Why do witches not hunt dragons

Separate from these real forms of magic, there was the imaginary magic of the witches. Early modern Europe and Britain treated witchcraft as a capital crime. A t first glance, the relation between the economy and the imaginary magic of the witches seems to be entirely negative.

Witches were often accused of attacking livestock. They magically made frost, storm and hail, and thereby caused crop failure. Indeed, their weather magic was said to endanger the economy of entire regions. Weather magic especially looked like a strange form of auto-aggression because the hailstorms the witches supposedly conjured up damaged their own fields as well.

Rather, it stated simply that the witch submitted to the will of the demon. However, there were exceptions. At first glance, this might seem like an allusion to the Biblical allegory of Satan as a dragon. However, Luther had a very specific form of witchcraft in mind: the witches that were said to be in contact with a dragon.

Even though the belief in this form of witchcraft was widespread in early modern Germany, eastern Central Europe and the Baltics, it was, to the best of my knowledge, virtually unknown elsewhere.

The dragon in German, Drache in question was not the giant monster of medieval epics but rather a household spirit. Its alleged ability to fly and its affinity to fire might have suggested transferring the name of the medieval monster to this rather peculiar spirit. A number of people maintained that they had seen the dragon: it looked like a long burning beam with a thick, cow-like head that soared through the night sky.

Flying into a house through a window or through the chimney, the dragon brought its master or mistress money as well as other readily usable or saleable goods such as grain, milk or butter. A dragon was a cloud of burning gas that was attracted to the smoke emerging from the chimneys of houses. It was quite clear where the dragon got the goods, and our sources emphasise this point: everything the dragon brought its master had been stolen from somebody else. Dragon magic was about magical theft.

Indeed, the dragon seems to be an embodiment of transfer magic, that is, any kind of magic that takes some good, including fertility or energy itself, out of one context and transfers it into another context. And the dragon delivered not only various kinds of produce. It brought money. The very idea of the dragon had adapted to the rising market economy. The household dragon was feared and probably coveted by people living in the vast area between Bavaria and Estonia.

The house dragon was mentioned not only in trial records from witch hunts, we encounter it in very different sources, too: some early modern Scandinavian and German scientists at least knew the rumours about household dragons and commented upon them. They provided an alternative explanation for the dragon sightings. For them, draco volans — the spirit that looked like a burning beam with a thick head in the night sky — was clearly a meteorite.

Others insisted that the phenomenon mistaken for a dragon was really a cloud of burning gas that was somehow attracted to the sooty smoke emerging from the chimneys of houses where they burned too much green wood.

This would make the dragon a preindustrial smog phenomenon. As usual, hardly anyone listened to the academics. At least till the 18th century, scientific explanations of dragon beliefs had little impact.

Most people saw the dragon simply as a demon, just another shape the devil could take on. In , the first Saxon witch trial was held that mentioned sexual intercourse with a demon. It was maintained that the devil had appeared in the form of a dragon.

G iven the tradition of the Biblical dragon, it was of course all too easy to see the dragon as the embodiment of Satan, so it comes as no surprise that people rumoured to have a dragon ended up at the stake. In fact, the women and men said to own a dragon were all fairly affluent. What distinguished them in the eyes of their neighbours, though, was that they had a uniformly bad reputation for reckless profit seeking, usury and even fraud.

Their fellow villagers considered these people greedy and highly aggressive. The accused replied that they were the victims not just of slander, but of envy. So the rumours about dragons were really attacks on profit seeking; the rural ambassadors of the rising market economy were denounced as immoral and greedy, reviled as dragon owners. Ramhold came from a family of modest artisans.

However, by tapping two new sources of income — they sold beer and milk even though they owned only one cow — the Ramholds became relatively affluent. In time, the family began lending money on interest. Margareta Ramhold was executed in There was a second kind of witch that instilled fear and loathing in the people of early modern Europe: the significant minority of wealthy people assumed to be witches.

And indeed, we do find a relatively high number of affluent people among the defendants of early modern German witch trials. Rich witches were mostly male and many of them were parvenus who had profited from the agrarian crises in the 16th and 17th centuries. Others were officials who enriched themselves through straightforward corruption. A great number of these people — the newly rich and corrupt officials — were accused of witchcraft. Arguably the most prominent witch of 16th-century Germany was Dr Diederich Flade, executed in He was also a notorious money lender.

Flade seems to have specialised in small loans he gave to the peasants from the impoverished villages surrounding the relatively well-off town of Trier. He became fabulously rich and influential in only a couple of years. Then came his sudden downfall. At least 28 so-called witches denounced Flade in their confessions: they presented him as a demonic figure presiding over the Sabbath. Another rich witch was Martin Gerber, a merchant and burgomaster of the Swabian small town of Horb.

After having made a fortune in trade, Gerber took up brewing. When he purchased large quantities of barley to brew beer, he not only displaced small-scale brewers but also triggered such a substantial price increase for barley that the price of bread became inflated too. From onwards, suspicions of witchcraft developed not against Gerber himself, but against his wife and his daughter, who had vociferously supported him.

Even though she never confessed and was eventually released from prison, she fought against accusations of witchcraft for the rest of her life. N ow, we can put the dragon magic into the wider context of treasure hunters and rich witches. The dragon witches were said to owe their wealth to magical theft perpetrated for them by a demon in the shape of a dragon. The demonic figure of the dragon and the magical thievery associated with it establish a direct connection between economic advancement and suspicions of magic.

The rich witches are much more difficult to understand. They were not said to have become rich because of their magic. Their wealth as such provoked rumours of witchcraft. Of course, there is a gender aspect to all of this: treasure hunters were almost exclusively male.

Among both the rich witches and dragon witches we find women and men. There seem to have been more men than women among the affluent victims of the witch trials.

Greed and witchcraft were not exclusively attributed to women. What unites all three, however, was social mobility. The dragon witches and the rich witches were not simply rich.

They were newly rich. It was that the treasure hunters tried to tap a source of wealth outside of society. They hoped to find a treasure, which by definition meant valuable objects of which nobody could rightly claim ownership.

The treasure belonged to the spirit world. Spirits controlled it; spirits could reveal it. People in pre-modern agrarian societies behaved as if all goods are available only in limited quantities.

The economy is a zero-sum game. Therefore, innovation and profit-seeking are strongly discouraged. Treasure hunters are excellent examples of persons who accepted the world view of the limited good. They sought profit by using magic. They dealt with the spirit world. Rather than alienating their neighbours, they faced ghosts and demons in order to get the spirit world to hand over its money.

Dragon witches and rich witches were the complete opposite. They had engaged in competition, often quite aggressively. According to the Brazilian author Raphael Draccon, we would become demigods, and today you will understand your role in a universe that is not just a fairy tale.

New Ether is the world presented in Dragons of Ether: WitchHunters, the first book of the trilogy that has sold more than thousand copies, getting into best-seller lists in Brazil, Portugal and Mexico.

That world is built by nothing more than our collective unconscious and ether — the fifth element, which connect us to our dreams — and is tangible only for those who believe in the stories we were told in our childhood. In that world, bedtime stories are not as sweet as we remember. The two siblings attracted by a house made of candies actually fall into a terrible trap, eating broken glass, spikes and mud thinking they were goodies, and from that day on they go through a traumatized life.

There are strange things happening at the Arzallum Kingdom, and it seems that the witches have returned. A ton of fairy tales retellings have been produced, both in literature and cinema, but what Raphael Draccon does in Dragons of Ether is something really unique, and for that reason it led him to stardom in Latin America. It is a fairy tale re-tale in a medieval style, but in its essence talks about the transition to adulthood and how external factors can speed up the process.

The book, however, is not restricted to a young audience and does not fail to address more complicated topics. Everyone can be enchanted by New Ether, you just need to have the power of believing. Although the writing is in prose, the small interventions made by an omniscient bard make us feel the presence of an unshakeable poetry at each line.