When people refer to the witch hunt, they are usually
referring to a period in Europe and America where women and men who were
suspected of practicing witchcraft were hunted, trialed, tortured, and
executed. Most of us are unaware that modern witch hunts occur in many
countries today. International agencies declare that witch hunts still exist in
many parts of the world, such as in Africa and Asia-Pacific, claiming the lives
of women and children.
In 2009, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary
or Arbitrary Executions reported that there were thousands of persecutions and
killings related to witch accusations in many parts of the world with the
majority of cases involving women and children (OHCHR, 2009).
Theories of the witch hunt are mostly constructed based
on what have occurred sporadically in Europe and the American colonies during
the 14th–17th century. Because of the controversy
surrounding the history of the witch hunts and its present-day existence,
theories on the causes of the witch hunts continue to spark debate among
scholars. In this debate, the view that witch hunts reflect gender conflict has
mostly been abandoned. In regard to this development, there is a need to
revisit theories of the causes of witch hunts as gendered assumptions play a
significant role in current witch hunt cases.
This article is written in two parts. Part 1 discusses
the European witch craze and the Salem witch trials to explore their causes.
Part 2 discusses and explores the causes behind the modern witch hunts which
occur in different parts of the world today with a view to revisit existing
theories of the origin of the witch hunts.
The European and American Witch Hunts
In December
1691, two young girls, 9 year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigail
Williams, all of a sudden began having unexplained outbursts accompanied by disorderly
speech and display of odd postures. Soon, other young girls in the area began
exhibiting the same symptoms. After a local doctor diagnosed the girls with
“bewitchment”, public hysteria emerged. Witch accusations—toward neighbors,
spouses, and family members—one
after the other followed. As a result, within one year, nineteen
people in the town were hanged and 200 people were listed as worthy of arrest (Salem
Witch Trials).
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The Abandoned, Hugues
Merle (pinterest.com).
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An estimate of deaths resulting from the witch hunts in early modern
Europe and the American colonies begins from
50,000 to 200,000 (Pavlac, 2015). Although men were also accused of
witchcraft and were trialed and killed, overall, according to Thurston (2001), women
were the victims in 75%–85% of witch hunt cases during this period.
Today,
the witch hunts tend to be viewed as a historical tragedy that have been laid
to rest, despite the fact that witch hunts still occur today and
in other parts of the world. To explore the causes of these acts, we need to
look back to the historical European and American witch hunts which have been
examined by many scholars.
The
European Witch Craze
The "witch craze" appeared
in Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. The hunts were not constant and
varied in intensity throughout Europe, where some parts of Europe suffered many
intense hunts and some others far less, such as in England. Trials were sporadic and
were concentrated in central Europe and early cases appeared in what is
presently Switzerland, Germany, and eastern France. Switzerland and Germany (Germany
having the highest number of witch executions in Europe) were where rival
Christian sects were found (Gibbons, 1998).
In
countries like Spain and Italy, where the Catholic Church ruled unchallenged,
witch hunts were less common (Gibbons, 1998), although a number of isolated but
historical trials took place in regions with weak central authority or in pagan
areas (Mastin, 2009a).
The first mass trials
appeared in the 15th century. Persecutions began apparent when the formerly
unified Christian Church became divided into Catholic and Protestant sects. The
hysteria and panic largely occurred in one century, from 1550–1650 (Gibbons
1998). During this period, tens of
thousands of supposed witches were executed (Mastin, 2009b). According to Scarre
and Callow (2001), it was women and men of the lower classes who were majorly accused.
However, in some countries (such as Iceland and Russia), a majority of those
accused were men (Gibbons 1998; Pavlac, 2015).
The
European witch hunts were characterized by the involvement of secular government
authorities; it was the princes who decided whether witch hunts should take
place (Pavlac, 2015). Furthermore, many prosecutions
were not instigated by religious authorities, but by the demands from within
the community. More
and more evidence reveal that most of the killings were conducted under the
authority of secular courts. "Community-based" courts conducted the
highest killings; 90% of all accused witches, while national courts condemned
only about 30% of the accused (Gibbons, 1998).
Scholars tend to conclude that little evidence points to
religious rivalry with the Roman Catholics accusing Protestants of witchcraft
and vice versa (Pavlac, 2015). However,
some scholars consider that the development of religious sects, nonetheless, contributed
to the witch hunts (Waite, 2013).
The
Salem Witch Trials
Although the Salem witch trials are usually the focus of
scholars, it was Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut, who became the first
person recorded hanged for witchcraft in May 1647 in the thirteen American
colonies. This was followed in 1648 by the first recorded confession of
witchcraft in Connecticut given under coercion by Mary Johnson, a servant who,
after giving birth, was hanged in 1650 (Mastin, 2009c).
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Alse Young (ca. 1600–26 May 1647) (plus.google.com) |
Aside
from nineteen hangings in 1692, one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death;
fifty-five were frightened or tortured into a confession of guilt; 150 people were
imprisoned (Salem Witch Trials).
There
were apparent conflict between elites and those involved were mainly wealthy
women and men. In fact, 30% of those accused were
ministers, their immediate family members, or extended kin. Many accusations of
witchcraft against the religious and political elites and their families
reflect the people’s discontent of a failed government. (Baker, 2014).
The Cause of the Witch Hunt
Scholars link the European witch
craze to a crisis of power, where the hunts became intense during a period when
both Church and State authority were weak. (Gibbons, 1998). Other scholars,
such as Oster (2004)—who gathered climate records between
1520 and 1770 in Europe and found that colder periods showed an increase number
of witch trials—attribute the cause of witch hunts to climate change which
impacted on the community’s food security (Tejeda-Moreno, 2015).
Scholars believe that increasing
conflicts between community members, famine, and the years of war with the
French-Catholics of Canada and their native allies—which were all associated with the Devil’s doing—reflected the Salem’s
community’s struggle to redeem an economy destroyed by the war ().
Although convincing, theories of
conflict and climate change, as other scholars have pointed out, do not demonstrate
consistency and are less sound when different cases are examined (Pavlac, 2015).
Dismissing conflict theories, psychologist
Linnda
Caporael in 1976 argued that “ergotism”, a physiological condition caused by
the ingestion of rye grain—a staple grain—as what triggered the Salem witch craze.
Muscle spasms, vomiting, delusions,
and hallucinations caused by ergot-contaminated foods led the girls to their
strange behaviors. However, what’s missing in this explanation is why other
areas having the same staple grain did not exhibit the same symptoms (Wilmoth,
2015).
Feminist
theory of the 1970s have argued that the witch hunts were specifically targeted
at women and thus reflected misogyny. Radical feminist theories of the witch
hunts have even considered witch hunts as a form of systematic exclusion of
women. This view today is no longer supported because of lack of valid data on
women actually killed and that it ignores the fact that in some places men were
also or mostly accused. Some feminist analyses throughout the 1990s link the
witch hunt to the removal of religious female figures and female healers that
threatened the patriarchal world view.
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In
line with this, Day argues that the female healers of Europe presented a
threat to the church hierarchy, which, together with the upper class, supported
the rising male medical profession and did not accept the female healers of the
peasant underclass (Day, 1992). This view has been mostly abandoned because
only between 2% and 20% female healers were ever accused and there was never a
case where the majority of accused were female healers (Gibbons, 1998).
However,
Day also see other factors, such as the economic independence of women and women’s
sexual conduct, as having made the female sex the target of witchcraft
accusations. Day (1992) notes that women without brothers or sons to share
inheritance were 89% of the women executed for witchcraft in New England
between 1620 and 1725, while during the Salem outbreak many women suspected of witchcraft
were also accused of sexual-related crimes, such as adultery and fornication.
There was no one
ultimate cause and no simple explanation to why the witch hunt crisis happened
in Europe and America. We must understand that—as many scholars have
pointed out—in the case of Europe and America, witch hunts cannot be
generalized because they occurred in specific cases, time, and places.
However,
a large gap in these theories remains due to the fact that many scholars tend to
dismiss the view that witch hunts were or are at all gendered in any sense. This
may partly be in response to weak data and methodology surrounding feminist investigations
of the events, especially in 70s feminist theories. However, the fact that
women were more than half of the victims of the witch hunts which happened in
Europe and America and those that are still happening today (as discussed in
Part 2), calls for a gender-related explanation.
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