Who were these ignorant backward people who saw witches and demons in every corner? How could they be so uninformed, so unscientific, so, well, primitive?
One of the hardest myths to bust about the witch persecutions is that they were some kind of medieval stupidity; in truth, they primarily happened after the Renaissance on the eve of the enlightenment in the 16th and 17th centuries in a world entering what we would understand as a modern consciousness. In fact, the worst persecutions happened in those places--in Germany, Scotland, Holland, and England--that would become renowned for their scientific inquiriries and rationalist philosophies. Lest we forget it was the most accomplished and erudite of scholars at Harvard who hung the ropes at Salem.
Lands that were "backward" and less "advanced" in their intellectual and technological accomplishments, saw less violence against women. Russia and Ireland, who the history books will tell you were left behind by the Enlightenment, saw almost none at all.
The medieval consciousness was still primarily what we would call today "indigenous." Christianity was a thin veneer of belief over much older ways of knowing and being in the world. Most people could not read. They had no book learning. What they had instead was a deep wisdom about the land on which they lived which they experienced, although they would not have described it this way, as animate. DNA evidence has let us know that people occupied the same areas for thousands of years...they had gods and goddesses of the springs, the trees, the wind, the moon, the seasons, the plants, and the whole around them. They were in conversation with that world. Even today our most useful medicines come from the ancient conversations of these peoples with the beings in their world--from willow bark to poppy juice. Each empire demanded new names for these deities but the collaborative experience of aliveness remained unchanged. Hecate became St. Catherine, Anubis St. Christopher, Isis Mother Mary and Dionysus Jesus but the everyday conversation with the unseen world was a harmony of voices and possibilities. The world and everything in it was alive. Even the dead were alive.
Max Dashu in her essential book Witches and Pagans documents how frustrated were the early Church authorities by people's refusal to listen to them. They talked to the dead directly in the graveyards. Why did they need mediation with the divine? In order to get people to listen to them, these men had to silence these many many voices, all waiting to offer consolation, guidance, and power.
If today we have a hard time remembering or imagining a consciousness before instantaneous information, a time before google and the internet and even radio and television and the telegram, it is harder still to get inside the mind of a people without even the compelling media of books and the written word. Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist, once noted that the primary difference between peoples with writing and peoples without is that the former wrote mostly about themselves and the latter told stories mostly about the natural world.
There are only two talking animals in the entire Bible and these animals--the snake and and an ass--are neither appealing nor helpful. Yet in the middle ages almost no one knew what was in the Bible, not even the priests. There's a marvelous story in Stripping the Altars (about medieval beliefs in England) about some muckety muck from the city comning to a village and asking the local parson if he even knows who Jesus is. "Sure, I do," he answers confidently. "He's that bloke who hangs from a tree upside down and bleeds."
Odin becomes Jesus and the world tree is still a tree and not a cross.
But with the arrival of the printing press in the late 15th century, everything changes. The Bible is translated into familiar languages and people are expected to know what is in it. It creates a uniformity of belief--a whole new understanding of what and who is important. Two writers in particular, David Abrams in Spell of the Sensuous and Leonard Shlain in The Alphabet Vs. The Goddess, have documented what happens to human consciousness and human behavior when the abstraction of the written word enters the world. With each new innovation (hieroglyphs to alphabets, manuscripts to printed book, books to the internet) people become less tolerant, less engaged with the natural world, and more violent. The only book printed as often as the Bible and desseminated as widely in the 16th century would be the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches.
This period of time when the "witch craze" occurs is also, not coincidentally, the birth of capitalism, the expansion of colonialism, and the eve of the scientific revolution. Before the world can become a resource and a commodity, the conversation with all of nature, with all the many beings of wood and stone and fur, must be silenced. Women must be terrfied into submission and silence. Anne Barstow documents in her invaluable book Witch Craze how women speaking with the dead were the most likely to be accussed. Just as the early scientists (and even many today) would cut the vocal cords of the animals they were experimenting on, the inquisitors primary goal was to silence the natural world.
The devil lurked in all of nature. Natural desires were unnatural. Nature needed to be tamed, regulated, eradicated, but most of all silenced. Today serious articles wonder if animals have feelings or if they feel pain. What has gone so wrong that such questions even need to be asked?
The world we live in, the world of technological innovation and industrial efficiency, is a materialist illusion that has been made noisy enough, loud enough, that we will not hear the cries of the forests, the oceans, and each other.
The witch craze was about silencing all those in conversation in any way at all with the unseen world--and silencing at last the unseen world itself, covering it in aslphalt, weed killer, and concrete, the wall to wall carpeting of a species gone mad.
I call myself a witch because I have always been in conversation with the unseen world. I have always been listening--and I will not keep my voice shut about it.
This is a seven-part series I am offering as part of my Free Substack. To join a monthly in-person conversation about the unseen world, join my paid Substack.
In a Facebook challenge that starts with: my new book is called… (and you let auto text fill in the blank for you). Mine came up as “My new book is called The World War of Silence.” Reading your piece about the silencing of women’s voices, the silencing of the land, the silencing of our instinctual connection to the natural world gave me pause. Perhaps that is the world war we’ve been in for centuries. And we are starting to see we can no longer remain silent.