This comes from The Woman's Ency. Of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker. It is rather
long and so I will break it down into bits.
***
WITCH
There are many other words for witches, such as Incantatrix, Lamia, Saga, Maga, Malefica,
Sortilega, Strix, Venefica. In Italy a witch was a strega or Janara, an old title of a
priestess of Jana (Juno). English writers called witches both "hags" and
"fairies", words which were once synonymous. Witches had metaphoric titles:
bacularia, "sitck-rider"; fascinatrix, "one with the evil eye";
herberia, "one who gathers herbs" strix, "screech owl"; pixidria,
"keeper of an ointment box"; femina saga, "wise woman"; lamia,
"night monster"; incantator, "worker of charms"; magus, "wise
man"; sortiariae mulier, "seeress"; veneficia, "poisoner";
maliarda, "evil doer". Latin treatises called witches anispex, auguris,
divinator, januatica, litigator, mascara, phitonissa, stregula.
Dalmatian witches were krstaca, "crossed ones," a derivative of the Greek
Christos. In Holland a witch was wijsseggher, "wise-sayer," from which came the
English "wiseacre." The biblical passage that supported centuries of
persecution, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18), used the
Hebrew word kasaph, translated "witch" although it means a seer or diviner.
Early medieval England had female clan-leaders who exercised matriarchal rights in
lawgiving and law enforcement; the Magna Carta of Chester called them iudices de wich-
judges who were witches. Female elders once had political power among the clans, but
patriarchal religion and law gradually took it away from them and called them witches in
order to dispose of them. In 1711 Addison observes that "When an old woman begins to
doat and grow chargeable to a parish, she is generally turned into a witch."
Scot remarked that the fate of a witch might be directly proportional to her fortune. The
pope made saints out of rich witches, but poor witches were burned. Among many examples
tending to support this opinion was the famous French Chambre Ardente affair, which
involved many members of the aristocracy and the upper class clergy in a witch cult.
Numerous male and female servants were tortured and burned for assisting their masters in
working witchcraft; but in all the four years the affair dragged on, no noble person was
tortured or executed.
Illogically enough, the authorities persecuted poor, outcast folk as witches, yet
professed to believe witches could provide themselves with all the wealth anyone could
want. Reginald Scot, a disbeliever, scornfully observed that witches were said to
"transfer their neighbors' corn into their own ground, and yet are perpetual beggars,
and cannot enrich themselves, either with money or otherwise: who is so foolish as to
remain longer in doubt of their supernatural powers?" Witchcraft brought so little
profit to Helen Jenkenson of Northants, hanged in 1612 for bewitching a child, that the
record of her execution said: "Thus ended this woman her miserable life, after she
had lived many years poor, wretched, scorned and forsaken of the world."
The nursery-rhyme stereotype of the witch owed much to Scot's description:
"Women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles;
poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as know no religion; in whose drowsy
minds the devil hath gotten a fine seat; so as, what mischief, mischance, calamity, or
slaughter is brought to pass, they are easily persuaded the same is done by themselves....
They are lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of all that
see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish; and not much differing from them that
are thought to be possesed with spirits."
Persecutors said it was heretical to consider witches harmless. Even in England, where
witches were not burned but hanged, some authorities fearfully cited the "received
opinion" that a witch's body should be burned to ashes to prevent ill effects arising
from her blood. Churchmen assured the arresting officers that a witch's power was lost the
instant she was touched by an employee of the Inquisition; but the employees themselves
were not so sure.
Numerous stories depict the persecutors' fear of their victims. It was said in the Black
Forest that a witch blew in her executioner's face, promising him his reward; the next day
he was afflicted with a fatal leprosy. Inquisitors' handbooks directed them to wear at all
times a bag of salt consecrated on Palm Sunday; to avoid looking in a witch's eyes; and to
cross themselves constantly in the witches' prison. Peter of Berne forgot this precaution,
and a captive witch by enchantment made him fall down a flight of stairs- which he proved
later by torturing her until she confirmed it.
Any unusual ability in a woman instantly raised a charge of witchcraft. The so called
Witch of Newbury was murdered by a group of soldiers because she knew how to go
"surfing" on the river. Soldiers of the Earl of Essex saw her doing it, and were
"as much astonished as they could be," seeing that "to and fro she fleeted
on the board standing firm bolt upright... turning and winding it which way she pleased,
making it pastime to her, as little thinking who perceived her tricks, or that she did
imagine that they were the last she ever should show." Most of the soldiers were
afraid to touch her, but a few brave souls ambushed the board-rider as she came to shore,
slashed her head, beat her, and shot her, leaving her "detested carcass to the
worms."
From ruthlessly organized persecutions on the continent, witch hunts in England became
largely cases of village feuds and petty spite. If crops failed, horses ran away, cattle
sickened, wagons broke, women miscarried, or butter wouldn't come in the churn, a witch
was always found to blame. <arion Cumlaquoy of Orkney was burned in 1643 for turning
herself three times widdershins, to make her neighbor's barley crop rot. A tailor's wife
was executed for quarreling with her neighbor, who afterward saw a snake on his property,
and his children fell sick.One witch was condemned for arguing with a drunkard in an
alehouse. After drinking himself into paroxysms of vomiting, he accused her of bewitching
him, and he was believed.
A woman was convicted of witchcraft for having caused a neighbor's lameness- by pulling
off her stockings. Another was executed for having admired a neighbor's baby, which
afterwards fell out of its cradle and died. Two Glasgow witches were hanged for treating a
sick child, even though the treatment succeeded and the child was cured. Joan Cason of
Kent went to the gallows in 1586 for having dry thatch on her roof. Her neighbor, whose
child was sick, was told by an unidentified traveler that the child was bewitched, and it
could be proved by stealing a bit of thatch from the witch's roof and throwing it on the
fire. If it crackled and sparked, witchcraft was assured. The test came out positive, and
the court was satisfied enough to convict poor Joan.
Witches were convenient scapegoats for doctors who failed to cure their patients, for it
was the "received" belief that witch-caused illnesses were incurable. Weyer
said, "Ignorant and clumsy physicians blame all sicknesses which they were unable to
cure or which they have treated wrongly, on witchery." There were also priests and
monks who "claim to understand the healing art and they lie to those they seek help
that their sicknesses were derived from witchery." Most real witch persecutions
reflect "no erotic orgies, no Sabbats or elaborate rituals; merely the hatreds and
spites of narrow peasant life assisted by vicious laws."
Witches provided a focus for sexist hatred in male-dominated society, as Stanton pointed
out: "The spirit of the Church in its contempt for women, as shown in the Scriptures,
in Paul's epistles and the Pentateuch, the hatred of the fathers, manifested in their
ecclesiastical canons, and in the doctrines of asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft,
destroyed man's respect for woman and legalized the burning, drowning, and torturing of
women.... Women and their duties became objects of hatred to the Christian missionaries
and of alternate scorn and fear to pious ascetics and monks. The priestess mother became
something impure, associated with the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her
very cooking a brewing of poison, nay, her very existence a source of sin to man. Thus
woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch.... Here is the reason why in all
the Biblical researches and higher criticism, the scholars never touch the position of
women."
Men displayed a lively interest in the physical appearance of witches, seeking to know how
to recognize them them- as men also craved rules for recognizing other types of women from
their physical appearance. It was generally agreed that any woman with dissimilar eyes was
a witch. Where most people had dark eyes and swarthy complexions, as in Spain and Italy,
pale blue eyes were associated with witchcrafts. Many claimed that any woman with red hair
was a witch.
This may have been because red-haired people are usually freckled, and freckles were often
identified as "witch marks," as were moles, warts, birthmarks, pimples,
pockmarks, cysts, liver spots, wens, or any other blemish. Some witch-finders said the
mark could resemble an insect bite or an ulcer.
No one ever explained how the witch mark differed from an ordinary blemish. Since few
bodies were unblemished, the search for the mark seldom failed. Thomas Ady recognized
this, and wrote: "Very few people in the world are without privy marks upon their
bodies, as moles or stains, even such as witchmongers call the devil's privy marks."
But no one paid attention to this.
Trials were conducted with as much injustice as possible. In 1629 Isobel Young was accused
of crippling by magic a man who had quarrelled with her, and causing a water mill to break
down. She protested that the man was lame before they quarrelled, and water mills can
break down through neglect. The prosecutor, Sir Thomas Hope, threw out her defense on the
ground that it was "contrary to the libel," that is, it contradicted the charge.
When a witch is on trial, Scot said, any "equivocal or doubtful answer is taken for a
confession."
On the other hand, no answer at all was a confession too. Witches who refused to speak
were condemned: "Witchcraft proved by silence of the accused." Sometimes mere
playfulness "proved" witchcraft, as in the case of Mary Spencer, accused in 1634
because she merrily set her bucket rolling downhill and ran before it, calling it to
follow her. Sometimes women were stigmatized as witches when they were in fact victims of
unfair laws, such as the law that accepted any man's word in court ahead of any number of
women's. A butcher in Germany stole some silver vessels from women, then had them
persecuted for witchcraft by claiming that he found the vessels in the woods where the
women were attending a witches' sabbat.
Sometimes the accusation of witchcraft was a form of punishment for women who were too
vocal about their disillusionment with men and their preference for living alone.
Historical literature has many references to "the joy with which women after
widowhood set up their own households, and to the vigor with which they resisted being
courted by amorous widowers." The solitary life, however, left a woman even more
vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, since men usually thought she must be somehow
controlled.
Those who tortured the unfortunate defendant into admitting witchcraft used a euphemistic
language that showed the victim was condemned as priori. One Anne Marie de Georgel denied
making a devil's pact, until by torture she was "justly forced to give an account of
herself," the record said. Catherine Delort was "forced to confess by the means
we have power to use to make people speak the truth," and she was "convicted of
all the crimes we suspected her of committing, although she protested her innocence for a
long time." The inquisitor Nicholas Remy professed a pious astonishment at the great
number of witches who expressed a "positive desire for death." pretending not to
notice that they had been brought to this desire by innumerable savage tortures.
The extent to which pagan religion, as such, actually survived among the witches of the
16th and 17th centuries has been much discussed but never decided. Dean Church said,
"Society was a long time unlearning heathenism; it has not done so yet; but it had
hardly begun, at any rate it was only just beginning, to imagine the possibility of such a
thing in the eleventh century." In 15th century Bohemia it was still common practice
at Christmas and other holidays to make offerings to "the gods", rather than to
God. European villages still had many "wise women" who acted as priestesses
officially or unofficially. Since church fathers declared christian priestesses
unthinkable, all functions of the priestess were associated with paganism. Bishops
described pagan gatherings in their dioceses, attended by "devils... in the form of
men and women." Pagan ceremonies were allowed to survive in weddings, folk festivals,
seasonal rites, feasts of the dead, and so on.But when women or goddesses played the
leading role in such ceremonies, there was more determined suppression. John of Salisbury
wrote that it was the devil, "with God's permission," who sent people to
gatherings in honor of the Queen of the Night, a priestess impersonating the Moon-goddess
under the name of Noctiluca or Herodiade.
The Catholic church applied the word witch to any woman who criticized church policies.
Women allied with the 14th century Reforming Franciscans, some of whom were burned for
heresy, were described as witches, daughters of Judas, and instigated of the Devil.
Writers of the Talmud similarly tended to view nearly all women as witches. They said
things like, "Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft," and "The more
women there are, the more witchcraft there will be."
Probably there were few sincere practitioners, compared with the multitudes who were
railroaded into the ecclesiastical courts and legally murdered despite their innocence.
Yet it was obvious to even the moderately intelligent that Christian society deliberately
humiliated and discriminated against women. Some may have been resentful enough to become
defiant. "Women have had no voice in the canon law, the catechisms, the church creeds
and discipline, and why should they obey the behests of a strictly masculine religion,
that places the sex at a disadvantage in all life's emergencies?" Possibilities for
expressing their frustration and defiance were severely limited; but voluntary adoption of
the witch's reputation and behavior was surely among such possibilities.
Blessed Be
Lady Pavane Maya
"I'll Be Missing You" is playing.