The Witch in History

Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations

Diane Purkiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134882380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

'Diane Purkiss... insists on taking witches seriously. Her refusal to write witch-believers off as unenlightened has produced some richly intelligent meditations on their -- and our -- world.' - The Observer 'An invigorating and challenging book... sets many hares running.' - The Times Higher Education Supplement

Part I The histories of witchcraft

1 A holocaust of one's own

The myth of the Burning Times

DOI: 10.4324/9780203359723-2

Popular history, and also the history taught in schools, is influenced by this Manichaean tendency, which shuns half-tints and complexities; it is prone to reduce the river of human occurrences to conflicts, and the conflicts to duels—we and they, the good guys and the bad guys respectively, because the good must prevail, else the world would be subverted.

Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Here is a story. Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived on the edge of a village. She lived alone, in her own house surrounded by her garden, in which she grew all manner of herbs and other healing plants. Though she was alone, she was never lonely; she had her garden and her animals for company, she took lovers when she wished, and she was always busy. The woman was a healer and midwife; she had practical knowledge taught her by her mother, and mystical knowledge derived from her closeness to nature, or from a half-submerged pagan religion. She helped women give birth, and she had healing hands; she used her knowledge of herbs and her common sense to help the sick. However, her peaceful existence was disrupted. Even though this woman was harmless, she posed a threat to the fearful. Her medical knowledge threatened the doctor. Her simple, true spiritual values threatened the superstitious nonsense of the Catholic church, as did her affirmation of the sensuous body. Her independence and freedom threatened men. So the Inquisition descended on her, and cruelly tortured her into confessing to lies about the devil. She was burned alive by men who hated women, along with millions of others just like her.

Do you believe this story? Thousands of women do. It is still being retold, in full or in part, by women who are academics, but also by poets, novelists, popular historians, theologians, dramatists.¹ It is compelling, even horrifying. However, in all essentials it is not true, or only partly true, as a history of what happened to the women called witches in the early modern period. Thousands of women were executed as witches, and in some parts of Europe torture was used to extract a confession from them; certainly, their gender often had a great deal to do with it; certainly, their accusers and judges were sometimes misogynists; certainly, by our standards they were innocent, in that to a post-Enlightenment society their ‘crime’ does not exist. However, the women who died were not quite like the woman of the story, and they were not killed for quite the same reasons. There is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also in some parts of the Continent, midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters. Most women used herbal medicines as part of their household skills, some of which were quasi-magical, without arousing any anxiety. There is little evidence that convicted witches were invariably unmarried or sexually ‘liberated’ or lesbian; many (though not most) of those accused were married women with young families. Men were not responsible for all accusations: many, perhaps even most, witches were accused by women, and most cases depend at least partly on the evidence given by women witnesses. Persecution was as severe in Protestant as in Catholic areas. The Inquisition, except in a few areas where the local inquisitor was especially zealous, was more lenient about witchcraft cases than the secular courts; in Spain, for example, where the Inquisition was very strong, there were few deaths. Many inquisitors and secular courts disdained the Malleus Malificarum, still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was women-hunting; still others thought it ridiculously paranoid about male sexuality. In some countries, torture was not used at all, and in England, witches were hanged rather than burned.²

All this has been known for some time. Yet in the teeth of the evidence, some women continue to find this story believable, continue to circulate it. Some women are still so attached to the story that they resist efforts to disprove it. The myth has become important, not because of its historical truth, but because of its mythic significance. What is that significance? It is a story with clear oppositions. Everyone can tell who is innocent and who guilty, who is good and who bad, who is oppressed and who the oppressor. It offers to identify oppression, to make it noticeable. It legitimates identification of oppression with powerful institutions, and above all with Christianity. This is, above all, a narrative of the Fall, of paradise lost. It is a story about how perfect our lives would be—how perfect we women would be, patient, kind, self-sufficient—if it were not for patriarchy and its violence. It is often linked with another lapsarian myth, the myth of an originary matriarchy, through the themes of mother-daughter learning and of matriarchal religions as sources of witchcraft. This witch-story explains the origins and nature of good and evil. It is a religious myth, and the religion it defines is radical feminism.³

How did radical feminists come to need a Holocaust of their own? In order to understand this myth fully, we need to look in more detail at its history. Around 1968, the ‘action wing’ of New York Radical Women formed, and they chose a striking new name: WITCH. The name exploited the negative associations of the witch as woman of dark power, but the group’s members also played with the signification of the term in their presentation of it as an acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. The meaning discovered in the term ‘witch’ by that acronymic rendering is interesting because it goes beyond any simple reclamation of the witch as a foresister in order to assign explicit meaning to the figure. ‘Woman’ names the witch as gendered, while ‘international’ asserts the ubiquity of witches, and ‘terrorist’ marks witches as violent. ‘Conspiracy’ deliberately flirts with fears of a secret organisation of subversive women, while ‘from Hell’ draws attention to the origin of witches’ otherness while pointing to women’s oppression. This adds up to an image of the witch as violent and empowered woman. WITCH’s members hexed the Chase Manhattan bank, and invaded the Bride Fair at Madison Square Gardens dressed as witches. Despite the disjunction between self and role implied by such flagrant theatricality, WITCH also inaugurated many of the myths of witchcraft which have become central to many radical feminists and most modern witches. Describing witches, the collective wrote:

They bowed to no man, being the living remnant of the oldest culture of all one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual oppression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.⁴

This image owed a great deal to Engels’s history of the pre-capitalist family: it was attractive to WITCH’s original members and enabling for radical feminism. However, it was also subject to less helpful change and reformulation.

This reformulation began with WITCH itself. ‘Violence’, ‘Conspiracy’ and even ‘Hell’ were eliminated, and more harmless-sounding acronyms were formed. Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment; Women Indentured to Traveller’s Corporate Hell (a coven who worked at an insurance company); Women Intent on Toppling Consumer Holidays; Women’s Independent Taxpayers, Consumers and Homemakers; Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums; Women Inspired To Commit Herstory; the acronym increasingly meant only a mild-mannered bunch of consumer-rights groups. While the final group, Women Inspired To Commit Herstory, continue to use the rhetoric of crime, committing herstory is significantly less threatening than committing terrorist acts. This also identifies academic pursuits such as writing and lecturing with magic and with witchcraft as objects of persecution. This is an obvious way to romanticise what might otherwise seem dull or bookish, but it also incises the myth deeply into radical feminist identity.

These examples, however, stand for the extraordinary flexibility of the term ‘witch’ as a signifier within all feminist discourse. Constantly cast and recast as the late twentieth century’s idea of a protofeminist, a sister from the past, the witch has undergone transformations as dramatic as those in any pantomime. The figure of the witch has been central to the revival of women’s history over the past two decades. That revival has been carried out by academic historians, but not only by them; the original impetus behind the attempt to uncover women’s past came from activists in the women’s liberation movement, and partly from the fact that witches were among the few women given any space whatever in pre-feminist history. The witch has consequently been caught up in virtually all of feminist history’s debates about itself and its own project. The enormous changes in the standard feminist narrative of the witch and her place in history reflect feminism’s attempt to ask and answer questions about what history is, what feminist history is, what might count as authority and authenticity, and where the intersections are between history and textuality, history and politics. The figure of the witch mirrors—albeit sometimes in distorted form—the many images and self-images of feminism itself. Originally, women’s history was inspired by the wish to uncover the truth about women, and this led to a yearning to find oneself in the past, to locate real women who share our natures and problems. The witch offers opportunities for both identification and elaborate fantasy, standing in a supportive or antagonistic relation to the contemporary feminist-activist-historian inscribing her. To remark this is not to side with those notorious critics of women’s history who see feminist historians as unreasonably ‘biased’; feminist histories are no more ‘biased’ than those male historians who have taken up the figure of the witch and reformulated it according to their needs and fantasies.⁵ It is, however, true that many radical feminist figurations of witches and narratives about witches set out to challenge or question the ‘rules’ by which academic historians have operated, and these challenges can involve a refusal of the professional authority and discursive strategies which have for long defined authentic or ‘true’ history. While doing this, radical feminist historians make truth-claims of their own, some of which are very easy to refute using the methods of historical scholarship as usually conceived, and in particular the ‘rules’ of evidence.⁶ Usually this has nothing to do with poststructuralism or even solipsism: the more flagrant a radical feminist writer’s disregard for the rules of evidence, the more dogmatic her own truth-claims are likely to be. However, I am less interested in engaging with the ‘truth’ of various figurations of the witch, or even in legitimating or delegitimating various strands of feminist historical scholarship, than in examining radical feminist figurations of the witch to see what kinds of investment produced them.

Like other histories, then, though more egregiously than some, radical feminist histories of witches and witchcraft remember the past according to a variety of myths, ideas and political needs, and often they refer explicitly to the needs and desires which brought them into being. Equally often, however, radical feminist figurations of the witch, again like other histories, seek to erase the traces of their own historicity, in the interests of offering themselves as a means of access to a transparent, unmediated past. Gesturing away from its own immediate past and towards the stories it narrates, the radical feminist history of witches often appears to offer a static, finished vision of the witch. However, feminist histories of witchcraft are not finished artefacts, but stages in a complicated, conflictual series of processes within the public sphere, processes which involve both the writing of women’s past and the rewriting of their present and future. Since all feminist histories offer to ask —and sometimes answer—the question ‘What is a woman?’, all feminist histories of witchcraft are caught up in contemporary questions of authority, authenticity and public politics.

Where the shaping power of those questions in determining radical feminist historical narratives is acknowledged, the acknowledgement often takes the form of a refusal of historicity, an insistence that the past must be mapped in a certain way because such a map still applies in and to the present. This tension between past and present is experienced in all feminist histories, but only radical feminism resolves it by denying the difference. Radical feminism offers its narrative not as a reconstruction of the past, but an account of the way things always are. This stance is ironically close to traditional humanist scholarship, with its insistence on eternal verities. It constitutes a challenge to the traditions of academic history not because of the explicitness of its political agenda, but—more importantly—because its ahistorical stance allows the complete overthrow of the rules of reading and interpreting evidence. Yet what is significant about these histories is not only unprofessional ‘indiscipline’, but the way this exposes the extent to which orthodox (male) history suppresses the emotions invested in it in favour of a discourse of objectivity. Radical feminist histories make more conventional historians uncomfortable because of their closeness to what we wish to hide.

Radical feminist history refuses the various positions of detachment which define the historian in a judging, criticising, evaluative relation to the traces of the past. It values highly emotional, involved, ‘personal’ pleasure and engagement: fear, hatred, love and solidarity are evoked. Emotion is evoked by the fact that the story told by this kind of feminist history is a story of sameness; conversely, it is produced as a story of sameness by the relentless repetition of figures of emotional identification.⁷ This emotion is often figured as the eruption of ‘feminine’ values into the masculine terrain of history. The priority given to personal engagement with texts from the past also means a lack of interest in other ‘rules’ of evidence, especially rules about comprehensiveness and balance. For instance, male historians never tire of observing that radical feminist histories of witchcraft use almost no early modern texts as a source for views about witchcraft except the Malleus Maleficarum, refusing to undertake any demonstration of the centrality of the Malleus.⁸ There are many reasons for this, but one reason is the Malleus’s ability to arouse strong feelings in the reader. Passages are quoted from it not for their centrality to witch-beliefs, but for their striking qualities, hence the more or less constant reiteration...