Historian Ronald Hutton has produced a brilliant history of witchcraft. Elisabeth Krohn, editor of Sabat magazine, went to meet him

In his book The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Ronald Hutton, who is Professor of History at Bristol University, traces the history of witchcraft from the ancient world to the witch trials of the 17th century.

The fruit of 20 years of study, The Witch not only delves deeply into the origins of witchcraft, it also explores why we are afraid of witches. I personally have a fascination with witches and in 2016 started a witch-themed magazine called Sabat. To me, the modern witch is a glamorous figure who oozes dark, powerful femininity. Independent, wise and witty; she combines the allure of the femme fatale with the cunning of the crone. I love her for her mystery. But who was the real witch?

Professor Hutton distinguishes sharply between this modern idea of the witch, the so-called “good” or “white” witches, and the real witches of old, the ones discussed in the book, who were objects of fear and were believed to cause harm by mystical means. Witches, real or perceived, are still persecuted in many parts of the world today, and until fairly recently, were also being prosecuted here in the UK.

This makes The Witch a key document for understanding not only where the witch originated, but also what triggers the fear and loathing of witches and how witch-hunts can be eradicated. Professor Hutton’s book caused a profound shift in my perspective. It made me realise that my modern witch was just that, quite modern, and that trends have always defined how we perceive the witch figure.

On a sweltering June day in Bristol, I sat down with the Professor to ask him my burning questions on the real historical witch: why people were so afraid of them; and the witch as a feminist icon.

Elisabeth Krohn: What drew you to explore the witch as a subject in the first place?

Ronald Hutton: It’s just romanticism really. I’ve been interested in images of witches, rather than witchcraft, since I was in my teens. There is always a shiver and a glamour that hangs around the figure of the witch. Not least because it is one of the very few images traditional European culture has left to us of independent female power.

EK: What does the word witch mean to you?

RH: There are four totally different definitions. The oldest is that a witch is some- body who uses magic to harm others. There is also an equally old definition which is used more by highbrow people, and often people who didn’t really believe in magic – that a witch is anybody who uses magic, for any purpose. There are two modern definitions and both first appeared in the 19th century: one as a witch as a practitioner of a surviving pagan religion, the other as an independent feisty lady being persecuted by patriarchy.

EK: How important do you think it is to draw parallels between the old and the new witch?

RH: There is a real problem because they are not compatible. They produce some contrasting reactions even in the present day. To those who use the word “witch” for somebody who uses bad magic, she is unequivocally a figure of fear. She, sometimes he, is there to hurt other people, sometimes in alliance with evil cosmic powers, and is a real danger to individuals in the community. Whereas in the modern spiritual sense the witch is a celebration of independent womanhood, a celebration of the powers of nature and their indwelling divinity and a celebration of an ethic of responsibility towards others and the planet. So they don’t really connect at all. EK: So the modern image of the witch is of a woman who fights patriarchy and who embraces her own sexuality – whereas the witch in your book seems more like a sad figure, or a random person accused of witchcraft.

RH: As I explain with an apology at the opening of this book, I’m only taking the word “witch” in one sense, which is the negative and destructive sense – because what I was interested in was why people fear witchcraft and hunt witches. So what my book is about ultimately is a contribution to ending witch-hunts in the world, and removing the fear of witchcraft. To do that I need to show how widespread witch-hunting is on the planet, and how dangerous it is in the present as in the past. And then to look at how ancient the practice is in Europe and how and why there was a bloodbath at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern period, when Christians hunted witches on a large scale.

EK: What do you think that societies which fear the witch are afraid of?

RH: Really I think it’s a misunderstanding of how magic works. There is no doubt that the effect of belief on the human body is so tremendous that if people believe they have been hexed to death, they often die. They only need to have one weakness in a vital organ which isn’t suspected, and which left to itself wouldn’t do any damage, to be hit by a tidal wave of adrenaline and, often assisted by being starved of sleep and food, it will cave in and they will die. People can be frightened to death. The effect only works if you believe in the curse – if you don’t, you’re totally safe. So by educating people that they actually have a natural defence mechanism against all bewitchment, you remove the need to go after the person you think has bewitched you.

EK: Do you think that a fear of female sexuality is behind a lot of witch-hunts? Or do you think that’s a modern idea?

RH: I don’t think that a fear of female sexuality or female power as such lay behind the witch-hunts of the 15th to the 18th centuries. You do get some rather demented clerical writers, churchmen, who are over-quoted, worst of “Witch Swimming”, a pracise carried out on Mary Sutton in 1613 all Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum of 1487, who was plainly terrified of sex. But they are quite rare. Really people who are chosen as witches in the early modern hunts tend not to be powerful independent women – they are women who don’t get on with their neighbours. Sometimes men. They are people who are cantankerous, edgy, curse a lot, and make people feel uncomfortable. The most important thing is that the root of the witch-hunting is not an excuse for enforcing patriarchy – it’s a real fear of magic. Mostly people go after witches when their children start dying. The death of a child is something that really gets emotions going in people to a point almost beyond anything else.

EK: Do you think we’ve gained anything positive from the figure of the witch from the witch-hunts in Europe?

RH: The figure of the witch has got positive aspects. I’m writing an essay on the way the witch figure was imagined in British fiction between 1800 and 1940. She can be the ultimate terror, the ultimate menace or the ultimate victim. Again, her role as an image of female liberation, which really comes into its own in 1920s, is enormous. From quite early on, too, the witch can be seen as a heroine. People telling folk tales often exult if an old woman is insulted or bullied by a wealthy man and then hexes him. People hearing that tale can join the sense of social tension and class revenge on an oppressor getting his comeuppance.

EK: Do you think she’s a necessary outsider, a necessary archetype in any society?

RH: No, because there are societies in all parts of the world which have never believed in witches. That’s simply because whenever uncanny misfortune happens to people, they blame somebody or something else. Usually it’s either ghosts or angry ancestors, or else it’s land spirits, fairies. In large parts of the world – Siberia is the biggest – land spirits are feared so much that they get blamed rather than humans.

EK: You mention the evil eye as well …

RH: Yes, there is the belief in lots of parts of the world, especially Southern Europe and the Middle East, in the involuntary power of people to hex others because they’re born with a bad magic in their eyes. In certain moods – and looking in certain ways – they curse people without meaning to. This is not voluntary and the people concerned can be avoided. They are feared but not actually punished for it because they don’t mean it.

EK: You talk about popular culture in the Middle Ages and its view of the witch.

RH: For decades historians have recognised the existence and the importance of the creativity of popular culture and seen it as engaging in dialogue with learned culture. Medieval and early modern people, who were in their outward faith Christian, were quite capable of developing, discovering, imagining and re-encountering new types of being that bore no relation whatsoever to Christian mythology. I’m thinking here of the “faerie queen” in late medieval and early modern British culture. I’m thinking of the super- natural woman who leads a retinue of spirits and lucky people across the sky at night and feasts in people’s houses and generally has a good time. And although she isn’t actually in my book, because she’s not directly witch-related, I’m interested in the figure of the Cailleach, this enormously powerful female land spirit from Scottish and Irish Gaelic culture. The amazing capacity of so-called Christians at a local level to keep generating these figures without any input from the social elites really is impressive.

EK: Do you think there is a resurgence in the interest in witchcraft right now?

RH: Oh my goodness yes! It’s got three routes really. The first is the feminist input with the witch as a great symbol of female empowerment. The second is the environmental input, the sense that witches, if only because they met for their gatherings in wild natural places, are closer to nature and understand its spirits. Also traditionally magicians talked to fairies and learned secrets from them and fairies can look very much like land spirits. That’s the ecological connection. Finally, the witch is somebody who makes their own life and their own choices, who does not take commands from the divine. Put that together and it will converge on the witch. And they are all three immensely powerful impulses in the present day.

EK: Do you think a feminisation of culture allows for a greater openness to low magic, even “old wives’ tales” and magic associated with women?

RH: I think it certainly does. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is the growth in respect for alternative medicine, therapies of all kinds; that plugs right into something which folk magicians have always been very good at as part of their services. There is a boom in hypnotherapy, aromatherapy, colour healing and all forms of divination. All these draw on traditional practices of magicians and all of them have an obvious role in the modern world – and they are growing. The second reason is that with the word “witch” being so contested, people in the present day – quite understandably – are excited by the term “witch” but don’t want in the least to identify with or be identified with workers of harmful magic. They employ the term “witch” as it often has been employed for magicians of any kind. We call them “folk” or “popular magicians”. I tend to avoid those words because “folk” and “popular” are such hazy words and so controversial among scholars. I use the word “service magician” for those who charge fees or take gifts for providing magical services. EK: My generation, the millennials, talk a lot about victim culture, being the victim of the system. And people who might otherwise feel victimised can feel like empowered outsiders through the idea of the witch. We talked a little bit about the witch as a victim and as the ultimate evil, but do you think the witch could also be a tool to heal ourselves and our society?

RH: I think these two images of the witch as either evil or as a healer and wise woman have been running alongside each other for thousands of years. Ordinary people who believed in magic and used it, tend to reserve the term “witch” for destructive magic. Scholars and churchmen tended to use the term “witch” for people employing any magic. But in the 18th and 19th century the witch got redeemed and given positive qualities when applied to magic. It really wasn’t until the 20th century that educated people, or even professional writers – we’re talking poets or novelists, not scholars – would refer positively to wise folk and cunning folk and “good witches”. When you read the novels and poetry of the 18th and 19th century, local magicians are regarded as charlatans and frauds or manipulators or deluded. They don’t start looking good, looking positive until around 1900 and they’ve kept on looking better ever since. As for empowerment, if we go back to the influence of the women’s’ writing, and the 1840s and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the feisty young woman Cathy Linton uses the belief in witchcraft on the obnoxious male servant of the house in which she is trapped in order to gain power over him, to cow him and stop him being rude to her. And it works! So there, without actually regarding the witch figure as a heroine, is a really early example of the way in which the witch could open a door for womanhood to gain its own space.

EK: Do you think the people persecuting witches actually believed in witchcraft?

RH: A vast majority of them did. The victims are never selected by the judges or by the elite – they are denounced by their neighbours, are terrified of them or furious because they believe they have already suffered from them. These accused are then presented to the judges and what happens then depends on the court system and the mindset of the judges. If you’re accused of being a witch most who are either in Tudor or Stuart England you have a 75 or 80 per cent chance of being found not guilty. You’re tried by professional judges who won’t know you personally and the jury will be directed by the judge, will be drawn from all over your county and won’t know you either. All you need to do is keep your nerve, deny the charges, tell a plausible story and you’re fine. But cross the border to Scotland – people suspected of witchcraft there were arrested by their neighbours and tortured into confessing. The confessions were sent up to government which gave them the right to put them to death. That is why Scotland, which has one fifth of the population of England, has an intensity of witch-hunting that is ten times as bad.

EK: What role did the Reformation play in all of this? In my experience, Catholicism seems to have allowed for a lot more “hiding of occultism”?

RH: Certainly Protestantism has less in common with paganism. Catholicism is hugely intolerant and draws boundaries with vicious determination in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, but you’re right that it’s easier to smuggle paganism and occultism into a Catholic framework because it’s got the saints which add a touch a polytheism. Catholics would remind us sharply that saints are not deities, but in functional terms they can look a lot like them. Catholicism endows material objects with spiritual powers – holy water, holy earth, blessed candles and of course the consecrated host. Protestantism sweeps that out. Catholicism is a more magical religion in the eyes of Protestants, than Protestantism. Although Catholicism has always tried to be clear in its own mind of the distinction between what it does – which is religion – and what people do outside the Church – which is magic and shouldn’t happen.

EK: Do you think that it’s just coincidence that the myths of the Mediterranean Flying Ladies of the Night and the Germanic cannibal witch are women?

RH: There is a great double effect going on in traditional European and Middle- Eastern societies – by traditional, I mean since history begins. These societies are traditionally dominated by men and so a lot of the demon figures tend to be feminine. But also women are concerned with occupations like child-rearing and healing which are literally vital to people. Women are often seen as the nurturers and providers and guardians so there’s this kind of anti-woman figure in the imagination of both women and men, the demoness. Two quite different forms of emotional response actually converge on the same point.

EK: Do you believe in magic?

RH: To the extent that – if people really believe that magic can help them, it will. I’ve studied charmers who have spells that they recite to deal with particular problems like haemorrhaging or warts or skin rashes or asthma. What all these complaints have in common is that they respond very well to the central nervous system and one’s overall health. If someone has total faith in the charmer, then their central nervous system relaxes completely and they are on the way to be cured. That is a case where what people often call magic has an identifiable medical and scientific outcome. In terms of people’s luck, I would suggest that if they feel more confident in what they are doing or are forced by a ritual or a spell to think harder about what they are doing, they are more likely to succeed. Leaving aside anything you might call “magical cause and effect” there is an enormous amount going for magic that makes it a wonderful mechanism.

Ronald Hutton is Professor of History at Bristol University. He is an expert on late medieval and early modern England and paganism. His books include The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Stations of the Sun, The Triumph of the Moon, A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, and Witches, Druids and King Arthur. Specialising in witchcraft and social media, Elisabeth Krohn is the founder and editor-in-chief at Sabat magazine. Born in Norway, she moved to London in 2010 and graduated from London College of Fashion in 2016 with an MA in Fashion Journalism. She launched ‘The Maiden Issue’ of Sabat in March 2016. Elisabeth’s surname has nothing to do with witches and is actually a German nickname for a tall, thin person with long legs.

This article is from Idler #56, September-October 2017.

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