Ancient Fears and the New Order: Witch Beliefs and Physiognomy in the Age of Reason

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy common accord, the eradication of witch beliefs is one of the most important signs of the new order established in the Enlightenment. During the ‘Age of Reason’, experimental and mathematical sciences began to form the basis of new philosophies; mechanistic processes supplanted the spiritual as a method of explaining the world; witch beliefs and other superstitions began to lose their validity, and – accordingly – witch hunts, trials and executions became a thing of the less enlightened past.1 But there is also much evidence to the contrary, indicating that the old superstitions were not abandoned during the Age of Reason, but co‐existed comfortably alongside new intellectual and philosophical thought systems like Cartesianism and Deism. Witch beliefs weathered the Enlightenment in two ways: out in the open – in the form of eighteenth‐century witch hunts and witch executions – and underground, sublimated not only in ‘art’, such as the fairy tales of Romanticism,2 but also in ‘science’, such as physiognomy, a discipline embraced or at least condoned by the best and brightest of the Enlightened Age, including Goethe, Herder, Lenz, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn.3 The witch trial of Anna Göldi and physiognomic analyses of the poet Anna Louisa Karsch will serve as my test cases for this assertion. Throughout, I will take a look at an organ that has not only played an important role in both witch beliefs and physiognomy, but is also at the centre of the enlightened credo of ‘seeing is believing’: the eye.