Who Burned the Witches?
The stench of their burning is with us yet. The stakes and gibbets where witches perished by the tens of thousands during Earl Modern times still stand in popular imagination. For historians, the Great European Witch-Hunt has been an ongoing controversy, one easily contorted to suit the prejudices of every age.
Since the Enlightenment, rationalists have liked to cite witch-burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and religious (usually Catholic) bigotry run amok. Leftists today still denounce it as a cynical plot by the strong against the weak. Writing history that way was simple: researchers catalogued horrors, disparaged religion (or at least someone else’s religion), and celebrated the triumph of science and liberal government. The history of witchcraft seemed a settled issue in 1969 when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his classic essay, “The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”
But since the 1970s, new voices clamored to reopen the question. Adherents of the emerging Neo-pagan movement claimed victims of the witch-hunt as their martyred forebears. They mourned a “Pagan Holocaust” of nine million secret nature-worshippers exterminated centuries ago by bigoted Christians. Gerald Gardner, founder of modern Wicca, had called the era of persecution “the burning times.” Although his reading of history, as well as his history of Wicca itself, has been soundly debunked, Pagan proponents Margot Adler and Starhawk (née Miriam Simos) kept preaching Gardner’s teachings because “invented history is satisfying myth.” (Current Pagan leaders acknowledge that Gardner was factually wrong.)
Nine million women burned is a figure conveniently larger than the Jewish Shoah, but it has no basis in reality. The figure originated with an eighteenth-century anticlerical German lawyer who extrapolated the toll in one city to all of Europe, as if witch trials happened everywhere. Pioneer American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage cited this number in her book Woman, Church, and the State (1893) whence it became embedded in radical feminist consciousness. Anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin referred to mass “gynecide.” Second-wave feminists saw witches as the natural enemy of patriarchy–Mary Daly suggested women use “witch” as a liberating label–and rallied around them as Old Leftists did around the leaders of the Spanish Republic. For such feminists as for Pagans, playing the victimization card strengthens solidarity.
Meanwhile, those of a Green persuasion, a group overlapping with Pagans and radical feminists, charge that suppressing witchcraft deprived medieval people of alternative medicine and estranged them from ancient Earth wisdom. In their 1973 book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, feminist and environmentalist writers Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English argued that witches were actually midwives targeted by their rivals—male physicians. Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant blamed patriarchal science for “the death of Nature” in her 1990 book of that title.
