What You Didn’t Know About Witch History
Well, Northern European witches, because I’m European
Part 1: Why witches existed, even from a modern secular perspective
Witchcraft has a lot more to do with fraud, theft, and harassment than toads, bats and frogs. It’s tempting- and understandable- to view all the women who died in the witch-hunts of the 13th to 17th centuries as delicate virgins wronged by superstitious morons. And that, as with much of history is…half true.
The truth is a lot less sexy than beautiful pagan innocents weeping as they are led to their fiery deaths. Most of the women who were put on trial were almost definitely guilty of trying to do harmful witchcraft, or at least to scare someone with it. Out of around 30,000 cases, the vast majority circle around ‘putting a curse on someone’.
Make no mistake: some of the things these ‘witches’ did were objectively horrible. From putting a ‘death curse’ on a baby to scare his mother, to threatening passersby in exchange for money, they weren’t the whimsical grannies the media might have you believe. They were often very challenging people. Today, however, there would be less fire and hanging involved. The women would instead go to jail for fraud, malicious communications, or harassment. In the same way that Debbie Smith might get pulled up in court for threatening to smash her neighbour’s face in, Mistress Deborah Smithe would have faced legal action for threatening to put a deadly curse on her. But that’s ridiculous, surely, you say. There’s no way that you could send someone for prison for threatening to curse someone!
Well, you’re viewing that through a secular, modern lens. If I told you I was going to break your legs and bury you alive in concrete if you didn’t share your fries, you’d probably be a touch concerned, because you recognize that as objectively threatening and harmful. In the early 1600s, you would’ve almost certainly believed in curses as equally objectively harmful. You would have lain in bed for weeks, terrified that I would make your barn burn down, or send demons to strangle your newborn baby. You would have felt obliged to hand over money or goods. So, as weird as it sounds, a curse was really a case of coercion by threat. If you really believed you could seriously harm someone through a curse: isn’t that just as bad as thumping them with a baseball bat?
And women of the time knew this, they weren’t stupid. Women on the fringes of society often threatened people who didn’t give them alms, food, or pay them for midwifery or traditional medical treatments. Every village and hamlet would have had a suitably outcast ‘crone’ who lived off alternative ‘medicine’, love potions, and fortune telling. Many actively bought into the whole ‘witch’ mystique, selling fortune readings and making up ‘ancient’ spooky-sounding spells which were really just a mix of the King James’ Bible and folklore. Many were pretty advanced con-women, knowing what plants would induce hallucinations, how to make smoke do scary things and how to rap their knuckles to make it seem like spirits had appeared. None of this was really a hanging matter, but occasionally a person who had been ‘cursed’ would have a stroke or fall sick, and what had been a local falling-out became attempted murder by witchcraft.
Now, I am not saying these women deserved to be killed. But I am saying that they were ‘witches’. They really believed they had magical powers, and many confessed and fell into a full on mental breakdown when confronted by what they thought they had ‘done’. They certainly weren’t delicate genteel grandmothers wickedly accused by a nefarious Witchfinder General.
Which brings us nicely onto our next question: if this was going on for centuries, what caused the great moral panic over witchcraft in the 1600s?
Part 2: The right conditions for a witch (and a witchhunt)
Contrary to what modern Wiccans might believe, paganism didn’t exist by the late medieval and early modern period, and the ecofeminist sex-loving druids that spring to mind with witchcraft didn’t really arrive until the 1930s. ‘Witches’ would have identified strongly with a Christian understanding of the world.
If you read the testimony of the ‘witches’, most are very devoted and religious women, and it’s clearly not an act. To many, witchcraft was a heavily frowned upon job -a craft- a bit like sex work or pickpocketing. Scandalous, but not something divorced from your faith or beliefs as a Christian.
The idea that witchcraft is ‘unchristian’ is a very modern idea considering how fascinated and indulgent society has often been to folk medicine, magic tricks and conjuring. Even the uptight, god-fearing Victorians had a seance mania. No, witchcraft in itself wasn’t a problem for being ‘pagan’: being a witch was a problem of three age old concerns:
- Poverty: Old and mentally unwell women were a ‘burden’ to society
- Class: The women who were accused were homogeneously of a low station
- Gender: Women openly challenging or threatening patriarchal norms were dangerous
It’s no coincidence that by the time witchhunting was really taking off, the women who had been thrown out of the nunneries by Henry VIII were in their seventies and eighties. Suddenly you had a huge number of expensive spinster aunts, great aunts and cousins to feed, clothe and house, many no doubt experiencing dementia or frailty.
The only way these women could earn a living to support themselves was through ‘witchcraft’ or begging. If you look at how much modern society reviles beggars and hawkers, it might give you an insight into the contempt people had for witches, even if the magic wasn’t ‘real’. With no allies, supporters or male champions in the world, suddenly these women were extremely vulnerable. Even if the ‘witchcraft’ was just selling herbs as love potions or having conversations with your cat, it was suddenly an easy excuse to get rid of a troublesome, costly, old woman. That, doubled with the fact that powerful men probably felt undermined by the old woman challenging them in public in a society where women were expected to be silent, served well for the perfect storm of witch hysteria.
Did witches exist? Yes.
Were some of them deeply horrible people? Yes.
Were some of them vulnerable, unwell women? Yes.
Were some of them totally innocent and dragged into hysteria? Yes.
Did they deserve the murder, hatred and persecution they faced? No.
As with so much of history, western witches exist in a murky limbo of truths, tales, and wild imagination.
