modern era, the story of Johann Weyer.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
“Of all the misfortunes which the various fanatical and corrupt opinions, through Satan’s help, have brought in our time to Christendom, not the smallest is that which, under the name of witchcraft, is sown as a vicious seed. The people may be divided against themselves through their many disputes about the Scriptures and church customs, while the old snake stirs the fire; still no such great misfortune results from that as from the thereby inspired opinion that childish old hags whom one calls witches or sorcerers can do any harm to men and animals. Daily experience teaches us what cursed apostasy, what friendship with the wicked one, what hatred and strife among fellow creatures, what dissension in city and in country, what numerous murders of innocent people through the devil’s wretched aid, such belief in the power of witches brings forth. No one can more correctly judge about these things than we physicians whose ears and hearts are being constantly tortured by this superstition.”

These are the words of Johann Weyer, a Dutch physician writing in 1563, and if you’ve spent any time at all in the sixteenth century (which, if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, you have), you’ll understand why a doctor might feel that way. Because in the sixteenth century, witch trials weren’t an occasional curiosity. They were a fact of life. Women—almost always old, poor, and powerless—were being hauled before courts across Europe, accused of consorting with the Devil, casting spells, and causing harm through supernatural means. Confessions were extracted under torture. Executions followed.

And into this world stepped Johann Weyer, who looked at all of it—the confessions, the trials, the executions—and said that these women are sick, not sinful. They are patients, not criminals. And the men putting them on trial ought to know better.

That argument, put forward in a dense Latin treatise called De praestigiis Daemonum, or On the Illusions of Demons, would make Weyer one of the most controversial figures of the sixteenth century, earning him the lasting enmity of some of the sharpest minds in Europe and, four centuries later, winning him the unlikely title of “the father of modern psychiatry.”

In this episode, I bring you a story of religious belief and scientific inquiry at the dawn of the modern era, the story of Johann Weyer.

The Making of a Skeptic
Johann Weyer was born around 1515 in a small town in what is now the Netherlands. As a young man, he became a student and, by all accounts, something of a protégé of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the notorious German polymath whose writings on occult philosophy had been scandalizing polite society since the 1510s. Agrippa was brilliant, erratic, and deeply controversial, a man who had defended a woman accused of witchcraft before an Inquisitor, written extensively about ceremonial magic, and managed to offend virtually every authority he encountered. Spending your formative years in the orbit of a man like that tends to leave a mark.

After his time with Agrippa, Weyer went on to study medicine, eventually earning his medical degree and settling into a long career as a court physician, most significantly, as the personal physician of Duke William III of Jülich-Cleves-Berg, a territory in the western Holy Roman Empire. Duke William was a man of notably moderate religious temperament in an age when moderation was in short supply. He was also, crucially, a ruler who gave Weyer the freedom to write, to think, and to publish and the political protection to survive the consequences.

Weyer was a Lutheran, a committed, believing Protestant. In his attack on witch-hunting, he wasn’t arguing from a position of skepticism about the supernatural. Weyer believed in God. He believed in the Devil. He believed in demons. He believed, quite sincerely, that Satan was active in the world and capable of real harm. What he did not believe was that a frightened, confused old woman, likely suffering from some form of mental illness, was a meaningful instrument of that harm or that burning her was either just or pious. And he had some pointed things to say about the people who thought otherwise, many of whom happened to be Catholic.

In 1563, Weyer published De praestigiis Daemonum in Basel. It was a substantial work: six books, dense with theological argument, medical observation, classical citation, and, occasionally, barely-contained outrage. The full title translates to something like On the Illusions of Demons and on Spells and Poisons, and that word “illusions” tells you a great deal about where Weyer is going before you’ve read a single chapter. At the heart of De praestigiis Daemonum is a move that was, for its time, genuinely radical. Weyer wanted to break apart the category of “witch”—that catch-all term that sixteenth-century courts, theologians, and panicked neighbors applied to anyone suspected of supernatural wrongdoing—and replace it with something more precise and, he believed, more honest.

He proposed three categories. The first he called the lamiae, a classical term for a kind of female demon, which Weyer repurposed to describe the typical victim of a witch hunt: elderly, often poor, mentally unstable women. These women, Weyer argued, were not witches in any meaningful sense. They were sick. Using the medical framework of his era—the Galenic theory of humors—he argued that an excess of black bile, what physicians called “melancholy,” corrupted the imagination and made these women susceptible to demonic delusion. The Devil, Weyer believed, was real and actively working in the world, but his primary method was manipulation: he planted false visions and fantasies in the minds of vulnerable women, leading them to believe they had attended the sabbat, flown through the night, and caused harm to their neighbors. None of it, in Weyer’s view, had actually happened. His second category was the magi, educated men who practiced ritual magic. For these men, Weyer had considerably less sympathy. Unlike the deluded old women, the magicians were of sound mind. They knew what they were doing. They had consciously and willingly sought out demonic instruction. Even if their magic ultimately produced nothing—and Weyer believed it didn’t—their intent was punishable as a form of heresy and fraud, and they deserved to be prosecuted accordingly. His third category was the venefici:poisoners. These were the only people Weyer believed deserved the full weight of the law without qualification. Poisoners used real substances to cause real harm. They acted with malice aforethought and a clear mind. Their crimes were not supernatural but natural, and the courts should treat them as such.

What Weyer had done, in effect, was to redirect the full force of the law away from frightened old women and toward the people who, in his view, actually deserved it. It was a sophisticated legal and medical argument. It was also, wrapped inside its layers of Latin scholarship, a deeply compassionate one.

The Lutheran Angle
There is, however, another dimension to De praestigiis Daemonum that more recent scholarship has brought into sharper focus, and it complicates the portrait of Weyer as a straightforward champion of reason against superstition. Weyer was not writing in a vacuum. He was writing in the middle of the Reformation, a period of profound religious conflict in which boundaries often blurred between theological argument, political allegiance, and personal rivalry. And while his arguments for the protection of accused women are genuine and consistent throughout the book, he is also, at every turn, taking aim at the Catholic Church.

Consider his treatment of the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious fifteenth-century witch-hunting manual written by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Where other critics might have treated the Malleus with a degree of scholarly caution, Weyer dismissed it as “the silly and often godless absurdities of the theologians Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.” Not exactly diplomatic. But then, diplomacy wasn’t really the point.

As a devoted Lutheran, one of Weyer’s chief complaints about the witch trials was that they were, in his view, a symptom of a broader Catholic pathology. The Inquisition’s methods—torture, forced confession, the spectacle of execution—he saw as an abuse of spiritual authority that had no foundation in scripture rightly understood. He was particularly contemptuous of Catholic sacramental practices: signing oneself with the cross, the wearing of amulets, the appeals to the Virgin and the saints. If these practices availed their practitioners nothing—and as a Lutheran, Weyer was quite sure they didn’t—then how could anyone seriously believe that elderly peasant women were commanding demonic power?

He also made a pointed philological argument that was, at its root, a critique of Catholic biblical interpretation. The commandment in Exodus 22:18, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” was the foundational proof-text for the prosecution of witchcraft. Weyer argued, through careful attention to the Hebrew original, that the term being translated as “witch” actually referred to a veneficus, a poisoner. The text, properly understood, commanded the execution of poisoners, not of deluded old women. That the Catholic Church had spent centuries misreading this passage and building an apparatus of persecution on top of that misreading, was, for Weyer, further evidence of what happened when you let the wrong people handle scripture.

Recent scholarship, particularly the work of historian Vera Hoorens, has suggested that this anti-Catholic dimension was not incidental to Weyer’s project but may have been one of its driving motivations. Notably, Weyer began writing De praestigiis Daemonum in the late 1550s, a period of relative calm in the history of the witch trials, before the largest waves of persecution had begun. Rather than reacting to an immediate crisis, he was instead making an argument that had as much to do with the failures of the Catholic Church as with the fate of individual accused women. This doesn’t mean his compassion for those women was insincere. The two things coexisted. But it does mean that De praestigiis Daemonum is a richer, more complicated, and more politically entangled document than its later reputation as a landmark of medical rationalism might suggest.

Enter Bodin
If Weyer was looking for a fight, he certainly found one.

The most formidable response to De praestigiis Daemonum came from Jean Bodin, a French Catholic jurist and political philosopher who was, in almost every respect, Weyer’s intellectual equal and ideological opposite. Where Weyer was a physician arguing from medical experience, Bodin was a legal theorist arguing from the authority of law, scripture, and classical precedent. Where Weyer saw accused witches as victims, Bodin saw them as criminals, dangerous ones. And where Weyer saw the persecution of witches as a catastrophic miscarriage of justice, Bodin saw it as a necessary instrument of social order.

In 1580, Bodin published On the Demonomania of Sorcerers, which was, among other things, an extended rebuttal of Weyer’s arguments. Bodin’s first line of attack was medical. He rejected Weyer’s melancholy defense on the grounds that it was internally contradictory. Melancholy, in the Galenic framework, was characterized by excessive heat and dryness. Women, as Bodin pointed out—citing Greek, Latin, and Arab medical authorities with some relish—were “naturally cold and wet.” Therefore, women could not be melancholics. Therefore, Weyer’s entire explanation for their behavior was medically impossible. It was, Bodin argued, “ridiculous” to attribute the behavior of witches to melancholy, particularly since some of these women had allegedly been practicing their craft for forty or fifty years without any obvious deterioration of health.

This argument has a certain horrible internal logic if you accept the premises, which of course we no longer do. But what is more striking than the medical argument is the personal one. Bodin couldn’t bring himself to believe that a man of Weyer’s intelligence and learning could be making these arguments in good faith. The conclusion he reached was stark: Weyer was not merely wrong. He was complicit. Bodin accused Weyer of being a sorcerer himself, of deliberately working to protect his fellow practitioners of the dark arts by arguing for their release. He even argued that Weyer, by publishing his book, had effectively taught “a thousand damnable sorceries,” because De praestigiis Daemonum described the methods and invocations of magicians in enough detail to serve as a practical manual. Weyer, by this logic, was not a critic of witchcraft but a promoter of it and deserved to be prosecuted accordingly.

Bodin also made a more substantive legal argument that cut to the heart of what separated the two men. Weyer had argued that witches, being deluded and mentally incapacitated, could not meaningfully enter into a pact with the Devil, and therefore could not be held legally responsible for whatever they believed they had done. Bodin was unmoved. Even if the witches themselves lacked the power to cause direct harm, he argued, their renunciation of God and their homage to Satan allowed the Devil to work in the world with their cooperation and at their invitation. “Judges cannot bring Satan into court,” Bodin wrote, “but they can diminish the scope of his power by removing from him the witches who help him, pray to him, pay him homage, and carry out his instructions.” The women were guilty not of witchcraft but of something worse: apostasy. And apostasy was absolutely a crime that warranted execution.

To this, Bodin added one final dismissal: Weyer’s “vocation,” he wrote, was “to judge the color and consistency of urine and other such things.” He was a doctor, not a theologian, and had no business touching questions of divine and human law. It was a line designed to sting, and it probably did. For his part, Weyer was not without his own defenders, and the debate between the two camps rippled through European intellectual life well into the late sixteenth century. The English writer Reginald Scot, whose 1584 Discoverie of Witchcraft would become another landmark text in the skeptical tradition, drew heavily on Weyer’s arguments. So would others. But the tide of witch trials would not begin to turn for decades yet, and in the short term, Bodin’s view was closer to the mainstream.

Conclusion
Johann Weyer died in 1588, having spent the better part of three decades defending a position that made him, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, a dangerous radical at best and a criminal accomplice at worst. Both Bodin and King James VI of Scotland, who would later commission his own witch-hunting manual, Daemonologie, and who had a particular gift for bearing grudges, accused him of sorcery.

The irony is that history has vindicated Weyer in ways that would probably have surprised even him. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, physicians and psychologists rediscovered De praestigiis Daemonum and found in it something that looked, at least in outline, like a precursor to their own work. The psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg was perhaps the most enthusiastic champion of this reading, giving Weyer the title that has stuck: “the father of modern psychiatry.” Jean-Martin Charcot’s colleagues reprinted Weyer’s work as evidence for the reinterpretation of demonic possession as a form of hysteria. Sigmund Freud himself noted that Weyer’s observations about forced confessions had contributed to his own thinking about the role of fantasy in psychological life.

Whether Weyer would have welcomed these endorsements is an open question. He was, after all, a believing Lutheran who fully accepted the reality of the Devil. He was not arguing that the supernatural didn’t exist. He was arguing about who had access to it and who, in the eyes of a just God and a rational court, could reasonably be held responsible for its effects. The mentally ill old woman, he insisted, could not be. The educated magician who consciously chose to seek demonic instruction could be. And the poisoner who caused real harm through real means absolutely should be.

Weyer’s taxonomy has not aged uniformly well. His views on women, for all his compassion toward them, were thoroughly shaped by the misogynist assumptions of his era. But his insistence that the accused deserved to have their mental and physical condition examined before they were condemned, that courts should be skeptical of confessions obtained under torture, and that the spectacle of witch-hunting served no one’s interests except those who profited from fear, these ideas, however imperfectly he articulated them, have proven more durable than almost anyone in the sixteenth century would have predicted.

There is a moment in De praestigiis Daemonum where Weyer surveys the landscape of his era—the trials, the executions, the treatises piling up in defense of persecution—and finds himself essentially alone. “Wherever I listen,” he writes, “there is no one, no one who out of compassion for humanity unseals the labyrinth.” This was not quite true, even then. There were others, scattered across Europe, who had their doubts. But Weyer was willing to write those doubts down, publish them, attach his name to them, and defend them against the most formidable critics the age could produce. He did it from a position of genuine religious belief, motivated at least in part by anti-Catholic conviction, armed with the tools of medicine and classical scholarship, and sustained by the protection of a duke broad-minded enough to let him keep his job.

He was not a modern rationalist. He was not, by any sensible standard, a feminist. He was a sixteenth-century Lutheran physician with a talent for Latin, a contempt for the Malleus Maleficarum, and an abiding conviction that the women being burned across Europe were not witches. They were patients. They were victims. And someone, he decided, ought to say so.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.