Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool People who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff. I'm your host, Marcare Kildrey, and every
Speaker 1: week I cover people being cool, except when I have
Speaker 1: special episodes like today, where instead I cover things I
Speaker 1: think are cool, and I think witches are cool or
Speaker 1: at least interesting. The actual definition of witches I came
Speaker 1: up with earlier, where you like, do magic to hurt
Speaker 1: people or whatever, Like, I don't know, that's like not
Speaker 1: actually particularly cool. That's like saying like violence is cool,
Speaker 1: Like violence is sometimes useful or necessary, but overall it's
Speaker 1: like nothing to be proud of, right, because it's mostly
Speaker 1: done in bad ways. So I guess that's actually how
Speaker 1: I probably feel about what would definitionally be understood is witchcraft,
Speaker 1: but the concept of witches as we currently talk about
Speaker 1: them super cool. Except this episode isn't really about the
Speaker 1: current version of witches. It's more about how we got there,
Speaker 1: and specifically how the concept of the witch was developed
Speaker 1: by a bunch of misogynists and church people both Protestant
Speaker 1: and Catholic, in order to keep power relations going. And
Speaker 1: that's bad, but reclaimed stuff is good. It seems obvious
Speaker 1: that I think that I'm a punk punk is an
Speaker 1: example of a reclaimed slur so, which is an example
Speaker 1: of a reclaimed category of crime that has now become
Speaker 1: an identity for people. Anyway, this is part two. If
Speaker 1: you go back to part one, you'll hear me talk
Speaker 1: about how which is kind of weren't real except service
Speaker 1: magicians were and some of them did witchcraft, so actually,
Speaker 1: which is kind of were real. Also, no one knows,
Speaker 1: but we're going to talk about the inquisition. There's a
Speaker 1: money python joke I could do here, but I'm not
Speaker 1: going to. It's a leave it as an exercise for
Speaker 1: the audience too. Imagine the money python joke. Also, this
Speaker 1: is a solo episode. You probably figured that out by now.
Speaker 1: There's no Sophie, there's no guest. There's a Rory.
Speaker 2: Hi. Rory.
Speaker 1: Rory is our audio engineer. Anyway, where were we The
Speaker 1: Hammer of Witches, which is a pretty.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty cool name for like real evil book.
Speaker 1: And it's like, like evil is cool and spooky. This
Speaker 1: is like evil evil. This is like, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: exercising institutional power to destroy people. That this is like
Speaker 1: the biggest most dangerous in cell book ever written, which
Speaker 1: is kind of impressive. Okay, so the story of the
Speaker 1: Hammer of Witches. That's not the entire episode, it's going
Speaker 1: to be part of it. There was this asshole guy
Speaker 1: named Heinrich Kramer. He joined the Dominican Order, and soon
Speaker 1: enough he's an inquisitor. This is like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: fourteen hundreds. He shows up in Germany and is like, hello,
Speaker 1: I am an inquisitor and I'm specifically mad about witches
Speaker 1: because I hate women. And local authorities are like, no,
Speaker 1: we don't really need you. Fuck off, which is, after all,
Speaker 1: worn a big deal, nothing to get inquisitioning about. So
Speaker 1: our guy, Heinrich, He's like, all right, fine, I'll go
Speaker 1: to Skydad's main man, the Pope, and get his permission
Speaker 1: to do some fucking witch hunting. And you know, earlier
Speaker 1: I was like talking about all these popes that were like,
Speaker 1: witches aren't real. There's a problem with investing absolute power
Speaker 1: into specific individuals. It's the monarchy problem. And besides the
Speaker 1: moral problem, there's the specific problem of well, if you
Speaker 1: have a different guy, then he might have a different
Speaker 1: point of view and he might have a bad take,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, the bad take is
Speaker 1: the rules. So in fourteen eighty four, Pope Innocent to
Speaker 1: the eighth proves his own name to not have been
Speaker 1: much of a nominative deterministic thing. Because he is not
Speaker 1: so innocent. He writes a papal bull which is basically
Speaker 1: a decree, because in Catholicism they just rename everything, And
Speaker 1: this decree says that witchcraft counts as heresy. It says, quote,
Speaker 1: many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation
Speaker 1: and strain from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils,
Speaker 1: incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and
Speaker 1: other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have
Speaker 1: slain infants. Yet in the mother's womb, as also the
Speaker 1: offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth,
Speaker 1: the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees,
Speaker 1: nay men and women, beasts of burthen herd beasts, as
Speaker 1: well as animals of other kinds, vineyards orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat,
Speaker 1: and all other cereals. This is all one sentence. I
Speaker 1: don't even I'm not even gonna quote the entire sentence.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of anywhere you might think there's a period,
Speaker 1: there's a semicolon. These wretches, furthermore, afflict and torment men
Speaker 1: and women, beasts of burthen herd, beasts as well as
Speaker 1: animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and
Speaker 1: sore diseases both internal and external. They hinder men from
Speaker 1: performing the sexual act and women from conceiving. That's like
Speaker 1: only half the sentence. That's yeah. Anyway, So the papal
Speaker 1: bull is like, I'm afraid of them witches. They make
Speaker 1: men impotent, and they also do all of these other things.
Speaker 1: And Okay, one of the things that's horrible about talking
Speaker 1: about all this like witchcraft stuff and this witch trial stuff.
Speaker 1: So like we're really seeing the return to this. Honestly,
Speaker 1: like the evangelical embrace of the pro life thing really
Speaker 1: has this vibe of like they're all a bunch of
Speaker 1: baby murderers, and I don't know, there's gonna be some
Speaker 1: other fun comparisons coming up later about suddenly people believing
Speaker 1: in real wild stuff, especially because the Protestants, once they
Speaker 1: come on the scene, they're gonna like specifically believe Eve
Speaker 1: they're way more that. Yes, of course sex is bad,
Speaker 1: but it's still like, you got to be having it,
Speaker 1: so therefore you've got to be married, and you can
Speaker 1: only be married in ways that are procreative.
Speaker 2: And blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I've read in a couple places, but like anecdotal sources,
Speaker 1: that the clergy was really mad about this particular degree
Speaker 1: because they were like, no, we have a long standing
Speaker 1: tradition of not giving a shit about witches, and then
Speaker 1: here's this pope and isent the eighth being like blah
Speaker 1: blah blah, witches this and that, and they're like, that's bullshit,
Speaker 1: none of that's real. But all the clergy didn't stop
Speaker 1: this from influencing the Pope's pet misogynist murderer, the aforementioned inquisitor,
Speaker 1: Heinrich Kramer. Kramer went on to kill fifty people over
Speaker 1: the next five years, after he'd been given permission specifically
Speaker 1: to do so by the Pope. Why did he so
Speaker 1: desperately want to hunt witches, Well, it sounds like it
Speaker 1: was because he was low key stalking this local woman,
Speaker 1: Helena Schubern. He was obsessed with her, and she didn't
Speaker 1: like him. She didn't go to church, perhaps because she
Speaker 1: was avoiding him, or maybe she just didn't like going
Speaker 1: to church. One day, she was supposedly walking past Kramer
Speaker 1: and spat and said, fie on you, you bad monk. May
Speaker 1: the falling evil take you, which is a pretty sick
Speaker 1: like I don't want the falling evil to take me.
Speaker 1: That sounds scary, Like what even is that? Is it
Speaker 1: just the slow embrace of darkness? Who knows? Anyway, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe other people know.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the falling evil is. It just
Speaker 2: sounds cool and spooky.
Speaker 1: However, it's not a good idea to say this to inquisitors.
Speaker 1: She was put on trial for witchcraft. She was acquitted.
Speaker 1: Kramer got so mad about it that he invented the
Speaker 1: modern witch hunt. The local bishop was like, you are
Speaker 1: senile and crazy, get out of here. And this is
Speaker 1: presumably when he went to the Pope for permission to
Speaker 1: murder people. But I've like read the timeline in different ways,
Speaker 1: so I wasn't exactly sure how to put it together.
Speaker 1: And so then he's like murdering people and he's like, hell, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the rules. I'm in cel murder man. He
Speaker 1: wrote the most influential book on witch hunting, even though
Speaker 1: it actually strayed. This is going to shock you. It
Speaker 1: actually strayed from most of the accepted inquisitorial material, and
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church would soon disavow this book. This book
Speaker 1: is The Hammer of Witches, and it influenced secular courts,
Speaker 1: but not religious courts by and large, So this like
Speaker 1: wasn't being used by the Church inquisition. This was being
Speaker 1: used by local secular courts. That book, The Hammer of Witches,
Speaker 1: is a misogynistic tone about why women are uniquely weakned
Speaker 1: evil and that they should be tortured and burned at
Speaker 1: the stake. It's bad. It presents the idea that witchcraft
Speaker 1: is heretical, which is actually a secular crime at the time,
Speaker 1: so this is why secular courts are doing their witch hunting.
Speaker 1: It also contains some pretty elaborate forgery. It claims that
Speaker 1: a respective theological institution supported it, and like even has
Speaker 1: like all the signatures and then like signatures of notaries
Speaker 1: and things like that on it. But it's almost certainly
Speaker 1: all a forgery. It seems as though everyone at that
Speaker 1: institution hated this book. It's possible that the book was
Speaker 1: banned after three years by the church in fourteen ninety,
Speaker 1: but this is disputed. It seems like people believed it
Speaker 1: was banned.
Speaker 2: But the I don't know whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get into the weird details about
Speaker 1: the list of banned books and when they were published.
Speaker 1: But Kramer himself was condemned in fourteen ninety for doing
Speaker 1: shit unethically and illegally, and from then on, as best
Speaker 1: as I can tell, he wasn't personally allowed to murder
Speaker 1: people anymore. His book, though, continued to go through dozens
Speaker 1: of editions, leading to uncountable more deaths. Eventually, the book
Speaker 1: pretended had a second author, basically like one of the
Speaker 1: printings they were like, it's by two people, like a
Speaker 1: respective theologian's name was added to it, even though we
Speaker 1: probably didn't approve of it. The Hammer of Witches says
Speaker 1: quote the witches deserve the heaviest punishment above all the
Speaker 1: criminals in the world. It was obsessed with the sex
Speaker 1: lives of evil women. Sexuality is the literal basis of witchcraft,
Speaker 1: according to this book, and the devil fucks power into people.
Speaker 1: If you don't fuck the devil, you don't get as
Speaker 1: cool magic powers In the book, Kramer writes, the devil
Speaker 1: has power over those who follow their lusts. As for
Speaker 1: why women are particularly prone to witchcraft, it's because women
Speaker 1: are more carnal. Of course, we also have bad memories,
Speaker 1: which is why we're undisciplined and impulsive. We're vain, our
Speaker 1: voice is a siren song, and we ruin men. He writes,
Speaker 1: woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch,
Speaker 1: and deadly to keep. And all witchcraft comes from carnal lusts,
Speaker 1: which in women are insatiable. Oh and also, plus, Jesus
Speaker 1: was a boy, so boys are clearly more holy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: obviously hasn't heard of my home. Jesus is a transman theory,
Speaker 1: although you know, maybe he's just being trans inclusive. Jesus
Speaker 1: is a transman theory, being that, well, if you don't
Speaker 1: have an earthly father, you have xx chromosomes. Anyway, this
Speaker 1: is not necessarily always true, but whatever this is, go
Speaker 1: with it. So, according to Kramer, witches meet the devil
Speaker 1: at the witch's sabbath, swear an oath to him, and
Speaker 1: make an ointment from dead baptized babies. Earlier works on
Speaker 1: these sabbaths were a bit more pornographic describing how people
Speaker 1: would kiss Satan on the asshole and such, and the
Speaker 1: Sabbath was more of a lustful orgy in the earlier books,
Speaker 1: But in The Hammer of Witches, neither the witches nor
Speaker 1: the devil actually enjoy the sex. It's just a solemn
Speaker 1: duty in the name of evil. Like lie back and
Speaker 1: think of Satan. But after her initiation into evil, the
Speaker 1: witch likes fucking lots of people, probably everyone but Kramer.
Speaker 1: This whole book is so so incel coded. Just looking
Speaker 1: at an impure woman can corrupt a man, since eyes
Speaker 1: are the mirror of the soul. Also, only the witches
Speaker 1: can see the devil during these ceremonies, and observers see
Speaker 1: only the women lying on their backs orgasamine, which makes
Speaker 1: me wonder if people weren't just like watching women masturbating
Speaker 1: in the forest or whatever, which seems like a perfectly
Speaker 1: fine and healthy pastime. Get together with your you know,
Speaker 1: gal pals, and go masturbating the woods. The sexual powers
Speaker 1: of witches are endless. They can cause lust in men,
Speaker 1: They can destroy relationships. They can turn dicks into other
Speaker 1: things or steal them outright. They can make a man
Speaker 1: no longer attracted to a given woman. They can also
Speaker 1: cause impotence or sterility. Some witches would collect dicks and
Speaker 1: keep them in a bird's nest where they lived off
Speaker 1: of corn and oats, like they were little baby bird dicks.
Speaker 1: And according to this book, all accused witches are guilty,
Speaker 1: and the ones who don't confess are damned. The ones
Speaker 1: who do confess are you know, saved by being burned alive.
Speaker 1: It's real good, much like the good that comes from
Speaker 1: giving all of your money to the people who gave
Speaker 1: us money. That's what you should do. You totally shouldn't
Speaker 1: either subscribe to cooler zone media and therefore not have ads,
Speaker 1: or just press the forward fifteen seconds but in like
Speaker 1: four or five times.
Speaker 2: You probably know how many times to put it. Here's
Speaker 2: the ads and we're back.
Speaker 1: So this book is bad, but also its impact on
Speaker 1: the witch trials has been overstated. Like I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: interest in the witch trials really kicked off during the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies or so, and there wasn't as much research
Speaker 1: available back then. The Hammer of Witches was likely the
Speaker 1: only tone available in print in English at the time,
Speaker 1: and so people read it and were like, oh, the
Speaker 1: witch hunts were pretty much just misogyny. But this book
Speaker 1: didn't really cause the witch trials? So what caused the
Speaker 1: witch trials? There are a bunch of different hypotheses. Most
Speaker 1: of them are wrong. I'm going to talk about one
Speaker 1: of the more can convincing ones for a moment before
Speaker 1: I get to the one that I find most convincing.
Speaker 1: This next one I don't think is like wrong. It's
Speaker 1: just we's wrong in some ways. But whatever, it has
Speaker 1: a lot of good truth in it. It's worth understanding.
Speaker 1: A Marxist feminist named Sylvia Federici wrote what is in
Speaker 1: my Circles the single most important book about witches and
Speaker 1: the witch Trials. It's called Caliban and the Witch. It
Speaker 1: covers a reasonably wide range of topics, but the core
Speaker 1: of its argument, as I understand it, is this the
Speaker 1: witch trials represent the patriarchal oppression of women, the excizing
Speaker 1: of women from the healing arts like you've got the
Speaker 1: good learned doctors who are men and who went to
Speaker 1: man only school, and in the early modern era, they
Speaker 1: become the only acceptable form of healing, so more organic
Speaker 1: and folk practices were being shoved out and criminalized. Federici
Speaker 1: ties this idea into the idea of primitive accumulation. This
Speaker 1: is a concept in Marxism that, while I'm not a Marxist,
Speaker 1: I think is worth understanding because I overall think that
Speaker 1: Marx had incredibly important contributions to the study of economics.
Speaker 1: Even if I disagree with whatever. You don't need to
Speaker 1: know why disagree with Marx. Just listen to like half
Speaker 1: the episodes I do. Primitive accumulation might be better translated
Speaker 1: these days as original accumulation, because the word primitive has
Speaker 1: different connotations than it did when the idea was coined.
Speaker 1: It originally kind of meant like original, like oh, this
Speaker 1: is the first version of this. The primitive form of
Speaker 1: it just means the original form of it. It's not
Speaker 1: like the accumulation from primitive people, although that happens. By
Speaker 1: the reason that it sounds confusing this because we'll get
Speaker 1: to it. Primitive accumulation. Basically, wealth has to come from somewhere,
Speaker 1: right in Marxist economic theory simplified here the labor theory
Speaker 1: of value. Wealth comes from the labor of the working class.
Speaker 1: But what about the raw materials? Those are gathered through
Speaker 1: primitive accumulation, which is to say, the extraction of value
Speaker 1: from the natural world. Colonialism does this right, show up
Speaker 1: somewhere and cut down all their trees and send them
Speaker 1: off to England and suddenly have extracted all the value
Speaker 1: from Ireland. This is the thing that comes before capitalism.
Speaker 1: Marx came up with the idea of primitive accumulation to
Speaker 1: counteract the Adam Smith pro capitalist idea that what started
Speaker 1: capitalism was that the industrious worker eventually built up more
Speaker 1: value than the lazy worker did, and so this is
Speaker 1: how the lazy worker ended up a worker and the
Speaker 1: other guy ended up an owner. Marx was like, no,
Speaker 1: it was because the proto capitalist just like robed the
Speaker 1: shit out of everything and everyone, or to quote him
Speaker 1: directly from capital and of course he's going to use
Speaker 1: outdated racial terminology here. The discovery of gold and silver
Speaker 1: in America, the extirpation enslavement and entoument in minds of
Speaker 1: the Aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
Speaker 1: of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a
Speaker 1: warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signaled a
Speaker 1: rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. So basically,
Speaker 1: primitive accumulation is like run around privatize everything, and you know,
Speaker 1: ties into the enclosure of the comments that I talk
Speaker 1: about all the time and things. Anyway, Marxist feminists, especially
Speaker 1: those in developing nations, started talking about how basically this
Speaker 1: accumulation continues today based on the unpaid work of women,
Speaker 1: that the whole of capitalism is upheld by unpaid domestic labor,
Speaker 1: reproductive labor as it's called, which is another weird phrase
Speaker 1: because it makes you think that they mean like making babies,
Speaker 1: but they actually mean reproducing social conditions. I think that, honestly,
Speaker 1: all this terminology needs to be renamed, because otherwise this
Speaker 1: is never going to come across to people.
Speaker 2: But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: The unpaid stuff that greases the whole economy is the
Speaker 1: reproductive labor doing the dishes and child rearing, and the
Speaker 1: unpaid labor of teaching kids as compared to the paid
Speaker 1: labor of teaching kids, all of that stuff. A German
Speaker 1: woman named Mariah Maiz wrote a book called Patriarchy and
Speaker 1: Accumulation on a World Scale that is like and behind
Speaker 1: this accumulation is a genocidal or like what happened to
Speaker 1: women in the witch hunts of Europe. And I'm under
Speaker 1: the impression Mariah Meis was writing this when people for
Speaker 1: good reason, when the research hadn't been done, and people
Speaker 1: thought that we were talking about like millions and millions
Speaker 1: of women being killed instead of like, eh, thirty thousand
Speaker 1: or whatever. This is the idea that Sylvia Federici is
Speaker 1: expanding upon, the idea that primitive accumulation continues to this day,
Speaker 1: and one of the places it does so is women.
Speaker 1: And one of the big examples of this is the
Speaker 1: witch hunts. That which cannot be controlled will be exterminated, which,
Speaker 1: to be clear, is absolutely what the Catholic Inquisition was
Speaker 1: all about. Convert what you can, exterminate what you can't.
Speaker 1: So Federici talks about the witch hunts as a war
Speaker 1: against women who don't participate properly in capitalism. She also
Speaker 1: describes the medieval world as a world in revolt against
Speaker 1: the masters, against nobility in the church, future veterans of
Speaker 1: the pod, the peasant revolts were kicking off all over
Speaker 1: the place, and heretical Christian sects that believe in it autonomy,
Speaker 1: basically communism, free love, and all kinds of cool shit
Speaker 1: were just everywhere you looked, and some of them were like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, heretical Christian sects that were only mildly
Speaker 1: better than the Catholic Church or whatever. But it's fine. Again,
Speaker 1: this is the kind of stuff that the Inquisition absolutely
Speaker 1: wanted to destroy and existed to destroy. Those movements, Federici says,
Speaker 1: were often led by women. Then you've got the Black Death,
Speaker 1: and suddenly there weren't so many workers, and wages go
Speaker 1: up and rents go down, and there was this spirit
Speaker 1: of revolt in the possibility of change. Maybe the workers
Speaker 1: would finally throw off their chains. But then capitalism showed
Speaker 1: up as a counter revolution, something that shut down this
Speaker 1: other revolution that was happening. To quote Federici, capitalism was
Speaker 1: the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the
Speaker 1: bishops and popes to a century's long social conflict that
Speaker 1: in the end shook their power. Capitalism was the counter
Speaker 1: revolution that to destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from
Speaker 1: the anti feudal struggle, possibilities which, if realized, might have
Speaker 1: spared us the immense destruction of lives in the natural
Speaker 1: environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.
Speaker 1: So basically shit had to change, but rather than change
Speaker 1: in a cool way, a counter revolution made it change
Speaker 1: in a bad way. Serfdom is out rent and wage
Speaker 1: labor is in and so this new status quo emerged,
Speaker 1: and it wanted to deal with the wild other anyone
Speaker 1: living outside this growing capitalism, basically including women and children
Speaker 1: in colonial subjects, they didn't get to have wages, and
Speaker 1: so they had to be contained as wild others. We've
Speaker 1: talked about this a few times on the show before,
Speaker 1: about how in the European medieval conception women like now
Speaker 1: we tend to think that this misogynist thing is to
Speaker 1: assume that women are like servile and demur whatever. But
Speaker 1: instead the medieval conception of women was that they are
Speaker 1: chaotic and outside of good civilized Christian values, which is
Speaker 1: of course pretty cool. This is an excuse for centuries
Speaker 1: of misogyny. But this framework that women are wild, uncontrollable
Speaker 1: people makes like, I don't know, makes womanhood both like
Speaker 1: cys and trans like all the more interesting to me.
Speaker 1: To declare my womanhood is to declare my affinity to
Speaker 1: the wild world or whatever, much like I've declared my
Speaker 1: affinity to the thing that I just said. I hated
Speaker 1: capitalism because they gave me some money to run their ads,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to eat food, so I run the ads.
Speaker 1: Here they are anyway, we're back. The rise of capitalism
Speaker 1: in this read is tied to the rise of patriarchy
Speaker 1: and stronger gender roles. But I've read criticism of Federici
Speaker 1: pointing out that she's not doing enough work here talking
Speaker 1: about the patriarchal forms that preceded capitalism. And also when
Speaker 1: she was talking about being like and then the popes
Speaker 1: and the lords did a capitalism, I don't she might
Speaker 1: be better read about this than me. I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: But overall I would say that it's like the merchant
Speaker 1: class that really wanted capitalism, and like the lords and
Speaker 1: the popes like really didn't because it undermined their power.
Speaker 1: So it's imperfect, but right. So you have this idea
Speaker 1: that rise of capitalism is the rise of patriarchy and
Speaker 1: stronger gender roles. By this read, instead of the power
Speaker 1: being held by a whole surf family, it is now
Speaker 1: a rental agreement between the head of the household, the
Speaker 1: man and the landlord. Now that ownership is important, women's
Speaker 1: inability to own things is suddenly a big problem. We've
Speaker 1: talked a few times on the show about how the
Speaker 1: invention of the white race is part of the colonial
Speaker 1: project's way of pitting working class people against each other, like, hey,
Speaker 1: mister English working class man, you may be starving, but
Speaker 1: at least you're better than a black man or an irishman.
Speaker 1: And then soon enough, hey mister irishman, you're white now too. Whiteness.
Speaker 1: It's like basically whiteness as a way to destroy class solidarity. Well,
Speaker 1: patriarchy offered something similar in Federici's take, as Karl Krisplebedeb
Speaker 1: put it, Federici explains how the rebelliousness of male workers
Speaker 1: was channeled into sexual violence, women's bodies providing a pleasant
Speaker 1: diversion and safety valve to relieve social pressure. Drawing on
Speaker 1: Jacques Roussaud's research about prostitution in the fifteenth century France,
Speaker 1: she describes a literal rape movement whereby sexual assaults on
Speaker 1: any poor woman were now tolerated by the authorities, essentially decriminalized.
Speaker 1: This was potentially when the sphere of men's work in
Speaker 1: women's work was codified, with men in the productive labor
Speaker 1: sphere the money economy and women in the reproductive labor sphere,
Speaker 1: the non money economy, that basically working class men were
Speaker 1: offered the chance to be better than someone, to therefore
Speaker 1: have gender solidarity with other men instead of class solidarity
Speaker 1: with other oppressed people. This book, Caliban and the Witch,
Speaker 1: is incredibly influential, and there are parts of it that
Speaker 1: I'm sure will hold up probably forever. There are other
Speaker 1: parts that are not really holding up to more recent scholarship,
Speaker 1: especially as relates to the witch hunts specifically, there just
Speaker 1: isn't evidence that witch hunts targeted women healers. The witch
Speaker 1: hunts didn't tend to target the cunning folk, the service magicians.
Speaker 1: A lot of the accusers or expert witnesses were the midwives,
Speaker 1: the herbalists, the cunning folk, the service magicians. Women did
Speaker 1: an awful lot of the accusing as well. In numerous countries,
Speaker 1: more men than women were targeted as witches, and perhaps
Speaker 1: most importantly, witch hunts weren't really They weren't this top
Speaker 1: down thing. The witch hunts were basically church and secular
Speaker 1: authorities giving in to popular pressure, the popular demand for
Speaker 1: witch hunts. The witch hunts primarily targeted women because some
Speaker 1: of their orchestrators were misogynists, and because the witch hunts
Speaker 1: were about power dynamics, more bro loose women serving girls,
Speaker 1: or just unpopular women or even two popular women were
Speaker 1: easy targets. Author Christina Larner put it, quote witchcraft accusations
Speaker 1: were sex related, not sex specific. Doctor Wanda Waporska, author
Speaker 1: of Witchcraft and Early Modern Poland fifteen hundred eighteen hundred,
Speaker 1: said in an interview with the New Statesmen about the
Speaker 1: Polish witch trials, the majority of women accused were servants
Speaker 1: in a precarious situation, living in someone else's house and
Speaker 1: subject to the power dynamic that brings It's not always
Speaker 1: easy to discover the age of the accused, but a
Speaker 1: wide range of women and men were accused from varying
Speaker 1: social backgrounds, of various ages and different family situations. Waporska
Speaker 1: went on to say, quote, although many have tried to
Speaker 1: claim an overarching reason for the witchcraft persecution, from ergotism
Speaker 1: to the little Ice age, from misogyny to the persecution
Speaker 1: of midwives, as more research emerges in a rich tapestry
Speaker 1: of regional studies, it's clear that a mono causal explanation
Speaker 1: is impossible. But while the causes of individual trials were
Speaker 1: all over the place. There was potentially a single institutional
Speaker 1: reason why the trials were happening at all, or specifically
Speaker 1: where they were happening, and the chain of events that
Speaker 1: caused that to happen was on October thirty first, fifteen seventeen.
Speaker 1: I'm writing this on October thirty first, spooky, a man
Speaker 1: named Martin Luther nailed ninety five theses onto the door
Speaker 1: of a church in Germany. And for once the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church would be faced with a heresy they couldn't immediately crush.
Speaker 1: Protestantism was born. Germany, the birthplace of Protestantism, was where
Speaker 1: around forty percent of which trials would take place orchestrated
Speaker 1: by both Protestants and Catholics alike. Why. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: two economists Peter L. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ put
Speaker 1: forth a theory in the Economic Journal that, well, I'll
Speaker 1: just quote their introduction quote. We argue that the Great
Speaker 1: European Witch Trials reflected a non price competition between the
Speaker 1: Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally
Speaker 1: contested parts of Christendom. Analyzes of new data covering more
Speaker 1: than forty three thousand people tried for witchcraft across twenty
Speaker 1: one European countries over a period of five and a
Speaker 1: half centuries, and more than four hundred early modern Catholic
Speaker 1: Protestant conflicts support our theory. More intense religious market contestation
Speaker 1: led to more intense witch trial activity. Basically, the people
Speaker 1: wanted to be saved from witches. They've been clamoring for
Speaker 1: this for one thousand years. Or they wanted the fun
Speaker 1: of a big show trial, and they wanted to get
Speaker 1: to accuse people and shit, and you know, the Church
Speaker 1: kept telling them, no, they're not allowed to do the
Speaker 1: random murder. But much like politicians campaigning in swing states,
Speaker 1: both Protestants and Catholics were like, yeah, okay, what do
Speaker 1: you want, We'll do it. And they would put on big,
Speaker 1: expensive show trials and say we're the ones who can
Speaker 1: save you from witches. Stick with us. This is pretty
Speaker 1: easily understandable just by looking at the locations of the trials.
Speaker 1: Wherever Catholicism had a strong monopoly, they didn't burn many
Speaker 1: witches at all. Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, really unburning, Germany,
Speaker 1: France firetimes. The other thing these trials were trying to prove,
Speaker 1: of course, was like, hey, we can fuck you up,
Speaker 1: you know, like we're good at exerting power. You should
Speaker 1: probably stick with us. People wanted to accuse the other
Speaker 1: side of heresy and witchcraft as much as possible. At first,
Speaker 1: the Church had tried to brand luther a heretic, but
Speaker 1: so many rulers had converted to Lutheranism that the Church
Speaker 1: couldn't touch it. The monopoly was broken. Inquisitors weren't allowed
Speaker 1: into Lutheran lands. Eventually, in order to like make peace,
Speaker 1: in fifteen fifty five, the Holy Roman Empire decriminalized Lutheranism
Speaker 1: to bring peace to the land. This wasn't freedom of
Speaker 1: religion for people, as far as I can tell, but
Speaker 1: just for various princes to determine what religion everyone in
Speaker 1: their land had to be, so like freedom of religion
Speaker 1: for princes. Since the Catholic Church couldn't crush Lutherism, they
Speaker 1: had to try other things to exert their dominance, like
Speaker 1: you know, witch trials. The competition between the two faiths
Speaker 1: went beyond who can burn the most people alive. Of course,
Speaker 1: both rushed to build schools. Protestants were like ten percent
Speaker 1: off the top of the tithe is cheaper than Catholicism,
Speaker 1: all of its indulgences and weird, expensive things. And Catholics
Speaker 1: were like, you like saints, We'll give you more saints,
Speaker 1: all the saints you can pray to. The Catholics were like,
Speaker 1: the Protestants are heretics. The Protestants were like, the Catholics
Speaker 1: themselves are witches. Look at their weird rituals transubstantiation. Really
Speaker 1: you think that bread literally turns to flesh in your stomach.
Speaker 1: So both sides burn people and burn people. Luther himself
Speaker 1: advocated burning witches. A fifteen thirty two law declared witchcraft
Speaker 1: a crime in Germany, punishable by burning at the stake
Speaker 1: if it hurts someone. By fifteen seventy two, Augustus of
Speaker 1: Saxony said burn every witch, even for fortune telling. On
Speaker 1: both sides, a ton of clergy were like, hey, can
Speaker 1: we can we not? What the hell are we doing?
Speaker 1: Why are we burning people? This seems bad, but it
Speaker 1: took centuries for those voices to be heard. This pissing
Speaker 1: match between the Catholics and the Protestants is far and
Speaker 1: away the most convincing hypothesis to me. But of course
Speaker 1: Federici makes some interesting points about how it ties into
Speaker 1: the rise of capitalism and the war on women and
Speaker 1: the war on everything outside the new social order. There
Speaker 1: are a few other hypotheses floating around as well, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure they're sometimes out accurate and had some influence.
Speaker 1: Some people blame bad weather. There was a mini ice
Speaker 1: age at the time and people were suffering, and some
Speaker 1: of those people thought that witches could control the weather.
Speaker 1: Imagine something so silly as that. That's my reference to
Speaker 1: the fact that currently there's people who claim that either
Speaker 1: the Democrats or the Jews are like controlling the weather
Speaker 1: because nothing has changed, which is bad because this all
Speaker 1: led to hundreds of years of burning people alive. Anyway,
Speaker 1: statistical analysis shows there's no correlation between bad weather and
Speaker 1: witch trials. There is some correlation between economic downturns and
Speaker 1: witch hunting, which makes sense the popular clamor goes up
Speaker 1: when wages go down. Sure, a few people have tried
Speaker 1: to suggest why Ireland didn't have many witch trials. NIVEH. Boyce,
Speaker 1: writing for The Irish Examiner, suggests that this is because
Speaker 1: Ireland had pretty cozy feelings about quote so called witchcraft
Speaker 1: practices at the time, and no one was mad at
Speaker 1: anyone for believing in fairy wells or anything. Sylvia Federici
Speaker 1: would say it was because Ireland still had a strong
Speaker 1: communal economy, with collective land ownership and strong informal and
Speaker 1: familial social safety nets in place. I also think you
Speaker 1: could say something about how Ireland was during the early
Speaker 1: modern period, a colonized place, more than part of Europe proper,
Speaker 1: at least economically. But I admit, as much as I
Speaker 1: want to believe that Ireland is just cool and good,
Speaker 1: the most likely reason is that it was firmly Catholic.
Speaker 1: No need to burn any witches anywhere but the Swing
Speaker 1: States anyway, Hopefully none of that seems on the nose.
Speaker 1: About the future you're listening to this in where whatever.
Speaker 1: If you're listening to as like five years from now,
Speaker 1: this will seem quaint. But how are the camps that
Speaker 1: you're stuck in? Or maybe we've created a socialist utopia
Speaker 1: or something else.
Speaker 2: Who knows.
Speaker 1: No one knows the future but you in the future.
Speaker 1: That's the song that I always close this pod, asked with, Oh,
Speaker 1: maybe I should have guests more often, otherwise I'll just
Speaker 1: keep singing to you all. No one wants that. But
Speaker 1: what you do want are my plugs, which is that.
Speaker 1: I have another podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying,
Speaker 1: comes out every Friday and is put out by anarchist
Speaker 1: publishing collective I'm part of called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness,
Speaker 1: and Live Like the World Is Dying is about individual
Speaker 1: and community preparedness. I have a bunch of co hosts
Speaker 1: and they've been doing most of the work while I'm
Speaker 1: on tour. Well they do a lot of yeah, they
Speaker 1: do probably most of the work.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: I'm just one of the hosts. But you can listen
Speaker 1: to me talking about making go bags and getting ready
Speaker 1: for bad stuff because for some reason, I think that
Speaker 1: that's important. Anyway, to go just poison people, know, go
Speaker 1: live your best life.
Speaker 2: I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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Speaker 1: your podcasts.