Witches, women, and the death of nature

Witch hunts and broader societal and legal changes that marginalized and subjugated women were all part of capitalism's renegotiation of the social contract between the ruling class and the poor

Image: Woodcut of “witches” flying, from Mathers’ Wonders of the Invisible World (1689) and used in an 18th-century pamphlet about the Lancashire witches.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was seized by a fear of witches. Scores of women were arrested and tried for witchcraft, were forced under torture to confess, and tens of thousands were killed in brutal fashion, often burned at the stake. The reasons for this seemingly-sudden bout of witch hysteria have been debated. There are several factors which we can point to in an effort to understand. First, the Protestant Reformation had rejected the “magic” of Catholic ordinances and rites. Martin Luther’s “priesthood of all believers”, in which individuals stood in direct relation to God, stood in stark contrast to the Catholic doctrine of sacerdotalism, the belief that only through the mediation of a priest could humans experience divine grace. Indeed, “Protestantism thus presented itself as a deliberate attempt to take the magical elements out of religion… .”¹

Where Catholicism had placed its emphasis on the ability of its rites and rituals to constitute a community of believers, Protestantism emphasized the belief of the individual. Rites and ceremonies that endowed “physical objects with supernatural qualities by special formulae of consecration and exorcism”² were wholly rejected. Magic was still considered real, and widely accepted, but was now divorced entirely from religion.

As a result, ritualistic religion was targeted with specific vigor, and so pagan traditions that had long had an uneasy truce with Catholicism were rooted out under Protestantism. Witches were not new, they were widely known for their ability to magically heal or cause harm to people

It was only in the Middle ages that a new element was added to the European concept of witchcraft which was to distinguish it from the witch-beliefs of other primitive peoples. This was the notion that the witch owed her powers to having made a deliberate pact with the Devil. In return for her promise of allegiance, she was thought to have been given the means of wreaking supernatural vengeance upon her enemies. Seen from this point of view, the essence of witchcraft was not the damage it did to other persons, but its heretical character - devil worship.³

Devil worship was not only the greatest of heresies, and thus sins, it was the most serious crime. Over the years, the accusation morphed from merely making a compact with the devil, to a ceremonial orgy on the witches Sabbath, where all witches engaged in debased sex with the devil and his demons before leaving charged with supernatural evil energy to curse and bring ruin to their neighbors.⁴

The tying of witchcraft to devil worship brought all of the might and fury of both the church and the state down on it. In 1612, King James I, who himself wrote a treatise on witchcraft, made execution mandatory for any convicted witches. The handbook used most often regarding witchcraft was the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), written by two Catholic inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Joseph Springer and first published in 1458. It would go on to be the best selling book aside from the Bible for the next two centuries.

The Malleus Maleficarum goes into explicit detail regarding the specific aspects of the compact between witches and the Devil, and the kinds of evil that witches participated in. Aside from its scrupulous detail, what stands out is the utter misogyny of the text. Great effort is made to explain why women are more susceptible to witchcraft on account of their “lack of faith, ambition, and debauchery.”⁵ Debauchery, in particular is “insatiable” in witches, and the “ones that are more tainted are those who are more inflamed with the purpose of satisfying their base lustings.”⁶ The sins of witches are more serious than the sins of Adam, indeed they “surpass all the evil things that God permits and has permitted to happen from the beginning of the world until the present day”⁷ in their heinousness and deserving of severe punishment. Heinrich and Springer go so far as to say that the evil of witches is worse than the sins of demons and fallen angels, solidifying the cosmic scope of their misogyny. These evil acts derive from

seven different sorts of sorcery, by means of the tainting of the sexual act and fetuses in the womb with various acts of sorcery… First, by diverting the minds of men to irregular love and so on. Second, by impeding the procreative force. Third, by taking away the limbs appropriate for this act. Fourth, by changing men into the shape of beasts through the art of conjuring. Fifth, by destroying the procreative force with reference to females. Sixth, by causing a miscarriage. Seventh, by offering babies to demons. This is apart from the other animals and fruits of the earth, on which they inflict various injuries… .⁸

Armed with this diagnostic tool, people began seeing witches everywhere. Neighbor turned on neighbor. Midwives and healers were blamed for illnesses, miscarriages, stillbirths, or infant deaths. Crop failures, death of cattle, natural tragedies were all seen as the work of witches. Millions were accused, thousands arrested, tried, and tortured for witchcraft. At least 60,000 were killed, some suggest the number was much higher. The misogyny of the torture is evident, as it often took on an explicitly sexual nature, and the confessions elicited under torture describe explicit sexual acts between witches and devils that bear the mark of careful crafting and fantasy.⁹

These events have been suggested by some to reflect the environment of sexual repression that characterized religious tradition at this time. Thus, one interpretation of the fury of the witch hunts is that they reflected a displaced antagonism towards the sexual impulses that were not allowed to be expressed under strictly-enforced religious morality.

But the specific context in which accusations of witchcraft occurred suggests another cause. Those accused of witchcraft were often the most poor and marginalized women. Their victims often admitted to wronging them, and the adverse events which then befell them were attributed to the power of the witch

A typical case was that of Margery Stanton of Wimbish, who was tried for witchcraft at Chelmsford in 1579. During the hearing it emerged that her first victim, Thomas Prat, had scratched her face with a needle, and had been subsequently racked with aches and pains; later he snatched a handful of grain from her and gave it to his chickens, most of whom promptly expired. Richard Saunder's wife had refused her yeast, whereupon her child was ‘taken vehemently sick, in a marvellous strange manner’. Robert Petie's wife had her turned away from his house, and her child “fell ill. William Torner denied her requests, and his child was taken with a fit. Robert Cornell's wife refused her milk, and was taken sick with a great swelling. John Hopwood denied her a leathern thong, and his gelding suddenly died. John Cornell denied her requests, whereupon his cows yielded blood instead of milk. The vicar's wife turned her away, and her little son became sick. Finally, Robert Lathbury refused her request, only to incur the loss of twenty hogs.¹⁰

This example indicates that accusations of witchcraft accompanied the degeneration of the social bonds that accompanied the movements to expropriate land and means of subsistence from the poor (maps of enclosures and maps of witch hunts even correspond).¹¹ According to Keith Thomas, these episodes are

not to be confused with vagrant begging, but illustrate the breakdown of the tradition of mutual help upon which many English village communities had been built… Margery Stanton’s requests were typical enough; what was distinctive about them was that they were consistently refused. The fact that she should be accused of witchcraft, by the very people who had failed to fulfill their accepted social obligations to her illustrates the essential conflict between neighbourliness and individualism which generated the tensions from which the accusations of witchcraft were most likely to arise.¹²

The rapidly changing social, economic, and religious environment thus led to a breakdown in communal and social bonds, and witch hunts could be viewed as an outcome of this change. But when we consider the specific nature of the shifts in class and social relations that accompanied the transition to capitalism, we can view the witch hunts, like other legal and judicial changes, as part of the renegotiation of the social contract between the wealthy ruling class and the poor laborers.¹³

Sylvia Federici sheds profound light on how the transition to capitalism specifically affected women. She locates the witch hunts at the intersection of two problems faced by the capitalist class in the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution: 1) how to control labor, and 2) how to control the reproduction of the labor force. The enclosure movements had expropriated the means of subsistence and forced the poor into wage labor.¹⁴ At the same time, a series of legal changes exerted complete control over the reproductive process. Crimes against reproduction, such as contraception, termination of a pregnancy, or infanticide were made capital offenses¹⁵

As a consequence women began to be prosecuted in large numbers, and more were executed for infanticide in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe than for any other crime, except for witchcraft, a charge that also centered on the killing of children and other violations of reproductive norms… [T]he female body was turned into an instrument for the reproduction of labor and the expansion of the work-force, treated as a natural breeding-machine, functioning according to the rhythms outside of women’s control.¹⁶

Midwives were suspect because of their proximity to birth and the reproductive process, and the time of the witch hunts corresponds to the time period in which midwives were replaced by male doctors. Those accused of witchcraft were usually older women, widows, or unwed young mothers or women; those most likely to be hurt by the expropriation of the common means of subsistence, and those most likely to resist. In the witch hunts those in power had found a way to accuse any woman, at any time, of a capital offense, and to subject her to horrific public shame, humiliation, and torture, with the threat of death ever present.

The fracturing of communal and social bonds that resulted cannot be overstated. Neighbor turned on neighbor, men turned on women, women turned on one another. The solidarity so crucial to any resistance effort was shattered, leaving suspicion and distrust in its wake. The poor were divided against themselves, making them easy to subject:

The witch hunts were the means by which women in Europe were educated about their new social tasks and a massive defeat was inflicted on Europe’s ‘lower classes,’ who needed to learn about the power of the state to desist from any form of resistance to its rule. At the stakes not only were the bodies of the ‘witches’ destroyed, so was a whole world of social relations that had been the basis of women’s social power and a vast body of knowledge that women had transmitted from mother to daughter over the generations… This is what was consumed on every village square with the execution of the women accused, who would be exhibited in the most abject state: tied up with iron chains and given to the fire. When in our imagination we multiply this scene by the thousands, we begin to understand what the witch hunt meant for Europe, in terms of not only its motifs but also its effects.¹⁷

Women were terrorized and brutalized into accepting their new roles as wives and mothers, punished for any behavior that suggested anything less than complete submission. They were increasingly attacked as “nags” or “scolds” or accused of idle talk or domineering behavior towards their husbands. Women were hauled in front of magistrates by their husbands or the public, fined in court or sentenced to cruel punishments for showing the least degree of independence:

Obedience—as the literature of the time constantly stressed—was a wife’s first duty, enforced by the Church, the law, public opinion, and ultimately by the cruel punishments that were introduced against the ‘scolds,’ like the ‘scold’s bridle,’ also called the ‘branks,’ a sadistic contraption made of metal and leather that would tear the woman’s tongue if she attempted to talk. This was an iron framework that enclosed the woman’s head. A bridle bit about two inches long and one inch wide projected into the mouth and pressed down on top of the tongue; frequently it was studded with spikes so that if the offender moved her tongue it inflicted pain and made speaking impossible… Wives who were seen as witches, shrews, and scolds were also forced to wear it locked onto their heads… With such a frame locking their heads and mouths, those accused could be led through town in a cruel public humiliation that must have terrified all women, showing what one could expect if she did not remain subservient.¹⁸

At a time when the needs of industrialists and manufacturers required exploitation of both human and natural resources on an unprecedented scale, the so-called Scientific Revolution provided support for a view of humanity and nature that conformed nicely with the required exploitation. The enclosure movements and privatization of the commons had already disrupted the social fabric of society, atomizing communities into individuals competing for the same jobs, rather than encouraging working together in complimentary relationships.

But the generation of resources and capital for manufacturing also required extraction of natural resources on a huge scale, and the religious and cultural views were at odds with this type of exploitation of nature. The prevailing view of both humanity and nature was that it comprised an organic and communal whole, individuals were inseparable from the larger community. The view of the earth was as a benevolent mother that took care of and provided for humanity, and deserved respect and reverence in return. As Carolyn Merchant illustrates:

The image of the earth as a living organism and a nurturing mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining would soon require that. As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it.¹⁹

These views carried with them both ethical implications and reflected a value system that would be radically reshaped by the scientific advances of the Enlightenment. These changes shifted the prominent metaphor of nature and the cosmos from that of an organic, dynamic system, to a predictable, controllable, unfeeling machine. The misogyny of the time period, in which witch-hunting and inquisition of women was rampant, was reflected in the language of the changing scientific and philosophical positions towards nature, treating it as “a female to be tortured through mechanical interventions.”²⁰ Francis Bacon, one of the “fathers of modern science”, explicitly invoked the tortures of witch trials as a model for the “taming of nature”:

a useful light may be gained, not only for a true judgement of the offenses of persons charged with such practices [witchcraft], but likewise for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object… .²¹

Nature had been changed from a benevolent mother who protected and provided to a woman to be dominated and violated in an effort to learn her secrets and exploit her for profit. This attitude was further sanctioned by the religious view of the Fall. It was woman who first sinned by partaking of the fruit. By so doing, she caused the ruin of humankind, and once they were exiled from the garden, nature became undominated, unruly, wild, and unpredictable. She was in need of being controlled, molded to the use of man, and he had a God-given responsibility to oblige; “Although a female’s inquisitiveness may have caused man’s fall from his God-given dominion, the relentless interrogation of another female, nature, could be used to regain it.”²²

This was the context in which the modern scientific method was formed. A method obsessed with reduction, dissection, and manipulation of nature in the pursuit of progress, which too often corresponds to the invention of new means of exploitation and the accumulation of profit. While these explicit intentions cannot be fairly attributed to all of the influential thinkers of the time, neither should the social and political movements be minimized. Their influence is seen in the common usage today of language “praising a scientist’s ‘hard facts,’ ‘penetrating mind,’ or the ‘thrust of his argument’.”²³ These ideas, ethics, and values permeated the social consciousness and created the intellectual environment in which the scientific method was developed.

The interrogation of witches as symbol for the interrogation of nature, the courtroom as model for its inquisition, and torture through mechanical devices as a tool for the subjugation of disorder were fundamental to the scientific method as power… [S]exual politics helped to structure the nature of the empirical method that would produce a new form of knowledge and a new ideology of objectivity seemingly devoid of cultural and political assumptions.²⁴

1. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1973), 87.

2. Thomas, Religion and the Decline, 87.

3. Thomas, Religion and the Decline, 521.

4. Philip C. Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (I.B. Tauris & Co: New York, 2014).

5. Christopher S. Mackay, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge: University Press, 2009), 171.

6. Mackay, Hammer of Witches, 171.

7. Mackay, Hammer of Witches, 62.

8. Mackay, Hammer of Witches, 171-172.

9. Almond, The Devil.

10. Thomas, Religion and the Decline, 662.

11. Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), Sylvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (Oakland: PM Press, 2018).

12. Thomas, Religion and the Decline, 662.

13. See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Verso, 2006).

14. Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023).

15. This time period saw the rise of the legal prohibition of homosexuality. Both the church and the state came to view this widespread aspect of society as an abomination, and persecuted practitioners ruthlessly. This time period also saw the rise of municipal brothels, which were viewed as a remedy for a number of social ills, homosexuality being one of them. Federici locates the new antagonism against homosexuality within the larger prohibition of “non-productive” sexual behavior that contributed to the witch hunts. See Federici, Caliban, 49, 194.

16. Federici, Caliban, 88, 91.

17. Federici, Witches, 33.

18. Federici, Witches, 39.

19. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperOne, 1990), 3.

20. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 168.

21. Francis Bacon, quoted in Merchant, The Death of Nature, 168.

22. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 170.

23. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 179.

24. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 172.