wild thing about witch trial records: they're basically the only reason we know ordinary folk magic existed at all in early modern Europe 📜 like. the accused weren't even hiding. neighbors got on the stand and testified *openly* that yes, they'd gone to Margery or Alice or Old Joan for a healing charm. yes, she'd helped when the cow got sick. yes, she'd found their stolen goods. this was normal. this was just... the village system of care working as intended. the prosecution created the archive. 🕯️ scholars like Keith Thomas (*Religion and the Decline of Magic*, 1971) and Emma Wilby (*Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits*, 2005) have spent decades mining these records — not for evidence of devil worship, but for glimpses of an entire working practice that otherwise left almost nothing written down. because why would it? this wasn't a literate tradition. it was embodied, local, passed person to person. the trial record becomes this bizarre artifact where the state, trying to destroy something, accidentally documented it in extraordinary detail. the questions asked of the accused. the neighbors' testimonies. the lists of what was found in the house — the bags of herbs, the written charms, the image in wax. we get names. we get relationships. we get *prices charged*. (yes, cunning folk were often paid. not in secret. just... Tuesday.) and here's the part that gets me every time: the vast majority of people being accused weren't claiming to be witches in any spiritual sense. they were providing services. healing. finding lost things. protecting livestock. lifting curses someone else had allegedly laid. the theological framework — the pact with the devil, the sabbath, the whole lurid inquisitorial fantasy — was largely projected *onto* them by the court system. what the records show underneath that framework is something much more mundane and much more interesting: a community-embedded practice of folk magic that people relied on and paid for and mostly didn't think twice about. the demonology was the court's contribution to the story. ✍️ which is also why it matters who gets counted in these records and who doesn't. the witch trials weren't evenly distributed across Europe — intensity, theology, and targets varied wildly by region. the famous English trials look different from Scottish ones look different from German ones look different from colonial American ones look different from the contemporaneous persecution of folk practitioners in colonized territories, where the mechanisms were sometimes similar but the stakes and contexts were entirely different and deserve their own careful treatment. and across all of it: women, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the socially marginal, the queer (if you know how to read the codes). the state's decision about who to target tells you everything about whose knowledge was considered threatening, and whose community bonds were considered suspicious. 🖤 reading witch trial records as folk magic documentation doesn't mean aestheticizing the violence. the trials killed people. destroyed communities. were part of larger patterns of social control. that's not a subtext — it's the text. but the documentation is real, and the practitioners were real, and if we want to understand folk magic lineages honestly rather than mythologically, we have to sit with the uncomfortable fact that we often know what we know because the state tried to eradicate it and wrote everything down while doing so. the archive exists because of persecution. we can acknowledge that and still use it. 📖 --- *[fuhnke — art, music, engineering, entrepreneurship, and witchcraft]* #witchcraft history #folk magic #cunning folk #witch trials #keith thomas #emma wilby #early modern europe #magic history #witchblr #paganism #occult history #history of magic #folk practice #witchcraft research #the archive as violence #but also the archive as survival













