A Vindication of the Rights of Witches
The Witch – an archetypal villainess in fairy tales told to children before bed, to scare them; warn them of the evil that exists. It’s only necessary, Hansel and Gretel meet their fates in a boiling pot of a greedy witch in the woods, Sleeping Beauty is cursed by the evil fairy with malicious powers, Snow White is poisoned at the hands of an ugly, evil, old queen hungry for attention. And they all, in the end, will fall.
Because witches are evil, no?
No.
Malleus Maleficarum - The Hammer of Witches
Witches, witchcraft, and the likes go back to ancient times. Mesopotamian records show that people (usually women, big surprise) were being accused of using malevolent forces to do harm, one record found in the Library of Ashurbanipal states:
If a man’s head keeps on hurting him, slee[p …],
his dreams are terrifying, he is constan[tly frightened] in his sleep,
his knees are immobilized, his chest [is afflicted with] paralysis,
(and) his flesh is full of dampne[ss] all over,
that man is bewitched.
The development of witchcraft can be traced from the Babylonian times to its rampant uprise in portrayal in the classics – think Homer’s Odyssey with Circe, or Euripedes’ Medea – and then to the gradual progression into what witchcraft is perceived as today with the publication of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum.
This book, published in the late 1400s, ingrained into the minds of old, young, fool, and genius alike the characteristics of a witch and how to properly eliminate one. According to the book, witches can show attributes like having splotchy birthmarks, squeaky voices, or wrinkled faces and therefore should not only be suspected of being a witch, but prosecuted for it. Heaven forbid you spoke out as a woman, or dared to be loud and slightly annoying as a woman – only witches did that. The “tests” to prove the innocence of an accused witch included: weighing the accused against a Bible, being heavier (or in some cases, lighter) than the word of God proved a corruption of the soul; being thrown into water to see if they had Satan’s help by not drowning; “witness” testimonies, which in themselves were a whole other issue entirely. Notice a pattern?
Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals online: Maqlû, translations from Tzvi Abusch, The Magical Ceremony Maqlû: A Critical Edition (Ancient Magic and Divination 10, Brill: 2015), Accessed December 25, 2023, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cmawro/maqlu/
Broedel, Hans Peter (2003). The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719064418.
The signs of a witch are what is now understood and accepted as the traits of any non-pre-pubescent woman – wrinkles, birthmarks, shaky voices, confidence, conviction. Any woman that was, either voluntarily or involuntarily, unsubscribed to the norms of subservience was at risk of being labeled a witch. The prospect of a woman potentially holding power and confidence was a concept so inconceivable and threatening that any indication of a woman existing as a human and not a supplement to a man signaled witchcraft.
The tests to prove witchcraft, too, aimed to silence and subjugate women. The tests were said to have proved either divine intervention or a satanic collaboration, but they intentionally applied the laws of physics against the accused. It becomes abundantly clear that the accusers and prosecutors were aware of the falsehood behind the witch hunts, and used this skewed logic to further spread fear among the common people. The warnings against witchcraft and black magic in biblical scripture were further used as ignition to persecute women, with the Malleus Maleficarum including papal bulls and biblical citations as backing.
Prior to the Malleus being released, witches were not commonly linked to brooms or cats. The broom, a domestic object commonly used by women, became a phallic symbol when women placed them between their legs and rode off into the night sky. The idea is that women who had fallen to demonic and malevolent wills took the purity of a woman, colonized the powers of a man, and used it to invoke terror. As for cats, witches were often depicted with familiars and most were a black cat. There is, of course, the superstition that black cats are unlucky, but beyond that, cats are uncontrollable. Unlike dogs, sheep, cows, the cat has never been a willing subject to humans. Domesticated, yes. Obedient? Absolutely not. Witches would either have a cat companion or have the ability to turn into one, to reflect their disobedient, disruptive nature.
A similar analysis can be applied to the potions, cauldrons, hats, and witches’ preference to act at night. Potions and cauldrons are skewed versions of the daily womanly duties and appliances – cooking and pots. Pointy hats are thought to be aligned with witches due to antisemitism, though the sources are not absolute. What is known is that the Quaker women in America – a radical utopian group – wore similar pointy hats; the Quaker’s belief in gender equality was nothing if not a threat to patriarchy, so they must have heinous intent – like witches! Women were supervised in the day, with the eyes of not just men but fellow women on them at all times. The night, however, was the devil’s domain, where your eyes deceive you and ears fail you. And thus, the quintessential picture of the witch was born.
The Malleus Maleficarum maintained its title as second most best-selling book in Europe for two centuries, trailing behind only the Bible. Its contribution to the world of formal witch-hunts, the type that society recognizes as barbaric and sensational, is beyond description – it propagated the dehumanization of women in ways that most do not realize. Women, for centuries after the book and even now, hold the weight of the witch hunt on their shoulders.
A form of decree by the Catholic Church.
Daughter, Wife, Mother, and Witch
Throughout history and culture, women have been confined to characterizations. Young girls are Daughters, young women are Wives, and old women are Mothers – fall out of the norm and you are a Spinster, an Adulteress, an Old Maid, a Crazy Cat Lady. With the witch hunts, a new character was born – the Witch. The Witch was the woman that not only fell short of the ideals, she openly defied them.
It’s a tale as old as time; the role of a woman was always in subordination to someone or something. Her value is only as high as the superior grants, and a resistance to that threshold is, and always has been, seen akin to a toddler’s tantrum. Many a time well-meaning activists have advocated for women’s rights by preaching that the woman is someone’s daughter, sister, wife, mother. Is it not enough that she is a woman for her rights to be valid, to be warranted? Is conformity the price women have to pay to access their birthrights?
The Witch is subordinate to no one, and that reality led the people of the past to believe that certainly she is subordinate to the Devil, then. Older women were the bulk of the accused, or in other words, women had lived long enough to see through nonsense. Widows, spinstresses, old maids, midwives – women who knew something that men did not were, again, threats. Instead of, say, reading their Bibles a little deeper and “loving thy neighbor”, witch hunters grabbed their pointer fingers and put them to work.
We do not associate most outlying women with witchcraft and malevolence nowadays – but the witch hunt still exists because the Witches still exist. We still shame women for choosing paths that are unconventional. We still discourage women from existing as their own entities and not thumbtacks for the achievements of men. We have not yet accepted that the woman is, after everything, a human – capable of excellence and extreme evils alike. If a woman truly is at her core a bad person – who is to say she has been possessed? We have seen many evil men, why can there not be an evil woman? The unorthodox woman, the unfortunate woman, and the genuinely evil woman are all the Witches in our society. And we hunt them all, by the hour.
To make things absolutely clear: there is nothing wrong with finding pride in one’s role as a daughter, sister, mother, wife. In fact, it should be encouraged – what should not be encouraged is the reduction of a woman’s existence to the contributions she makes for other people. Selfishness is a human trait; let the Woman experience it, too. Let the Woman be one for her own, exist as a human before a body or an organ. Let her learn how to feed herself before she creates life, love, or laughter. Then, and only then, will her life, love, and laughter reach their fullest extent.
Witch; Crone; Hag
Witches are to wizards, as male is to female. But Merlin does not exactly seem like the type to brew potions in a cauldron and feed you a poisoned apple, does he? No, he is the wise sage a hero goes to defeat his obstacles, perhaps a meddling witch on the path. Wizards have wands and long beards and kind eyes, but witches have warts, crooked noses, and a rotten heart. The old man is wise and the old woman is bitter; the old man is experienced and the old woman no longer has a purpose, and therefore should no longer have a voice. And if she has one anyway? You guessed it, she’s a witch.
There is a strong link between the age of a woman and her perceived value in society. The recent massive spike in anti-aging efforts does not help with the stigmas either. A wrinkle on a woman is not seen as a sign of life (despite everything) but as a sign that she has let herself go. The same is seldom said for men. Companies market niacinamides and retinols, moisturizers and snail mucin serums, and then dust the invisible dirt off their laps when women are ridiculed for being vain and caring too much about their looks. Women are punished for existing; the longer they do, the heavier the weight on their backs.
Old women are stripped of their humanity simply because their bodies cannot reproduce any more. The value of fertility is one that has stood the test of time, but seemingly only for women. Studies have shown that the health of a man plays a great role in the health of a baby, yet infertility, miscarriages, stillbirths, SIDS, and the likes are almost always blamed on the mother. The “biological clock” argument applies only to women, and the childless woman is 100% missing out and will die lonely and miserable. A woman’s womb is more valued than her livelihood; menopause marks the point where a woman ceases to be seen as worthy of care.
When these women live for themselves, they become modern-day witches. Their confidence and experience scares those that want to prove to little girls that their time is limited. Consumerism and cash-grabs, products that guarantee to get rid of all cellulite, wrinkles, pores, stretchmarks, would tank in profits if women believed that having flaws, actually aging, was okay. The elderly women are not only silenced, they are also led to believe that beauty is only in smooth skin and minimal body fat percentages. From life to death, girls and women are made to chase after beauty. And if they do not, or fail to be beautiful, they are witches.
We may not be weighing them against a Bible or dumping them into pools, but we weigh women against their teenage selves and keep them submerged in an ocean of insecurities. We do not let women age; we do not let women live, or at least do so peacefully. It is easy to think that this does not concern us – but you and I will become witches, crones, and hags one day. And on that fateful day, the hunt will begin.
“But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!”
– Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Fantastically written!!