The History of Witchcraft

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Clara and the Curandera by Monica Brown, illustrated by Thelma Muraida:“‘ Once there was a little girl named Clara, who was grumpy.’ She was grumpy about having to take out the trash, having to share her toys with her seven brothers and sisters, and having to read one book a week for school. And Mami is tired of Clara’s grumpy face, so she sends her daughter to the curandera or healer to ask for help. The curandera gives Clara a list of things to do in the coming week: take out her own trash and the neighbors’ as well; give all of her favorite toys to her brothers and sisters; and read five books instead of one! It’s a difficult, busy week for Clara. But, when the week is over, Clara realizes that she has not had time to feel grumpy. Could it be that helping others makes her feel happy? A satirical article (supposedly written by Benjamin Franklin) about a witch trial in New Jersey was published in 1730 in the Pennsylvania Gazette. It brought to light the ridiculousness of some witchcraft accusations. It wasn’t long before witch mania died down in the New World and laws were passed to help protect people from being wrongly accused and convicted. Book of Shadows Like all the best historians of witchcraft, Roper explains witchcraft without explaining it away by condescending to her subjects. If Briggs’s Witches and Neighbours takes us into the heart of the community to see what witchcraft meant there, Roper goes even further: into the hearts and minds of people, especially the witches themselves, whose own life-stories were intertwined with narratives of demonism and witchcraft.

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones: “SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH. When the note, written in ordinary blue ballpoint, appears between two of the homework books Mr Crossley is marking, he is very upset. For this is Larwood House, a school for witch-orphans, where witchcraft is utterly forbidden. And yet, suddenly magic is breaking out all over the place–like measles! The last thing anybody needs is a visit from the Divisional Inquisitor. If only Chrestomanci could come and sort out all the trouble!” A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett: “ Tiffany Aching, a hag from a long line of hags, is trying out her witchy talents again as she is plunged into yet another adventure when she leaves home and is apprenticed to a real witch. This time, will the thieving, fighting and drinking skills of the Nac Mac Feegle the Wee Free Men be of use, or must Tiffany rely on her own abilities?”Frazer was not a Witch or a Pagan, but much of what we believe in Greater Pagandom comes straight from Frazer. The modern Wheel of the Year Cycle containing a sacrificial god comes from Frazer, as do many of our ideas about sabbats such as Samhain or Beltane.

Behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions” One such figure was peculiar to the western Alps. She was the female embodiment of winter, a female figure often called Bertha or Perchta or Befuna. She punished social disobedience and rewarded ‘goodness’. She was always portrayed as an old hag, because she represented cold and winter. It did not take long for intellectuals to note her resemblance to the witches with whom they were familiar from classical literature. When orphan Lois Barclay lands in New England in 1691 she finds the ground as unsteady as the water. And well she might. Gaskell shows us a community in terrified opposition to its native forests and people. I love the way she refuses to condescend or simply condemn – she puts the reader in the middle of the panic, feeling it spread. The novella has been overshadowed by Gaskell’s novels, but it’s a small, bright gem. Moving on to the witches, I agree that it’s saying something absolutely gorgeous about a refusal to judge between ill effects and good effects and to discriminate.Again, if you’re doing stuff that Protestants think is bad, there’s no grey area. There’s no room for tolerance. You’re either right or wrong. In that sense, it’s quite terrifying. It’s a terrifying worldview. And it persists to this day—it’s very similar to what we saw when the Harry Potter books were published in America.

One last question, before we finish. On the topic of witches and the supernatural, we’ve spoken a lot about the idea that the dead haunt the living. Do you believe in ghosts?My criticism nevertheless should not take away from the fact that Hutton has given his readers abundant food for thought. His book will no doubt provoke ample and lively discussion and for that he should be congratulated. Notes It’s the idea that behind the obvious and the everyday is a world that you can’t see, but which in some sense corresponds with your emotions. It’s the fear you feel of death. If you visit any battlefield—even battlefields that are now quite old, like those of the First World War—there’s a haunting sense that here the dead still are, and they’re not going away. For instance, there’s this vast ossuary at Verdun, which has the bones of 55,000 unidentified men in it. There are still trenches where men were buried alive and they haven’t been reburied yet. The town, yes. But have you been to the village? The village renamed itself in the nineteenth century, so many people don’t know it’s there. It renamed itself Danvers. It’s got a memorial to the Salem witches that lived there. The one that lived there that many people know about is Rebecca Nurse. Her house is still there and you can go visit it. Unlike the town, it has this hushed quality. It’s like walking with death. You’re right—the town of Salem is this creepy monetization of the terrifying aspects of the past. That to me is a little uncomfortable. I sometimes want to say to people: you realize actual people died here, right? This isn’t fun. I’m aware that there’s an earlier edition of this book, but the 1989 version is the one most of us are familiar with, and it was in every major bookstore throughout the 1990’s. Not only that, it was sometimes in the Feminism section and not the New Age or Witchcraft section at Barnes and Noble. Wow! This was the first easily available book articulating women-only Witchcraft, which makes it highly influential. (I often find myself in disagreement with Budapest-and that’s putting it mildly, especially when it comes to issues concerning trans-women.)

In Homer’s Odyssey ( c.800 BC), Circe – who turns men into animals – is described as a witch, and Plutarch refers to witchcraft in his treatise On Superstition ( c.AD 100). Illicit magic features heavily in Roman law statutes, some of which are passed down to the Christian world. However, many of those early laws were really laws against sorcery, which unlike witchcraft can be beneficial, and which requires special skills, tools and words. If you look at the Lancashire witch trial of 1612, the two older women in their nineties accused in that trial are, according to their own children, using charms that we would probably think of as Catholic prayers. They’re getting people to invoke the five wounds of Jesus Christ, and to say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria afterwards, in those terminologies, in Latin. For a very theologically up-to-the-minute Protestant, those prayers are themselves kind of diabolical, because by that stage, they’ve decided in their own minds that the Catholic church is all about Satan. I think one of the reasons that we find elderly women so horrifying is that they are literally a kind of dead end. We’ve now created a culture—good old us!—that is far, far more rigorously ageist than any culture previously on Earth. Girls at fifteen are having Botox before they even get any facial lines. Actually, this book is fantastic is because it’s about the way in which being a shaman is nearly destroyed by Stalin and his policies. He wants to wipe it out for the same sort of reason that Protestants want to wipe out the grey areas that I’ve been describing in late medieval culture: because he wants everybody to have exactly the same mindset. Of course it fails, which is the good news. The bad news is a lot of people die, but the good news is that it fails.I also wanted to look at one poem by Thomas that explicitly mentions witches, called “This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong”. I’ll read a section of it: The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab: “ The Near Witch is only an old story told to frighten children. If the wind calls at night, you must not listen. The wind is lonely, and always looking for company. And there are no strangers in the town of Near. These are the truths that Lexi has heard all her life. But when an actual stranger–a boy who seems to fade like smoke–appears outside her home on the moor at night, she knows that at least one of these sayings is no longer true. The next night, the children of Near start disappearing from their beds, and the mysterious boy falls under suspicion. Still, he insists on helping Lexi search for them. Something tells her she can trust him. As the hunt for the children intensifies, so does Lexi’s need to know-about the witch th It’s increasingly to do with the relation between the Siberian people and their environment. As you probably know if you read the papers, the environment in Siberia—just like the environment all around the poles—is changing much faster. The further up you go, the more strongly climate change is happening noticeably. In Siberia, they’re dealing with incredibly scary stuff, like fields of bubbling methane.