Talia Link, Witch no.1, 2012. Digital collage, Inkjet print. 112 x 110 cm. From the Witches Project. Courtesy the artist
The Brief History of Witch Hunting
Link’s work touches on something longstanding. Scholar and activist Silvia Federici, author of “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation”, asserts that women accused of witchcraft and subsequently burnt at the stake were not necessarily practicing members of pagan cults, but rather regular peasants who resisted the oppressive and impoverishing developments arising from feudalism. Witch hunts, she and many other scholars agree, served as a regulating tool to maintain a hegemonic political economic system. even so, the dark ages weren’t the darkest centuries as far as women’s persecution and demonisation go. In the late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries things, to coin a phrase, got a hell of a lot darker.
Folk belief in the reality of witchcraft was indeed widespread in the middle ages, but it was vehemently denied by the Catholic Church; Charlemagne had specifically outlawed the old practice of witch burning, dismissing the practice as pagan in itself, owing to the fact that witchcraft was originally viewed by many early medieval Christians as a pagan superstition. It wasn’t until the publication of the “Malleus Maleficarum” (the “Hammer of the Witches”) by the German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer in 1486, that witchcraft was widely accepted as a real danger. Backed by a papal bull from Pope Innocent VIII, the “Malleus” negated the prevailing orthodoxy that witches could not surpass the power of god with their rituals, and instead instilled the belief that Christians had an obligation to hunt witches down and kill them.
Inevitably, their persecution became far more brutal following the publication of the “Malleus Maleficarum”: witchcraft was then accepted as a real and dangerous phenomenon, and witch hunt hysteria swept over europe. evidence used to convict and execute many thousands of alleged witches was entirely fabricated. But whether they were real or not, witches were a political necessity, their suggested threat serving both as a distraction from real plight and as means to eliminate resistance.
Descriptions of the traits of witches and their crimes drew on existing traditions of rural paganism. Though practicing pagan “magic” was not exclusive to women, a combination of existing popular mythologies, fear of the communal role women played in society and superstition regarding older women in particular (older, post-menopausal women didn’t have to bear children, were often widowed, and enjoyed certain freedoms that placed them too close to men) were used to establish their marginalisation and enabled jurists and rulers to easily blame them for coincidental phenomena such as poor harvests, dying cattle, stillbirths and inclement weather. Only with the advance of the enlightenment with its creed of empirical reason, scepticism and humanism did europe’s unquenchable thirst for what was essentially femicide finally subside – only to reappear, albeit briefly, in the New World, culminating in the infamous Salem witch trials.
Not all publications on the topic of witches were incriminating, however. In 1862, Jules Michelet published “Satanism And Witchcraft” (originally “La Sorcière”), a book on the history of witchcraft. In his account, Michelet postulates that medieval witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism and the Roman Catholic Church, a rebellion that nevertheless took the form of a secret religion inspired by paganism and fairy beliefs. Though highly romanticised and embellished, Michelet’s account is openly sympathetic to the sufferings of peasants and women in the middle ages.
While exploits of superstition may be fathomable in the murk of the dark ages, the practice of vicious, dogged and irrational persecution of subgroups is not something the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, modernism and the information age have managed to prevent; on the contrary. And while the existence of witches rather serves as fodder for sitcoms like “Bewitched” and “Charmed” than for inciting mass hysteria these days, the folkloric image of the witch still endures; it man- ages to retain its power and fascination.