Some Refreshing Mythbusting About (Ahem) "Witches"

[ER]

A PSA from back around Halloween, sent me by a historian I know, this article was penned by someone with a rare grasp on history, and an even rarer courage to write something true.

About "witches."

No, not real witches, as in the green-skinned, warty-nosed, rotten-toothed, child-eating authentic kind waddling around where they belong in fairy tales and dying under houses, I mean the culturally insensitive posers of strictly modern invention, with zero grasp of history ("Oh, but it's an oral tradition...") and even less sense of humor, who have stolen the word "witch" from its proper use in mythology, and have tried to say they alone own it by claiming to be the only true witches while they sell the credulous potions at Renaissance Faires and New Age festivals, and grow veritable forests of underarm hair Oddly, instead of being laughed at, these stealers of our tradition have been taken seriously for too long with their BS about "the burning time" a supposed Holocaust among witches that, um, kinda never really happened as claimed. Like Mother Goddess-worshipping witches themselves, who likewise didn't exist until about the 1970s.

Hence this delightful article below:


You are living during medieval times, and you are accused of being a witch by the Catholic Church. All you did was practice science, and medicine that helped save lives. What do you say before you are burned?

This question is such a perfect microcosm of how the witch trials have become mythologized to the point of absurdity.

Let's go through it line by line:

You are living during medieval times...

Not if I'm being accused of witchcraft, I'm not. Belief in witches actually wasn't all that common in the Middle Ages, and was even discouraged by the Catholic Church. It was heretical to believe in witchcraft, because that meant believing that supernatural power could come from somewhere other than God. Persecution for witchcraft didn't really get started until the early modern period, the fifteenth-thru-eighteenth centuries. Of course, this doesn't fit with the cultural narrative that the medieval period was "the Dark Ages" when everybody lived in a superstitious backwater and there was no progress of any kind.

I swear to God, the Middle Ages are one of the most misunderstood periods of European history...

...and you are accused of being a witch by the Catholic Church

Witch persecution wasn't specifically a Catholic thing. Protestants did it too, sometimes with more fervor. The witch craze was, in part, a reaction to the upheaval caused by the Reformation. When Christendom is getting ripped apart at the seams, it's helpful to have someone to blame.

All you did was practice science, and medicine that helped save lives.

Ohh boy... So, one of the pervasive myths about the witch trials is that it was an attempt to stop female doctors from practicing real medicine and inhibiting the male doctors who believed in the four humors and thought that leeches were the cure for everything. To call this an overly simplistic interpretation would be an understatement.


(Romania is Eastern Orthodox, by the way.)

The early modern witchcraft hysteria didn't actually have that much to do with medicine. It's classified as a hysteria because it was exactly that — people lashing out at an imaginary enemy with no rhyme or reason. "Witches" were not gentle healers or cunning folk, let alone doctors. They were evil devil-worshippers who cast evil spells against their communities and sought to bring down Christendom from within. But of course, no such devil-worshippers existed. Apart from a bias towards women, the witch hunts did not actually target anyone in particular.

Cunning folk, local healers who practiced folk magic as a profession, were definitely a thing throughout the Middle Ages and were starting to decline in the early modern period. They were occasionally persecuted in isolated incidents in the Middle Ages, but never on a mass scale. They were relatively protected from the witch trials, because they were considered the first line of defense against witches. Once again, I'm going to let Ronald Hutton elaborate on the difference:

"It may be helpful at this point, therefore, to emphasize how the image of the magician which underpinned the fourteenth century trials differed from that of the satanic witch which underpinned those of the early modern period. There was no sense in the late medieval attack on magic that magicians were part of an organized and widespread new religious sect, which posed a serious menace to Christianity. They were, rather, viewed just as individuals or small individual groups, in particular places at particular times, who yielded to the temptation to gain access to normally superhuman powers for their own ends. The ends concerned, though selfish, were generally just for personal profit rather than dedicated to the commission of evil as an end in itself, and most of those targeted offered their services for sale to others or sought assistance from such experts. The acts with which they were charged were usually heavy on the paraphernalia — special objects, substances, and spoken words — on which ceremonial magic generally relied. In most cases the element of apostasy from Christianity was not central to the charges, and because those accused were not suspected to belong to a sect, there was no cumulative effect of arrests, as those already under interrogation were not required to name accomplices. As a result of all these features, the overall body count produced by the persecution was low: between 1375 and 1420 the total number of people executed for offenses related to magic, across Western Europe, was probably in the scores rather than hundreds. In this period as throughout the Middle Ages, there was in practice no significant element of gender among those tried, save that — mirroring educational patterns in society as a whole — men were more likely to be accused of the more text-based and learned kinds of magic, and women of the less. The stereotype of the witch that underlay the early modern trials had not yet appeared by the opening of the fifteenth century."

—Ronald Hutton, The Witch

So, yeah, cunning folk weren't targeted by the witch trials, and the entire notion that the witch trials were a reaction to the emerging practice of medicine is wrong.

What do you say before you are burned?

Burning certainly happened, but it wasn't universal. It appears often in media because it's a striking image and one that's become specifically associated with witchcraft, but witches were executed by other means. In England, witches were typically hanged rather than burned, because witchcraft was considered a civil crime rather than a heretical one.

What would I say? Well, I might recite the Lord's Prayer. It was a belief during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a witch couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer in full. I'd prefer not to, but if it would save my life, well... It's not like I can cast a spell to make sure the flames can't harm me, right?

The witch trials were a result of fear, superstition, and conspiracy theories, but they were not a result of ignorance about medicine, technology, magic, or paganism. It's a common misconception that some Church official would see a piece of technology or practice that they didn't understand and immediately cry "witchcraft!" because that's something that we see depicted in modern media. Accusations of witchcraft were based on even less than that, and were just as often an excuse to get rid of people as they were a genuine fear response. The misinformation about them contributes to the same kinds of narratives that caused the trials in the first place, and lots of people like to appropriate the events of the trials to support their own agendas. Don't do that.

Learn the history first.

[Alex]

You might find this interesting. It argues that witch trials were part of the competition between Protestant and Catholic factions.

https://www.peterleeson.com/Witch_Trials.pdf

[ER]

Man's inhumanity to man is history's most dismal fact. I think the epicenter for the mania about witches was in Germany around the time of the Thirty Years' War. People are just nuts and will take any opportunity, or none at all, to form tribes, define a norm, and persecute deviation. I think that's a big part of why the Jews have suffered for so long and suffer today, they are the ultimate outsiders. And then people will take any opportunity to form myths when the reality is horrible enough. Imagine if everyone across time had lived and let live whether they agreed with the other person or not. The Cathars, the Jews, the Kurds, Armenians under the Turks, Christians across a big part of their history, the list could go on and on. It's a world where individuality hasn't been popular, and cruelty has always been on hand, and readily justified.