Witchcraft: Fun today, mass executions in an earlier time
Today, many think of witches as Halloween and horror movie staples. From 1500-1700, though, being accused of being a witch in Europe or America led to serious consequences.
Every October, we fall in love with witches. Do they scare us? Maybe some on screen do, but there seem to be as many comedy witch movies — “The Witches of Eastwick,” a 1987 film with a brilliant cast led by Jack Nicholson, is one — as there are films supposed to frighten us. This year’s entry in the genre is entitled simply “Witch.”
We seem interested in three types of witches: little girls in black hats, sexy women like Elvira and old hags brewing up evil stuff. But centuries ago, witchcraft was a capital crime.
The witch hunts in Europe and Salem, Massachusetts occurred above all in the Early Modern period, 1500-1700. In England and Salem, the accused — no real witches with evil powers existed — were hanged; on the Continent, they were often burned. Some were strangled to death first. Many records have been lost to fire and war or were never kept in the first place, so we must estimate the death toll. Some feminist writers of the 1970s set the number of women executed in the millions; detailed research since then has brought the estimates down to 25,000 to 35,000 of both sexes. Those numbers should be enough to shock and dismay all of us.
About three quarters of the known victims were women. Misogyny obviously played a horrible role in the hunts, yet that word leaves big questions open. Witchcraft trials peaked between about 1550 and 1630 (the famous Salem Witch Trials of 1692 came very late in the story). Why then and not before or after, when misogyny has always been around?
Why did hunts occur above all in villages, not towns? Lines drawn 150 miles from either side of the Rhine River would cover the vast majority of cases. Only in Western Europe did the stereotype of the witch appear. The first known trial that featured the stereotype was of a 60-year-old woman, Alice Kyteler, in Ireland in 1324. She was accused of bringing various “sorcerers” together to practice “black arts,” including making some men impotent and killing others. Kyteler was charged with having intercourse with her own private demon. The only part of the witch image missing was flying; it finally appeared in several areas of the Continent in the 1450s.
Books and illustrations of the time described witches’ “sabbaths,” gatherings of hundreds who could fly to a meeting place in an instant, there to dance, have sex (often painful) with demons and eat babies. Yet this stereotype was accepted in only some parts of Europe. It never took hold in Spain or Italy, for example.
What was required for a hunt to erupt was first, peasants aired grievances against each other, for example (really) that Jeanne’s turnips were larger than Erik’s because Jeanne was drawing on evil forces to steal material from Erik. But that was everyday stuff, and peasants did not say that anyone received power from Satan. Certain people just had evil powers. A second ingredient was needed: belief among the local elite in the witch stereotype. When that happened, erratically across Western Europe, local authorities would often stage a trial, with the outcome all too predictable. Aided by extensive torture, the accused would be forced to admit that they had made a pact with the devil. In return for his help, they destroyed crops, animals and children.
But, even as all this was going on, other elite men raised objections to the idea of witches. These voices asked, for example, if witches had such great powers, why didn’t they have demons bring water to them from wells, cook wonderful food for them and so on. And was there any credible testimony about witches flying? With those criticisms, and when the Parlement of Paris (more a court than a legislature) rejected witch convictions on appeal beginning in the 1620s, trials and executions became infrequent. The last case occurred in Switzerland in 1782.
Most witch hunts took place in areas with weak central authority, like Alsace (now in eastern France) in the early to mid-1600s. Local nobles and judges did what they pleased, often influenced by witch hunters’ “manuals” and news of trials nearby. In my book, I refer to witch panics as much as I do to witch hunts. This seems to characterize Salem in 1691-92; because of another upheaval in England, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, Massachusetts had no governor on the scene, and the regular courts had ceased to function.
Beyond misogyny, why so many female victims? My view is that women were charged with witchcraft for a variety of reasons. One, Satan and his demons were almost always depicted as male, so they would choose women as partners. Two, women were around babies much more than men, and infants could die suddenly, without explanation in the day’s science. Three, women made and served food, giving them more chances, in the fevered popular imagination, to poison it.
Give that cute kid in a witch’s hat some candy on Halloween. Let us hope that our current rancorous politics do not descend into hunting each other as the devil’s spawn.
Robert Thurston is Professor Emeritus at Miami University and author of “The Witch Hunts.”
