Vatican City
“WITCH TOURISM” IN VATICAN CITY is . . . complicated. I can hear the discontents already. Why would any self-respecting witch traveler dare enter the dark heart of an organization that has inspired the suffering of untold people because of its pernicious whims and intractable dogma? As with much of witch-hunting history, there is more to the story than meets the eye. For those intrepid souls desiring to hack their way through the hoary jungles of heresy to come face-to-face with the institution that once stoked the fires of witch persecution, the Vatican is your ground zero.
Visiting the Vatican most any day of the year involves intimate contact of some kind. It is stuffy, it is crowded, and I found myself brushing up against many strangers in a nonconsensual orgy of Christian ardor. When it's particularly jammed, the masses making their pilgrimage through the seat of Catholicism become forcibly trapped in the corridors in between when certain rooms like the Sistine Chapel become overpacked. To prepare myself for the crush of visitors, I secreted in a snack for sustenance, carried my favorite apotropaic charm for protection, and draped myself in modest coverings to ensure I'd be allowed inside.
So opulent it's overwhelming, the Vatican boasts multiple galleries and museums, gardens, villas, chapels, and one monumental basilica. Faced with this remarkable array of choices, there is only one option: go heathen or go home.
Contrary to what some might think, pre-Christian deities are cheerfully present in much of the Vatican—as are Christian icons who figure prominently in neo-Paganism. Once inside, I began by asking my tour guide to point out a few of my favorite Christian “witches.” My first stop was the Pinacoteca Gallery to see Eve towering above Adam in Eden. Fingering a snake with one hand, she offers her man a bite of juicy truth with the other in Wenzel Peter's painting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Next, I sought out the stigmata-bearing Saint Catherine of Siena, portrayed in Francesco Messina's bronze sculpture Santa Caterina da Siena in the Collection of Contemporary Art. Near Catherine, the depiction of another immortal beloved saint was captivating fans. Odilon Redon's portrait of the teenage witch wonder, Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, is housed in the same collection.
Satisfied with Christians, I spent the next hour having my fill of Pagan goddesses as I sauntered from one exquisitely decorated room to the next. I paid my respects to Greek goddess of love Aphrodite who is featured in a fresco in the Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding. I communed with Egyptian lioness goddess of war Sekhmet, whose statue is in the Terrace of the Niche in the palatial Courtyard of the Pinecone. And I stumbled upon Greek goddess of wisdom Athena on a ceramic kylix that depicts the virgin warrior saving Jason in the Georgian Etruscan Museum.
Poring over the Vatican's magnificent artifacts, I couldn't help but compile a mental list of some of the pervasive myths about witch hunting and the Catholic Church. When it comes to witches, misinformation always abounds.
Myth 1: The Inquisition is responsible for the witch hunts.
It's tempting to attribute the witch hunts solely to the Catholic Church, but without the secular—and, later, Protestant—authorities, the prosecution of maleficium would probably have played out quite differently. In the twelfth century, rogue Christian groups like the Cathars and Waldensians—as well as Jews and Muslims—inspired the Catholic Church to crack down on heresy. This new offensive inspired sweeping collusion between the church and state, and by 1231, heresy began to be treated in ecclesiastical courts as treason was in secular courts: punishable by death. This influenced the creation of the Inquisition, a formidable institution that still evokes the screams of torture and the flames of zealous persecution to this day.
The Inquisition was simply an arm of the church with the authority to inquire into and indict heretics of all stripes—including witches. However, inquisitors didn't act alone, but continued to collaborate with secular authorities. Sometimes excommunication or a variety of lighter penances would be prescribed. But in many cases, the smoke screen of the old decree “Ecclesia non sitit sanguinem” (The Church does not thirst for blood) was used to shirk responsibility for condemning heretics to death.
As Rainer Decker explains in Witchcraft and the Papacy: “In formal terms, the inquisitors did not themselves impose the death penalty . . . [but] employed a formula by which they turned over the delinquent to the secular arm with a request for mild treatment. But these were only empty words, for the secular authorities knew very well what was really being demanded of them.”
While ensconced in the Vatican, I spent hours craning my neck and taking upskirt photos of statues or of frescoes high above, but my tour guide kept reminding me to look down. Upon entering the Greek Cross Hall, I melted at the sight of a magnificent mosaic centering a bust of Athena encircled by golden stars and the phases of the moon (a perfect place to stage a surreptitious full moon ritual). Sometime later, I spotted another beautiful Roman mosaic from the third century AD where Medusa makes an appearance with her glorious snaky mane unfurled. Pagan magic is indeed pulsing through the floors of this place.
Myth 2: The Catholic Church killed the most witches.
Although the Inquisition may have set the standard for prosecuting perceived heresies from divination to necromancy to witchcraft, by the end of the early modern witch hunts, the secular courts and Protestant clergy arguably had just as much blood on their hands. In fact, recent research suggests that some of the most heinous witch hunts raged in areas where Catholics and Protestants were going head-to-head, competing for followers.
As Peter T. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ argue in their witch-hunting study published in The Economic Journal: “Europe's witch trials reflected non-price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom.” The authors compare this ideological battle of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to contemporary Republicans and Democrats in the United States, focusing campaign activity in key areas. “By leveraging popular belief in witchcraft, witch-prosecutors advertised their confessional brands’ commitment and power to protect citizens from worldly manifestations of Satan's evil,” they write, “to attract the loyalty of undecided Christians.”
So where are the witches in the Vatican? (Besides those of us traveling incognito, of course.) Although there are many “witches” in this place, perhaps the most witchy piece of art isn't any of the above examples, but Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.
As I entered the chapel, the museum attendants requested our silence. There is no photography allowed, so I sat on the floor to gaze up at the ceiling and walls to take in their brilliance. Painstakingly crafted between 1508 and 1512, the central fresco of the Sistine Chapel depicts The Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden, which brings to life an anthropomorphic snake woman extending her left hand to Eve. The half-animal, half-human serpentine tempter holds tight to a fig tree with a thick, pink fleshy tail as Adam eyes her. There were plenty of depictions of the serpent with a female face before this rendering, but Michelangelo also bestows the Devil's snake with breasts, buttocks, and long flowing hair.
Around the outside of the central fresco there are a bevy of Pagan babes to behold. Michelangelo painted five sibyls from the ancient world: the Persian Sibyl, the Erythraean Sibyl, the Cumaean Sibyl, and the most notorious soothsayer of Greece, the Delphic Sibyl, a seer from the Trojan Wars who received her visions from Apollo. Just as saints and witches share certain attributes, so do sibyls and witches. As Jules Michelet writes in La Sorcière:
In virtue of regularly recurring periods of exaltation, she is a Sibyl; in virtue of love, a Magician. By the fineness of her intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often beneficent—she is a Witch and casts spells . . .
Myth 3: The practices condemned as witchcraft were a distinct form of pre-Christian magic.
The sorcery prosecuted by the Inquisition was a mix of folk magic, ritual magic, and nontraditional Christian practices that originated in different eras and evolved over time. Much of the so-called witchcraft that was practiced in late medieval and early modern Italy, for example, took cues from Catholicism, but was “often at cross-purposes with official doctrine,” notes Matteo Duni. “The vast majority of magical practices included elements borrowed from church rituals,” he continues. “Indeed, some of the most common types of love magic were known as ‘oriazoni,’ or prayers, whose format and language they mimicked.” Sometimes, Catholicism and witchcraft made strange—but symbiotic—bedfellows.
I turned to take in The Last Judgement on the altar wall opposite The Fall and came face-to-face with demons crawling their way up from a subterranean hellscape, trying to drag more men down with them. There are no witches here per se, but the damned are animalistic, featuring the ears and horns and claws of earthly beasts. These tropes would be utilized in descriptions of the Satanic witch throughout the Renaissance, when she was believed to shape-shift into cats, dogs, and all manner of animals—or be accompanied by a demonic animal familiar.
Upon leaving the Sistine Chapel, I was right near the glorious behemoth that is Saint Peter's Basilica. A cadre of Swiss Guards in their fantastical period uniforms marched by, and I might have been spirited back in time if it hadn't been for the selfie sticks blocking my line of sight. The basilica loomed ahead, and I went through its resplendent doors. Inside, I was drawn to the Baldacchino above the Papal Altar, supported by marble pedestals. My tour guide pointed out the carving of a woman's anguished face as she gives birth on top and, on the bottom, a grinning satyr's face. She affirmed that there was another tour option to go below and visit the necropolis with the papal sarcophagi and Pagan tombs from the first century AD, but I declined. I had to save something for my return.
Myth 4: The Catholic Church was dedicated to destroying witches at all costs.
Throughout the medieval and early modern era, there was no single Church perspective on witchcraft and its deserved punishment. “Instead, there were a multitude of theories and ways of dealing practically with the devil and with magic,” writes Rainer Decker. Contrary to popular belief, Rome was at times the voice of reason in many witch persecutions, not always a bloodthirsty instigator. As Decker cautions, “One should not speak sweepingly of the witch hunts as a policy of ‘the’ Catholic Church,” or be taken in by the “‘black legend’ once propagated by Protestant, Enlightened, and liberal historians.” The church no doubt contributed immensely to the persecution of magic and witchcraft—and popular ideas of heresy—but its role in the witch hunts has also been distorted by calumny and half-truths.
Once I had my fill of Roman Catholic drama, I followed the hordes to exit through the Vatican gift shop. While slowly perusing the gold and silver crucifixes, holy statues, saints’ medals, and pocket-size bottles of holy water, I thought of how many witch friends of mine would make good use of these ritual materials—just as much as my devout Catholic grandmother would. This syncretic sorcery is nothing new, as many accused witches of medieval and early modern Europe sourced their materia magica from the Catholic Church, too.
Caressing the beads of a rosary I just bought, it dawned on me that of all the sites I had visited in Italy, the Vatican just might be the witchiest of them all. The irony was so acute I laughed aloud. With pre-Christian deities and occult symbology around every corner and a Pagan crypt sheltered beneath its floors, the Vatican is indeed a worthy destination for witch travel. For as much as the Catholic Church tried to wipe out witches, they remain very much alive and well within its ranks, merely hiding in plain sight.
