The Season of the Witch

(part one)

I first read the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th century book on how to identify a witch, over forty years ago when I arrived at college certain I would be a history major. The terror that document unleashed in me is still hard to process. I stopped studying history and I wonder how many other women have had that experience or at least shifted their interests so as not to contend with the cataclysmic misogyny at the very foundation of our modern world.

In her groundbreaking masterpiece Witch Craze (1995), historian Anne Barstow laments the pervasive absence of scholarship into this period of endemic violence in both Europe and America and begs young scholars to join her in documenting the accusations, the trials, and their repercussions on ordinary people's beliefs, relationships, and lives.

Yet decades later there are still so few comprehensive documentations of what actually happened. There are a few, very few, analysis of the events (see Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch) but not the kind of exhaustive detailing, town to town and trial to trial, that would gives us a real vision of the breadth and scope of these events.

Just last night I found myself wanting to explore the history of witch accusations in early America. Surely someone had gathered some kind of data base where one could see not just the most gruesome executions of justice but the banishments, the dispossessions of property, the lives ruined. How many trials had there even been I wondered?

Who knows. It didn't exist on the internet. State by state (or rather colony by colony) I began exploring. And state by state discovering that, oh yes, there were so many, many witch accusations against women in the new world. So many. None of the information was organized, none of it was easily available and I had the clear feeling that much had vanished or been consigned to the back rooms of local historical societies.

The tidy bit of propoganda affected by that good ol' Arthur Miller was to distract everyone from how pervasive and legally justified such accusations were in the New World and to frame what happened in Salem as an isolated incident of adolescent hysteria run amok. The girls themselves become their own worst enemies in The Crucible, that play read by every American teenager for the pasy fifty years. The problem is adolescent female hysteria—not the considered “rational” justice of the good doctors from Harvard who instituted and ran the trials, who built the gallows and executed ordinary men and women.

Did anyone in any of their American or European history classes in high school study this two-hundred year period of endemic violence against women? Or was it, as some states are even now trying to do with slavery, fundamentally disappeared from the official record? What happens when there are people who don't know the Holocaust happened? What happens when people think slavery "just wasn't that bad"? What happens when we don't know that the world we live in, the rational scientific world founded in Germany, England, Scotland and the Netherlands, unleashed the very worst horrors against the earth and women of all backgrounds and ages? [fun fact: the worst violence always took place in the most “educated” areas…it was an outgrowth of rationalism not a defiance of it.]

I call myself a "witch" out of solidarity with those women and yet, as I will explore in essays to come, rarely would they have self-identified as witches. There are many misconceptions about what it meant to be accused of witchcraft during that period and even when it was all going on and who was doing the trying and the killing.

But I want to start by looking at how little factual scholarly information is available. I am indebted to the brave, thorough work of Anne Barstow but unfortunately I did not have her, or someone like her, to guide me through that period of revulsion and terror as I first glimpsed what had actually happened.

In preparation for Halloween and the Day of the Dead, in the memory of those women who died by torture, burning, and hanging, I want to explore that period of time that I did not dare to bear witness to when I was younger.

[note: this series of posts was originally offered last year but due to the overwhelming response I received about them I will be archiving them here.]

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In my book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World I explore how the very ancient and ordinary practice of people talking to their loved ones on the other side was initially demonized by the inquisitors and ultimately triviliazed and mocked by modern people. I’ll be talking about all of this, and reading from my book, on The Day of the Dead in Woodstock, NY. Everyone is invited.

Take Back the Magic with the Dead

November 2nd at 7 pm

St. Gregory’s Church in Woodstock NY