Healers in Hungarian Witch Trials

Abstract

After overviewing the evaluation of the ambivalent role of healers and ‘unwitchers’ in international and Hungarian historiography, this essay examines witch trial documents from Kolozsvár/Cluj, Hódmezővásárhely and Kiskunhalas. The author discusses how healers, as ‘magical experts’, provide the diagnosis of bewitchment by means of divinatory processes, shaping the suspicions of the alleged victim into an accusation against a concrete person, and how they initiate, subsequently, a magical counter-action against the presumed witch. The inevitable consequence of the healers’ participation in these trials was that they became victims of witchcraft accusations themselves.