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

by Mona Chollet

The demonization of women as witches had much in common with anti-Semitism. Terms such as witches’ “sabbath” and their “synagogue” were used; like Jews, witches were suspected of conspiring to destroy Christianity and both groups were depicted with hooked noses.

“Male witches are of small concern,” as one author of the Malleus confirmed.14 Its authors feel that “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.”

along with Switzerland, of the witch-hunts—was so relentless that, in two of the villages, only one woman was left alive; in total, 368 women were burned. Entire family lines were wiped out: the charges were not very clear against Magdelaine Denas, who at seventy-seven was burned as a witch in the Cambrésis region of Northern France in 1670, but her aunt, mother and daughter had already been executed and it was thought that witchcraft was hereditary.18

For some time, the accusations tended to spare the upper classes, and when they in turn came under scrutiny from accusers, the trials rapidly fizzled out.

The trial by ducking sums up these contradictions. The suspect was thrown into deep water: if she drowned, she was innocent; if she floated, she was a witch and must then be executed.

Having a woman’s body could be enough to make you suspect. After their arrest, accused women were stripped naked, shaved and handed to a witch pricker, who would carry out a meticulous search for the Devil’s mark, on the surface or within their body, by pricking them with needles. Any birthmark, scar or irregularity could serve as proof—which explains why older women were condemned in such great numbers. This mark was understood to be unaffected by pain; many of the suspected women were so shocked by the pricker’s violation of their modesty—by the violation the entire business represented—that they were, by then, in a state of semi-consciousness

and so did not react to the pricking.

Karlsen rejects the portraits often drawn of New England’s accused women, which, by dwelling on their “bad character” or “deviant personality,” adopted the accusers’ point of view. She discerns here a manifestation of the “deeply embedded tendency in our society to hold women ultimately responsible for the violence committed against them.”

The public staging of the tortures, a powerful source of terror and collective discipline, induced all women to be discreet, docile and submissive—not to make any waves. What’s more, one way or

another, they were compelled to assume the conviction that they were the incarnation of evil; they were forcibly persuaded of their own guilt and fundamental wickedness.

“American religious fanatics [have been] crucifying women’s rights since the 1600s.”55

the witch-hunts paved the way for the gendered labor division required by capitalism, reserving remunerated work for men and assigning to women the birthing and education of the future labor-force.69 This division has endured into the present day: women are free to have children or not … on condition they choose to have them. Those who choose not to are often likened to heartless creatures, obscurely evil and malevolent toward the children of others

Women depended disproportionately on common land, on areas where it was possible to graze cows, to gather firewood

or herbs.72 The enclosure process both dissolved their independence and, for all who could not count on their children’s support, reduced the oldest among them to begging.

One way or another, old age in women remains ugly, shameful, threatening and satanic.

Modern medicine, in particular, was built on this model, and the witch-hunts enabled the official doctors of the period to eliminate competition from female healers—despite their being broadly more competent than the doctors. The legacy for healthcare today includes a systematically aggressive stance toward patients, and especially toward female patients, as shown by the mistreatment and violence exposed over recent years, particularly through social media.

“Choose Miss and you are condemned to childish immaturity. Choose Mrs. and be condemned as some guy’s chattel. Choose Ms. and you become an adult woman in charge of your whole life.”19

Witness the cliché of the “cat lady,” where the pet is considered to fulfill unmet emotional needs.

Cats are, in fact, witches’ favorite choice of “familiar spirit”—usually simply called their “familiar”—a supernatural creature who assists in their magical practice and allows them sometimes to change their appearance. In the original animated opening credits for the series Bewitched, Samantha turns into a cat and rubs against her husband’s legs, before jumping into his arms and becoming her human self again.

Then, in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII ordered that all cats seen in the company of women be considered their familiars; these witches were to be burned along with their animals. The cats’ extermination contributed to the growth of the rat population, so aggravating subsequent outbreaks of disease—which were blamed on witches … 43 In 1893,

Men, it seems, experience the merest breeze of equality as something like a catastrophic hurricane—there’s a similar exaggeration involved when majority groups feel under attack and consider themselves practically overwhelmed as soon as victims of racism show the least sign of standing up for themselves.

“Trend journalism attains authority not through actual reporting but through the power of repetition,” Faludi observes.

The only occasions—in France, at least—on which the murder of women is treated appropriately, and the gravity of the crime is recognized, are when the murderer is black

or of Arab origin, but then it’s a case of fanning the flames of racism, not defending the cause of women.

“Well, sorry, but you’re one of the lucky ones. When a woman unloads a husband, or a husband unloads a woman, however it happens—death, desertion, divorce—the three ds—when that happens, a woman blooms! She blossoms. Like flowers. Like fruit. She is ripe. That’s the woman for me.”

“the Witch is arguably the only female archetype that has power on its own terms. She is not defined by anyone else. Wife, sister, mother, virgin, whore—these archetypes draw meaning based on relationships with others. The Witch, however, is a woman who stands entirely on her own.”

“dissolving woman”—a “femme fondue.”

“Some day Roseline would melt seamlessly into another family, while he, the little man who clenches his tiny and already willful fists, why, he would become simply ‘himself.’”77

Whereas, in the Middle Ages, like their male counterparts, European women could access a great range of professions, as Silvia Federici points out: “In the medieval towns, women worked as smiths, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, hat-makers, ale-brewers, wool-carders and retailers.”93 In England, “seventy-two out of eighty-five guilds counted women among their members” and some were “dominated” by them.

It must be done in the most altruistic way. A woman’s role in life is to give everything to those around her—comfort, joy, beauty—while keeping a smile on her face, without making herself out to be a martyr, without ill humor, without visible fatigue. It’s a major task; we must lead every daughter toward this happy, lifelong renunciation. From her very first year, a girl must know how to share her toys and sweets spontaneously and to give what she has to those around her, especially whatever she most treasures.105

In our own time, nothing is more deceitful than the “pro-life” label assumed by militant anti-abortionists, a large proportion of whom are also in favor of the death penalty and, in the US, the free circulation of guns29 (there were more than 15,000 deaths by shooting in the US in 201730), and there is no sign of their marshalling such ardour to protest against wars, nor against pollution, which it is estimated was responsible for one death in six around the world in 2015.31 “Life” does not inspire them to action except when it comes to wrecking women’s lives. A pro-birth policy is about wielding power, not about care for humanity.

nullipara,

Furthermore, let’s be clear that, when it isn’t occupied, the uterus takes up little space, so the notion of a cavity draped with cobwebs and swept by bleak and whistling winds becomes patently fantastical.

Any other view is tantamount to seeing women as interchangeable representatives of some single female being and not individuals with their own distinct personalities and wishes.

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flibbertigibbet

“Men don’t age better than women, they’re just allowed to age.”19 The late, great Carrie Fisher retweeted this

opprobrium

If the witch-hunts particularly targeted older women, it is likely because they displayed an unbearable degree of confidence. Confronted by their neighbors, by priests or pastors, even before judges and torturers, these women talked back; as Anne Barstow writes, they “talked back in a time when they were increasingly expected to be submissive.”

She can’t see me in the future, but I can see her very clearly. She runs past me, worried about being late for an appointment she doesn’t want to go to. She sits at a restaurant table in tears of anger arguing with the wrong lover. She strides toward me in the jeans and wine-red suede boots she wore for a decade, and I can remember the exact feel of those boots on my feet. […] She rushes toward me outside a lecture hall, talking, laughing, full of optimism.

used to feel impatient with her: Why was she wasting time? Why was she with this man? at that appointment? forgetting to say the most important thing? Why wasn’t she wiser, more productive, happier? But lately, I’ve begun to feel a tenderness, a welling of tears in the back of my throat, when I see her. I think: She’s doing the best she can. She’s survived—and she’s trying so hard. Sometimes, I wish I could go back and put my arms around her.77

I like this idea of reflecting and looking back at yourself at a younger age and what you notice about that person and the worries that they had back then.

In the tenth century, Abbot Odo of Cluny robustly challenged his peers: “We who are loath

touch vomit and dung, even with our fingertips, how is it we love to embrace in our arms

sack of o...

He’s saying a woman is a sack of shit.

antediluvian

is decided that the minds of women are defective. That the fibers of the brain are weak. That because women menstruate regularly the supply of blood to the brain is weakened. All abstract knowledge, all knowledge which is dry, it is cautioned, must be abandoned to the laborious and solid mind of man. “For this reason,” it is further reasoned, “women will never learn geometry.”

I am feeling that my brain is defective while I’m reading some of this. And then I get to the last line of this quote and it says women can never learn geometry. And that’s the subject. I struggled with in high school and had to give up mathand I fell off the university track.

The old view conceived the world as a living organism, often figured as a nurturing maternal presence. Since antiquity, particular opprobrium was reserved for excavatory mining, which, in texts by Pliny the Elder, Ovid and Seneca, was considered an act of aggression driven by greed (for gold) or blood thirst (for iron ore). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lust was added to the roster, and such mining was denounced by poets including Edmund Spenser and John Milton, who described it as a rape of the Earth. The imagination of the time saw “a direct correlation between mining and digging into the nooks and

crannies of a woman’s body.”18 The mine itself was analogous to the vagina of Mother Earth, and the cavities where metals lay hidden became her uterus. Having gradually grown untenable, these ancient views were replaced by others that, in stripping out our sense of the world as a living body, dissipated all such old scruples and would eventually allow untrammeled exploitation.

From now on, the world is viewed as dead and its matter as passive. The model of the machine and especially that of the clock is applied in every arena.

parturition”: