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Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law, Folklore, and Mentality, Württemberg, 1606–1770
... In 1773, in the town of Günzburg, a group of treasure hunters faced arrest, and their leader received punishment in the form of kneeling in the marketplace with his magical manuscripts (Davies 2010, p. 120). Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, in a comprehensive list of publications, presented numerous instances of treasure-hunting cases from the Protestant Duchy of Württemberg during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dillinger 2003;Dillinger and Feld 2002;Tschaikner 2006). Intriguingly, even the dukes themselves occasionally participated in these treasure hunts, despite the official stance deeming treasure hunting as a prohibited magical action and an abuse of religious practice. ...
This study explores destinative elements in late medieval and early modern learned magic in East-Central Europe, focusing on names, images, characters, invocations, and addresses facilitating communication with transcendental entities. It contends that a thematic shift occurred in the early modern era, witnessing a decline in destinative talisman texts, replaced by a surge in treasure-hunting manuals. Drawing from legal cases and treasure-hunting manuals, the research aims to categorize the “souls” frequently invoked in these practices. The term “souls” is interpreted as either spirits or the souls of the deceased, reflecting the significant role of the dead in treasure hunting, often conducted in cemeteries. This shift is linked to changes in the sociocultural background of practitioners, marking a transformation in magical practices from destinative talismans to treasure hunting, revealing a nuanced evolution in East-Central European magical traditions.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
When several girls and young women living in Salem Village, Massachusetts, began to have strange fits in January 1692, their worried families and neighbors wanted to know what was causing the afflictions and how to end them. Mary Sibley, a member of the local church and the aunt of one of the afflicted girls, Mary Walcott, suspected that her niece was bewitched and turned to defensive magic in an attempt to identify the culprit. Sibley asked two Indian slaves who lived and worked in the local minister’s home, Tituba and John, to bake a cake consisting of meal and the afflicted girl’s urine, which they then fed to a dog. If the experiment worked, the witch responsible would be revealed. Sure enough, once the cake had been baked, the girls could see "particular persons hurting of them." Over the coming months, as a growing number of local inhabitants were accused of witchcraft, both accusers and accused gave testimony that included descriptions of colonists using defensive magic, divination, and image magic. That testimony confirmed what earlier witch trials had already shown - that folk magic, although condemned by the Puritan faith as an instrument of the Devil, was deeply embedded in New England’s culture and that many settlers saw nothing wrong with such practices. One of the accused, Dorcas Hoar of Beverly, Massachusetts, had "a book of palmistry" in which "there were rules to know what should come to pass." She also claimed that she could predict a neighbor’s future by the "veins about her eyes." When Hoar’s minister, John Hale, confronted her in 1670, explaining that "it was an evil book and evil art," she "seemed … to renounce or reject all such practices." Yet the minister came to believe that Hoar had merely been humoring him. Several years later, Hale heard that she was still in possession of a fortune-telling book and perhaps still offering her services to neighbors.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
Histories and anthropologies of magic and witchcraft rarely meet in the spacetime of a single scholarly reflection. By this, I mean more than the self-evident fact that historians attend to past events and that anthropologists usually (although not always) research their contemporaries. By and large, historians have restricted themselves to the geographic imaginary of Europe and the nation-states that currently comprise it. Until relatively recently, their major temporal concern was the era of organized witch trials; they tended to treat magic as an aberrant feature of Europe’s past and to focus on its decline. Although now many emphasize that magic and witchcraft did not vanish with the Enlightenment, most treat it as a survival mostly found among less-educated or rural European populations. For anthropologists, magic and witchcraft mainly constitute elements of everyday life in regions beyond Europe’s borders, with Africa as the heart of magical darkness. As the discipline coalesced around the figure of the "primitive" in the late nineteenth century, armchair ethnologists unproblematically recognized magic in reports streaming back to European metropoles from outposts of empire, penned by travelers, merchants, missionaries, colonial officials, and other "men on the spot." Declaring magic fundamental to the primitive, and thus a phenomenon with worldwide distribution, they assumed contemporary accounts recounted forms of life unchanged from a past once shared by all of humanity, and overcome by only a few. As anthropologists turned from speculative human history to careful ethnographic description, with some even arguing that magic might itself become altered in response to changing circumstances, treatment became resolutely local, a feature of specific non-European ethnic groups, regions, and nations.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
Some time around the turn of the eighth century, in an Insular learning centre on the European continent, a diligent scribe copied a short list of magical practices and superstitions into a codex that comprises mostly canonical material and Carolingian capitularies. This short text, commonly known to modern scholars as the Indiculus superstitionum et paganiarum ("a short list of superstitions and pagan practices"), is an appropriate starting point for this chapter because it not only stands at the core of any discussion of magic in the early medieval West, but it also exemplifies in a straightforward manner the numerous stumbling blocks one has to tackle when studying early medieval magical practices in their cultural, religious and social context. Let us, then, cite this short text in full: A SHORT LIST OF SUPERSTITIONS AND PAGAN PRACTICES 1. Of sacrilege at the graves of the dead.2. Of sacrilege over the departed, that is, dadsias.3. Of the spurcaliae in February.4. Of the little houses, that is, sanctuaries.5. Of sacrilegious acts in connection with churches.6. Of the sacred rites of the woods which they call nimidas.7. Of those things which they do upon stones.8. Of the sacred rites of Mercury and Jupiter.9. Of the sacrifice which is offered to any of the saints.10. Of amulets and knots.11. Of the fountains of sacrifices.12. Of incantations.13. Of auguries according to birds, or according to the dung or sneezing of horses or cattle.14. Of diviners or sorcerers.15. Of fire made by friction from wood, that is, nodfyr.
For I should not have thought it likely that the same things could be effected by magicians, even in appearance, which he who was sent by God performed. Magic as a Discourse There is no such thing as magic in and of itself. There are practices, beliefs and texts that are given - usually by outsiders - the label of being magical. During recent decades, the distinction between religion and magic has been challenged as untenable. Ancient practices often cross the boundaries between magic and religion that are traditionally followed by modern scholarship.Magic functions as a discourse - and most often as a polemic. In order to avoid essentialistic definitions, I shall treat the concept of magic as a discursive category that is dependent on the perceiver. I understand magic as a socially constructed object of knowledge whose content and formulations vary according to different social contexts and circumstances. For closer definitions of magic, terms such as "unsanctioned religious activity", "ritual power" or "extra-cultic ritual practices" are preferable. In modern scholarship, magic has been used to refer to alternative, deviant, private and usually unaccepted forms of ritual behaviour. When I do make use of the term "magic", it is only to illustrate how Late Antique writers employed the term in their condemnations of certain practices. I do not take a stand on whether these texts and practices are magic or religion.
A Brief Introduction The first time I saw the altar of a bruja (witch-healer) in Puerto Rico, I was astounded by the bizarre mishmash of Catholic saints and African- and Amerindian-looking deities side by side with a Buddha and a chromolithograph of a blonde Jesus surrounded by all sorts of tall, colored candles. Hanging from a large bronze cross, I also noticed a small packet, obsessively wrapped with a cord - a magic work, I later learned, that had been left there to be empowered by the cross (Figure 19.1). What was the meaning of this carefully displayed, yet, to my view, incongruent configuration of icons and religious symbols that had crossed geographical, temporal, and, most importantly, cultural boundaries? These apparently incongruous mixtures - what for many would be examples of syncretism or creolization - tell just one side of the story, as will become clearer later in the chapter. They could be seen as sediments comprising the strata of past and present ritual practices, the products of recurrent, nonofficial, irreverent religious appropriations of hegemonic religious symbols, rather than just mixtures. Elsewhere I have characterized these power-laden processes as "ritual piracy" as an alternative, and more historically precise, way of discussing "creolization" processes and creole (vernacular) religions (Romberg 2005b, 2011c). The other story that creole religions tells has to do with the rewriting of these harsh creolization histories in ways that reflect the experiences and agency of their practitioners in the present. The shape and form of altars today may reveal to the ethnographically curious, then, not only the particular ritual practices of their owners, but they may also, in a broader sense, manifest the layered histories of volatile religious, cultural, economic, and political encounters in the Americas and their ongoing reinterpretation.
The laws against the crime of witchcraft, or maleficium, instituted across Europe during the early modern era also prohibited the practice of magic more generally. For some theologians, Protestant and Catholic alike, those who practised magic to combat witchcraft and misfortune were worse criminals than those who were accused as witches. Magic was blasphemous, even a heresy; there was no such thing as good magic. The lure of magic to resolve mundane difficulties tempted people from the path of God. Only the divinity could perform the miracles that cunning folk and sorcerers claimed for themselves. To resort to magic and magical practitioners was, therefore, an implicit renunciation of Christianity. Witches killed people yet did not damn their souls, but the practitioners of "good" magic damned those who procured their services. As we shall see in this chapter, the redefinition of these notions regarding the legal and religious status of magic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was messy and inconsistent, and it continued to perplex and embarrass in the next century. Magic was not a unified and inextricably linked set of beliefs that unravelled simultaneously when one aspect, such as witchcraft, waned or was undermined by new social, intellectual or religious developments. Astrology has maintained its currency in the West, as has spirit communication. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, furthermore, science and religion generated new or rehashed notions of the occult or hidden world that could be encompassed within the magical realm, such as Spiritualism and mesmerism.
A curse tablet from fourth-century Attica exemplifies many aspects of what has come to be considered magic in Western thought. Inscribed on a thick tablet, this curse emerges from an apparent love triangle or situation of romantic/erotic competition. The petitioner seeks to end the relationship between two lovers, Theodōra and Charias, by binding both Theodōra’s ability to attract lovers and Charias’s desire for pleasure with her. The second side of the tablet indicates that it was deposited in a grave: "And just as this corpse is without effect (literally incomplete) may all the words and deeds of Theodōra be without effect towards Charias and the other people." There are certain elements in this tablet that resonate with conceptions of magic both ancient and modern. First, this ritual binds the victim in the presence of Hecate (a goddess closely associated with magic and the restless dead in classical Greek thought) and those who died incomplete or unfulfilled, indicating either that they died before achieving their natural life span and destiny (being unmarried, for example), were unburied and consequently unable to pass to the underworld and find repose, or were uninitiated and, therefore, lacked the protection of the chthonic deities who granted a better afterlife to initiates. Whichever was the case, they form part of a cohort of ghosts believed to follow Hecate and roam the earth. Like the ghosts of legend and horror films, they were considered to be restive and angry - resentful of living human beings and demanding placation to keep them from causing harm. Additionally, the private goals of this spell, combined with its intention to control and possibly harm another person, signal to most observers (both ancient and modern) an act of magic.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.
Spain’s colonial enterprise in the Americas brought Europeans into contact with hundreds of peoples previously unknown to what was now the "Old World." These diverse societies included nomadic foragers, village horticulturalists, and the urban civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes. When in 1494 Pope Alexander VI granted Isabella and Ferdinand sovereignty over the newly discovered lands, he also demanded that they Christianize the inhabitants. Although rapacity frequently overrode religion among the colonists’ priorities, Spanish colonialism - more than that of any later European power - always concerned itself with the state of its new subjects’ souls. Even as much of Europe rejected Roman Catholicism, Spain proudly replenished Rome’s territories with great tracts of American soil. This chapter focuses on Spain’s encounter with Mexico, the jewel added in 1521 to the crown of the newly elected Emperor Charles V, Ferdinand and Isabella’s young Habsburg grandson. In August of that year, the Mexicas’ twin cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, center of the Aztec Empire and one of the world’s largest urban settlements, fell to a combined force of long-time enemies, rebelling subjects, and Spanish adventurers led by Hernando Cortés. The Mexica defeat allowed Spain to establish its first large mainland colony, which endured until 1821. The Viceroyalty of New Spain encompassed Aztec and neighboring territories, and it expanded into what is now Central America and the southwestern United States.
The intersection between Sicilian inquisitorial sources and the island's ethnographic literature has made it possible to investigate the popular belief in the existence of hidden treasures, which manifested itself in other cultures beyond the Mediterranean region. The testimonies in the archives of the inquisition range from the end of the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth centuries. While certain superstitions (such as the baptism of coins and magnets or the stealing of the host or holy oil) continued being severely repressed from the eighteenth century onwards, treasure-hunting, though still practiced, had by then started being considered a simple and negligible popular error.
The discovery of hidden treasures is one of the avowed motives of ritual magic, in the Medieval West as in Byzantium and in Islam. But the exact nature of the concerned operations, the "ritual power" of the magicians which compete at least implicitly with religious and political institutions, and the different kinds of spirits who are their partners in this area, remain little known. This paper aims to provide an update on this issue by pulling most of its information from magical manuscripts themselves.
Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons. Narrowing his focus to two specific regions-Swabian Austria and the Electorate of Trier-he provides a nuanced explanation of how the tensions between state power and communalism determined the course of witch hunts that claimed over 1,300 lives in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. Dillinger finds that, far from representing the centralizing aggression of emerging early states against local cultures, witch hunts were almost always driven by members of the middling and lower classes in cities and villages, and they were stopped only when early modern states acquired the power to control their localities.Situating his study in the context of a pervasive magical worldview that embraced both orthodox Christianity and folk belief, Dillinger shows that, in some cases, witch trials themselves were used as magical instruments, designed to avert threats of impending divine wrath. "Evil People" describes a two-century evolution in which witch hunters who liberally bestowed the label "evil people" on others turned into modern images of evil themselves. In the original German, "Evil People" won the Friedrich Spee Award as an outstanding contribution to the history of witchcraft. © 2009 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
Like perhaps no other military struggle in German history, the Thirty Years War exemplifies a conflagration largely defined by immense suffering. It offers an optimal testcase for the analysis of suffering as an emotional category by historians. In the twentieth century, some (such as Dame C.V. Wedgewood or the SS officer Günther Franz) employed a political frame of reference to more recent events in German history. One of the inadequacies of this interpretative framework is its tendency to moralize and over-simplify the roles of victims and perpetrators. In fact, we now recognize that most suffering during the Thirty Years War related only indirectly to military conflict, resulting instead from economic disaster, famine and disease. As a direct outcome of the war, rape poignantly illustrates methodological difficulties facing historians of suffering, given the patriarchal character of seventeenth-century society. The present historiography overcomes a variety of obstacles through micro-historic methods employing so-called ego-documents and Selbstzeugnisse. Theoretically, William Reddy's exploration of hyperbolic sentimentality during the French Revolution may offer us a better analytical framework for understanding suffering during the Thirty Years War. In our case, a hyperbolic sensitivity to suffering shared by victims and non-victims alike contributed to the cessation of hostilities at Münster/Osnabrück and enshrined principles of sovereignty and religious tolerance in the Western political vocabulary. Thus elevated, the mechanisms of emotional suffering assume a central explanatory role in our understanding of the Thirty Years War.
Two monographs from Austria promise new insights into neglected areas of the history of magic. Manfred Tschaikner discusses the much ignored and underestimated field of treasure hunting. In his pioneering study, he introduces us to treasure seekers who haunted the eastern Alpine region, or to be more precise the territories of today’s Austrian federal state of Vorarlberg and the principality of Liechtenstein. Hansjörg Rabanser deals with witch trials in the Tyrol, a region that has been virtually disregarded by recent research.
Tschaikner is one of the most productive Austrian historians working on magic. His new book on magical treasure hunting acquaints us with dozens of mostly ill-starred ventures of magicians and frauds spanning the years 1464 to 1858, and spares future historians countless hours of work in the archives of Austria and Liechtenstein. Tschaikner gives his audience all the facts one might wish for, even the most minute ones. His account of treasure hunters’ activities, their biographies, and the social and legal framework they worked in is so incredibly detailed the unwary reader might well get lost in it.
Even though there is hardly any new literature on treasure hunting, it is well known that until the nineteenth century, treasure seeking was steeped in magic. One common belief was that treasure could allegedly move about and thus actively escape treasure hunters. Ghosts, fairies, or demons were also supposed to watch over treasure, and the connection between ghosts and treasure was especially important. Treasure, often consisting of ill-gotten goods, bound the soul of the person who had hidden it to earth. Thus, contemporaries often regarded treasure hunting as a godly deed—by finding the treasure they released the ghost from captivity and the person would finally be able truly to die.
Tschaikner’s analysis of the social background of treasure hunters reveals that most of them came from the rural and small town middle classes of peasants and artisans. Treasure hunters worked in groups. As a rule, an expert magician led the group or at least lent it advice. These experts were often clerics. The fraud Franz Peter Hagspiel, a professional mining expert who had fallen on hard times, posed very successfully as a treasure magician. Tschaikner is able to reconstruct Hagspiel’s biography and his criminal career in great detail. Unsurprisingly, Tschaikner finds many more male than female treasure hunters. Just as witchcraft was predominately female, treasure hunting was male magic. What few exceptions there are only serve to confirm the rule.
Authorities punished treasure hunting as fraud and magic. Yet stereotypes of witchcraft and legislation against it played hardly any role in trials against treasure seekers in Vorarlberg and Liechtenstein. Considering that most of these trials took place late in the eighteenth century, this comes as no surprise, for witch trials were already declining in this period. While authorities might not have labeled treasure hunters as witches, they largely refrained from licensing treasure hunts.
Tschaikner confirms this reviewer’s own interpretation of treasure hunting as a typical phenomenon of the early modern period. Treasure seeking was used as a means to better one’s position without engaging in economic competition. It was a product of an economic mentality that had begun to engage in competition and market-oriented production but still struggled with corporative thinking and the concept of the limited good.1 In Liechtenstein and Vorarlberg, treasure hunting was mostly an affair of the eighteenth century. Tschaiker believes this conjuncture of treasure seeking was not just the accidental outcome of faulty recordkeeping and the incomplete preservation of documents. He points out that the magical literature that treasure hunters often used to find treasure troves and to banish guarding spirits was much easier to come by in the eighteenth century than in previous periods. In addition, Tschaikner emphasises that treasure hunting went hand in hand with attempts to reactivate the ore mines of the eastern Alps that took place in the eighteenth century.
Tschaikner’s book would have profited if the author had interrupted his sometimes breathless narrative more often to provide summaries and overviews. His most helpful summary is like the solution to the intricate riddle of the narrative. This reviewer would have preferred...
Although some scholars in the 1970s and 1980s noted the frequent appearance of ghosts in early modern European society, only in the last fifteen years have ghosts received more systematic study and most synthetic works are products of the last five years. Beginning with a definition of “ghost” that considers the early modern context, this article examines ghostly apparitions in a wide variety of fields ranging from the history of crime, drama, and gender to the more expected realms of the history of death and demonology. It also describes how literary scholars have used the concept of the “spectral” or “ghostly” to deconstruct early modern genres and how folklorists have continued their traditional classifications of ghost stories and moved into interpretation of ghosts' generic and psychological roots. Following an analysis of the ghost’s role in modern understandings of demonology and witchcraft, this article concludes by arguing for the need to integrate manuscript, archival, and print material on ghosts and to attempt transnational and transconfessional analysis of European beliefs about apparitions.
For over 40 years historians have intensely debated the precise contents and definitions of concepts such as magic, religion and the supernatural. Nevertheless, defining these concepts and their mutual relationship remains a thorny undertaking. Analytical approaches pursuing trans-historical and multicultural definitions, in potentially overlooking the complexity and evolution of historical reality, face the risk of becoming anachronistic. Searches for historical definitions, on the other hand, are hampered by the elastic and ascribed content of these categories, as well as by the fact that these categories customarily reflect the polemical ideas of authorities rather than the opinions of the masses. This article seeks to infiltrate into the identification of the supernatural by laypeople in the early modern period via scrutiny of the specific context of witchcraft accusations in four cities and their rural surroundings in the duchy of Brabant, situated in the low countries. Through a study based predominantly on witness reports in local witch trials, this article will suggest that a combination of several contextual element predisposed certain experiences to be identified or constructed as supernatural. As a result of this construction process, these experiences were reduced to fit stereotypical models, thereby filtering out atypical elements so as to end with an account that featured familiar and commonly expected traits. The article suggests that these processes of construction and reduction can serve as a useful and effective analytical tool for unearthing everyday experiences of the supernatural. This analytical tool, in encompassing stereotypes and broad characteristics as well as case-specific particularities, avoids detracting from history's complex reality.
Foster's limited-good model has been both widely accepted and roundly criticized. Upon superficial examination, certain behavior patterns among the Mopan Maya of southern Belize seem to reflect the presence of a limited-good cognition. With closer scrutiny, however, much contrary evidence emerges, and the behavior patterns in question appear, instead, to stem from what is tentatively termed the expectation of circumstantially balanced reciprocity (ECBR), a deep seated expectation that those who have more should share with those who have less. The zero-sum game implicit in the limited-good model is not involved; it is understood that "goods" may be increased in absolute quantity. However, it is felt that all should share equally in the increase. In the traditional Mopan system, ECBR was expressed primarily through pressuring men with greater means to become fiesta sponsors and to come to the aid of other members of the community who were in need. Traditionally, the primary function of the expectation was to underwrite the people's security. In doing so, it acted as an economic leveler and also served to integrate the community. In recent years, ECBR has come to be extended beyond the traditional system: to members of the community who have recently become "big men" through involvement with the larger society, to the national government, and even to members of certain other societies. It is noted that it would be easy to confuse ECBR with behavior in terms of a limited-good cognition and that there is suggestive evidence that other instances of ECBR may have been mistakenly interpreted as limited-good behavior. ECBR is offered as an alternative to the limited-good model.