Gustav Henningsen, c.2005. Courtesy of Mariah Rey Markvig.
I first met Gustav at a meeting of the Arbeitskreis Interdisziplinäre Hexenforschung (AKIH—Interdisciplinary Witch Research Working Group) in Weingarten, Germany, in early 1996. I remember particularly a long conversation on the Bodensee when we had an outing to Koblenz and took a boat journey back to Friedrichshafen where the bus picked us up again. Gustav may have given a talk on the Spanish Inquisitors, but since we were also both folklorists we had a subject in common that was not usually discussed at the AKIH: the continuation of witchcraft accusations into the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I knew one of his Danish articles about it and Gustav was impressed that I had bought a Danish dictionary to get to grips with the finer points. Sometime later we met in Copenhagen, where Gustav showed me the Danish Folklore Archive (then still in a separate building) and where my wife Cornelie and I met Marisa and Gustav in their home. From that time onwards we stayed in touch. We planned a book for the Witchcraft and Magic series of which I was one of the editors, and Gustav contributed to my Festschrift with the article ‘The Catechism of Witch Lore in Twentieth-Century Denmark’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
As he revealed in that contribution, he had written his MA thesis based on his Danish fieldwork on the island of Ærø in the early 1960s. This thesis remained sealed for a long time, out of consideration for the informants and several living ‘witches’. Half a century later, he wrote, the veil could be finally lifted from some of this long secret study. The start of Gustav’s career as a witchcraft historian was also long hidden, and this was even more true for his international, anglophone public than for his Danish readers.
Gustav Carl Henningsen was born in Slagelse (Denmark), the son of Niels Henningsen and Magdalene Margrete Terp. He met his wife Marisa Rey in 1957 when she was an au pair for an English family on holiday in Denmark. They had four children: a daughter, Mariah, and three sons, Nils Jacob, Ulrik, and Gustav. Falling in love with and marrying Marisa turned out to be decisive for his later career. The other crucial element stemmed from his fieldwork, mentioned earlier, when he learned that witchcraft was still prevalent. He may have started with contemporary legends (or friend-of-a-friend [FOAF] tales), but soon moved on to witches. Around 1990 he made a Danish documentary on FOAF tales and we must have discussed them, although I do not remember that we did.
Working with Gustav as a fellow European in command of several languages (but sadly not Danish) had its advantages and disadvantages. His talk in Weingarten is a good example of the former. He gave it in English, but it was translated into German for publication. The original English version had got lost (in all probability he had given it to the organizers to be translated), but luckily he still had the German version which could be revised to serve as the basis for his English language article ‘The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, Or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible’ in Folklore in 2009. The disadvantage is that I never communicated with him in Danish and missed some of the intimacy his Danish students had experienced.
Through Marisa, Gustav learned Spanish (she learned Danish) and started to work on historical Basque material. Doing fieldwork in the local dialect would have been a step too far. The result of the historical research turned out to be his most famous book, The Witches’ Advocate, published in 1980. With the Danish fieldwork inaccessible, the Spanish material was the only way to participate in international conferences, discussions, and publications—in short, to exercise his profession. In this he displayed both an intellectual eagerness and a thematic parsimony. He nevertheless participated in the most important discussions of the 1980s and 1990s on the subject. His paper on the White Sabbath at a conference in Budapest resulted in an exchange with Carlo Ginzburg. His article about a (very rare) fairy cult, based on research in the Spanish archives in Sicily, set historical witchcraft on unsuspected paths. But with hindsight, offering it to a Festschrift for Mircea Eliade was probably a political mistake.
Gustav’s article ‘“The Ladies from Outside”: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath’ in Early Modern European Witchcraft, which he edited together with Bengt Ankarloo, was published in 1990 by Clarendon, and pre-published in English, German, Danish, and Hungarian. It shows his trust in the historical record—found in the Archivo histórico Nacional in Madrid—dealing with the donni di fuora. But were they witches or fairies? The Inquisitors in Palermo categorized them as witches since that is what these men had learned to do, but they were at the same time extremely sceptical about their existence. It was, as Gustav very subtly argued, a matter of language. It concerned a particular type of healer who claimed to provide cures for ailments caused by fairies. The donni were fairies, but those who talked about them professionally were (according to the tribunal) a kind of witch. At the same time (according to the locals), these fairies were humans and organized in companies. Neither the Inquisitors nor those who were interrogated had an open mind. The question is, who held more power—the former or the latter? Gustav’s analysis provides some initial clues, but at the same time he admitted that he only scratched the surface and that more research, including outside Sicily, was necessary. As he also managed to interview a present-day ‘charismatic healer’ (see her picture in Folklore 120, no. 1 [2009], p. 70), he revealed convincing evidence that the belief in Sicily continued. It is fair to conclude that Gustav left behind more than enough material and questions for future research.
The same is true for his work on the Danish witchcraft discourse. Danish witchcraft was first concealed in Gustav’s publications and now it is concealed in the Danish bureaucracy. But thanks to his efforts an enormous number of Danish texts were collected, and we cannot blame Gustav that it was neither digitized nor that it is now hidden away in the Danish archives. It (only?) needs committed students to carry out dedicated excavations and thereby honour Gustav’s memory. I hope that this obituary will contribute towards reviving his research. To underline this last point, a slightly more precise look at both Gustav’s last publications and his as yet unpublished Danish work is helpful.
As he wrote in ‘The Catechism of Witch Lore’, there were short statements of what witches were, or were not, capable of, such as ‘she can only teach her craft to someone else until she knows she doesn’t have long to live’. In Gustav’s mind a statement like this hardly ended up in the folklore records: it had been filtered out because it was too normal. The Dutch (Frisian) equivalent of this statement is that a witch can only die when she has transferred her craft, which may tell us that either someone made a mistake in the statement or that it was not completely accurately recorded. Dutch and Danish witchcraft are very much alike (they even use the same word for witch, heks). However, what is important here is that Gustav was prepared to question Danish folklore records. He also was willing to conclude that the informants of Danish folklorists such as Evald Tang Kristensen were usually reticent. This last conclusion was based on his own fieldwork; he did not need the revolutionary work by the French anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada, who conducted her fieldwork in her own country (for me it was an argument not to do any fieldwork in the Netherlands), as he developed similar sensitivities himself. The downside of this experience was that he did not feel the need to look for other source material and that we still do not know what Danish newspapers reported on witchcraft (or whether Danish Lutheranism filtered everything out there). The thing to take away from a comparative discussion of the few pages of introduction to ‘The Catechism’ is that it will, in all likelihood, be very rewarding to start working on the witchcraft texts, Gustav’s own material included.
A part of the analysis of his own material points to male witches. This merits quoting in full from ‘The Catechism’ (p. 237):
On the island of Ærø, the word heks, ‘witch’, is used not only in the feminine sense as in modern Standard Danish but also as a masculine designation, for both men and women can be witches. As a synonym for hekse, ‘witches’, the term onde mennesker, ‘evil people’, is used. In the articles of witch lore to be reviewed in what follows, reference is often made to witches using the collective ‘they’ (de). This is quite in accordance with the witch-believers’ view of themselves as what must be called an ‘in-group’ in sociological terms, while the witches are viewed as an ‘out group’.
Note
My heartfelt thanks to Professor Louise Nyholm Kallestrup, who regards Gustav as her mentor and provided me with many things I did not know and even more I could not use.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Willem de Blécourt
Willem de Blécourt obtained his PhD ‘Termen van toverij’ (Words of witchcraft) at the Erasmus University at Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is still putting the last touches to his monograph The Cat and the Cauldron: The History of the Witchcraft Discourse in the Low Countries.