#witch craze

[god-of-annwn]

In 1594 Gwen Ferch Ellis was the first person to be executed for witchcraft in Wales. Like most accused female witches, Gwen was previously known to have carried out healing of sick humans and animals in the town of Landyrnog.

Gwen was accused of having a charm written backward; something that was assumed to be a form of bewitching. Gwen was taken to Flint goal to await trial.

During her trial, Gwen was accused of having murdered a man called Lewis ap John through witchcraft and was subsequently found guilty and executed as a witch.

Unlike in England, there were very few witch trials in Wales, with only five executions having taken place. It has been estimated that 500 executions of accused witches had taken place in England during the Early Modern Period.

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ray Atkinson - Hexenwahn und Hexenprozesse - Eden - 1958

[clatterbane]

Just reminded of this classic when it showed up in the latest Esoterica video.

I just wanted to hug all of the imps as soon as I saw it. Really effective as propaganda, that.

Jarmara in particular can come live with me, anytime. Shame the artist didn't show us Griezzdl Greedigutt*, or the other few members of that crew.

* Though that may be me. I could probably be fairly described as sorta grizzled by this point, and also a greedyguts. Which my Nana still used half-jokingly about animals and kids who were particularly prone to gobbling down food with some gusto.

[the---hermit]

Articles I read in May 2022

I normally don't do this, but since I have been working full time on my thesis, I read a lot of articles, so I thought I do a wrap up of those aswell. The theme of the articles is witch hunts and the historiography of witchcraft, as my thesis is on a witch trial. All the articles I found on jstor (and I will link the website), the majority are in English but I'll also include those written in Italian.

The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of Witchcraft by Malcolm Gaskill

The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects by E. William Monter

The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologist's Perspective by Nachman Ben-Yehuda

Who Were the Witches? The Social Roles of the Accused in the European Witch Trials by Richard A. Horsley

Witchcraft, Female Aggression, and Power in the Early Modern Community by Edward Bever

Witchcraft Prosecutions and the Decline of Magic by Edward Bever

The Invisible Men: The Historial and The Male Witch by Lara Apps and Andrew Gow (This is the first chapter of the book Male Witches In Early Modern Europe, I ended up reading the whole book, all the chapters are present on jstor, but I will link only this one. For those interested the book is composed by five chapters plus the introduction and conclusion)

La stregoneria. Confessioni e accuse, nell'analisi di storici e antropologi di Mary Douglas Reviewed by Michela Pereira

Ancora a Proposito di Streghe by Michaela Valente

The full list of books I read this month and their reviews is here

[avellanas-nutty-empire]

Did anyone see the post I reblogged and talked about the witch craze of Salem and europe? Cuz the OP taged me and said some rude things and when I go into my notifications it's not showing up as the post I rebloged???

That's the post I reblogged and said the thing on

And this is what shows up in my notifications???

What's going ooooooon ;-;-;-;-;-;-;-;

[metanoiyed-archive]

The Ahistorical “Burning Times”, Or: Why White People Shouldn’t Be Trusted To Record History

*cracking knuckles* If you saw this post about this post, you know what this is about. If not, read them and come back. Without further ado: The Ahistorical “Burning Times”, Or: Why White People Shouldn’t Be Trusted To Record History.

“The important backdrop for this group is the time period that modern witches and pagans refer to as The Burning Times.”

So the first thing you’ll notice about posts or books that mentioned the ‘burning times’ is that they use very purposeful wording and diction. Notice how the OP says ‘that modern witches and pagans refer to as’ and not, “what historians refer to as”? That’s because historian’s don’t refer to it as the burning times, they refer to it as the ‘Witch Craze’ or ‘Witch Hysteria’, where many people in medieval Europe and America [14th-17th century, but 16th and 17th were the most popular years] were often falsely accused of witchcraft and hung - not burned - for the crime. During the Salem Witch Trials, especially, people like to say ‘we are the granddaughters of witches you couldn’t burn’ -- but no witches were even burned at the stake in Salem (1). Accusing someone of witchcraft was very, very often a political tool used by the Roman Catholic Church or others who operated under it to execute whomever they wished, but we’ll get to that in a second.

“Europe and America were thrust into a moral panic and hysteria over alleged satanic witches. Most of those accused were midwives, healers, poor women, women suffering from mental health issues, and women who were practicing preChristian traditions.” So... Yes to: hysteria, healers and women suffering from mental health issues and practicing pre-Christian traditions. No to pretty much everything else. Men who were healers or suffering mental health issues were also accused, but that’s because anyone could call witchcraft like a boy crying wolf and it was believed. In my ‘A Deed Without A Name’ notes, I go over how in some cases it appears that a certain aspect of people who are in some way different can indicate they’re touched, but often in the past I’m inclined to think in most cases it was simply used to execute people. Also, they killed people practicing pre-Christian traditions because they were racist Europeans and colonialists, and most of the time those pre-Christian traditions were by POC. 14th Century-17th Century is by no means pre-Christian, by that point a lot of folk belief in Europe had been touched by Christian belief, not so much that it entirely changed it, but enough. ‘Alleged’ Satanic witches? Are we just purposefully looking away from Isobel Gowdie’s confession before she was executed? Confessions of people [of those who confessed and were actually witches] who made deals with the Devil/Man in Black/Witchfather in some form are overwhelmingly common. (2).

“Many witches fear a return to the Burning Times, when any old woman was burned at the stake for merely existing below the poverty level.” I really have nothing groundbreaking to say about this one, just that I hate the OP for making me look at it and I hope they stub their toe. ‘fear a return to the burning times’ my ass.

“The total number of those murdered under the guise of witch accusations varies widely by source. Many historians have argued that the number is anywhere between 40,000 and 60,000. Other sources, however, have claimed the number is closer to 100,000 with potentially hundreds of thousands more unaccounted for. It has even been suggested that there were 392,000 in Great Britain alone. The highest number, and number that has become part of popular legend, is approximately 9 million (with the fullness of the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition included). It will never be certain how many women, men, and children were killed, and truthfully the numbers game is irrelevant in the face of trauma. Any genocide, no matter how big or small, is a moral stain on our history.”

Other sources? What sources. You don’t name any of yours, I noticed. ‘Any genocide ... a moral stain on our history’ yet I am sure you turn a blind eye to the plight of those right in front of you, while my people suffer a real continued genocide, you make a fantasy crime. Statista did a chart on how many people were tried and executed between 1300 and 1850, and the number is even lower than you think. (3). 

“The Burning Times were a systematic rooting out of female power and autonomy, and non-christian practices. The midwives and healers posed a threat to the structures and systems of politics and medicine... both groups challenging the patriarchy.” This sounds... so fishy. Doesn’t this sound like a weird radical-feminist argument? I’m not implying anything about OP, but the way this whole paragraph reads while trying to include ‘men, women and children’ and then focusing on how this was a whole attack on the women against the patriarchy just... grosses me out, a lot. Because it was never about that, has never been about that, and will never be about that. I also just don’t trust people who refer to women as ‘females’ but that’s just me.

“Most of the following women were (wrongfully) believed to have had sexual intercourse with Satan, signing their names into his black book with their blood.” Again, are we just ignoring Isobel Gowdie’s straight up confession? Or any of the other confessions from Scotland, England, and surrounding areas? This stupid purity culture of wanting to be seen as better to outsiders is so annoying. “I’m not like that trope of witches you’ve seen, we don’t actually have sex with the Devil or sign his black book with blood!” Just because some of us aren’t worried to get our hands dirty and you are doesn’t mean that other witches don’t do that. “wrongfully” where the fuck are you getting your information? Many confessions that they did get included detailed accounts of joining the Man in Black for sabbats, having sex with him, and signing his black book. Not everyone continues the practice today, but some definitely do, they definitely did, and it definitely wasn’t “wrongfully believed”. They were powerful women in their own right. If anything OP, by trying to separate themselves from the legacy of these women, has disgraced them in that way. It takes courage and strength to work with infernal forces from the otherside like that, and here this asshole is just shittin’ on their name pretending they never risked their lives doing it. A source on this from Isobel Gowdie, “As I was going betuix the townes of Drumdewin and the Headis, I met with the Devil, and ther covenanted, in a maner, with him.” and from ‘A Deed Without A Name’ by Lee Morgan, “As we can see when we look over the testimonies of witches from earlier times not everyone is initially approached by an animal spirit. Isobel Gowdie seems to have initially been approached by ‘the Devil’, Bessie Dunlop by a faerie man who claims to have once lived as a human man, others were taken by faeries or by the spirit of another living human practitioner.” (4)

And obviously there are various other sources, these are not the only ones. I’m just too tired to go through my library, cite them all, attach them all - y’all gotta do your own work for once. Read actual history, please. Learn discernment. I don’t even have the energy to go through the list of people the OP put as ‘in memoriam’ because I have no idea if those are historical reasons, either, but honestly I don’t even wanna know. Anyway, it’s bullshit and ahistorical, thanks for coming to my tedtalk. If you push this narrative you owe Black, Native, Jewish people and anyone else otherwise affected by the witch-craze repatriations immediately, I don’t make the rules except I do and those are the rules.

Citations:

Andrews, Evan. “Were Witches Burned at the Stake during the Salem Witch Trials?” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 13 Aug. 2014, www.history.com/news/were-witches-burned-at-the-stake-during-the-salem-witch-trials.

Wilby, E. (2013). The visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, witchcraft and dark shamanism in seventeenth-century Scotland. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

McCarthy, Niall, and Felix Richter. “Infographic: The Death Toll Of Europe's Witch Trials.” Statista Infographics, 29 Oct. 2019, www.statista.com/chart/19801/people-tried-and-executed-in-witch-trials-in-europe/

Morgan, Lee. A Deed without a Name: Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft. Moon Books, 2013. 

[ouroboros8ontology]

The ability of early modern women to attack with words was fearsome. Curses... were the basis for many witchcraft accusations.

Anne L. Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“For all its fidelity to history, Summers’s work is a confrontation with the various elements of modern life he’d come to detest. He had, as one reviewer later noted, “a flatteringly poor opinion of anthropologists,” and he saw anarchists and Communists (groups he regularly conflated) as direct descendents from the witches of the Medieval world. Witches were “avowed enemies of law and order, red-hot anarchists who would stop at nothing to gain their ends.” When his patron, Lady Cunard, introduced him to her husband, Lord Balfour—who expressed disbelief in the existence of people who craved evil for evil’s sake—Summers produced a political analogy: “Well, Lord Balfour, you have only to think of the views of some of your opponents.” Liberals, socialists, and anarchists, he told Balfour, all bore “the witch philosophy.”

Scholars and critics immediately attacked him for this kind of hysteria. Theodore Hornberger disparaged Summers’s “alarmist themes”: “It is just about time, thinks Mr. Summers, for legislation, a bit more severe, if possible, than the famous statute of James I. The political implications of this logic are indeed alarming, but perhaps not always with the effect intended by the author.” In a similarly scathing review, H. G. Wells noted that Summers “hates witches as soundly and sincerely as the British county families hate the ‘Reds.’” Wells, anticipating Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery,” saw in Summers’s work a “standing need” of mankind “for somebody to tar, feather, and burn. Perhaps if there was no devil, men would have to invent one. In a more perfect world we may have to draw lots to find who shall be the witch or the ‘Red,’ or the heretic or the nigger, in order that one may suffer for the people.”

Other reviewers castigated Summers for not “judging between different kinds of evidence,” and for his “odd mixture of learning and almost childish credulity.” But Summers maintained that a religion cannot on the one hand assert an unbroken line of pious infallibility, while, on the other, offer the kind of apologetic backtracking that characterized 20th century Church thought. The 1914 entry on witchcraft in the Catholic Encyclopedia (written by Herbert Thurston), attempting to thread the needle between the church’s past and its future, is reduced to equivocations: “In the face of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil and of a diabolical interference in human affairs can hardly be denied, but no one can read the literature of the subject without realizing the awful cruelties to which this belief and without being convinced that in 99 cases out of 100 the allegations rest upon nothing better than pure delusion.”

Summers’s attitude was vile, perhaps indefensible, but at least it was consistent. As the Church lumbered towards Vatican II, it found itself caught between the demands of a tradition and a need for modernization. Despite what apologists like Thurston might have you believe, exorcism was then (and is still today) a sacrament; Summers’s work brought this history out of the Latin and into the light.” - Colin Dickey, “The Last Witch,” The New Inquiry. October 26, 2013.