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Managing Our Darkest Hatreds and Fears Witchcraft from the Middle Ages to Brett Kavanaugh Diane Purkiss Fellow and Tutor of Keble College, Oxford Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford First, take a candle. Then, pour some salt they were descended from German or French into your hand. Then, keeping the grains in immigrants, they were actually descended your palm, take a pen to write out a thank you from the witches that hadn’t been hanged. to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman whose allegations of sexual assault against Supreme The writers probably mean the Salem Court nominee—and now justice—Brett witches, though, which means they are Kavanaugh, stunned a nation. Or, if you mathematically challenged. It’s an odd image prefer, simply say, “I believe you.” to choose to empower young women. The spells, the shows, and the signs are pretending to a history that could be hiS iS just onE of ThE Many described charitably as misunderstood, quasi-religious rituals circulating on uncharitably as utter rubbish. In fairness to the internet in the wake of them, they are drawing on published books, TKavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme albeit ones that have been overtaken by more Court. These rituals are said to help recent work. And they are very clearly self-identified witches process trauma, anger, picking and choosing. Yet as a historian, I and grief.1 The autumn 2018 television am, shall we say, uncomfortable with the schedule was also full of witches, from degree of falsification involved. pseudo-historical A Discovery of Witches to A central aspect of witchcraft in its remakes of Charmed and Netflix’s reboot of 21st-century incarnation is its insistence on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, a feminist who its own virtue, a virtue which it projects back hexes her headmaster with a plague of into the past. Modern witches have no doubt spiders when he refuses to act on the that witches in the time of the persecutions bullying of her non-binary best friend. were good too, opponents of patriarchy like The witches of 2018 are galvanised and themselves. Patriarchy here means political, says the London Times. Which all Christianity in the sense of organised religion, sounds like a lovely extended Halloween and especially the Catholic Church with its party. But soon, the reservations begin. obvious discomfort with the body and “We are the granddaughters of the witches human sexuality. Modern witches claim to you weren’t able to burn,” read a sign at the be speaking for an entire class of oppressed 2017 Women’s March. Yes, except that unless people who have existed throughout history: 154 9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 154 10/3/19 11:02 AM For decades, witches have been moving slowly Those accused of witchcraft—including out of the shadows and spreading good magic those who genuinely believed themselves to across the planet…the forces of capitalism, be practicing magic, a minority of those patriarchal greed and white supremacy united for one last gasp, producing our accused—espoused beliefs that derived present circumstances—Nazis in the streets, directly from medieval Christendom. In this our earth in peril, and an actual rapist in the essay, I will show that medieval and early White House. It’s not great out there these modern witchcraft was for the most part not days. But in 2018, we will fight for the change a pagan practice, but a dissident form of we deserve to see. In 2018, we will support Christianity. I will also argue that modern progressive candidates, advocate for justice, and, most importantly, vote witch.2 pagans and modern witches are themselves products of the very globalized, commercial, In a way, this is indeed nothing new; urban and anywhere culture which they set countercultural movements from the 1960s out to resist, because rather than reacting also sought ironically for magical powers, as against those trends, they are turning what when the Yippies tried to levitate the might once have been a genuinely radical Pentagon. Witchcraft “was always practiced alternative into another form of self-care. by the people who were the outliers, who were Finally, I will show that the surviving on the fringes,” witch Dakota Bracciale says. remnants of pagan culture illuminate a “Those people oftentimes had to also be the much more violent and less liberal world than arbiter of their own justice.” This almost the one imagined by modern witches. A meaningless statement seems to claim number of publications in the past ten years impunity for launching magical attacks. They have focused on highly specific aspects of the have been attacked, so it’s fair to fight back. medieval body, the classical understanding This argument depends on history. of sexuality, and a wide range of forms of These exotic outsiders are framed as historical magical thinking in the Middle Ages, including constants. However, the source quoted and in particular ideas about the beings (even by such an august scholarly journal as usually called fairies. Here, I want to attempt Marie Claire) is Barbara Ehrenreich’s long- a synthesis of all these strands of thought. discredited idea that the majority of those Many modern witches style themselves accused were midwives and herbalists. as goddess-worshippers, but in medieval and Careful study of the witch trials, including early modern witchcraft spells, the Virgin studies by women historians such as Lyndal Mary plays a much bigger role. She is Roper, has revealed that very few of the referenced far more often than any goddess. accused were midwives, and some historians The work of Claude Lecouteux in have argued convincingly that the majority Traditional magic spells for protection and of midwives were more likely to be working healing illustrates this perfectly. The vast with the persecutors than against them. majority of his examples of charms combine The popular idea that witches in the past were Christian prayers, a logic of the extensible lonely souls living at odds with their ignorant and sympathetic body, and ideas about the Christian communities is just not true. supernatural ministers that surround There are in fact so many problems with human beings. Examples of spells include some modern witches’ historical narrative the following: that it’s hard to know where to begin, but a Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, good starting point might be the assumption and the blessed Virgin Mary, miraculously that witches are at variance with their fertilised by the operation of the Holy Ghost, culture rather than a product of that culture. logos, God, and flesh, we implore your mercy Objects of History 155 9.30_Athenaeum Review ISSUE 3_FINAL.indd 155 10/3/19 11:02 AM so that we may be delivered from any snare dominated—not just in Britain and its and evil spell of the devil, and give us the colonies, but in many parts of France, ability to engender conceive and nurture Switzerland and the Low Countries—were children for eternal life. only too happy to interpret Catholic survivals as witchcraft. In both the 1566 This is indistinguishable from prayer. Essex trial and the 1612 Lancashire trial of Jonathan Roper, the world-renowned expert the Pendle witches, many of the complaints on English charms, offers a wide variety of about the accused cite what are very similar combinations. They do not involve evidently Catholic rites, an uncomfortable candles (and candles are a Christian and mix of mystifying prayers in Latin, prayers Islamic artifact in any case). They do not to icons themselves declared witches such involve herbs. They mostly involve the reuse as the statue of the Virgin Mary at of the strangest and most eerie aspects of Ipswich—burned as a witch in Smithfield medieval Catholic thought. One example is market—and sympathetic magic in which, the healing charm designated the bone to as in the charm above, matching words bone type of charm, sometimes called the bring together severed flesh. This complex Merseburg charm; it was unearthed by a and nuanced world was a coherent, folklorist in a north-western German village satisfying, and sophisticated body of as recently as 1985: popular knowledge which was grudgingly As our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ tolerated by the medieval Catholic Church, was riding into Jerusalem, his horse tripped but hated and feared by Protestants. A and sprained his leg. Our blessed Lord and sizeable minority of those had by 1625 decided Saviour blessed it, and said that the Pope was the Antichrist and the mass—any mass—a satanic ritual. It is bone to bone, and vein to vein,/oh vein turn to thy rest again! And so shall thine. In the probable that more witches were accused name of the Father and of the son and of the and condemned because they were residually Holy Spirit. Catholics than because they were pagan. Admittedly, there are occasional cases It’s not very pagan, though it would have throughout Europe where men and women upset Calvinists. Repetitive prayers, such as are executed as witches for being the wrong the Rosary and the Litany of Our Lady of kind of Protestant. Together, these massively Loreto, always troubled Calvinists because outnumber the tiny number of cases which they are so like magic charms. It follows that suggest some visible pagan beliefs in play, magic charms are rather like prayers. and in the vast majority even of these cases, Accordingly, the line between prayer and those residual pagan beliefs are knitted and charm was blurred by popular piety in woven fully into a tapestry of belief and medieval Catholicism—and for that matter, practice derived from if not entirely in the Catholicism of my childhood, in approved by medieval Catholicism.

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