Heretics and Heresies, Episode Two:

DAME ALICE KYTELER: First Lady of the Witch-Hunt

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Night. The moon rides high in the trees. Loud heartbeat, ragged breathing. Through shadow and moonlight runs a woman pursued by a shrouded figure who clutches a cross. Ahead she can see the glow of a huge bonfire in a forest clearing – it seems she is racing to reach the fire before the shrouded one catches her. She dashes into the clearing, sees several robed forms standing around the fire. She approaches, glancing over her shoulder to make sure the one in the woods is not upon her, finds that the figures are scarecrows. She stares into the blaze. Images of women burning at the stake weave through the flames. The air fills with screams, the voices of the Burning Times. The woman, in mediaeval bedclothes, jolts awake, sits upright in bed, shivering, drenched in sweat. Someone pounds at the door…

Societies, like individuals, have a night-side teeming with dreams and nightmares. One of the oldest dreams is that of the shaman – a person who has a special relationship with the realm of spirits, so intimate that it was often thought of as an actual marriage to a ghost. Shamans would enter trance states and foray into the otherworld, battling enemies and garnering wisdom to bring back to their communities. One of the oldest nightmares is that of the evil spirit, personifying the chaos that constantly tries to disrupt the ordered world of humanity. Among the most ancient members of this demonic class was a creature known among the Sumerians and Babylonians as Lalitu. She was winged, fanged, and gorgeous. She had two specialties: seducing men, then killing them and drinking their blood; and murdering infants. She embodied all the terrors that lurk in the dark, as well as the age-old male fear of the overwhelming power of woman’s sexuality. As such Lalitu crops up in other cultures: she directly entered Hebrew mythology as Lilith, Adam’s demon-wife prior to Eve’s creation; among the Romans she was the awful night-hag Lamia; and she haunted the nocturnes of mediaeval monks as the dread Succubus. In western Europe in the later Middle Ages, the primordial dream of the shaman fused with the archaic nightmare of the she-devil, and a new horror chilled the nights of the pious – the Witch. (A series of shaman-images, from Old Stone Age caves, from the pictograph site of Val Camonica in Italy, from shamanic cultures studied by anthropologists such as the Huichols; a series of female demon-images, starting with the Sumerian Lalitu, culminating in a witch-image.)

What is a witch? In Western culture this term has borne diverse meanings through the ages. By the fifteenth century the most learned men in Europe had concurred that Christendom was under siege by an international organization of witches. Witches were thought to resemble the shamans of old in that they had allied with, even married, occult beings. But for orthodox Christians of the time these beings were sinister, under the sway of The Evil One himself – Satan. Any contact with the king of the demons was thought to be extremely hazardous, probably motivated by heretical views. So witches, even when they seemed to do good deeds like healing the sick, must actually have been covertly trying to destroy the ordered world, like the seducing devils they were held to serve. This notion was a fantasy – there has never been such a conspiracy. But belief is a reality unto itself. A belief can kill – especially if the belief is that you are a witch, and the believer is the bishop of your town, and you live in Ireland in the 1300s.

The year was 1324. The bishop was Richard de Landrede, Bishop of Ossory. Almost two hundred years prior to Luther’s time western Europe, including Ireland, was officially a Roman Catholic bloc. But there were alarming cracks. Exotic heresies of every stripe had been breaking out like brush-fires of the soul in Italy, France and Germany for the past couple of centuries: the Cathars taught that the wealth and militancy of the Catholic church proved that it was spawned by the Devil; the Petrobruscians trampled on the cross as the emblem of Christ’s torturers, not of Christ; the disciples of the prophet Tanchelm thought they could attain a great blessing by guzzling his bathwater. Most of Iberia was still occupied by Moslem armies, feared as anti-Christian forces. What could explain this onslaught on the True Faith? Devils, surely, and their human helpers. Pope John XXII felt that he was personally targetted by black magicians, and lived in terror of finding mutilated wax dolls of himself. When word reached him of a nest of Satan’s servants uncovered in Ireland by Bishop Richard de Landrede, he must have shuddered and crossed himself.

The ringleader was said to be Dame Alice Kyteler. In the man’s world of the time, she had several strikes against her. She was the richest lady in Kilkenny; worse was that she had gained her wealth through inheritance following the untimely deaths of three husbands; and John Le Poer, her fourth, was ailing. There was no such thing as coincidence in this demon-wracked cosmos. The Devil’s hand was seen behind the string of deaths, and the beneficiary, Dame Alice, was an obvious suspect of heretical sorcery.

The bishop, trained in France and steeped in continental anxieties about Satanism and heresy, conducted an investigation, interviewing Kyteler’s stepchildren who had been cut out of the inheritances, as well as the sickly husband John. His findings were horrific. Sure enough, witnesses confirmed there were witches in Kilkenny, with Dame Alice at their head. The witches had damnably denied God and Church, met at night to perform blasphemous inversions of Christian rites, and sacrificed roosters to the Devil. Alice, like an old-time shaman, had a spirit lover. Its name was Robert Artisson, and would assume the shape of a cat or a shaggy black dog for her to have sex with. In addition to doing in her husbands, Dame Alice and her witches cast curses and love spells on their neighbours by boiling up a true "witches’ brew" composed of chicken guts, worms, corpse fingernails, babies’ brains and some herbs for seasoning, heated in a skull over an oak fire. (Contemporary art illustrating this, e.g. woodcuts from Compendium Maleficarum etc.)

The situation was dire, but Dame Alice didn’t go easily. She had friends in high places and resisted the persecution of the bishop for months, even managing to get him thrown in jail briefly. But eventually the danger drove Kyteler to the safety of England where there were no witch hunts at the time, and she lived out her life in comfort. Her maid, Petronilla de Meath, was left behind. The bishop tortured her six times until he was satisfied she was telling the "truth": she verified his worst nightmares about the witches of Kilkenny, and was herself convicted of heresy. On November 3, 1324, Petronilla was burned alive, the first accused witch to die in Ireland, one of the first in Europe. But far from the last.

Were there witches in Kilkenny? Only in the troubled dreams of Bishop Richard and the townspeople, whose resentments garbed themselves in forms drawn from the stream of half-remembered folklore and whispered old tales about people who had intercourse with ghosts, and malevolent night-hags. But the fear was spreading. Two years later, paranoid Pope John issued a decretal excommunicating anyone who, like Dame Alice, had teamed with Lucifer "to fulfill their most depraved lusts". The stage was being set for the Great Witch Hunt that would engulf Europe in the next century. And, in the case of the Kilkenny witches, we see an early snapshot of the sorts of fevered fantasies that would loom in the cross-hairs of the Hunt – Satan-loving sorcerers, part wicked shaman, part sex-monster. In 1486 the delusion reached fruition in the lurid details of the famous witch hunters’ manual, Malleus Maleficarum, which established disbelief in witches as a most vile heresy. (Here we can summarize the full witch stereotype that was incompletely developed by Kyteler’s time, including flight to the sabbath, witches transforming into animals, etc. Footage or stills here from the old Swedish film "Witchcraft Through the Ages". Great stuff.)

Night, moonlight, heartbeat. A man clutching a cross stumbles through the woods, several cowled figures in pursuit. He bursts into the clearing, runs toward the fire, trips on a skull. He is surrounded by the figures, who throw back their hoods. Each has his face. Trapped, he turns toward the fire, flames licking the visages of condemned heretics. Sound of screams. Bishop Richard de Landrede jolts awake, but awakens into another nightmare – his own witch-haunted world. Someone, or Something, pounds at the door…