A sermon given at Church of the Morningstar on December 5th, 2020

The Witch Trials.  What do those words bring to mind?  Arthur Miller’s play the Crucible?  Bodies burning on stakes?  The opposing forces of religion and rationality as modernity took hold?  The persecution of female healers and midwives who knew “the old ways”?  A madness instigated by clergy?  Ergot poisoning?  A misogynist campaign to remove protofeminist independent women?

    Most of these are more reflective of folklore than fact.  Outdated scholarship and fictional depictions that have become part of our cultural mythology.  What function do these stories have?  Why are they so… sticky culturally? 

    Why is it so pleasing to us to believe the “witch dunking” torture inevitably resulted in death (those who sank were perceived as innocent, whereas those who floated were guilty because the water had “rejected” them), when in reality those who sank were of course not just allowed to drown.  Why are we so keen to explain them away? Blame ergot hallucinations, or Christianity, or misogyny, or the “irrationality” of the era.

    Well I think it’s because it’s hard to confront these things directly, and because they feel so inexplicable they become mirrors, empty spaces where we can fill in our fears and fantasies.

    So for this sermon I want to focus on one particular aspect of the folklore of the history of the witch trials, the feminist myth of the witch trials, because that seems to be the most prevalent here.

    So what is this myth?  I’ll borrow a version of it from Diane Purkiss’s marvelous book “The Witch in History”

Here is a story, Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived on the edge of a village.  She lived on her own, in her own house surrounded by her garden, in which she grew all manner of herbs and other healing plants.  Though she was alone, she was never lonely; she had her garden and her animals for company, she took lovers when she wished, and she was always busy.  The woman was a healer and a midwife; she had practical knowledge taught her by her mother, and mystical knowledge derived from her closeness to nature, or from a half submerged pagan religion.  She helped women give birth, and she had healing hands, she used her knowledge of herbs and her common sense to help the sick.  However her peaceful existence was disrupted.  Even though this woman was harmless, she posed a threat to the fearful.  Her medical knowledge threatened the doctor.  Her simple, true spiritual values threatened the superstitious nonsense of the Catholic church, as did her affirmation of the sensuous body.  Her independence and freedom threatened men.  So the inquisition descended on her and cruelly tortured her into confessing to lies about the devil.  She was burned alive by men who hated women, along with millions of others like her.

I think this is a fairly good encapsulation of this myth.  It’s a popular story, a deeply appealing story, and a story that’s had a huge effect on the history of many social movements, from gay liberation, to feminism, to ideas that spread through and take deep root in the modern left.  However, it’s also not a true story.  The true story is far more complicated, with far less clearly defined camps in terms of good and evil, and far less persecution of a supposed threat to patriarchal authority or economic dominance, but rooted in genuinely and deeply held beliefs.  Midwives were not targeted (we have exactly one case of a midwife being accused of and executed for witchcraft in Britain and a second one in France), in fact Midwives were more likely to be involved in witch trials as expert witnesses for the prosecution.  A good portion (and possibly the majority) of accusers were women themselves, and most cases relied at least partially on the testimony of women.  There is no evidence that most witches were unmarried, sexually liberated or members of what we would consider the LGBTQ community.  Catholic church courts were usually more lenient than civil courts.  These facts are backed up by the numbers we get when we look at compiled trial records across Europe, checking for prosecutions, convictions, details of accusers and accused, witness testimonies and so on, and you can find most of this in the Witch in History.

    In Medieval Europe the Catholic church considered belief in evil witchcraft to be heretical and the Germanic Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches.  Those who accused others of witchcraft were the ones considered acting pagan, not the accused, and the author of the Malleus Maleficarum (often a source used to support this myth) was admonished by the Catholic church and his book was banned, additionally many authorities dismissed his work as quackery.  Not to mention that the Medieval and early modern Catholic church often considered birth control and abortion a lesser evil for a family that would suffer if they had more children. Clergy often using the phrase “Si non caste tamen caute” meaning “if not chastely, at least cautiously” (essentially advising those engaging in elicit sex to use some form of protection).

This myth also astronomically inflates the number of witches executed from the modern scholarly consensus of less than 100,000 and likely between 35,000 and 60,000 during the period from 1400 to 1782 across all of Europe.  More were tried of course, but another myth is that witches, once accused, were nearly always convicted and conviction inevitably resulted in execution.  In fact conviction rates were no greater than was usual for the period and place typically (and sometimes lower, in some places and times as few as 25% were convicted) and punishments also included fines, imprisonment, exile, and flogging.  Witch trials could also take the form of civil rather than criminal matters.

Certainly, misogyny is evident in the fact that 75% of those accused (in all of Europe across the period) were women, but the fact that 25% were men, and that there were areas and periods where the majority were men (Iceland for example where 92% of the accused were men, and 70% were men in Normandy) suggests that misogyny, or an attempt to gain control over reproduction during the population crisis after the black death were not fundamentally the cause of the witch panic.  It does seem that societal stress (for example in Scotland 3 of the 5 witch panics occurred during times of unusually high prices for wheat) was an influential factor, or Germany which was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds during the religious wars between Catholic and Protestant had a very high number of witch executions).  There are also theories that the witch panic was partially or entirely based on either economic tensions (such as the Thomas/Macfarlane theory that rich neighbors accused poor neighbors out of guilt after refusing them alms) or as part of a plan to discipline the working class, interrupt networks of mutual aid, sew distrust and seize property so it could be consolidated by the elite (such as Federici’s analysis in Caliban and the witch).  The problem with these theories is that more witch accusations were intra-class than interclass (Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century England: a Historiographical Review RACHAEL MACLEAN) and Witch panics were quashed by authorities as often as they were encouraged.   Anton Praetorius, a noted Calvinist preacher for example, preached against witch trials, as did Reginald Scott, a member of English parliament, who wrote a pamphlet on the unreality of magic and the absurdity of the trials..

There are even accounts of elite judges who didn’t believe in witchcraft being forced by juries made up of the lower and middle classes to convict witches they didn’t believe were guilty as recounted in particular by Roger North.  The Witch panic seems to be as much a popular phenomenon as an elite one (and it should be noted that the number of witch executions does not include the unknown number of extrajudicial killings that occurred).

It’s a thing that’s happened repeatedly.  For example in 186 BC Livy records that there was a panic over a secret society of Bacchus worshippers which lead to mass arrests and executions. He accuses them of sedition, orgiastic sexual practices and infanticide… all same claims that show up for the early modern witch panic.  Prior to that Theoris of Lemnos was accused and convicted of some crime involving poisoning and sedition at some point before 323 BC, and those are far from the only examples.  In the 80s and 90s where the idea of “recovered memories” of horrific abuse along with a number of other factors lead to a Satanic Panic which bore striking resemblance to all the other witch panics that had come before.

    It is also worth noting factors that seemed to prevent witch trials, for example strong local belief in effective countermagic or in faeries as agents of supernatural mischief tended to mean an area would be unlikely to have significant witch persecutions (Ronald Hutton, The Witch).  Honestly, I think the witch trials can be ascribed to a variety of factors, 1. The fact that efficacy of Catholic sacramentals as protective talismans was now in doubt due to religious conflict, like I don’t think it was the result of direct Catholic/Protestant conflict as the two just can’t be linked, but I do think the fact that “wait there’s a second option?” probably made the world seem more supernaturally threatening, 2. The fact that a dude wrote a scary book about witches and the printing press had just been invented. 3. Capitalism was starting, everyone was freaked out and under stress.

 I think it is interesting how much this myth strives to link the witch persecutions with persecution of women and pagans while skipping lightly over the very blatant link to persecution of Jews.  

The inquisition didn’t persecute all that many “witches”, but it did persecute a hell of a lot of Jewish people.  The witches “sabbat” (a very obvious corruption of shabbat, c’mon), the innumerable narrative threads that tie witch accusations to anti-semitic blood libel, which is especially interesting given the way that many modern texts espousing the myth appropriate language and forms associated with writing about the holocaust.  A particularly egregious example is Mary Daly’s equating bad reviews of feminist books to nazi book burnings in Gyn/Ecology a book that lingers lovingly on the torture of women. 

 Why do we feel we must find some ulterior motive for the witch trials, as if they must have had some hidden agenda behind them, rather than being simply another in the long history of Satanic Panics that have shown up throughout history?  What do these stories of groups of sexually liberated anti-church underclass rebels crushed by the forces of Christianity, heteropatriarchy and the advent of Capitalism mean for us?  What fascination do they hold?  This question is important to me because it was for a long time, a story I believed with the fervor of a founding myth.  

    There are a lot of reasons it sticks with us.  It frames being within the domestic sphere and the performance of traditionally feminized labor as a form of resistance.  This is a mixed bag I think, on the one hand it places real value and importance on things that have often been treated as unimportant, and without significant value.  On the other hand it is also in some ways limiting, as it can be said to suggest that the “true/natural power of women” lies in the domestic, in the unprestigious and usually unpaid.  In dismissing formal education and so on, it dismisses the struggles of women and other marginalized people to access those fields.

    It offers to grant groups of people often rendered invisible by history a glamorous and exciting role in it as martyred freedom fighters.  It gives us a sense of connection to a mythic and idealized past.  It offers us the belief that at some point, somewhere in history we have a model to work from for our ideal society… but if that model’s not real, then why should we give it the primacy it would have if it were a functioning example?

    I think another one of the reasons why we like these stories is that they’re very morally clear.  The accused has never done anything wrong.  The accusers are always malicious, venomous and fully aware their accusations are lies.  The accusers are powerful, the accused is powerless.  It’s an oddly Christian morality tale of the perfect innocent sacrificed by the malevolent and fearful.

    Ironically in our critique of Christianity, we make ourselves Christ, and I do mean ourselves because I think another reason for the enduring popularity of this narrative is that it’s so easy to identify with.   In histories of this nature, details of torture are often described with lurid and almost eroticized detail, while any details of what the accused said or did is oddly absent.  Anything in short that might break the sense of identification with the suffering body and make us see them as truly human, historical figures with identities of their own.  We are allowed only the knowledge of atrocity so that our focus can be on empathizing with fear and pain, and avoid having to understand them as people.  The witches in these stories (when they are allowed a voice) are modern people dropped into history.  They never say anything we’d disagree with.  They value nature and freedom.  They are sexually liberated.  They’re kind to animals.  They believe in gender equality and so on and so forth.  They are persecuted because they are not like the irrational, judgemental and cruel people who surround them.

    It’s a flattering picture.  We like the idea that if we existed in these past contexts we’d be like that.  That we’d maintain our current values unlike those people.  We like the idea that our ideas are somehow purely the result of something internal to us, and that we are discreet individuals with tidy and impermeable borders to our identity.  We also like to believe that the world is consistent, that we can comprehend the past easily through the lens of the present, that various beliefs consistently go together (like that Catholicism always means opposition to birth control, or that belief in the need for economic equality always means opposition to cruelty to animals).   It also allows us to see ourselves identified with the perfect victim.  We are never the midwife who examines the accused for witch marks.  We are never the accuser.  We are always the victim, never complicit, always innocent of the blood on the system’s hands. The accused is never mean spirited, vindictive or foul mouthed.  She is always, ironically, for all this myth’s focus on a society wishing to be rid of difficult women, easy to love.