Believe it or not, witches were once celebrated. Halloween or All Hallows’ Evening, as the early Christians called it, was a feast day. It originates in the Pagan belief that the Grim Reaper or the Leveller brings forth ancestral ghosts on the 1st November.
In Anglo Saxon England, there were female clan leaders. Alfred the Great ruled Wessex and kept the Vikings at bay. His grandson, Athelstan later united the country and the Catholic Church established, but in many of the rural areas, people held onto their traditional Pagan beliefs, still worshipping May Queens and nature. The Magna Carta of Chester refers to Judices de wich – female judges who had political power in their clans, but patriarchal law took it away from them.
Why did the Church and state begin to burn women for witchcraft? The answer is religious fanaticism. Exodus 22:18 says ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live’. This was taken as support for the persecution of witches.
In Tudor times, the order of things mattered. A woman raised above a man was considered unnatural. Henry VIII spent most of his reign securing the male lineage and bastardised his two daughters.
Every random act was considered an act of God. This gave superstition a powerful physical presence. When the harvest failed or the sweating sickness came on without warning, it was thought to be a result of God’s displeasure in man’s sinful ways.
The Catholic Church taught that by adhering to its religious practices, you would gain God’s favour and be assured of salvation.
Two things threatened the teaching of the Catholic Church and the social order. The first was the translation of the Bible. Ordinary people were able to read it or have it read to them in a language they understood, and they began to question the Church’s teachings. Secondly, the ‘cunning-folk’, as they were known, had knowledge of plants and herbs. As people turned to them in times of illness instead of the Church, the state sort to destroy them. This is why heresy and witchcraft became so closely aligned. Witchcraft became known as the greatest heresy.
Healers and wise women had always existed. Healing was a craft, like any other, just as needlework was known as a craft. As the Renaissance took hold, the knowledge of healers became a significant threat to the social order of things, and so they had to be stamped out.
In 1486, Heinrich Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum – The Hammer of Witches. The book became the hammer to smash anyone who held views that differed from Church teachings. The stereotype of the witch was born. Written in Latin, the Malleus provided an authoritative text to hunt and persecute witches. It became a witch hunter’s Bible and was second in sales to the Bible for 200 years. It was given a Papal Bull, the Summis Desiderantes – The Witchcraft Bull.
The Hammer of Witches, like the translation of the Bible, coincided with the invention of printing. Hundreds of copies were sold to churches, universities, and officials. The book tells of the manifestation of a spiritual war between God and the Devil. Religious fanatics preached that the Devil worked through witches to spread his heresy. It was the Church’s way to stamp out opposition. As the new religion grew, so did persecutions. The book itself is aggressively misogynistic. It is about repression and projection and is highly sexual and violent. It says: ‘What else is a woman but a foe to friendship? A necessary evil. An evil of nature painted in her fair colours’. Its effects are still being felt today in the negative stereotype of women. Sadly, fairy tales are the only stories we tell our children about the women that perished as witches.
During the early Middle Ages, women had a more equal standing with men. In England, women had stronger laws surrounding their inheritance than men. As the medieval period progressed, old women and women who lived on their own became vulnerable to being hunted down as witches. The Catholic Church considered these women uncontrollable by men and open to the influence of Satan.
In Anglo Saxon times ‘hag’ meant ‘holy woman’. It was used as a compliment to old women who were revered for their wisdom. But, as the propaganda of the Catholic Church took hold, women who met at night to trade their knowledge and gather herbs were said to be practising black magic. They could not chant together, or practise simple methods to relax and alter their states of consciousness, without being accused of conjuring spells in a coven. Anyone of high or low birth could find themselves accused of witchcraft or divination. Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was accused of witchcraft. Chillingly, Henry said that Anne Boleyn had seduced him into marriage by witchcraft. Once an accusation of witchcraft was made, it was virtually impossible to defend against.
The University of Edinburgh has produced an interactive map of more than 3,000 women who were executed as witches in Scotland during the 16th and 17th centuries. The number of women killed as witches in Scotland was five times higher than in England. It is often said that King James VI of Scotland and I of England bought witch trials to England, although they already existed to a lesser degree.
As King of England, James aggressively pursued witch hunting, becoming obsessed with the idea after being caught in a storm while sailing to Denmark to bring home his new queen.
Believing the storm was caused by a coven of witches, King James became paranoid that he was the target of a satanic assassination plot. James went onto write Demonology, a book that asserts his belief in magic and witchcraft. Demonology laid out the format for trial and punishment of witchcraft – in James’s view, death. The book drove the worst excesses of witch-hunting in England.
Eventually, towards the end of the Renaissance, people started to question the persecution of women as witches, but it was too late. Women’s power had become associated with darkness.
Even today, it is hard for women to find their voice and to hang onto it. Often, when women stand up and proclaim their truth, they have it twisted and used against them. This is especially true in a patriarchal court system in rape trials. In recent years, powerful men have used the term ‘witch hunt’ to undermine women who have spoken out against them.
In some parts of the world, women are still burnt as witches. In the western world, we no longer burn them, but we still use language to strangle and control. We teach our children: ‘sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me’. Sadly, this is not true. Name-calling destroys people, not just in the physical sense. It is through language that we project how we feel about ourselves and what we value.
I feel that Halloween is a sorrowful time. The thought of a living person bound to the stake by metal chains sends a shiver down my spine.
The Bishop of London, Dr. Richard Chartres, said: ‘The past cannot be changed, but we are responsible for how we remember it. What we extract and carry forward from what has gone before creates possibilities for the future or closes them off. In a sense, we remember the future.’
Sadly, not enough is being done to remember the women who perished despite Halloween’s present-day popularity. So, with this in mind, spare a thought for the women who were killed for being witches.