Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, Welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff Spooky
Speaker 2: Month edition. It's November. You might argue, Spooky Month is over,
Speaker 2: you might say in your ignorance, but you know what
Speaker 2: they say, It's always October somewhere. This week, it's just me,
Speaker 2: your host, Margaret Kildroy, no guest, no producer, just me,
Speaker 2: my microphone and you. Why Well, mostly because I'm on
Speaker 2: book tour right now, which makes scheduling guests particularly difficult,
Speaker 2: but also I want to experiment with this style of
Speaker 2: podcasting a bit. See how I like it. If I
Speaker 2: want banter, I'll have to write it into the script myself.
Speaker 2: This week we're covering something near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 2: This week we're covering witches, especially witches in Europe, especially
Speaker 2: the witch hunts. There aren't a ton of cool people
Speaker 2: in today's episode, but I think witches themselves, as a
Speaker 2: reclaimed archetype are cool. I don't know if I've ever
Speaker 2: seen a topic so well covered by academic literature with
Speaker 2: so little academic consensus about it. What is a witch?
Speaker 2: Were they real? As in, did they represent an actual
Speaker 2: sort of counter religion during the early modern period? Did
Speaker 2: witches gather at black masses, as the great Ozzy Osbourne
Speaker 2: once claimed, Well, probably not, at least not in the
Speaker 2: way depicted by the witch hunters at the time. Believe me,
Speaker 2: if they did, I'd be the first to want to
Speaker 2: believe in them. There were most likely strange occult countercultures
Speaker 2: here and there, mostly in cities, mostly selling love charms
Speaker 2: and poisoning husbands, but they're oddly disconnected from the phenomena
Speaker 2: of witch hunting. As for what's spurred on the witch trials,
Speaker 2: that's a harder question one with no shortage of potential answers,
Speaker 2: and we're going to get into that. So then witches,
Speaker 2: pointy hats, animal familiars right now brooms having a bunch
Speaker 2: of wild sex in the woods, cursing people cackling, I think,
Speaker 2: which is the coolest shit. I wouldn't have written a
Speaker 2: book about them if I didn't. What a good time
Speaker 2: to plug the fact that the book I'm on tour
Speaker 2: with the Sapling Cage is about a young trans witch.
Speaker 2: But by and large, the modern conception of a witch
Speaker 2: is of course a modern conception. There weren't, as best
Speaker 2: as anyone is able to determine people running around in
Speaker 2: the fifteen hundreds in Europe declaring themselves witches. This doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that there weren't magical practitioners, including practitioners of what
Speaker 2: you might want to call black magic, but we'll get
Speaker 2: to that. In general, a witch is a bad guy. Definitionally,
Speaker 2: one anthropologist Rodney need Him in nineteen seventy eight defined
Speaker 2: a witch as quote someone who causes harm to others
Speaker 2: by mystical means. This isn't the only definition of witchcraft,
Speaker 2: but it's the one most applicable to the medieval and
Speaker 2: early modern understanding of them, which then is less a
Speaker 2: category of a person or a set of magical practices
Speaker 2: or a religious belief system, but instead an accusation of
Speaker 2: crime levied at someone. Being a witch historically was more
Speaker 2: akin to being a murderer or an arsonist, or more
Speaker 2: specifically and legally actionably, in this case, heretic. It was
Speaker 2: an accusation to throw around at anyone who practiced religion, magic, healing,
Speaker 2: or science that you didn't like. It was also an
Speaker 2: accusation to throw around at anyone who slept with someone
Speaker 2: that you wish they hadn't, or was too rich and
Speaker 2: powerful or too poor and unpowerful. Witchcraft isn't a word
Speaker 2: for a type of magic, but instead a moral position
Speaker 2: with which we view that magic. Witchcraft is magic I
Speaker 2: don't like these days. Of course, a witch is something else.
Speaker 2: It's a reclaimed archetype, and it's one of the most
Speaker 2: important reclaimed symbols in our pantheon of symbols. Now, a
Speaker 2: witch is something people might identify as, either religiously or politically,
Speaker 2: the reclamation of folk healing or women's magic, of certain
Speaker 2: pagan practices. What have you? I wear all black and
Speaker 2: live alone in the woods with a dog. I named
Speaker 2: after a mystical figure from literature, So I like witches.
Speaker 2: There weren't really self styled witches five hundred years ago,
Speaker 2: but there were absolutely people in medieval and early modern
Speaker 2: Europe whose role was what we might describe as sorcerer
Speaker 2: or magician or whatever, just as there were in more
Speaker 2: or less every hitherto existing society. Every society perhaps has
Speaker 2: the figure of the magician, the diviner, the healer. In
Speaker 2: England these people were often called cunning folk, and this
Speaker 2: label was applied whenever an English speaker talked about just
Speaker 2: about anyone else in Europe, these were diviners and healers,
Speaker 2: and all of that. One of their main jobs was,
Speaker 2: in fact, to remove the curses laid on people by witchcraft.
Speaker 2: The cunning folk were not witches. They weren't even all
Speaker 2: that often accused of witchcraft. When English people met indigenous
Speaker 2: North Americans, they called their magicians, medicine men and medicine women.
Speaker 2: When English people met Indigenous Africans, they usually called the
Speaker 2: magicians witch doctors. The word shaman, currently used as a
Speaker 2: sort of catch all for all of these folks, actually
Speaker 2: comes from the Siberian indigenous group, the Tungus, from their
Speaker 2: word for their magicians. Anthropologist Ronald Hutton, who studies these
Speaker 2: various types of magicians, refers to this whole category of
Speaker 2: people of shamans and cunning folk and witch doctors and
Speaker 2: medicine women and men as service magicians. That's what I'm
Speaker 2: going to use here. In service magicians are, of course,
Speaker 2: people who perform magic as a service. In quote unquote
Speaker 2: simpler societies, they might live in the tribe or village
Speaker 2: and offer services to people. In more complex societies, they
Speaker 2: might live in towns or cities and well sell their
Speaker 2: services to people. You've got service magicians right now, up
Speaker 2: to the present day. Of course, you can stop in
Speaker 2: and talk to palm readers and astrologers wherever you'd like.
Speaker 2: You can subscribe to service magician apps that'll give you
Speaker 2: your horoscopes. I'm, by no means attempting to disparage any
Speaker 2: of these practices. The line between service magician and healer are,
Speaker 2: of course blurry. Are nature paths. Service magicians are chemists.
Speaker 2: Allopathic doctors are modern therapists. Specifically any better at making
Speaker 2: you feel better than fortune tellers than Catholic confessors. I'm
Speaker 2: really honestly not trying to opine on the matter here,
Speaker 2: because there's this incorrect belief that the West underwent what
Speaker 2: gets called a disenchanting process. Jason josephin Storm, author of
Speaker 2: The Myth of Disenchantment, said quote comparing several large scale
Speaker 2: sociological surveys suggests that roughly three and four Americans believe
Speaker 2: in ghosts, telepathy, which is demonic possession, or something comparable.
Speaker 2: Skeptics are in the minority. The sources of practices offered
Speaker 2: by service magicians vary from time to time and culture
Speaker 2: to culture, but divination is a big one, of course,
Speaker 2: as our love potions and charms, protection from curses and evil,
Speaker 2: all sorts of things, healing, midwiffery, even brewing beer could
Speaker 2: easily be a sort of magic, which makes sense if
Speaker 2: you don't like totally get what's happening with the East,
Speaker 2: like I mean, come on. One common trait, albeit not
Speaker 2: universal across cultures, is that service magicians often work in
Speaker 2: conjunction with various spirits who are coordinated with to perform
Speaker 2: the actual magic in question, with witches that we're going
Speaker 2: to get to you later, it's going to be like demons,
Speaker 2: and then eventually the devil himself. A few years ago,
Speaker 2: I covered the magical underground of early modern Western European cities,
Speaker 2: in which your street diviner could also help you with
Speaker 2: an abortion or even help you poison your husband. Before
Speaker 2: divorce was legalized, women had to resort to reasonably drastic
Speaker 2: measures in order to leave unhappy marriages. See our episode
Speaker 2: about Aqua Tafauna for more about that. Of course, the
Speaker 2: reality of these magical undergrounds is hard to discern. From
Speaker 2: here in the twenty first century, there is ample evidence
Speaker 2: of herbalism, alchemy, poisoning, divination, love, charms, curses, and the like.
Speaker 2: What's less clear is whether or not some of these
Speaker 2: folks met at black Masses performing ostensibly Christian rites with
Speaker 2: a nude woman as an altar. There certainly is a
Speaker 2: fair amount of writing that a tests that this happened.
Speaker 2: Priests might make some money on the side selling magical
Speaker 2: ointments that are anointed through some strange rituals, like you can,
Speaker 2: like drip oil down the relic of some old dead
Speaker 2: saint and then sell it as a love charm or whatever.
Speaker 2: What's far less likely, though certainly claimed, is that these
Speaker 2: same priests and diviners and herbalists killed children for their rituals.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly unlikely that if there were a sort of
Speaker 2: specific cult of satanic demonic counter Christians, that it was
Speaker 2: multigeneration and lasted through the ages. But it's only these
Speaker 2: urban groups, these magical undergrounds that I've found that seem
Speaker 2: to have any trace of a legitimate claim to being
Speaker 2: some kind of organized force doing what might be considered
Speaker 2: black magic or definitionally witchcraft. But you know what is
Speaker 2: an organized force doing what might be considered black magic?
Speaker 2: The sponsors of this show. That's right, We're brought to
Speaker 2: you by divination. Combine it with gambling and you're sure
Speaker 2: to do well, and we're back. Mostly there were just
Speaker 2: service magicians out there to help their friends and their
Speaker 2: customers through white and black magic alike. There have perhaps
Speaker 2: always been people willing to cast curses upon others, that is,
Speaker 2: to do witchcraft, and there are poisoners and murderers throughout
Speaker 2: all of it. But overall, the witch, as he or
Speaker 2: she existed in the early modern Christian imagination, lived only
Speaker 2: in that self same imagination. The real evil was, of
Speaker 2: course caused by the inquisitors, who tried and murdered tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of people across Europe, and oddly, even this
Speaker 2: evil has been greatly exaggerated by the popular imagination. In
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies or so, as feminists and pagans worked
Speaker 2: to reclaim witchcraft, the witch hunts were woefully understudied, and
Speaker 2: you'll see claims that hundreds of thousands, or millions, up
Speaker 2: to thirty million. I've seen people, almost exclusively women, were
Speaker 2: killed in these witch hunts. The reality, while still nothing
Speaker 2: to be excited about, is not nearly so dramatic. Current
Speaker 2: best estimates hold that about ninety thousand people, a majority
Speaker 2: of them women, were accused of witchcraft over the course
Speaker 2: of several hundred years, from about fourteen fifty to seventeen fifty,
Speaker 2: About half of those people were executed. About twenty percent
Speaker 2: of the accused were men, though men were the majority accused.
Speaker 2: In some countries. In Iceland, about ninety percent of those
Speaker 2: who were accused were men. The idea that a witch
Speaker 2: is necessarily a woman is actually a recent one, though,
Speaker 2: as we'll talk about in a bit, the seeds for
Speaker 2: that were sown by a particular medieval misogynist. During the
Speaker 2: witch trials, women were generally perceived to be more prone
Speaker 2: to the devil's temptations. Christianity had been around for over
Speaker 2: a millennium before the witch trials kicked in, So why
Speaker 2: were the witch hunts decidedly not a medieval phenomenon, but
Speaker 2: an early modern one. For more than a thousand years,
Speaker 2: witchcraft was not seen as a serious problem by the Church.
Speaker 2: Witchcraft was, of course magic done to harm people, and
Speaker 2: the Church they basically didn't believe in it. Witchcraft wasn't real,
Speaker 2: That was superstitious mumbo jumbo. All magic came from God
Speaker 2: as they saw it, And of course opinions varied over
Speaker 2: time and place, but in general, all that not real.
Speaker 2: There were certain types of magic they admitted were true,
Speaker 2: potions that caused abortion or impotence, for example, But witchcraft
Speaker 2: and the belief in it and the fear of it
Speaker 2: was generally a popular phenomenon. It is something believed in
Speaker 2: by the people, as it were. The Church saw itself
Speaker 2: as the learned authorities not to be swayed by superstition.
Speaker 2: We've got statement after statement by various Catholic authorities that
Speaker 2: the Church would not investigate witchcraft because witchcraft did not exist. Okay,
Speaker 2: but wouldn't it be funny if it was just like
Speaker 2: they were in on it and that's why they didn't
Speaker 2: investigate it. I bet you have like these like medieval
Speaker 2: conspiracy theorists who are like, the reason the Church claims
Speaker 2: to not believe in witchcraft is because they're the ones
Speaker 2: doing it, which is funny because I mean, they were
Speaker 2: doing weird rituals and hurting people and stuff. So maybe
Speaker 2: those conspiracy theorists were right anyway. In the eight hundreds,
Speaker 2: Saint Agobard wrote a book called Against the fool Fulish
Speaker 2: Belief of the Common Sort concerning Hail and Thunder, which
Speaker 2: is a sick title which basically said, Hey, witchcraft doesn't real,
Speaker 2: you guys. Basically, believing in witchcraft was the actual problem
Speaker 2: for the early Catholic Church. Belief in this kind of
Speaker 2: magic was a sin. It just like wasn't a very
Speaker 2: big deal sin. People accused of witchcraft and devil worship
Speaker 2: were generally told to do penance, but it wasn't taken
Speaker 2: seriously as a problem. In seven eighty five, the Council
Speaker 2: of Paderborn said anyone who burns a witch will themselves
Speaker 2: be put to death. Another old code, the Lombard Code
Speaker 2: of six forty three, says let nobody presume to kill
Speaker 2: a foreign serving maid or a female servant as a witch,
Speaker 2: for it is not possible nor ought to be believed
Speaker 2: by Christian minds. In eight sixty six, Pope Nicholas the
Speaker 2: First ban torture. In twelve fifty eight Pope Alexander the
Speaker 2: Fourth so that inquisitors shouldn't really bother investigating wins. Just
Speaker 2: over and over again. The Church was clear whiches don't exist,
Speaker 2: not really, And then the Church changed course. By the
Speaker 2: twelfth century or so, the monopolistic power of the Church
Speaker 2: was starting to fall apart, or at least show some cracks.
Speaker 2: There were these heresies like the Cathars and the Waldensians,
Speaker 2: who I think I'll be covering more in the future,
Speaker 2: that were starting to spread. The Catholic Church figured we
Speaker 2: should do something about this. We should stamp this out,
Speaker 2: force everyone to convert back to the one true faith,
Speaker 2: or you know, murder the shit out of them if
Speaker 2: they don't. So they formed the Inquisition. Their main targets
Speaker 2: in France were these heretical groups that I was talking about,
Speaker 2: while in Spain and Portugal they targeted the Jews and
Speaker 2: the Muslims who had been forced to convert, suspecting them
Speaker 2: of secretly still being Jewish or Muslim. Much like our
Speaker 2: main target is you with our inquisitional ads forcing you
Speaker 2: to convert to capitalism. Here's ads and we're back and
Speaker 2: the Inquisition. Of course, it's like a fucked up thing, right,
Speaker 2: It's not a good thing to do, to have an inquisition.
Speaker 2: But they weren't just running around setting people on fire.
Speaker 2: By and large. People who were convicted were forced to
Speaker 2: wear a cross like so across under their clothing or whatever,
Speaker 2: or go on a pilgrimage. Though it started to ramp
Speaker 2: up in its murderousness over time. I'm sure I'll be
Speaker 2: covering resistance to the Inquisition and the heretical groups themselves
Speaker 2: at a later time, and I'll come to understand this
Speaker 2: better here and there. The Inquisition went after witches, or
Speaker 2: at least various local church and secular authorities did. One
Speaker 2: of the earliest, most famous cases took place on that
Speaker 2: little island of Ireland. Okay, And this is gonna be
Speaker 2: really notable because almost none of the witch hunts took
Speaker 2: place on Ireland, and yet one of the first ones does.
Speaker 2: Ireland is decidedly light on witch trials throughout history for
Speaker 2: a bunch of reasons besides just being a decidedly cool place.
Speaker 2: But the first witch trial in the British Isles was
Speaker 2: in Ireland, in Kilkenny in thirteen twenty four. One source
Speaker 2: called this the first witch trial in Europe, but you
Speaker 2: know how much I hate the claims of like the
Speaker 2: first in history, so I'm just gonna stick with the
Speaker 2: first in British Isles. Also even then, like I don't know,
Speaker 2: there were probably some before that. This trial went after
Speaker 2: a woman who well quite possibly was doing witchcraft, that is,
Speaker 2: things understood as magic at the time for ill intent.
Speaker 2: There is a really good chance that this lady was
Speaker 2: a poisoner. Dame Alice Kiteller was a rich woman who
Speaker 2: inherited her father's fortune and then married the Chancellor of
Speaker 2: Ireland's brother in twelve ninety nine, then ran an inn
Speaker 2: and got even wealthier. Her husband died suspiciously. The story
Speaker 2: goes like, I don't know the different husbands that are
Speaker 2: all going to die have like, oh, fingernails fell out
Speaker 2: and hair got thin or whatever. The full story goes,
Speaker 2: according to a write up by Irish identity dot Com,
Speaker 2: that this husband found her cupboard in the basement full
Speaker 2: of things like entrails of roosters and eyes of ravens,
Speaker 2: and jars of night shade, and another more jars full
Speaker 2: of weird worms, and of course pieces of unbaptized babies.
Speaker 2: How did they know that those babies in the jars
Speaker 2: were unbaptized? Who knows? And a pot made from the
Speaker 2: skull of a beheaded thief with which they cooked it
Speaker 2: all anyway, the husband dies after discovering the mysterious witchcraft thing.
Speaker 2: She keeps running the inn and is surrounded by young women.
Speaker 2: More husbands show up, more husbands die. Her story is actually,
Speaker 2: it really interestingly parallels another story I've told on this show,
Speaker 2: the story of Elizabeth Botori. It's people mispronounce it as Bathory,
Speaker 2: and there's a metal band called Bathory, but it's pronounced
Speaker 2: but Tory, said the pet end who reads history books
Speaker 2: for a living, which doesn't actually make me the expert.
Speaker 2: It just means that I get lost in this stuff. Anyway.
Speaker 2: Her story parallels but Torre's story, who probably was teaching
Speaker 2: local women to become healers, but was accused of bathing
Speaker 2: in the blood of virgins. She was rich and the
Speaker 2: king owed her money, and so she's accused of unspeakable evil.
Speaker 2: Alice Kayiteller, she was rich and the king owed her money.
Speaker 2: I mean again, all of her husbands are dying mysteriously.
Speaker 2: I think this lady's up to no good, although I
Speaker 2: don't know, maybe they all deserved it. I'm not like
Speaker 2: going to give the benefit of the doubt a random
Speaker 2: medieval husband man, although I'm not really going to give
Speaker 2: it to Alice here either. Anyway, After her fourth rich
Speaker 2: husband dies mysteriously, each husband leaving a bunch of money
Speaker 2: to either her or the oldest of her children. I've
Speaker 2: read both a London born bishop showed up and accused
Speaker 2: her of witchcraft. The accusation is that she goes to
Speaker 2: the crossroads every night with her coven and like cuts
Speaker 2: up living animals and fucks a demon named Robin, son
Speaker 2: of Artisan. I want to know more about Robin's son
Speaker 2: of Artisan, but the Internet only provides this story. So
Speaker 2: she's found guilty, but she escapes. Most versions of the
Speaker 2: story say that her brother in law, the Chancellor of Ireland,
Speaker 2: helped secret her way to London. More serious analyzes seem
Speaker 2: to say, well, we have no idea how she escaped
Speaker 2: or where she went. Her handmaiden, Petronella of Meath was
Speaker 2: burned at the stake in her place, confessing to all
Speaker 2: sorts of demonic sins because you know, torture. This story
Speaker 2: happens like one hundred and fifty years before the witch
Speaker 2: trials start really kicking off, and to me, it seems
Speaker 2: most likely that Alice was killing her husband's sure and
Speaker 2: also that she was too rich and powerful and murdery
Speaker 2: and needed to be stopped because of how that threatened
Speaker 2: power in the area, and of course because you're not
Speaker 2: supposed to murder people. So some of the basic ideas
Speaker 2: of witchcraft have been going around for a long time.
Speaker 2: Witches fuck demons at midnight sabbaths in the woods or
Speaker 2: at the crossroads. They get there by flying on sticks.
Speaker 2: The first known drawing of a woman on a broom
Speaker 2: is drawn in the margin of a book from fourteen forty,
Speaker 2: The Champion de Dame. Sometimes lots of witches rode the
Speaker 2: same stick, And again, like the stick is the important part,
Speaker 2: not the broom, right, And it seems like the sexual
Speaker 2: energy implied by stick writing seems self evident. But I'll
Speaker 2: just point it out in case you missed it. These
Speaker 2: witches would also turn into animals, or they would ride
Speaker 2: strange demon animals to the sabbaths or fuck demons in
Speaker 2: animal form. But flying to the sabbaths has been an
Speaker 2: important part of the stories for a very long time.
Speaker 2: But again, the witch trials didn't kick off for a
Speaker 2: long time yet. The soil was the inquisition the seed.
Speaker 2: The seed was a guy with real big in cell
Speaker 2: energy who wrote a little book called Malleus Maleficarum, The
Speaker 2: Hammer of Witches, which we'll talk about on Wednesday. You're
Speaker 2: gonna have to wait till Wednesday to hear about The
Speaker 2: Hammer of witches. I can totally be trusted to record
Speaker 2: episodes by myself. I don't know what you're talking about anyway,
Speaker 2: dear guest, what would you like to plug? Well me
Speaker 2: the guest. I have a substack. It's called my substack.
Speaker 2: It's Margaret kiljoydot substack dot com. And I have been
Speaker 2: putting up my tour diaries, and I've been putting up
Speaker 2: essays and my reflections on these various things. I'll probably
Speaker 2: write a witch thing next week, but who knows. You
Speaker 2: might know if you listen in the future where it's spooky,
Speaker 2: actually all are going to have bigger problems next week
Speaker 2: maybe or maybe next week will be fine. I'm recording
Speaker 2: this the day after Halloween, and you know the elections
Speaker 2: are coming up, and you in the future know what happened,
Speaker 2: or honestly, I suspect you don't. I suspect that people
Speaker 2: don't know what happened yet, but I do know that
Speaker 2: this episode's done. Bye.
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