You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn

Say you are me (sorry about that) and you are minding your own business online, just trying to survive in a world of unrelenting horror when suddenly you are served an ad.  Because of the dark magic of the algorithms and ad service providers, the ads are being tailored to me based on things I have read, or purchased, or allowed my eyes to linger on for a little too long. Maybe it has figured out that I am mates with a bunch of the people who appeared in the Witch podcast. It has certainly gleaned that I am a woman, I tend to read things about history, and am interested in feminist theory more generally.

Hillariously, what that means is I am often served ads for this schlock:

This winds me up to no end, and today I thought I would explain why. After all, enough people seem to think that this is radical enough that you can buy variations on this twee ass shit on shirts, notepads, wherever. Yeah OK it’s a bit basic but is it that bad?

Yes, I would argue, yes it is. For a couple of reasons.

The first and most obvious one that I thought I would point out here is that the women who were killed during the early modern witch trials were not, in fact, witches. They were just people.

This is not to say that some people accused of witch craft didn’t confess to it on occasion, or maybe even think they were doing some witch ass shit. But that doesn’t mean they actually were doing it.

Medieval people were usually pretty clear on that, unlike the people making these stupid shirts. The monk Regino of Prüm‘s (d. 915) Canon Episcopi in the tenth century, for example, had this to say about the idea that witches flew off at night: “…it must not be omitted that some wicked women, turned away after Satan and seduced by the illusoons and phantasams of demons, believe and profess that, in the hours of the night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night traverse great spaces of the earth and they obey her commands as of their mistress, and are summoned to her service on certain nights.”[1] This is an important point. People might think they were doing some pagan shit and hanging out with Diana (seems cool, ngl), but in fact they were just delusional and if they thought this they needed religious intervention because they had been deceived into thinking that they were.

In the later medieval period before we get in to the modern witch panics, you occasionally got women who were found by inquisitorial boards to be guilty of witchcraft stuff when they were being investigated for heresy. This is important, for reasons I will make clear later.

Anyway, this was the generalised approach put forward by Pope Alexander IV (c. 1199-1261). In his 1258 papal bull Quod supernonnullis he ordered inquisitors to generally avoid investigating sorcery, unless what was happening “clearly savoured of manifest heresy”.[2] This remained pretty much the approach for the rest of the medieval period. If people were fucking around doing stuff where they thought they were sacrificing to demons or something you could get in trouble for that and excommunicated for heresy. However it wasn’t the main thing that inquisitors were meant to be worrying about because it was mostly just stupid.

I would argue that this is still bad even if it’s not a death sentence per se because it’s still a way of cutting people off from their communities, which isn’t great. Even if they think they are in a dialogue with a demon or whatever. But the point is for a long time the way people approached sorcery was, “That’s weird. You’re being weird and not Christian.”

In the early modern period things got a lot worse in this arena as they did with several many areas of life. (I wrote a book about it. Go read that. We don’t have time here.) Anyway suddenly you had a bunch of Protestants around the shop, and they were in a religious arms race with the Church to prove who was the most holy. And a great way of proving you were holy was to go around yelling that women were witches are something. They still weren’t. Instead they were women who had money that other people wanted. Or women who performed abortions. Or women who begged. Things of this nature.

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And occasionally they still sorta thought they were witches? Or sometimes told people that to scare them. During the Pendle witch trials, for example, Alizon Device (d. 1612) absolutely told a court that she had sold her soul to the Devil and had lamed a certain John Law when he refused to sell her some pins.[3] Anyway she got killed, a lot of her family got killed. A bunch of people got killed. But they weren’t witches. Alizon just … had a lot going on. Because you cannot in fact sell your soul to the devil and get the powers to take out people’s legs in return. This is a fact.

It’s even more of a fact that the great majority of people who were killed for witchcraft did not think they were witches. In the majority of cases if they confessed that they were witches it was usually because they were tortured repeatedly and at length in order to obtain a confession, as was the case in the Salem witch trials, for example. These were people who faced horrifying punishment for absolutely no reason, and then were killed.

So when you go around wearing a cutsie little shirt talking about the witches you couldn’t burn you are complicit in calling all of these innocent people, even the ones who had something weird going on with them and confessed freely, witches. And they weren’t. You are doing exactly the same thing as all those gross Puritans, or inquisitors. You are being worse than the medieval Catholic Church because at least they would say that witch stuff isn’t real. They weren’t witches. So knock that off.

Secondly – one thing about people who were falsely found guilty of being witches – they weren’t burnt. They were hung. The confusion here, I think, stems from the earlier medieval conflation of sorcery with heresy. Cuz you know who was burnt at the stake? Heretics. My boy Jan Hus? Burnt at the stake. The people accused of being witches? Not so much!

This is not to excuse the burning at the stake of heretics who I think should not, in fact, have been killed for not Christianing the right way. Nor is it to say that being hung is somehow a better way to die than being burnt and therefore excuses what happened. Instead, what I would argue is if you are gonna make merch that makes light of the estimated 30,000-60,000 people who were killed over the three hundred some years of the witch panics you could at least get the fucking facts straight. Are you bearing witness to the pain of these people or not? Because if you don’t care enough to get a basic fact like this correct, it looks suspiciously like you do not, in fact, care about all of the people who died so you can wear a silly little t-shirt down the pub and feel like a rebel.

Further, these shirts with their pictures of women and their references to being a “granddaughter” of the women killed as witches obscure the fact that in those thousands of people killed many were men. This isn’t to say that women didn’t account for a greater number of the people killed, because they did. However, in Europe a good ten percent of the total number of people killed as witches were men. This also varied from region to region. For example in Iceland, some twenty-two people were killed in witch trials, and twenty of them were men.[4] This probably has to do with a local understanding of sorcery as a learned skill which required Latin. (Because as we all know the demons of hell speak Latin.) We see a similar pattern in the Baltic witch trials, where about sixty percent of the people killed were men.[5] Men were also killed as part of witch trials in general, for example one of the most horrific of the Salem trial deaths was that of Giles Corey (1611-1692) who was slowly crushed to death by having rocks slowly piled on him when he refused to admit that he was a witch.

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I don’t say this just to “well actually” the remembrance of the witch panics, but to point out that the entire fucking thing was a disgusting waste of human life and everyone who was killed deserves to be recognised as a victim. These were horrible violent actions and the men killed in Iceland, or Estonia, or the American colonies were just as innocent and valid as the women who suffered alongside them. If we’re doing commemoration then let’s fucking do it.

All of which brings me to my last point about why this is unacceptable: all those algorithms trying to sell me a factually incorrect t-shirt are directly profiting from selling a lie rooted in the pain and death of thousands of people. This is disgusting. The innocent people who were killed in one of the darkest periods of human history deserve our respect and are not, in fact, a cute little way for some t-shirt company to make a quick buck. There’s no way to argue that this is a respectful commemoration because they can’t even bother to get the basic facts straight. There’s no way to argue that it’s a feminist statement because it directly plays into misogynist lies about marginalised women in order to try to make a point. Moreover, it’s not feminist because it occludes the men who were killed based on the same lies. In other words, a shirt like this basically says “those bitches had it coming” and that’s not cool.

I am incredibly here to celebrate all the people who identify as witches now, and I think their spiritual and religious practices are very valid. However, whatever is happening with all this merch isn’t doing that. It’s trading in lies and profiting from pain. If we want to argue that our society is better now than it was in the early modern period then we need to start acting like it, and we need to stop repeating these falsehoods. Now.

Make a cutesie little shirt about that.

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[1] Regino of Prüm: A Warning to Bishops, the Canon Episcopi (ca. 906), in Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a History of Witchcraft, 1:179-180.
[2] For more on this see Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages, (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010), p. 35.
[3] For more on this see Peter Davies, The Trial of the Lancaster Witches, (London: Frederick Muller, 1971).
[4] See, Ankarloo B Henningsen G. Häxornas Europa 1400-1700: Historiska Och Antropologiska Studier. (Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln (i distr.), 1987.
[5] Ibid.

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For more on witch trials and the myths around them, see:
On sex with demons
On cats

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Ⓒ Eleanor Janega, 2023

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© Eleanor Janega, 2024