Abstract
Within Norbert Elias' seminal text The Civilizing Process, religion does not occupy a central role in the formation of both the state and an individual's habitus. His later work, addressing fantasy and reality balances, also stops short of recognising the centrality of religious institutions in society during the crucial period of processual change (the Early Modern Period).
Whether this exclusion was deliberate has already been discussed (see Goudsblom (2009) and Linklater (2022)) however in order to understand the secular nature of modern European society, it is necessary to examine where the process of the 'de-centralisation' of religion fits within the wider 'civilising process'. As an institution, the church deeply influenced the habitus of the medieval population whereas the Early Modern period saw this power dynamic transform dramatical as the primacy of the state developed.
In examining the development of Elias' two pillars of state formation (feudalisation and the monopoly of violence), the influence of religious organisations should also be considered and will here be examined through the subject of Early Modern witchcraft prosecutions. A complicated fusion of religious and secular crimes, witchcraft prosecutions represent a microcosm of the societal transformations that were taking place throughout the period.
As the exclusion and separation of the church and the Early Modern state began, this process was enacted upon the stage of secular and religious courts as they battled over the fundamental question: are people responsible for their own behaviour or are they at the mercy of external (supernatural) forces? Such a question is routed in the Eliasian concepts of sociogenesis and psychogenesis. The rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions thus reflects fundamental changes in the centralisation of religious power during this period and it is therefore argued that a third pillar, religious decentralisation, was an essential component of the European Civilising Process.