06: What We Talk About When We Talk About Witches

[BACK]

A PRODUCT OF THE WHISPERFORGE: SOUND & STORY, BROUGHT TO LIFE

[[MUSIC: “Lakeside Path” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

KATE: Hello and welcome to Remarkable Providences: the podcast about magic and misogyny, cunning folk and cunning men, and, of course, the Salem witch trials. I’m your tour guide, Kate Devorak.

[[MUSIC: Curious]]

When we last left Salem Village, they were one step closer to solving this whole bewitchment debacle. Warrants had been issued, arrests made. Tituba, Samuel Parris’s slave and caretaker to the first two afflicted girls, Sarah Good, a destitute woman of Salem Village, and Sarah Osborne, a sickly older woman tangled up in legal issues surrounding her late husband’s will, were awaiting trial in the Ingersoll Inn. To the Salem Villagers, this would not have come as too much of a surprise. If anyone in their midst was a witch, it had to be one of those three. It was almost too easy, one might say. To understand why these three women were singled out as the usual suspects, so to speak, we need to understand what we’re talking about when we talk about witches.

The Puritans’ idea of a witch is not the same as ours today. There has recently been a resurgence of witch culture in the mainstream, both in terms of aesthetics and spiritual belief. “Witchiness” has become trendy, and Wiccans, witches, and neo-pagans have come out of the woodwork to embrace that. And I’m totally here for all that, but that isn’t what we’re talking about here, and that culture has very little to do with the subject matter of this podcast. Which can be a bit confusing, especially given the, let’s say, mixed messages the modern city of Salem gives to tourists. Yes, there is a large Wiccan and neo-pagan population in Salem, and you can’t walk down any of the main drags without tripping over a new age spell supply shop. And again, I think that’s great, I loved a lot of those places when I lived in Salem, but in embracing and promoting that culture, we lose the context needed to understand the trials by whitewashing how the Puritans understood witches. Or is that witchwatching? Witchwashing? That’s how I would end up with practicing witches and Wiccans on my tours who had come to a Salem Witch Trial museums to learn about their religious history. Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but there were no witches in Salem. At least none that we would identify as witches or would willingly identify as such. So today, I’m going to discuss what makes someone a witch through the 17th century Puritan lens, as well as make the distinction between that label, and that of cunning folk, or people who dabbled in fortune telling or folk magic. There is a difference.

[[MUSIC: Calm]

While someone from today could look at some cunning folk practices and might say “that’s just witchcraft”, these people would never have called themselves witches because that word was associated with some really dark stuff, and could probably get you killed.

I used this metaphor in a previous episode, but the practices of cunning folk were kind of viewed how ghost encounter shows view the use of ouija boards or tarot cards. Using a ouija board once or twice doesn’t necessarily make you a warlock or a necromancer, but it’s still frowned upon as a dangerous game that could open the door to some evil stuff, like Monopoly or Clue. Cunning folk could do some fortune telling on the side, and while it wasn’t outright prosecuted, it definitely wasn’t encouraged. It’s a slippery slope from a Venus glass to dancing naked around a fire and turning your neighbors’ milk sour after all.

[[Music continues]]

As long as people have been afraid of witches (which is to say, for a very very long time), people have tried to find ways to seek out and rid themselves of witches. I’m not going to get into the long period of witch hunts that took place in continental Europe in the middle to late medieval period. It’s a big subject to tackle, and while I may touch on some points there, to try and get into the whole thing would take me a full separate podcast. I will be focusing a bit on the spike in witch hunting that occurred in England from the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s and the Puritan perception of a witch. For that, I’ll be looking at a couple major sources on witches from this time, primarily the Malleus Maleficarum and William Perkins’ A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft. Also good band names.

If you were to ask a 17th century Puritan minister, “What is a witch?”, what would he say? Well, first he would probably look at you with a great deal of suspicion, and then cautiously explain that witches are, of course, humans (typically women) who have pledged their allegiance to the Devil in exchange for maleficium, or magical powers. They are foot soldiers of a sort in the ongoing battle between Good and Evil, performing evil deeds on Satan’s behalf. The Devil also provides them with familiar spirits--imps that can take the form of animals and assist witches in their dark arts. These familiars feed off of witches through a witch’s teat. Witch’s teats may also be identified as the Devil’s mark, a spot on the witch’s skin where the Devil branded his accomplice when the deal as sealed. Conveniently, both teats and marks could look like pretty much anything--warts, scars, moles, thick patches of skin, persistent rashes, freckles, birthmarks, skin tags, extra nipples, you get the idea.

Witches are in the Bible. If you’ve read the Bible (or know much about witches), you may be familiar with one passage in particular, Exodus 22:18- Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Cool. And just to stay ahead of the curb, I am aware that there is some ongoing debate over the translation from the original Hebrew as to whether or not this passage refers to “a witch” or “a poisoner”. But both the King James Bible and the earlier Geneva Bible use the “witch” translation, which is how the Puritans would have read and interpreted it. References to sorcerers, witches, and familiar spirits can also be found in the King James translation of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Acts, and Revelation. As some theologists pointed out, to deny the existence of witches was to deny the existence of the Devil, and, logically, to call into question the existence of God. Everything’s a slippery slope with these folks. Then there’s the story of the Witch of Endor, not the Star Wars planet, this from the first book of Samuel, in which King Saul consults a sorceress to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel for guidance. The spirit appears, apparently to the shock of both the medium and Saul. From what I can find, a popular Christian interpretation of this story is that the spirit was not the prophet at all, but in fact the Devil taking on the likeness of Samuel, because apparently the Devil can do that. Sometimes. You might want to add this to the list of things that will be helpful later. So while witches are in the Bible, the good book doesn’t really give many details as to how to go about identifying them. So as is wont to happen, the fandom took matters into their own hands, and made life worse for a lot of people.

[[MUSIC: Quirky]]

I guess I’ll start with one of the most insidious and unfortunately influential books on the occult ever written, the Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of the Witches, written in 1486. Right off the bat, I would like to point out the author’s deliberate use of the feminine plural of “maleficus”, in case anyone had any questions about the assumed gender of witches. It’s like the authors wanted to be upfront about how much they hate women, as though their ghosts are sitting next to you while you read it, ribbing you with their elbows while saying something spooky like, “Laaaaadies, am I riiiiiight?” The authors in question were the Dominican inquisitors and witch enthusiasts Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. I couldn’t find much about Jacob Sprenger, other than the fact that he was a Dominican friar–which by the way, I mean of St. Dominic, not of the Caribbean nation–who also acted as an inquisitor (who is basically an extreme Church cop tasked to find and eliminate anyone or anything that the Church didn’t particularly like, which has historically been a very long list). Heinrich Kramer was also a Dominican inquisitor, and seems to be the driving force behind the Malleus Maleficarum, which is unfortunate, given that Kramer was basically Lord Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He and Sprenger had been granted a papal bull, an authorization from the Pope, in 1484 which acknowledged the existence of witches and gave the inquisitors authority to prosecute witchcraft in Germany. But Kramer had to get creepy with it, apparently he came on a little too strong and that put a lot of people off. The straw that broke the camel’s back came during the trial of Helena Scheuberin, a woman from Innsbruck, Austria who was accused of witchcraft whom Kramer became fixated on. In particular, he became obsessed with her sexuality, surprise, making it a focal point of the trial, even though he had very little evidence and was seriously making everybody feel super weird. He was eventually removed from the case by the bishop in charge, and returned to Germany to mend his bruised ego. He published the Malleus Maleficarum two years later, including the 1484 papal bull in the introduction to make it seem like the book was sanctioned by the pope. It wasn’t. It was a lie. Kramer was a liar, you see.

Kramer’s Big Book ‘O Witch Shit is made up of three big sections. The first answers the question of whether witchcraft is real or simply a product of imagination or delusion. Of course witchcraft is real. The Devil is real, isn’t He? So it only tracks that he could corrupt humans to do his bidding. The second section describes the practices of witches- how one becomes a witch, how spells are performed, how to protect against a witch, that kind of thing. The third section acts as a guide to handling witches from a legal standpoint. There are a couple of major takeaways I’d like to touch on. First is the expanded concept of what a witch is and what they can do. The authors lay out some tactics the Devil uses to tempt potential witches: through weariness, carnal desire, or desperation and poverty. Those most vulnerable to the Devil’s wiles are those who have been worn down by the hardships of life, the poor and the outcast, or especially horny young women. Potential witches are also often recruited by other witches; we can assume there is a referral bonus. Witches have an array of powers, from causing natural disasters and sinking ships to inflicting illness on humans and animals alike, from transforming people into beasts to blighting crops and spoiling milk. They commit these atrocities with the help of their familiars, demons that take the form of animals such as cats, rats, birds, wolves, toads, and the like. Witches can quickly move from place to place via their familiars, flying on chairs or broomsticks that have been anointed with grease made from the limbs of unbaptized children, or flying through the air on their own, supported by her man, the Devil. In one story, told to the authors by a friend of theirs, a group of scholars got together for drinks, and when they ran out of beer, they decided that whoever would go out for more wouldn’t have to pay for it, so one of the men “who was carried away” announced that he’d go, and flew off into the night. There’s another detail that I found particularly interesting, since it comes up a couple of times in the witch trials, which is the idea that a witch can be identified by their inability to cry. The Malleus Maleficarum says that while witches will try to pretend to cry, or look distressed, they cannot produce real tears, just like sparkly vampires. Witches also have a whole thing about sacrificing children to the Devil, or just plain eating them. This applies to both fully human babies, but also to children conceived by witches through intercourse with demons.

This leads me to my second point, which is, well, the sexy stuff.

[[MUSIC: Tense]]

Staying on brand, Kramer makes the Malleus Maleficarum uncomfortably sexual. There’s a whole section in there where he talks about how witches can magically make a man’s penis disappear, or steal it and keep in a box like a pet. Actually, he talks about that a lot. Which I’m sure isn’t telling about his deeper anxieties at all. Dang it, Freud, you got me again with the ol castration anxiety! The Malleus Maleficarum makes the deal with the Devil an explicitly sexual act. There’s another whole section dedicated to the logistics of having sex with demons. It really gets into it in excruciating detail, from how it is possible for the Devil to take on a physical form to how demons procure semen to finish the job. A key aspect of becoming a witch is sex with the Devil, which is usually done at a witch’s meeting, a secret ceremony that often devolves into a weird orgy. It is here that the Devil brands the witch and gives them the power they crave. The Devil’s mark is like a hickey from Satan. The authors make sure to mention, several times, that women ar particularly fond of “vain pursuits”, and generally have little control over their carnal desires, so they are more open to temptation. Hmm.

The last big thing I want to mention is, of course, the misogyny throughout, which you might have noticed. While the book gives a decent number of examples of male witches, it also makes it clear that the real threat is women in power. According to Kramer and Spreger, there is nothing more terrifying than a woman with power. You give them a taste of knowledge and freedom and some good good Satanic lovin’, and the next thing you know, they’re flying around, sinking your ships, killing your cattle, magicking your dick away, and eating your kids. A big theme here is a rejection of motherhood, with witches either causing abortions, sacrificing children, and/or straight up eating babies. The implication being that given a bit of power, women will turn against their assumed nature and expected societal role in the worst way possible. Again, hmm. There’s also the icky assertion throughout that women are more corruptible because they are weaker than men both physically and morally. They are described by the authors as, quote, “defective in the powers of both soul and body”. Eve ate that Apple right? So it apparently stands to reason that women are more easily swayed to the dark side. The only real way for a woman to save herself from the temptation of witchcraft is to live a chaste and devout life dedicated to God. This is, of course, nearly impossible in the eyes of our dear authors because women simply cannot resist the D–that is to say–the Devil.

As a Catholic text, it likely wasn’t super duper popular with the Puritans (Catholics were one of the many many religious groups the Puritans did not take kindly to), but it had a lasting influence on the Christian perception of witchcraft, and definitely encouraged the witch hunts that swept Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Even the king got in on the fun.

[[MUSIC: Tragic]]

King James I of England, while he was still King James IV of Scotland (I’ve never quite understood the monarchy and I refuse to start now), was just wild about witches. Couldn’t get enough of them. In fact, the Three Witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“Double, double, toil and trouble” and all that) were likely written for him, because Billy Shakes loved to suck up to royals. You may be familiar with King James because of his sponsored translation of the bible, but you may not know one of his other notable works- his 1597 dissertation on the forces of evil, aptly titled Daemonologie, with an “ie” instead of a “y” so you know it’s an old book. As is wont to happen when the leader of a country endorses certain not-great attitudes and beliefs, the people feel emboldened to take matters into their own hands. One such upstanding citizen was Matthew Hopkins, a self-styled Witchfinder General who got off on travelling from town to town, tracking down and persecuting witches, which was essentially an excuse for him to torture women with impunity. King James had also made the practice of witchcraft a felony with the Witchcraft Act of 1604, meaning that the accused would be tried in common law court instead of by the Church, and, if found guilty, recieve the death penalty. A similar law was on the books in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as of 1641.

The other big witch text I wanted to dive into was a popular text amongst Puritan ministers and which was definitely influential to the trials in Salem: A Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, written by William Perkins and published in 1608, a few years after his death. Perkins was a prolific and popular Puritan preacher. His text is a bit less sensational than the Malleus Maleficarum. In fact, a big part of it is him directing folks away from traditional superstition, urging them instead to approach witch hunting and witch trials from a more logical standpoint. He’s still a big ol’ misogynist about it, though, because, like, obviously. Hoo boy. It is rough. I’m just going to read this whole section right here:

“The woman, being the weaker sex, is sooner entangled by the devil’s illusions with this damnable art, than the man. And in all ages it is found true by experience that the devil hath more easily and oftener prevailed with women, than with men. Hence it was, that the Hebrews of ancient times, used it for a proverb, ‘The more women, the more witches.”

Perkins makes it clear, with continued variations on the phrase “women, the weaker vessel”, that witches must be dealt with by trial and swift execution. He does also draw a distinction between a “good” witch (what we might call cunning folk) and a “bad” witch, what we’ve been talking about here. A “good” witch may aim to use their powers for good, but Perkins considers them to be the worse of the two, since their magic is still from the devil and can infect the souls of those they are trying to help. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you are a good witch or a bad witch. Either way, Perkins says you deserve to die. Though to make it to execution, Perkins writes, you need a solid confession of consensual covenant with Satan. Whereas the Malleus Maleficarum advocates the use of torture to obtain a confession, Perkins places more emphasis on voluntary confession from the subject supported by evidence in a court of law. If you can’t get that, the testimony from two reliable sources is good enough, but a full confession would be ideal.

Something else worth mentioning is the inherent contradiction in the battle between Good and Evil. The ol’ “why do bad things happen to good people?” question. These people believed that at the end of the day, God would always be victorious. Witches have power, and should of course be feared, but they only get that power through the Devil. If a witch thinks that they generate their power themselves, then they are delusional. But, the Devil is less powerful than God, since he is a fallen angel and was therefore created by God. To put it as simply as possible, the Puritans believed that bad things happen only because God allows them to happen. This can be for any number of reasons- to test people’s faith, to punish the sinful, to demonstrate His own power, to blow off some steam if He’s angry or bored or something. Bottom line is… God, in the Puritan worldview, is kind of a dick… but it’s all good? Though, if the Puritans of Salem thought magical misfortune was an indication from God that they needed to step up and sort out their bullshit, they totally missed the memo.

[[MUSIC: Restful]]

If we put on our seventeenth century goggles on, we can see that the clear difference between cunning folk and witches came down to their perceived role in society. Witches are harmful, whereas cunning folk are useful. Cunning folk could help you with any number of problems: questions about the future, matters of the heart, medical issues, missing people or property. Cunning folk are, apparently, particularly good finders. They could also help you ward off evil spirits and, yes, even through the use of poppets (dolls created in the likeness of a person), counterspells, or witch bottles, which would be filled with items such as the protected party’s hair, nails, urine, blood, as well as herbs, iron nails, thorns, and other bits or bobs that could help banish demons. Again, I want to make it clear that these folks, especially in Salem, were not pagans. They were Christians who used folk magic as a kind of tool rather than as an inherently religious ritual. These cunning folk would have chalked to natural magic or as coming from God or angels, rather than demons. Defense magic was also more common than you’d think in 17th century New England, and that shit is super neat, just mess me up with some apotropaic magic. Archaeological efforts have uncovered symbols such as horseshoes and tridents built into the walls of 17th century houses in Danvers, Massachusetts, so we know at least a handful of folks in Salem Village believed in their perceived protective qualities. Reverend John Hale gave accounts of Dorcas Hoar of Beverly as a fortune teller and palm reader. Dr. Roger Toothaker of Salem was also reported to have engaged in some kind of fortune telling. Both would eventually be jailed for witchcraft during the 1692 trials.

This is not to say that all this witchcraft talk was without its skeptics. As we’ll see throughout the trials, the people of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were not quite the fanatic mob as they’re often thought of in the modern era, and I think it’s unfair and unhelpful to paint them that way. There were avid believers and critics and everything in between. Yes, the general consensus was that witches exist, but to what extent and how to find and deal with them was not without debate. In Robert Filmer’s 1653 treatise, Advertisement to the Jurymen of England Touching Witches, he argues that if witches do in fact exist as Puritans believed, then they should only be tried in courts as accomplices, rather than the guilty party. Since they are employed by the Devil to do his dirty work, and therefore have no power themselves, it would only make sense to try the Devil himself in a court of law, rather than the tools of his mayhem. Given what we’ve learned today about witches, that totally tracks, but that logic didn’t really catch on with the courts in Salem. It’s almost like they weren’t as interested in rooting out evil forces as they were in settling old debts and killing women. Huh. That sure is funny… sure is funny.

In their own ways, Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne each fit the bill of a 17th century witch. Tituba was an enslaved woman of color. English was not her first language, and though she was well aware of English customs and beliefs, she was not considered a part of the society that she was forced to participate in. Moreover, she faced responsibility for the witch cake thing despite the fact that her husband, John, would be named more in accounts of the incident than Tituba was. Sarah Good was also an outsider. She had been dealt an awful hand in life, but rather than grin and bear it as the rest of the Village would have expected her to do, she made her grievances known. Because she lashed out at a society that had shunned her, she was seen as envious and resentful, key characteristics of a witch. Sarah Osborne, while higher on the social ladder than Tituba or Good, was likely singled out for her flagrant disregard for societal norms. I mean, the woman basically bought herself a second husband. She was also older and sickly, which would have cast some suspicion. It didn’t help that she had been vying for control over her late husband’s estate against her own sons, which put her at odds with the worst family to cross in Salem Village- the Putnams.

[[MUSIC: Tragic]]

And so, these women were arrested without anyone batting an eye. “Of course those three were witches,” one neighbor might whisper to another. “Anyone with half a brain could see it coming a mile away.” Less than a week after Betty and Abigail’s initial diagnosis, they had the probable culprits in custody. How very neat and tidy.

It could have ended here, with three suspected witches in custody. They would be questioned, likely given brief trials, and swiftly dealt with. But Salem Village was a powder keg, and one woman’s testimony was about to blow the whole thing wide open.

[[MUSIC: “Our Names Engraved” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

Remarkable Providences was written, researched, and performed by me, Kate Devorak. It was produced by Dan Manning, and recorded by Chad Ellis. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on Twitter @RemarkablePod, and everywhere else @RemarkableProvidences. For transcripts and links to everything, visit us at whisperforge.org/remarkableprovidences

Rate and review, and if you’d like to help pay my jailers’ fees, you can visit our Patreon.

Thanks for listening, and remember, the devil’s in the details.