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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter IV: History of Witchcraft

Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)

Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) explained: its argument on popular magic, witchcraft and astrology, its critics, and the Pagan Front.

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Religion and the Decline of Magic, published in 1971 by the Oxford historian Keith Thomas, is the classic study of popular belief in England between about 1500 and 1700. Drawing on church court records, astrologers' casebooks, trial pamphlets and diaries, it describes how ordinary people used prayer, charms, cunning folk, astrology, prophecy and accusations of witchcraft to cope with illness, theft and misfortune — and asks why educated opinion abandoned many of these beliefs by the end of the seventeenth century. In the same year a group of British witches and Pagans formed the Pagan Front, later the Pagan Federation.

Keith Thomas and the Making of the Book§

Keith Thomas was born in 1933 in Glamorgan, Wales, and studied history at Balliol College, Oxford. As a young fellow of St John's College he became interested in the methods of social anthropology, especially the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft and oracles among the Azande of central Africa. Anthropologists had shown that beliefs which looked irrational to outsiders could form coherent systems that explained misfortune and regulated social relations. Thomas set out to apply that insight to the English past.

The result, after more than a decade of research, was a book of some 700 pages and thousands of footnotes, drawn from an extraordinary range of sources: ecclesiastical court depositions, the casebooks of astrologer-physicians such as Richard Napier and William Lilly, almanacs, sermons, legal records and private letters. Thomas's student Alan Macfarlane published Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970) a year earlier, a detailed study of Essex prosecutions, and the two books together transformed the history of witchcraft in Britain. Thomas later became President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and President of the British Academy, and was knighted in 1988.

The Argument: Magic, the Church and the Reformation§

The book opens with what Thomas called the magic of the medieval church. Late medieval Catholicism, he argued, offered lay people a reservoir of supernatural help: holy water and blessed candles, the relics and shrines of saints, consecrated bells rung against storms, and sacraments that many believed protected body and property as well as soul. The clergy, in popular eyes, possessed powers that ordinary people could draw on in practical emergencies.

The Protestant Reformation, Thomas argued, rejected much of this as superstition. Reformers denied that sacred objects had power in themselves and taught instead a doctrine of divine providence: misfortune came from God, to be met with patience, prayer and repentance rather than with ritual remedies. The people's practical needs did not disappear, however. Into the gap stepped cunning men and wise women, who offered charms, healing and the detection of thieves, and astrologers who answered questions about health, love, lost goods and the outcome of lawsuits. These figures are described in Folk Magic and Horary Astrology and William Lilly. The theme of popular devotion that blended prayer and protective ritual is also explored in Folk Christianity.

The scope of "magic"§

Thomas's chapters range widely: magical healing, the finding of stolen goods with sieve and shears, treasure-hunting, astrology, ancient prophecies attributed to Merlin and Mother Shipton, ghosts and fairies, and beliefs about lucky and unlucky times and omens. Each is treated as part of a single system of explanation and remedy in a world of high mortality, poor medicine and sudden ruin. The chapters on ghosts and prophecy were as influential as those on witchcraft.

Witchcraft and the "Charity Refused" Model§

The most famous section of the book deals with witchcraft accusations. Thomas, like Macfarlane, observed that English accusations usually arose between neighbours who knew each other well. A typical story ran like this: a poor, often elderly woman asked a neighbour for food, money or help and was turned away. Soon afterwards the neighbour suffered a misfortune — a child fell sick, cattle died, butter would not churn. Feeling guilty for breaking the old obligations of charity, the neighbour projected that guilt onto the woman and accused her of witchcraft.

Thomas linked this pattern to social change. As population grew and the economy became more market-oriented, traditional duties of neighbourly charity were under strain, and poor-law reforms shifted relief from personal giving to parish administration. Witchcraft accusations, on this view, expressed the tensions of a society in transition. The model fitted English evidence well and was widely adopted, although historians later stressed that it explains some cases better than others and fits continental Europe, with its demonological theory and inquisitorial courts, less neatly. For that wider picture see The European Witch Trials.

Why Did Magic Decline?§

Thomas's conclusion addressed the question in his title. By the late seventeenth century, educated men and women increasingly dismissed witchcraft, astrology and magical healing, and prosecutions for witchcraft dwindled until the Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended them. Thomas noticed something surprising: this change came before the technical improvements — effective medicine, fire brigades, reliable insurance — that might have made magic unnecessary. The rejection of magic was not simply caused by better technology.

Instead he pointed to a change of mental outlook. The mechanical philosophy of the new science pictured nature as matter in motion obeying regular laws, which made occult influences seem less plausible. A new confidence in human effort and self-help, the growth of statistics and probability, the rise of newspapers and the early forms of insurance encouraged people to plan and calculate rather than to divine and propitiate. Religion itself, in its Protestant form, had helped by drawing a sharper line between religion and magic. Thomas was careful to say that magic declined mainly among the elite; among the population at large many of the old beliefs lived on.

Critics and the Legacy of Religion and the Decline of Magic§

The book was celebrated on publication and soon criticised. In 1975 the anthropologist Hildred Geertz argued that Thomas had imposed a modern, Protestant-influenced distinction between "religion" and "magic" on a past that did not share it; Thomas replied, defending the usefulness of the categories while conceding their difficulties. The debate helped launch decades of reflection on what scholars mean by magic, a question surveyed in Theories of Magic.

Later historians questioned other parts of the thesis. Eamon Duffy's work on late medieval religion argued that Thomas underestimated the depth and coherence of lay Catholic piety. Robert Scribner and Alexandra Walsham showed that Protestantism created its own forms of sacred power and providential wonder, so that the Reformation did not simply "disenchant" the world. Owen Davies and others documented the survival of cunning folk and popular magic well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Michael Hunter's The Decline of Magic (2020) traced the more complicated and contested intellectual retreat from magic among Enlightenment elites.

Despite these revisions, Religion and the Decline of Magic remains one of the most cited works of early modern history. It established popular magic as a serious subject, showed how to read legal and medical records for evidence of belief, and gave the history of witchcraft a social dimension it had lacked. It also appeared just as interest in the occult was surging, and many outside academia read it. Thomas's place among the scholars who shaped the field is traced in Historians of Esotericism.

The Same Year: The Pagan Front and the Pagan Federation§

While Thomas was charting the decline of magic in the seventeenth century, a revival was under way in his own. In 1971 a group of British witches and Pagans founded the Pagan Front to represent modern Pagan religions and to counter hostile press coverage. Among its early figures were John Score, who under the pen name "M" edited the newsletter The Wiccan, and supporters from the Gardnerian and other witchcraft traditions; Doreen Valiente was associated with it from its early days.

In 1981 the Pagan Front was renamed the Pagan Federation. It grew into the main umbrella organisation for Pagans in Britain, publishing a journal (later called Pagan Dawn), offering information to the public, prison and hospital chaplaincies, and stating a small set of shared principles centred on reverence for nature, personal responsibility and the freedom to follow one's own path so long as it harms none. The coincidence of 1971 is suggestive: the same decade that made historical magic respectable in the universities saw organised modern witchcraft, rooted in Wicca and Gerald Gardner, seek respectability in public life.

Frequently asked questions§

What is Religion and the Decline of Magic about?§

It is a social history of popular beliefs in England from about 1500 to 1700, covering magic, astrology, witchcraft, prophecy, ghosts, fairies and omens. It explains how these beliefs worked in everyday life and why educated opinion turned against many of them by 1700.

What is the "charity refused" theory of witchcraft?§

It is the explanation, associated with Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, that many English witchcraft accusations followed a neighbour's refusal to help a poor woman. When misfortune followed, the guilty neighbour blamed the refused woman and accused her of witchcraft.

Is Keith Thomas's book still accepted by historians?§

It is still regarded as a classic and a starting point, but many of its arguments have been revised. Critics have questioned its distinction between religion and magic, its view of medieval Catholicism and the Reformation, and the extent to which magic actually declined outside elite circles.

What was the Pagan Front?§

The Pagan Front was a British organisation founded in 1971 to represent modern Pagans and witches. It was renamed the Pagan Federation in 1981 and became the leading Pagan umbrella body in the United Kingdom.

Sources and further reading§