Historian Mikki Brock joins WIRED to answer the internet's bubbling cauldron of questions about witches, witchcraft, and witch hunting through the ages. Can men be witches or only women? Do witches really cast spells and create potions? Who came up with the concept of witches flying on brooms and why? Why do cartoon witches always have such a pointy nose? Why do we associate black cats with witches? Why did the Salem Witch trials start? Answers to these questions and an entire coven more await on Witchcraft Support.
Correction: An edit in this episode makes out that Elizabeth I was the first queen of England. In fact, she was the first unmarried queen of England; the first queen was actually her half-sister, Mary I.
Director: Anna O'Donohue
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Philip Anderson
Expert: Mikki Brock
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Constantine Economides
Sound Mixer: Lily Van Leeuwen
Production Assistant: Kalia Simms
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Correction: An edit in this episode makes out that Elizabeth I was the first queen of England. In fact, she was the first unmarried queen of England; the first queen was actually her half-sister, Mary I.
Director: Anna O'Donohue
Director of Photography: Ben Dewey
Editor: Philip Anderson
Expert: Mikki Brock
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Constantine Economides
Sound Mixer: Lily Van Leeuwen
Production Assistant: Kalia Simms
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm historian Mikki Brock, let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:04This is Witchcraft Support.
00:07It's too silly!
00:15At Leila Likes Music, can men be witches or is it hashtag just for the girls?
00:21Yes, men can be witches.
00:23Anywhere between 75 and 80% of those accused of witchcraft were women.
00:27There were a few places where the majority of people accused of witchcraft were men.
00:32Russia, Estonia, Normandy, Iceland.
00:35But these were also places where the witch trial never boiled into a full-blown panic.
00:40A lot of the men who are accused of witchcraft are accused in moments where they are related
00:45to or in proximity to a woman who is accused of witchcraft.
00:50So their mother might have been accused, their sister, their aunt, their wife even.
00:54And that could bring them in the minds of authorities closer to the crime and could
00:59make them vulnerable to that allegation.
01:01There were also some men who ran afoul of traditional norms of masculinity.
01:05They might have used their power in a way that was deemed irrational.
01:09Men were supposed to be rational, the opposite of women who were irrational and emotional.
01:14These sorts of deviations from the norms of masculinity could make potentially someone
01:18more vulnerable.
01:19You may remember the case of Giles Corey.
01:22Giles Corey was made famous by Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.
01:26And he is the man in that story and in the actual history who was pressed to death after
01:31he was accused of witchcraft.
01:33That is to say a slab of wood was laid on top of them and then rock was placed and rock
01:37was placed and rock was placed until he was pressed to death into the earth.
01:41He had been accused of witchcraft after his wife, Martha Corey, had been accused.
01:45And the reason he was pressed to death like this is because he refused to enter a plea.
01:50And in English law, you had to enter a plea.
01:52Are you guilty or not guilty?
01:54This system lives on.
01:55But he wouldn't say anything.
01:56He held fast.
01:58And of course, very famously, and this may be apocryphal, we don't know for sure if he
02:01said this, but Arthur Miller said he did, Giles Corey's last words were defiantly,
02:06more weight.
02:08Our next question is from Adam Mikkelveen.
02:11What better way is there to spend a Thursday morning than learning about methods of torture
02:15used on accused witches in Scotland?
02:17I too enjoy thinking about torture methods.
02:20We're talking about 90,000 people accused and about 50% of them executed.
02:26And torture was really key in order to get people convicted for witchcraft.
02:31And that's because when you think about witchcraft, it's a crime that's kind of unseen.
02:35It's secret.
02:36It's hidden.
02:37It's concealed.
02:38If you don't have eyewitnesses to the crime, then what you need is a confession.
02:40You need an individual to confess to meeting with the devil under the cover of night, using
02:45harmful magic to kill babies and harm crops and render men impotent.
02:49So the question might be, what sorts of torture methods did they use?
02:53If you're interested in Scotland, they really enjoyed the thumb screws, these little screws
02:57that tighten and tighten and tighten on your thumb.
02:59In some places, they were a little bit less gruesome, like the use of sleep deprivation,
03:04which was common in England in the 1640s.
03:07Other places more gruesome still, like the rack, a medieval torture device that was used
03:11into the early modern period that could either stretch or compress limbs, the strapato, which
03:16is used to tie arms behind one's back and hoist you up over a pulley, sometimes with
03:21weights attached to your legs, so that your shoulders become dislocated.
03:25So really horrific stuff.
03:27And of course, we know torture gives us terrible information.
03:30It's not good judicial practice.
03:32But it was useful for authorities who felt that witchcraft was such an exceptional crime.
03:36They would use torture in ways they typically wouldn't.
03:39People were allowed to flout the typical legal norms and practices.
03:43And what that meant is you could get people to confess to all sorts of fantastical things.
03:48Next question is from AskHistorians, great website on Reddit.
03:52And it is asked by SirDrunkenTheTall.
03:55Sir Drunken, 10 out of 10 name.
03:57I feel like you're a Monty Python character.
03:59How did the Salem witch trials become the face of the historical witch hunts when European
04:03witch trials took place much earlier and were more numerous?
04:08Number one, America, right?
04:10The dominance, kind of the cultural imperialism of America has really brought the witch trials,
04:15Salem witch trials to front of mind.
04:17And of course, Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, which was performed on both sides of the Atlantic,
04:22is going to be part of that.
04:24I think Salem too is kind of shocking.
04:26It's late, right?
04:28In the early 1690s, it happens in this Puritan colony that's often held up as this great
04:33example of the American experiment.
04:36And I think because it's so late, people think surely this is a time period when they have
04:40stopped hunting witches by the end of the 17th century, right?
04:42The 17th century is the heyday of the scientific revolution.
04:45We're talking about, you know, Galileo and Isaac Newton and all of these things.
04:49So people see Salem as sort of a shock to the system, whereas potentially a 16th century
04:54witch trial seems more understandable.
04:56But I also want to say that this idea that the witch hunts happened in the Middle Ages,
05:01they didn't.
05:02If you ever hear someone say witch hunting was a medieval phenomenon, it was not.
05:06The bulk of the witch hunts happened in the early modern period, that is to say the 16th
05:10and 17th century.
05:12Cora asks, were witches ever burned at the stake in the USA like they were in Britain?
05:17Actually, I'm going to go with no and no.
05:19They were hung in New England and in the colonies, and they were also hung in England.
05:24English common law treated witchcraft as a crime of sort of treason, an act against the
05:29state, an act against the church, and it wasn't treated as a heresy.
05:33So they weren't burned.
05:34They were just hung in England and the English colonies.
05:37In Scotland, they were strangled and then burned.
05:40And then in many places in continental Europe, they were straight up burned.
05:42So a nice range of execution methods we have there.
05:46Now we have a question from Phil Array.
05:48Why were the witch tests so deadly and dumb?
05:51Almost all the tests required the person to die, even if there was no proof that they
05:55were or not.
05:57So the witchcraft tests, these are variations on what people called in earlier periods the
06:02trial by ordeal.
06:04The idea that you could do a certain test, the most famous one that we tend to think
06:07of is the swim test, the dunking of witches, the throwing the women into water, and seeing
06:12if they floated or not.
06:14People really thought divine providence was critical, it was crucial.
06:17So there was a lot of confidence that God would not let an innocent person die.
06:22And that belief was really strong.
06:23It underpinned the faith in these tests.
06:25Now let me say, actually, the swim test, the thrower into a pond, you know, as they do
06:30in Monty Python.
06:31There are ways of telling whether she is a witch.
06:34That isn't actually used as often as we're led to think by its prominence in popular
06:40culture, but it did happen.
06:42And it is an example, again, of that belief that humans were not alone in the world, and
06:48there were a lot of other forces that governed the application of justice and the rooting
06:53out of evildoers.
06:55Another excellent question from Reddit's History Forum, asked by SixHorrigoth, how
07:01is it that there were witch trials happening in different parts of the world around the
07:04same time?
07:05It's the printing press.
07:06You have the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, or at least the use of
07:11it and development of it in Europe.
07:13And that leads to the printing of these demonological texts that are being spread around.
07:17So the printing press allows stories of, say, witches in Scandinavia to be printed and read
07:23about in London or in Boston.
07:26And that's going to help create this sort of consistency in the Western notion of the
07:31witch.
07:32At Mike Queener, do witches really cast spells, or are their abilities limited to potions
07:39and stuff?
07:40Well, people believed that witches had a wide range of powers.
07:44They believed witches certainly could use potions, double-double, toil and trouble,
07:49right?
07:50Shakespeare's famous line.
07:51Probably the most gruesome thing that people imagined witches to do is people imagined
07:56that some witches might grind up or use parts of humans, especially parts of unbaptized
08:02infants, to make them into a paste, to make them into a potion, and anoint themselves
08:07in order to fly.
08:08If you've seen The Witch from 2015, you'll remember the scenes of the witch in the woods
08:13grinding something on the stone block and then sort of flying out and turning younger.
08:18That was envisioned to be parts of a baby.
08:20But it draws on older stereotypes about blood libel, heretics doing these sorts of horrible
08:26practices to children.
08:27And by labeling accused witches as killers of babies and even as cannibals, using the
08:32pestle and mortar to grind up some bones of babies, whatever, is a very surefire, quick
08:37way to dehumanize them and to demonize them.
08:41At Scott Daly, 26, asks, has anyone watched The Witch?
08:46What an absolute shite horror film that is.
08:49Scott.
08:50Scott, my man.
08:51No.
08:52The Witch is a brilliant film.
08:53I think you just may be conditioned to people jumping out of corners and going, weee, weee,
08:58and there's none of that in The Witch.
08:59Robert Eggers' The Witch, which came out in 2015, is, to my mind, and I'm just saying
09:04this, I'm just the expert, the best film about witchcraft ever made.
09:09It looks at a family in the 17th century in New England grappling with fears of witchcraft.
09:16And it is the perfect encapsulation, I think, of Puritan anxieties, of theology, of fears
09:23the Puritans had about whether or not they were elect, and of this sort of fever dream
09:28about witchcraft that so took hold of people's minds.
09:32When you watch the film The Witch, you get a real window into why The Witch was so scary
09:38to people.
09:39It really helps us understand why people thought witches were deadly and a threat to their
09:44families, to their livelihoods, and to their communities.
09:47So I know Scott says it was shite.
09:49I don't think it was shite.
09:50I think it was great.
09:51Five stars.
09:52How many stars are there?
09:53A lot of stars.
09:54All the stars.
09:55I have two scenes from The Witch that I really love.
09:57They also happen to be quite gruesome scenes.
10:00One is, of course, the scenes involving Black Phillip, who is the goat that belongs to the
10:04family.
10:05The goat is really sort of emblematic of many depictions that we have in popular culture
10:10and historically of the devil as this goat figure, which, of course, is, again, an inversion
10:16of the idea of the lamb, right?
10:18The lamb of God.
10:19The black goat is an inversion of that.
10:21Of course, also a demonization of certain pagan rituals, ideas about Pan, whatnot.
10:25That's why the goat's often associated with Satan.
10:27But Black Phillip is a perfect devil.
10:29The other scene that I really love, there is a scene where a child in the film is sort
10:34of having this experience of bewitchment and is kind of having these almost possessed convulsions.
10:39And in that process, spits up an apple.
10:41And there's your clue to the role of the Eve narrative.
10:44He's been in the woods with a witch, and he comes back possessed and chokes up an apple.
10:49And that's straight to that stereotype that we see in a lot of depictions of witches.
10:54Next question is from at jasmine ermani.
10:57Who came up with the idea that witches could fly on brooms and why?
11:01This is a great question.
11:02The broom is one of those iconic images that we associate with The Witch.
11:07Number one, the broom is a totally domestic object.
11:10And so much of what we think of when we think of witchcraft is associated with the domestic
11:14sphere, right?
11:15You have the cauldron, right?
11:16The mortar and pestle, these things that you would find in the home.
11:20And that's because when you think of the crimes that witches supposedly committed, many of
11:25them were about harm to the domestic sphere, children, food, crops, and so forth.
11:29Now during the early modern period, people did wonder about whether witches could fly.
11:35Authorities really thought about this.
11:36How did it happen?
11:37How did it work?
11:38And the idea fundamentally was that with the aid of the devil, witches could fly to undisclosed
11:43locations, maybe a mountain under cover of darkness, maybe a forest far away on a hill.
11:48And there they could meet under cover of night and engage in the witch's sabbath, which was
11:53envisioned, believed, fantasized to involve all sorts of demonic acts, orgies, cannibalistic
11:59infanticide, singing and feasting, and things that were in some ways inversions of appropriate
12:04Christian practice.
12:06Another note about the broomstick is it was sort of envisioned to be a fairly phallic
12:11object.
12:12Now looking at this, make your own judgment.
12:14If you believed that witches were engaging in sex with the devil, then having these sort
12:19of phallic objects could reemphasize that aspect of witches being carnal and being in
12:25sort of lustful service of Satan.
12:27I love modern takes on some of this.
12:29I love how in Hocus Pocus, when you're looking for a domestic object that's like more or
12:32less phallic adjacent, you have one of the witches grabbing a vacuum.
12:37Now they weren't grabbing vacuums in the 16th century, but in our modern retelling, they
12:41serve that same purpose as the broom.
12:44Next question is from atwickedwalnut.
12:45I didn't know walnuts could be wicked, but now I do.
12:49I guess anything can.
12:51Anyhow, is the Malleus Maleficarum worth reading at this late date?
12:55Well, for those of you who don't know, the Malleus Maleficarum is the Hammer of Witches
12:59is what it literally translates to, and it's a work that's published in the late 1480s
13:04by a very nasty piece of work, a Dominican inquisitor called Heinrich Kramer, who basically
13:09was pissed off that he wasn't being trusted to run these witch trials in Innsbruck and
13:14writes this screed that's meant to be used as a guide to identifying and hunting witches.
13:20And should you read it?
13:21Is it worth reading?
13:22Well, how much do you enjoy misogyny and demon sex?
13:25If you enjoy both of those things, then that is the book for you.
13:28But in all seriousness, it's a book that is really important for sort of promoting
13:32some of those misogynistic tropes that are part of the witch trials.
13:37Certainly one of the things that Heinrich Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum was obsessed
13:40with was this idea of witches as being carnal, in witches as being lustful, in witches as
13:46having uncontrollable tongues that couldn't be trusted.
13:50He really thought mouthy women tended to be witches, so I can only imagine what he would
13:55have made of me and many of the women in my life.
13:59Sometimes my students ask me why the Malleus Maleficarum was so popular.
14:03Why was it translated so quickly into English?
14:05Why did it become so prevalent?
14:07And why today do we still think about it, right?
14:09If anybody knows a witchcraft book, that's what they know.
14:12And part of it is, I think, because the Malleus Maleficarum is at times quite illicit.
14:16It's quite pointographic.
14:18One of the most salacious, interesting folkloric stories in the Malleus Maleficarum is this
14:23story of this group of witches who were widely known, as he says, to be stealing men's members
14:30and taking them up to a tree and putting them in the branches and feeding them corn.
14:35It gets a bit weird.
14:36And a man came to the tree and said, I've lost my member.
14:39I need my member.
14:40And the witches say, OK, you can choose yours from this tree, but do not take the biggest
14:45one, for that belongs to the village priest.
14:48I love that story because in some ways it combines folklore, but also with actual witch
14:54belief.
14:55People were really worried about witches causing impotency.
14:57There really was a case of witchcraft in the 17th century where a man supposedly lost his
15:02penis to a witch.
15:03And I tell this story to my students, and we actually read parts of the Malleus.
15:06I have to say, though, I teach my witch hunts class at 8 a.m., and a lot of them say that's
15:10too early for demon sex and penis trees, but, you know.
15:14Next question is from at Sundered Seas.
15:17Who is going to tell these people that the Salem witch trials were the result of mass
15:22hysteria from false accusations and not actual witches like the European witch hunts?
15:26So I don't think we should call this a mass hysteria.
15:29I think there are moments where we can think about it as panic, where things really go
15:32off the rails, accusations get made willy-nilly.
15:35But it wasn't a panic.
15:36This was a group of people who truly and genuinely feared witches.
15:40The sort of authorities that they looked to, clerics and judges, and of course the Bible,
15:45provided fodder for this.
15:47It says in Scripture, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
15:51It's scriptural.
15:52So the sources of authority suggested that witches had to be eradicated.
15:56And the worldview at the time, the belief system, meant that it was very rational to
16:00believe in witches.
16:01Think about it.
16:02Early modern life is hard, right?
16:05We all live, by comparison, in homes with thousands of candles, and we have thousands
16:11of horses at our disposal if you have a car, and we never worry about what we're going
16:15to eat, and we have vaccines, and all of those things.
16:18We don't have to work in the same way to find explanation for misfortune.
16:22I think if you understand that, then you can't quite as easily dismiss the fears of witchcraft
16:27that were going on at the time period.
16:29At DrSandman11 asks, why is witch hunting considered to be bad?
16:35They tried to eat some children in a gingerbread house that one time.
16:38Ah, DrSandman, I love this question.
16:41Because it brings in one of the most prominent stereotypes that occurs not just actually
16:46in witch hunts, but in moral panics in general, and this is the fear of the specter of harm
16:51to children.
16:52The Hansel and Gretel story fundamentally is about these two innocent kids who just
16:56love candy following the trail into a gingerbread house and then becoming a nice midnight snack,
17:01pop it in the oven, whatnot.
17:03What's the inversion of the good mother?
17:05Someone who harms children.
17:07Women are meant to give life to children, to nourish them.
17:10So the inversion of that, the inverse of that, the opposite of it, is this witch who
17:14harms them, who eats them even.
17:16And that's why you see harm to children in so many of these witchcraft cases.
17:20And that's not unusual to witch trials, right?
17:23Much of the stereotypes about Jewish communities early on are related to harm to children,
17:28to blood libel.
17:29You see it certainly in the communist scare, actually, this fear that communism could be
17:34spread to children.
17:35What about the children?
17:37You see it in the satanic panics of the 1980s.
17:39This fear of what's going on at pre-K and daycares and whatnot.
17:44So harm to children, I think, is one of those useful, movable fictions that people use as
17:51a way to articulate, to justify, and to demonize over the course of repeated moral panics that
17:57are still very much with us, I think.
17:59At WiseMirror40718, why do witches always have such a nose in cartoon movies in Disney?
18:07Well, you see in some of these visual depictions of witches, including from the late 15th,
18:1216th, and 17th centuries, of these sort of large appendages, large noses, things that
18:18mark them out from other members of the community.
18:21And of course, the large nose trope, which is actually more prominent in some later depictions
18:26than in the early modern period itself, comes from anti-Semitic stereotypes.
18:30There's very little new that's under the sun.
18:33So much about the witch trials is pulling from stereotypes from other moments of panic
18:38in European history.
18:40So if we watch this little clip about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, of that famous
18:45scene of the witch holding out the poisoned apple and offering it to Snow White.
18:50This is no ordinary apple.
18:53It's a magic wishing apple.
18:56Now take a bite.
18:59I think we see some really prominent stereotypes that you can find in a number of the witch
19:06trials.
19:07First of all, the apple.
19:08If you see a woman with an apple, your brain should immediately go to Eve.
19:12Here is someone offering temptation, offering something that they shouldn't have access
19:17to.
19:18And of course, you have the witch in this scene.
19:20She's kind of an Eve figure, right?
19:22She's evil.
19:23She's been tempted by the devil.
19:24And then you have Snow White who is, of course, virginal, pure, a very Mary figure, right?
19:30We are always sort of skirting within this Madonna-whore-Mary-Eve complex and how people
19:36envision the roles of women.
19:37And it was very hard if you were a woman in any period to be a Mary.
19:41So people were more likely, especially authorities, to think of you like an Eve.
19:44You also have in this scene, this famous scene of the witch holding the apple to Snow White,
19:49her wearing a dark cloak that is kind of reminiscent of the way people envisioned heretics to meet
19:54under the cover of the night.
19:56And that large, cartoonishly anti-Semitic nose that you see in some of these depictions.
20:01At BunsenBurnerBMD asks, why do we associate cats with witches?
20:07This idea of cats being associated with witches comes actually very specifically from the
20:11English witch trials where witches were believed to have demonic familiars.
20:16So local domestic animals, a cat, a toad, a bunny, whatever, that was believed to be
20:22a little demon or a little creature doing the devil's bidding that was feeding off
20:27the witch.
20:28And this really becomes prominent in particular in some major witch hunts in the 1640s in
20:33East Anglia where you have Matthew Hopkins and John Stern style themselves as self-appointed
20:38witch finders and go out and basically use sleep deprivation to get people to confess
20:42to witchcraft.
20:43Any of you who have ever owned a cat will know they are finicky creatures.
20:47They have a mind of their own.
20:48They do their own thing.
20:50Also cats have always been sexualized.
20:52We'll all know the slang that is associated with cats and that's another thing that gets
20:57them kept up to the forefront of being associated with witchcraft.
21:00Probably the most recognizable object associated with a witch is, of course, the witch's hat.
21:05But I have to say historians aren't entirely sure where this comes from.
21:09Some people have posited that it's related to kind of an exaggeration of the types of
21:13caps people would have worn during the time period.
21:17Maybe it has some anti-Semitic roots.
21:19Maybe it's just, frankly, a really good way to mark someone as different than others in
21:23society.
21:24But they do show up only rarely in pamphlets from and woodcuts from the time period.
21:29But they have certainly become dominant norms in today's society.
21:33So happy Halloween.
21:35This question is from atholyschnitt, googling how to spot a witch.
21:41Let's imagine I am a minister and it is 1630s in a small town just outside of Edinburgh,
21:48Scotland.
21:50I am advising my parishioners on how to spot a witch.
21:52And it's very important they do so.
21:53We want to avoid divine wrath.
21:55What I might tell them is if you hear a woman who's on the margins of society in some way,
22:01maybe she's widowed, maybe she's poor, maybe she's just cantankerous, maybe you're skipping
22:05out on the church, maybe you're Sabbath-breaking, but if you're an ordinary person, you're really
22:10only looking for a witch if something bad happens.
22:13If your cow dies, if your child dies, if your husband goes impotent.
22:18You might think back to yourself and think, did someone do me wrong?
22:22Did something happen that could have been perceived to be an act of harmful magic?
22:26And you might think, did you have a neighbor who you quarreled with?
22:29And did that neighbor fit the bill of someone who could be a witch?
22:32And that would help you identify who the witch was.
22:35At carolyncalfo asks, why did the Salem witch trials start at all?
22:41Caroline, great question.
22:42And how much time do you have?
22:43The long-term causes are that we should understand Salem as coming at the tail end of a much
22:49larger chapter of European witch hunting.
22:52That is to say, the Salem witch hunts are in the early 1690s.
22:55By this point, most places in Europe have already hit their peak of witchcraft and witch
22:59trials are starting to decline.
23:01But Salem is very much part of this story, part of the circulation of all these demonological
23:06ideas about witches, about the devil, and the ways that they might interact in the world.
23:10And of course, when people come from England to the so-called New World, to these colonized
23:14lands in New England and elsewhere, they're bringing with them those ideas.
23:19The other sort of long-term causes are this intense Puritan desire to build a city upon a hill.
23:26When you have the major wave of Puritan migration in the 1630s, you have people coming who want
23:31to build a truly pure, truly godly society.
23:34And that takes zeal.
23:35They see themselves as fleeing persecution back in England and coming to the New World
23:40in order to build something better and more godly.
23:43And if you want to build something better and more godly, you have to be on the lookout
23:46for any threats from the devil.
23:48And for the Puritans who settled in Boston and beyond, they really saw themselves as
23:54under threat from a range of actors.
23:55They were colonizers, of course, so they were coming into conflict with local indigenous
23:59groups and they are going, in some ways, to perceive indigenous peoples as being potential
24:04servants of the devil.
24:05And especially, they think this after waves of frontier wars that took place in the middle
24:10and latter part of the 17th century.
24:13Short-term causes are there's so much communal feuding.
24:17There are debates among community members.
24:19There's a general sense of unrest and distrust of one's neighbors.
24:22A new minister has come to Salem a couple of years before the Salem witch trials, a
24:26guy called Samuel Parris, a real asshole.
24:29And he is certainly at the center of a lot of these witch trials.
24:32It's really in his home.
24:34He's the minister of the newly appointed Salem village where the witchcraft symptoms start.
24:39So Samuel Parris, this diehard Puritan minister, he has a daughter, Betty Parris, and a niece,
24:45Abigail Williams.
24:46They're in his home.
24:47They're young, 9 and 11.
24:49And they start to experience symptoms of bewitchment and affliction.
24:52And that is what gets the witch trials going.
24:55They are the first of the afflicted girls.
24:57And it sort of spreads like wildfire from that.
25:00And that's partially because it serves the purpose of Samuel Parris.
25:03If this minister is trying to make his way in the world, if he is trying to sort of show
25:07himself as the godly emissary on earth, then of course the devil's going after him, right?
25:12This legitimizes his position.
25:14And I think we also have to ask the question of why did these young girls perform bewitchment?
25:21Why did they think they were afflicted, or at least why did they manifest the symptoms
25:24of affliction?
25:25Odd contortions of the body, the speaking in strange voices, the writhing about, signs
25:31that we would typically associate with demonic possession.
25:35Why did they do this?
25:36Well, few people in Puritan society had less power, less of a say, less of a voice than
25:43young girls.
25:44They were told to be quiet.
25:46They were told to sit back.
25:47They were told to ask permission before speaking.
25:50They were told to obey their mother and father at all costs.
25:54And here is this moment where they take center stage.
25:57The spotlight is on them.
25:58And then you have the adults interpreting that for their own purposes in ways that spiral
26:02into the trials.
26:04Next question, and this is a good one, from at Dream of Delphi.
26:14I think in some ways people want to believe that these girls were just low-key tripping,
26:17right, as a little light LSD action, and that maybe explains it.
26:20Because that's easier to understand than thinking that people really believed in witches and
26:25were really fearful of them.
26:27When we read about people believing that witches were going to the Sabbath and having sex with
26:30the devil and committing cannibalistic infanticide and so on, we just find that beyond belief.
26:35We think, how did people actually think this was true?
26:38Surely the witch trials must have been about something else, social control, ergot poisoning,
26:42these sorts of things.
26:44But in reality, this was a serious belief in the time period.
26:47People genuinely believed in witches, and they genuinely believed that people who were
26:52guilty of witchcraft needed to be eradicated from the earth.
26:56And there's also no evidence that they were tripping on poisoned rye.
27:00That might have been a more exciting explanation.
27:02But the reason we know that's not true is because that would have been a lot, a lot
27:07of poisoned rye, of ergot poisoning going around.
27:10And the witch trials were not just in Salem.
27:12They took place from the late 15th century through to the early 18th century.
27:17That's tens of thousands of people accused, tens of thousands of people executed, and
27:21there's just not that much LSD bred.
27:26A really common question, Anne Boleyn didn't actually have six fingers, did she?
27:30And I think what Claire, in some ways, is sort of asking is, was Anne Boleyn believed
27:35to be a witch?
27:36Did she have these signs of witchcraft or physical difference, like six fingers, that
27:40could mark her out?
27:41Well, Claire, she didn't actually have six fingers.
27:44There's no contemporary evidence of that.
27:46And actually, Anne Boleyn was never accused of witchcraft during the period of her life.
27:51She was not accused of witchcraft at the time of her downfall.
27:54She was accused of adultery, she was accused of incest, but she was never formally accused
27:59or tried as a witch.
28:00That stuff comes later, when she was demonized by later writers in various ways.
28:05I will say, you know, what caused Anne Boleyn's downfall is, frankly, that Henry VIII was
28:11a megalomaniac with authoritarian tendencies who used women, abused women, and wanted to
28:16get his rocks off with Jane Seymour, one of Anne Boleyn's ladies-in-waiting, and Anne
28:20Boleyn had not given him a male child.
28:22Hence, that's really what causes her downfall, but it was not an accusation of witchcraft.
28:27It's not really until the latter part of the 16th century where certain people start to
28:31think about Anne Boleyn, to think about her legacy, and in some cases to try to tarnish
28:36it.
28:37Elizabeth I is in power 1558 to 1603, first female queen of England in this way, has a
28:43tremendous amount of influence, and Anne Boleyn was her mother.
28:46So if you're an enemy, then trumping up charges or rumors really against Anne Boleyn is a
28:51way to do it.
28:52At one with the funk, a good name, how do you avoid being accused of witchcraft?
28:59Well, number one, have a penis.
29:01No, in all seriousness, there were about 20% of those accused of witchcraft who were men,
29:07but typically the probability was that most witches would be women because a lot of the
29:13things that happened that were attributed to witchcraft, children dying, crops dying,
29:19someone getting poisoned, a husband getting impotent, a lot of those things happened in
29:23a really domestic space, right?
29:25Happened in the home, happened at the farm.
29:27And if you happen to be born a woman, you might want to really perform your good and
29:32godly behavior.
29:33Make sure you're going to church on time.
29:35Don't yell at any of your neighbors.
29:37Certainly don't curse out the minister or anybody in a position of authority.
29:40If you are engaged in any sort of neighborhood dispute, try to remove yourself from that
29:45because it's really often these neighborhood quarrels that lead eventually to witchcraft
29:50allegations when something goes wrong.
29:52If you're in the midst of a witch panic, even if you do everything right, even if you're
29:56a man potentially, you could be accused.
29:59We often have this assumption that if you were accused of witchcraft in this period,
30:04in as I say the 16th, 17th century, you would go from zero to being a witch to being executed.
30:11But in fact, there were judicial processes in place that were meant to try to sort the
30:15wheat from the chaff, the witches from the good Christians as it were.
30:19And some people in England, for example, a lot of people were afforded lawyers.
30:24There were jury trials and you had to have a unanimous jury conviction according to English
30:28law in order to be convicted of witchcraft.
30:30And that of course meant rates of conviction in a place like England were lower.
30:34But typically the way people were acquitted was that juries just did not find there to
30:39be enough substantive evidence that that person was truly guilty.
30:43Or the judge in charge of a trial decided that in fact the evidence was not there on
30:47the table to suggest that this witch had done all of these dastardly deeds.
30:51Harry asks, why would you be convicted as a witch in the witch trials?
30:55Let me give you a sense of how the legal process of this works.
30:58If you're accused of witchcraft, typically it goes like this.
31:01You're accused.
31:02You're brought to some initial questioning.
31:04If there's enough material to go on, you're then brought to the trial.
31:08And over the course of both that initial questioning and the trial itself, there are
31:12depositions given by witnesses.
31:14There are questions being asked by authorities.
31:17And often some of those questions relate to crimes that you purportedly committed ten
31:21years ago, twelve years ago.
31:23So you might have a neighbor who tells the courts, you know, I heard so and so is accused
31:28of witchcraft and I remember ten years ago we were having an argument about the boundary
31:33of our property line.
31:35And she gave me the stink eye.
31:37And then I came home later that night and my child got sick or there was a strange swelling
31:42in my belly.
31:43And I survived, or they survived, but I think that was a sign she might be a witch.
31:47Those sorts of allegations that could date back a really long time surface in the trials.
31:52Another reason you might be convicted is if you confess.
31:54Now Salem, let me add, is weird.
31:56Salem is strange because most people who confess live.
31:59Salem is unusual in this way.
32:01But in most places in Europe, if you confess, you're executed.
32:05And those confessions are often elicited through the use of torture and the use of
32:10very leading questions on the part of authorities.
32:13So you could be asked by authorities, didn't you go into the woods and meet with Goody
32:17Proctor at night and didn't you see this go down?
32:20And this intimidated person who's come from a small town and is now in this court with
32:25magistrates and ministers and so forth might just say, okay, yes, I guess.
32:29But if eventually this leads to a confession, that could be enough to get you executed.
32:35Next question is from atwhiskey456, whiskey, I also love whiskey, why do witches always
32:42get such a bad rap?
32:43They were midwives, herbalists, and oh, powerful women.
32:46Because there is this sort of idea that we have in popular culture that midwives are
32:50likely to be accused of witchcraft.
32:52And that does show up in some of the demonological literature, right?
32:56It does show up in the Malleus Malficarum, right?
32:58Watch out for midwives, watch out for how they might harm children.
33:01In practice, midwives were very rarely accused of witchcraft because they were trusted members
33:06of the community.
33:07Because you wouldn't have that position of helping deliver children into the world
33:11unless you were.
33:12In fact, I would say on average they were less likely than your average woman because
33:17their position in society meant often that they had a good reputation and a certain level
33:22of trustworthiness.
33:23And it's only when things go really wrong that they might find the finger pointed at
33:27them.
33:28Here's another great question from Reddit's Ask Historians by CheeseAndOnionCrisps.
33:33Did witch finders ever find anyone innocent?
33:37Great question.
33:38And yes, they did.
33:39Authorities were really keen with convicting and eradicating the actual witches.
33:45And it hurt their cause to convict someone who might not in their eyes be actually guilty.
33:50So there was a motivation for authorities to be somewhat judicious in this process.
33:55And if you happen to be accused in a country with more robust judicial processes, like
34:00England, for example, that gave most witches lawyers and that had unanimous jury verdicts,
34:05for example, you would be more likely to be acquitted.
34:09At DawnLaw98346851, where did the idea of witches come from in the first place?
34:17Once it's available, I can see that, sadly, it's often used maliciously by women against
34:21women.
34:22But who started the whole idea?
34:24Dawn, there's a lot here.
34:26I think the best way to understand the stereotype of the witch, the idea of the witch as conceived
34:32by elites at the height of the witch trials, was to see it as a sort of mixed bag of other
34:38groups and tropes that had long been objects of fear and loathing by authorities.
34:43And by that I mean, if you look at this witch stereotype, in it you see ideas that were
34:49anti-Semitic in origin, ideas about blood libel, harm to children.
34:53You see ideas about heresy.
34:55People certainly believed witches were heretics.
34:57If you serve the devil, if you worship the devil, what could be more heretical than that?
35:01You have the idea of ritual magic as being demonic.
35:05One of the things that happens over the course of the medieval period is that the church
35:08increasingly tries to control how people interact with the supernatural world and to deem all
35:15magic as being involving pacts with the devil.
35:19And what really you also have happen at the start of the witch trials is the development
35:23of a court system in early modern Europe that can put laws on the books, laws in place
35:29through which to prosecute witches judicially.
35:31So all of those things are part of this very complicated stew that eventually leads to
35:36the witch trials.
35:37Now, a really interesting point that you make here about women accusing other women.
35:42Some scholars, I think wrongly, have used the fact that this happened, women were often
35:47accusing other women, to say, you know, the trials weren't really about gender, they didn't
35:51really have anything to do with this.
35:53When in fact, of course, it makes sense that women would accuse other women, right?
35:57Most of these things, these initial allegations of witchcraft start in the home.
36:01She poisoned my baby, she did something to my husband, she made it impossible for me
36:05to churn my butter.
36:06I also want to say that if you're in the midst of a very intense witch hunt, it is safer
36:12if you're a woman to be on the side of helping identify who the accused witches were.
36:16Now this is not to say that that was being done cynically.
36:19Women also believed most witches were women.
36:22This is the way these ideas work, when something becomes a norm, everybody buys into it to
36:26a large extent.
36:27It might start with one woman accusing another woman of using various household objects to
36:32poison a child.
36:33But then when it gets to the authorities, who are really interested in what the devil's
36:37up to on earth, they might ask the accused witch, where did you meet Satan in the woods?
36:41You had this ability to poison, how did you get it?
36:43Did you enter into a pact with the devil?
36:45And it is, I think, that elite male interest in the devil and in sex with the devil and
36:51these sorts of questions where you really start to see things shift in the trials.
36:56At Simon Antihero, witch hunting never ends.
36:59It doesn't.
37:00So if we're looking at the timeline of witch hunting, the last witches are formally tried
37:05in England in the 1680s, the last witches formally tried in Scotland in the 1720s, and
37:11even in Central Europe as late as the 1780s.
37:15People had questions about the realism and efficacy of the crime of witchcraft.
37:20Particularly authorities became skeptical of that.
37:22And laws were taken off the books in the 18th century, so witchcraft laws.
37:26So witchcraft, as we think of it, historically ended, but witch hunting hasn't ended.
37:30It ended this tendency to demonize and dehumanize others and sort of associate them with very
37:36old and dangerous tropes, persist in really profound ways.
37:41Meg D. West asks,
37:43Apparently I've never seen Hocus Pocus.
37:46Why did I not know that witches were the bad guys?
37:49Number one, Hocus Pocus, 10 out of 10.
37:52I love that movie.
37:53It's kitschy as hell.
37:55What a delight.
37:56I watch it every year.
37:57I've seen it like 30 times.
37:58But why did I not know witches were the bad guys?
38:01Well, that's, you know, a really interesting point.
38:03It sort of raises the question for us of if in the pre-modern period people were scared
38:08of witches, they thought they were evil, servants to Satan, deadly.
38:11Why now do we have these kind of cuddly witches in Hocus Pocus or in the series Bewitched
38:17or in lots of other sorts of venues, Charmed, Practical Magic?
38:22Why do we have cute little toddlers wearing witches hats at Halloween?
38:27Why?
38:28The reason is because there's been, as we've become more skeptical, as we've decided that
38:34in fact maybe the devil's not that active in the world and maybe that there are different
38:38modes of spirituality that are appropriate.
38:40Maybe there are different ways that women are allowed to be in the world.
38:43There's been almost a witch renaissance, a sort of reclaiming of that label and a real
38:48interest actually in ideas about magic among the populace.
38:53So I think it really is our modern depictions that do in some ways come out of the 1970s
38:58and this sort of feminist rethinking of how we ought to conceive of and perceive witches.
39:04Thank you everyone for these fantastic questions.
39:07Clearly there is so much to say about witches.
39:10But that's all we have time for today.
39:12Thank you for watching Witchcraft Support.