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

by Mona Chollet

By wiping out entire families, by inducing a reign of terror and by pitilessly repressing certain behaviors and practices that had come to be seen as unacceptable, the witch-hunts contributed to shaping the world we live in now.

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.

the “years of propaganda and terror sowed among men the seeds of a deep psychological alienation from women.”

“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.”

Yet all women, even those who were never accused, felt the effects of the witch-hunts. 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.

“We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn,”

“When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.”

the members of the Old Religion never worshipped Satan. They were followers of a tripartite Goddess: it was the Christian church who invented Satan and then claimed that witches were Satanists.

Over the same period as the witch-hunts, we also see the criminalization of contraception and abortion.

when you want to channel someone else’s potency, an encounter with an image or a thought of theirs can be enough to produce spectacular effects. In the way women have of helping each other out, offering each other a leg-up—whether deliberately or unwittingly—we can see the exact opposite of the logic of ostentation that rules the gossip columns and endless Instagram feeds: not keeping up the illusion of a perfect life—good for nothing but exciting envy and frustration, and even self-hatred and despair—but instead extending a generous invitation to constructive and stimulating self-fashioning, without wishing away our flaws and weaknesses.

I believe that magic is art, and that art … is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness … Indeed, to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.

The gender-divided labor model that still constrains us has significant psychological consequences. Nothing in the way most girls are educated encourages them to believe in their own strength and abilities, nor to cultivate and value their independence. They are taught not only to consider partnership and family the foundations of their personal achievements, but also to look on themselves as delicate and helpless, and to seek emotional security at all costs, such that their admiration for intrepid female adventurers remains purely notional and without impact on their own lives.

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 …

The state no longer organizes public executions for alleged witches, but the death penalty for women who wish to be free has, in a sense, been privatized: when a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner (which, in France, occurs every three days, on average), it is often because she has left the partner or announced her intention to do so—as was the case with Émilie Hallouin, whose husband tied her to the rails of the high-speed Paris–Nantes line on 12 June 2017, on her thirty-fourth birthday.70 And the media treats these murders with the same flattening triviality used to describe the witches’ pyres.71 When, in September 2017, a man burned his wife to death in Le Plessis-Robinson, outside Paris, the tabloid daily Le Parisien opened with the headline: “Il met le feu à sa femme et incendie l’appartement” (“He sets fire to his wife and his apartment is gutted”), as if the victim were a piece of furniture and the key news item were the burned-out apartment; the journalist almost seems to find the husband’s clumsiness cause for humor. 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.

Improving one’s lot, or simply making one’s life liveable, includes the option to have as many children as one would like, or not to have any at all.

By virtue of an apparent paradox that’s easily disentangled, concern for humanity’s well-being and respect for life are actually to be found among those who accept or promote limiting births. Witchfinders did not hesitate to torture those suspected of being pregnant, nor to execute very young children or force them to witness their parents’ suffering.28 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. Besides which, it only applies to the “right” kind of women: as the historian Françoise Vergès has shown, 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.

There is room for every view, it seems to me. I only struggle to understand why the one I subscribe to is so poorly accepted and why an immovable consensus persists around the idea that, for everyone, to succeed in life implies having offspring.

“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.”

There are women who are born to be mothers. There are women who are born to be aunties. And there are women who should not be allowed to be within ten feet of a child. It is very important that you figure out which one of those camps you belong in, because tragedy and sorrow results [sic] from ending up in the wrong category.

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?

To say to your child, during a calm conversation, “You know, I love you deeply, I am so happy to have you, but I’m not sure I was perfectly cut out for this role,” is not at all the same as yelling at your child that they’re ruining your life and you wish they’d never been born. It could even disperse an obscure anxiety your kids may feel that some failing on their part, some imagined disappointment or shortcoming, could be the cause of your regret.

American edition of her book opens with an homage to her recently deceased grandmother, Noga Donath, who loved being a mother and with whom Orna held long discussions, each listening to the other with curiosity and goodwill, seeking to understand the other one, wishing them happiness and glorying in their achievements.

“The ‘childless woman’ and the ‘mother’ are a false polarity,

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 wouldn’t want them not to be here. I just don’t want to be a mother,”

Without a doubt, I really am a wonderful mother. […] I mean, I’m a mother whose children are important to her; I love them, I read books, I get professional counsel, I try to do my best to give them a better education and a lot of warmth and love. […] But still, I hate being a mother. I hate being a mother. I hate this role. I hate being the one who has to place boundaries, the one who has to punish. I hate the lack of freedom, the lack of spontaneity.

“Men don’t age better than women, they’re just allowed to age.”19 The late, great Carrie Fisher retweeted this when, in 2015, viewers of the latest episode in the Star Wars saga were scandalized to see that Leia was no longer the intergalactic, bikini-clad brunette bombshell of forty years ago (some even tried to ask for their money back).

Every minute. Every second. […] Growing older is a wonderful thing because it means that we get a chance, every day, to live a full, happy life. […] Language matters. When talking about a woman over, say, 40, people tend to add qualifiers: “She looks great … for her age” or “She’s beautiful … for an older woman.” Catch yourself next time and consider what would happen if you just said, “She looks great.” […] I’m not going to lie and say that everything about aging is great. […] But we need to stop looking at our life as a hill that we start rolling uncontrollably down past 35.

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.”69 They were better able to do so, being unconstrained by a father, husband or children. These were women “given to speaking out, to a bold tongue and independent spirit.”70 It is no surprise that such unwelcome, even feared speech could be taken for wicked enchantment.

Back then, if you fitted the stereotype of the nag—still alive and kicking today!—you were dicing with death. In sixteenth-century England and Scotland, women’s insolence could be punished by use of the “scold’s bridle” or “witch’s bridle:” an iron frame that enclosed a woman’s head and secured her tongue with a bit that was often covered in spikes, such that any attempt to move her tongue or mouth would cause the “bridled” woman to be appallingly pricked.

This has to be one reason why white hair is accepted on men but ill received on women: the experience the color denotes is considered reassuring and attractive in men, but threatening in women.

“Hag” was not pejorative in its original usage: it described “the wise woman who sat on the hedge—the boundary between the village and the wild, the human world and the spirit world,” in Starhawk’s explanation.

I 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.

Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

It took me a while to understand that intelligence is not an absolute quality, but can include enormous variations depending on the contexts in which we exercise it and the people we have before us. Different circumstances and interlocutors have the power to reveal or attract drastically different aspects of ourselves, to stimulate or to inhibit our intellectual capacities.

We deplore sexism—on the part of students and teachers—just as we deplore the lack of self-confidence that prevents girls from choosing to work in physics or computer science. But too often I think we forget to question the actual content of what is taught; we neglect the fact that, for young women, going to university implies adopting varieties of knowledge, methods and codes that, for centuries, have been almost entirely created without them—when not actually against them.

In her view, academics were resisting so hard because they knew this change would require not only bringing women and minorities into the course programs and into all their other teaching structures, it would also mean “learning to see with new eyes—to question the very idea of ‘norms’ against which all other experience is judged.”

As European cities grew and forested areas became more remote, as fens were drained and geometric patterns of channels imposed on the landscape, as large powerful waterwheels, furnaces, forges, cranes and treadmills began increasingly to dominate the work environment, more and more people began to experience nature as altered and manipulated by machine technology. A slow but unidirectional alienation from the immediate daily organic relationship that had formed the basis of human experience from earliest times was occurring.

In this period, we see a phenomenon that Susan Bordo calls a “drama of parturition”: a forced rupture from the organic and maternal world of the Middle Ages in order to step forward into a new world where “precision, clarity and detachment” rule.20 The human being emerges here “as a decisively separate entity, no longer continuous with the universe with which it had once shared a soul.” Bordo sees in this a “flight from the feminine, from the memory of union with the maternal world, and a rejection of all values associated with it,” replaced by an obsession with maintaining distance and demarcation.21 Guy Bechtel expressed it in other terms: the “machine for creating man anew” was just as much a “machine for killing women as they once were.”22 With this arises a “super-masculinization of rational thought,” a cold and impersonal “distinctively male cognitive style.”23 This interpretation, Bordo stresses, should in no way be dismissed as a twentieth-century feminist fantasy: “the founders of modern science consciously and explicitly proclaimed the ‘masculinity’ of science as inaugurating a new era. And they associated that masculinity with a cleaner, purer, more objective and more disciplined epistemological relation to the world.”24 The English scholar Francis Bacon proclaimed it “a masculine birth of time.”25

Once curbed and domesticated, both women and nature could be reduced to their decorative function, to become “psychological and recreational resources for the harried entrepreneur-husband.”30

The practice of shaving those suspected of witchcraft from head to toe—body hair as well as head hair—to enable their comprehensive inspection can be seen as a harbinger of this requirement that everything be visible, the better to be controlled.

Besides, it is quite strange that many people seem not even to dream that history could have been different, that progress could have taken different paths and we could have had—could still have—the benefits without the problems.

Historically, as we have seen, the war on nature has gone hand in hand with the war waged against women wanting to take control of their fertility.

This is about re-centering, allowing yourself to be the source of your own salvation and finding your resources within you, instead of always relying on standard male authority figures.

Turning the world upside down is no small undertaking. But there can be great joy—the joy of audacity, of insolence, of a vital affirmation, of defying faceless authority—in allowing our ideas and imaginations to follow the paths down which these witches’ whisperings entice us. Joy in bringing into focus an image of this world that would ensure humanity’s well-being through an even-handed pact with nature, not by a Pyrrhic victory over it—this world, where the untrammeled enjoyment of our bodies and our minds would never again be associated with a hellish sabbath.