Witch, Sacrifice and Eros in the Early Modern Europe

Abstract

The studies that regard the witch-hunt as sacrifice are many. R Girard's theory which regards the witch as scapegoat is the most famous among them. But it is difficult to say that the problems of sacrifice and scapegoat in the witch-hunt have been researched in detail. The purpose of this paper is to examine the problems of the witch-hunt as sacrifice again, and to show, if the witch-hunt is sacrifice, what the characteristic of this sacrifice is. After morphological analysis on the Pappenheimer's witch-hunt in Bavaria (1600), we examine the use of the word "sacrifice" in Jean Bodin's De la demonomanie des sorciers (1580). We arrive at the conclusion that the witch-hunt is the sacrifice certainly, that is "the inner sacrifice", and this sacrifice has the element of "eros".