Body Parts and Witchcraft

Disclaimer

This is NOT a page about Wiccans or neo-pagans, and I do not advocate the belief that Wiccans are Satan-worshippers and/or baby-killers. I am well aware that they are not. This is a starting point for historical research into the great witch craze of 1100-1700 AD. And please, don't ask me for spells.

Body Parts

In 1604, the Statute of James I the following was listed as a felony: to "take up anie dead man, woman or child out of his, her, or their grave, or anie other place where the bodie resteth, or the skin, bone or anie other part of anie dead person, to be emploied or used in anie maner of witchcraft, sorcerie, charm, or enchantment" (A. Harris 10).

People were afraid of witches, and were horrified of the thought of witches using bodies illicitly. Perhaps the most gruesome of a witch's tools were the body parts she harvested for use in potions and spell-casting. Female witches were especially feared. "As the ones who gave birth, women had access to a treasure trove of potentially magical bodily substances: cauls, dead infants, navel-cords, afterbirth" (Roper 1995 188). The fat of unbaptized infants was a key ingredient in flying potions.

In 16th-century Germany, the most intimate work of care for the body was assigned to women. Women were closely associated with mourning and with care for corpses, a vital font of magical substances. A Catherine Tenn was afraid the woman who pared her baby's nails at the civic bath was going to use them to cause her infant harm.

Nevertheless, it was men who tended to use the body parts in more extreme measures. Many are described as having tried to wrangle pieces of executed criminals from executioners:

Georg Schot asked the hangman of Schongau for a piece of the colon of a man who had recently committed suicide (and who was therefore accounted 'dishonourable' and buried by the executioner). Leonhard Nadler had taken 'a little piece' of the big toe of a cropse hanging on the gallows at Augsburg, and a fragment of the man's shirt. According to the council at Regensburg, Thomas Trummer had virtually ransacked the corpse of a man who had been broken on the wheel. The entire body had been plundered for magical segments: the man's penis, all his fingernails, toenails, spokes of the wheel on which his body had been broken--all had been removed, the council wrote. Just as the bodies of dead saints often had to be protected against relic-hunters, so here the exhibited corpse had become a collection of magical talismans, the pieces invested with supernatural power akin to the healing potential which relics contained (Roper 1995 189).

The alleged English witch Joan Harrison was believed to have a chest in her house containing "all the bones due to the Anatomy of man and woman, and under them haire of all colours that is customarily worne" (A. Harris 10). Similarly, in the Lancaster trial of 1612, Anne Chattox was accused casting three buried skulls out of their grave, and taking eight teeth from these skulls for nefarious purposes (A. Harris 9).

See also Hand of Glory and Cannibalism and Witchcraft.

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Body Parts and Witchcraft is copyright 1997-1998 to Shantell Powell.