Witches and their Christian Allies

I’ve been writing a lot lately about films, so this week it felt like the right time to turn back to some deep cultural history. We’re going to return now to the historical persecution of women as witches in early modern European history. I’m turning here partially in anticipation of my book Monstrous Bitch, which goes into much more detail that I have space for here, which publishes in less than three months (Yay! Pub date 10/6/26. You can buy it here: Monstrous Bitch.) But mostly I’m turning to witchcraft again in part because witchcraft ideology with its numerous insidious dehumanizations of women feels tragically relevant to the current roll-backs in women’s rights in this country, and elsewhere in the world.

So.

By the 16^th century, it was a broadly accepted idea that countless women, seduced by Satan and enabled to perform wicked magic in his stead, were freely running around Europe, making chaos. Witches were believed to be diabolically empowered to work all kinds of mischief and magic: killing people, causing miscarriages, triggering erectile dysfunction, causing plague, killing young people, slaughtering cattle. They could do just about anything. All a witch had to do was make an agreement with Satan, and she could imbibe of his power and deploy it against the unsuspecting populace.

This last point about making an agreement with Satan is super important. Witch status wasn’t something innate, nor something heritable. It wasn’t a disease or a curse or evidence that a woman wasn’t fully human. Quite the contrary, witchhood was voluntary; it was something you could simply opt into, simply by signing a contract with Satan. Witchcraft, that is, was a contractual relationship between two willing parties, one female and one devilish. A woman would enter into such a contractual relationship with Satan, typically, because she wanted some kind of revenge against someone in her life, or wanted the power and attention of Satan to flow through her otherwise weak body.

Supposedly.

Because, of course, there were exactly zero actual witches who actually did this. Zero.

But reality has never posed much of a problem for misogyny and femicide.

So Jean Bodin, author of the 1580s text Demon-Mania of Witches, insisted on all manner of atrocious forms of violence committed by witches, as justifications for hunting them down and killing them. One of the most common crimes of witches, according to Bodin (and others), was to murder their own children, before baptism.[i] They are also notorious, Bodin says, for murdering the babies and children of other women, in order to drink their blood and eat their flesh.[ii] Witches were baby-slayers, child-killers, and cannibals. Supposedly. So they had to die. And die they did, by the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands.

But it wasn’t just the executions that were bad. The juridical mechanisms themselves—the “tests” and “trials” to which women were subjected prior to their convictions—were also absolutely wrenching.

Accused women were routinely stripped naked and shaved. Apparently, inquisitors often raped the accused to help determine whether she was a virgin—if she was, it pointed toward her innocence. Obviously, once the rape had happened, it would be much more difficult for a woman to claim she was a virgin, or indeed to prove she had been one before the rape took place. The accused were grotesquely tortured in other ways besides: They were pierced with needles or made to sit on iron chairs positioned over fires.[iii] The tortures were frequently either explicitly or implicitly sexual in nature, because at the root of witch persecution was the notion that witches’ sexuality was the thing most to be feared about them, the thing most urgently to be tested, chastened, and destroyed.

This appalling and dehumanizing torture wasn’t, moreover, limited to the accused herself.

Quite the contrary, witches were burned publicly, at the stake. The explicit point of doing so was to dissuade other women from being “bad” in the way that witches were “bad.” The daughters of burning witches were sometimes made to stand close to the pyre, being whipped by locals while watching their mothers die in agony.[iv] Take that in for a moment, because I’m honestly not sure I’ve ever heard anything more sadistic in my entire life. Seriously, let’s slow it down and think it through, because this really happened to many real, historical women.

When I think about the daughter of an accused witch, I imagine her horror and her wracking emotional pain at seeing her mother die in slow, brutal physical agony. I imagine her physical pain at being flogged, and her humiliation at being flogged in public. I imagine her watching her neighbors jeer at her mother and very likely mock her, too. Then I imagine the mental gymnastics she must have had to do in order to survive, both socially and psychologically, after watching her mother scream her last, agonized scream. She would almost certainly be an outcast: Who would go to play at the house of the little girl whose mother had been burned as a witch? To have any hope of being socially accepted, she would certainly have to disavow her mother—the mother who had birthed her, nursed her, fed her, and raised her, and whom she had watched being tortured to death in public. Very likely, the daughter would have to decide that, yes, her mother had been a witch, and she had deserved to die. If the daughter didn’t decide that, how could she possibly survive the chaos of her own mind, the implication that she would have to spend the rest of her life among people who had unjustly executed her totally innocent mother? She would probably have to decide that her mother was guilty. And deserved it. Which would entail the young girl acceding to a reality in which women sometimes deserved to be tortured to death. I cannot imagine surviving that kind of psychological injury.

If we assume that the vast majority of executed witches were women of reproductive age or older, we can assume that a substantial number of executed women had at least one daughter, so we’re talking about a truly massive scale of social trauma befalling young women—and this is beyond the immediate physical violence enacted on convicted witches themselves. Hundreds of thousands of little girls, in all likelihood, had to decide that sometimes women—including their own mothers—deserved to be tortured to death in public because of something a little wild or a little unruly about their sexuality or about how they talked. The church and state used the public execution of accused witches to inflict abject terror and trauma on helpless young girls, on the brink of losing their own mothers, who were told that their mothers had been too loud, too sexy, or violent toward unborn children. Witch fever, by this point in history, had become a mechanism for brutally regulating and disciplining female behavior, and doing so intergenerationally.

So, what happened here? What really motivated all this femicide and torture of women and girls?

As Silvia Federici has argued, the systematic persecution of witches is intimately tied to the consolidation of private property during the same period of early modern European history.[v] If you look at England in the sixteenth century, and focus on areas where there was a high degree of enclosed land—which is to say, land that was taken and privatized by a particular wealthy landholder—you find a high degree of witch persecution. If you look at areas where privatization wasn’t happening, you find almost no witch persecution.[vi] If people are trying to lay exclusive claim to land, they’ve got to have clear, absolute knowledge about the lines of inheritance. No bastards in households, sired by other men. No sterile marriages. No promiscuous women. To control the land, you have to control the women—or, more precisely, you have to control their uteruses. If Patriarchy can’t control the wombs, it’s got to demonize and kill the women who contain them, as well as those women who have the temerity to try to control wombs in a way that Patriarchy doesn’t approve of.

The persecution of witches accelerated in lockstep with the increasing privatization of property in the sixteenth century. In fact, the earliest law that made witchcraft punishable by death passed in 1532: the so-called Carolina, an imperial Spanish code. England made witchcraft punishable by death slightly later, but by 1604, a woman could be executed for witchcraft in England even in the absence of hard evidence that she had caused harm to people or damage to property. Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and Switzerland made witchcraft a capital offense around 1550.[vii] Hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, and executed for witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[viii] Many of these women were midwives; many others used the services of midwives. Some were simply a little too sexy, or a little too loud. Maybe the men around them experienced erectile dysfunction and were looking for someone to blame. Maybe their neighbors had miscarriages or stillbirths. Someone had to take the blame for these reversals of reproductive fortune. And that someone was women.

Despite the rabid fury of witch fever, however, there were counternarratives, mostly in the form of treatises that sought to shake some sense into European populaces by reminding people that women were not simply conduits for diabolical interference. One of the most famous of these witch-skeptical treatises, from the sixteenth century, was Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which forcefully denies the existence of witches.

Scot insists in his treatise that the making of contracts with the devil is a complete fiction. Witches, he confirms, do not exist and therefore cannot and should not be prosecuted for witchcraft. He goes yet further to argue that those who persecute and prosecute witches are themselves corrupt, preying on elderly, depressive, and superstitious people—and chiefly on women. Specifically, he points out that “manie poore, olde women” are disproportionately persecuted, and for no good reason.[ix] He refers specifically to Jean Bodin’s sixteenth-century Demon-Mania as “Bodin’s bables,” implying that Jean Bodin was a big, stupid baby, not an adult man capable of making anything like real, rational sense. Scot has read the same texts as everyone else, but he’s somehow not buying it. He’s not convinced that this vilification of women as predatory, hypersexual, baby-slaying, bloodsucking, loudmouthed monsters is warranted. Or justifiable. Or even tolerable.

In fact, he thinks witchcraft a fiction, and one contrary to proper Christian belief. Why? Because it arrogates too much power to the devil, this idea that Satan went around corrupting and empowering witchy women and witchy girls. The devil, in his view, is simply not that strong. He sees a belief in this kind of diabolical witchcraft as weak, and anti-Christian.

This is a very important point, and one that I want to highlight in the rapidly escalating cultural environment of misogyny that seems to be enveloping the United States. Over four hundred years ago, writers—male writers, I hasten to note—wrote whole books critiquing the demonization of women for exercising their reproductive autonomy. They wrote whole books defending women against charges of witchcraft. Scot’s book was an important one, but by no means the only one of its type. And these men, these men who took up their pens in defense of the innocent women—all innocent—who were persecuted, prosecuted, and all too often executed as “witches,” all used Christianity itself as their justification.

All of these men came out and said that the very idea of witchcraft was unchristian, because it gave too much power to Satan, and didn’t reserve enough to God. God, in their views, simply wouldn’t allow women to be demonized and corrupted in the ways the witch persecutors limned.

Or, put rather polemically but not inaccurately: institutionalized, femicidal misogyny struck many a serious Christian philosopher of early modern Europe as actively heretical and unchristian. There is, therefore, a long history of allegiance between radical Christian reformers and vilified, persecuted women. I guess what I’m saying here is that I’d like to see that long-standing alliance assert itself a little more vocally in public political discourse now. Before people start putting metal-seated chairs over fires and asking women to sit on them.

Friends! You can learn more about witches and their persecution in my new book, Monstrous Bitch, which you can pre-order NOW on Amazon! Here’s the link: Monstrous Bitch

[i] Bodin, Demon-Mania, 205.

[ii] Bodin, Demon-Mania, 206.

[iii] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 185–86.

[iv] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 185–86.

[v] Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

[vi] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 171.

[vii] Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 166.

[viii] See Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 169. See also Ben-Yehuda, “European Witch Craze,” 1. Ben-Yehuda estimates that between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand people were executed as witches by 1650; 85 percent of them were women. The mechanisms of execution were burning, drowning, strangling, hanging, and beheading (6).

[ix] Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Brinsley Nicholson (1584; repr., London: Elliot Stock, 1886), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/60766/60766-h/60766-h.htm.