In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial

by Mona Chollet

She is what happens when women get to direct the warp and weft of their own lives.

Every possible decision modern women make or role they occupy, outside of the most rigorous and regressive, can be tied back to the very symptoms of witchcraft: refusal of motherhood, rejection of marriage, ignoring traditional beauty standards, bodily and sexual autonomy, homosexuality, aging, anger, even a general sense of self-determination.

Women’s liberation remains at odds with the patriarchal structures that govern our society.

The witch embodies woman free of all domination, all limitation; she is an ideal to aim for; she shows us the way.

Had they not occurred, we would probably be living in very different societies. They tell us much about choices that were made, about paths that were preferred and those that were condemned.

The witch-hunts demonstrate, first, the stubborn tendency of all societies to find a scapegoat for their misfortunes and to lock themselves into a spiral of irrationality, cut off from all reasonable challenge, until the accumulation of hate-filled discourse and obsessional hostility justify a turn to physical violence, perceived as the legitimate defense of a beleaguered society.

“if the evil of women did not in fact exist—not to mention their acts of sorcery—the world would remain unburdened of countless dangers.”

In the trials in most areas, women represented on average 80 percent of those accused and 85 percent of those condemned.16

The campaign led between 1587 and 1593 in twenty-two villages in the region of Trier, in Germany—the starting point and also the epicenter, along with Switzerland, of the witch-hunts—was so relentless that, in two of the villages, only one woman was left alive;

Talking back to a neighbor, speaking loudly, having a strong character or showing a bit too much awareness of your own sexual appeal: being a nuisance of any kind would put you in danger.

We also find instances of a victim-blaming reflex: studying the witch-hunts in southern Germany, eminent American scholar Erik Midelfort observes that the women seemed “to provoke somehow an intense misogyny at times” and calls for further study as to “why that group attracted to itself the scapegoating mechanism.”35

Une sorcière comme les autres

And there’s nothing surprising in this: after all, capitalism is always engaged in selling back to us in product form all that it has first destroyed.

The formidable Annette Richter, for example, has also lived essentially single and without children, and unquestionably deserves to become just as well known as Steinem, who is the same age as her.

In 2017, a Michigan court carried out a paternity test for an eight-year-old child born of a rape; without consulting any of those involved, it awarded joint parental authority and rights to visit to the rapist, whose name it also added to the child’s birth certificate and to whom it gave the victim’s address.

The word was invented in 1961 by Sheila Michaels, a civil-rights activist. She had the idea upon spotting a typo on a letter addressed to her housemate.

The cats’ extermination contributed to the growth of the rat population, so aggravating subsequent outbreaks of disease—which were blamed on witches …

“When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”

The thesis insisted on and repeated across all platforms over this period can be summed up in the following two lies: 1) the feminists have won, they have achieved equality; 2) they are now unhappy and lonely.

The second assertion makes no attempt to describe a situation, but rather aims to create fear, to send out a warning: women who dare to desert their posts and, instead of remaining in the service of their husband and children, try to live their own lives, are the architects of their own misery.

opprobrium.

There is no power issue if people are self-sufficient. For me, the history of witchcraft could equally be called the history of independence.

In her vivid novel of 2017, Aline Kliner brings to life the great royal beguinage in Paris, vestiges of which can still be seen today in the Marais quarter.

In the demonologists’ tirades, which betray the masculine obsessions of their times, the witch’s flight, as Armelle Le Bras-Chopard describes it, represents: a freedom to come and go, not only without the husband’s permission but generally without his knowledge (unless he is a witch himself) and even to his disadvantage.

“Always a Bride, Never a Person.”

This reflex recalls the “conservation of energy” theory, developed by doctors in the nineteenth century, in which the human body’s organs and functions were thought to be in competition for the limited amount of energy circulating among them.

Too much development of the brain, they counseled, would atrophy the uterus.

When women were allowed to return to the medical profession, it was as nurses; that is, in the subordinate position of assistants to the Great Men of Science, a position that was assigned them in recognition of their “natural” qualities.90

virago

Fortunately, we can also nurture those around us, whether they are from our innermost or wider circle, by developing our own particular strengths and giving free rein to our personal aspirations.

We are given the impression that there is no external element to the equation, that everything depends on these women and their sense of organization, and it loads guilt on the shoulders of those who cope less well, making them feel that they are in fact the source of the problem.

“I spent months looking for the old me, the one that could concentrate, the efficient person I used to be,” she admits.

Whether they live with men or not, and whether or not they have a vocation, some women do find another way to escape being sucked into the role of devoted servant: by not having children to bring up; by focusing on their own self-realization, rather than on giving life to others; and by fashioning a feminine identity that has no need of motherhood.

According to Michelet, for the “pact with the Devil” myth to arise, “there was needed the deadly pressure of an age of iron … it was needful that Hell itself should seem a shelter, an asylum, by contrast with the hell below.”

in the 1960s and 1970s, while refusing to legalize abortion and contraception on the mainland, the French state encouraged these practices in its overseas dominions; in La Réunion, an island off the east coast of Madagascar, white doctors carried out thousands of forced sterilizations and abortions.

A society in which life is limited to earning a living and reproducing is one that has no future, for it has no dreams.”37 For Maier, procreation represents the deadlock at the heart of the current system, to the degree that it induces us to perpetuate a way of living which leads directly to ecological catastrophe and which guarantees our compliance (because we have children to feed, bills to pay, etc.).

“I am the nullipara, never will I make a child. I abhor bloodlines and their toxic fictions, the notion of inheritance describes only the relationship of a virus to its most recent carrier.”

It also authorizes excess and letting go: an orgy of freedom and time for exploration, in which you can roll and roll till you’re breathless, without fear of going too far, but with the intuition that interesting things begin precisely here, where you would otherwise feel obliged to stop.

“There are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”

For most of us, children are only the most visible manifestation of our sojourn on Earth, and the only one we are enjoined to count like this.

“Children? I prefer to be there at the beginnings of a hundred than to finish a single one of them.”

Antediluvian

Chantal Thomas, a lover of freedom, solitude and travel, expresses it very simply: “Nothing in that whole business ever appealed to me, neither the pregnancy, the childbirth, nor the daily requirements of feeding a child, of taking care of it, of raising it.”

Can we force ourselves to do something we haven’t the least wish to do solely in order to head off a hypothetical regret hovering in the distant future?

All these women love their children; what they do not like is the experience of motherhood, what it is doing to them and to their lives.

“I immediately saw that it is not for me. And not only is it not for me: it is the nightmare of my life.”

It is other people’s dream, but you’ve still realized it.”