November 6, 2024 • 34 mins
Margaret finishes telling you about the history of European witchcraft and the witch trials and how it all came down to a contest between Catholics and Protestants to see who could murder the most people.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool People who
did cool stuff. I'm your host, Marcare Kildrey, and every
week I cover people being cool, except when I have
special episodes like today, where instead I cover things I
think are cool, and I think witches are cool or
at least interesting. The actual definition of witches I came
(00:24):
up with earlier, where you like, do magic to hurt
people or whatever, Like, I don't know, that's like not
actually particularly cool. That's like saying like violence is cool,
Like violence is sometimes useful or necessary, but overall it's
like nothing to be proud of, right, because it's mostly
done in bad ways. So I guess that's actually how
I probably feel about what would definitionally be understood is witchcraft,
(00:46):
but the concept of witches as we currently talk about
them super cool. Except this episode isn't really about the
current version of witches. It's more about how we got there,
and specifically how the concept of the witch was developed
by a bunch of misogynists and church people both Protestant
(01:11):
and Catholic, in order to keep power relations going. And
that's bad, but reclaimed stuff is good. It seems obvious
that I think that I'm a punk punk is an
example of a reclaimed slur so, which is an example
of a reclaimed category of crime that has now become
(01:32):
an identity for people. Anyway, this is part two. If
you go back to part one, you'll hear me talk
about how which is kind of weren't real except service
magicians were and some of them did witchcraft, so actually,
which is kind of were real. Also, no one knows,
but we're going to talk about the inquisition. There's a
(01:54):
money python joke I could do here, but I'm not
going to. It's a leave it as an exercise for
the audience too. Imagine the money python joke. Also, this
is a solo episode. You probably figured that out by now.
There's no Sophie, there's no guest. There's a Rory.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Hi. Rory.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Rory is our audio engineer. Anyway, where were we The
Hammer of Witches, which is a pretty.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's a pretty cool name for like real evil book.
And it's like, like evil is cool and spooky. This
is like evil evil. This is like, you know, uh,
exercising institutional power to destroy people. That this is like
the biggest most dangerous in cell book ever written, which
is kind of impressive. Okay, so the story of the
(02:41):
Hammer of Witches. That's not the entire episode, it's going
to be part of it. There was this asshole guy
named Heinrich Kramer. He joined the Dominican Order, and soon
enough he's an inquisitor. This is like, uh, you know,
fourteen hundreds. He shows up in Germany and is like, hello,
I am an inquisitor and I'm specifically mad about witches
because I hate women. And local authorities are like, no,
(03:04):
we don't really need you. Fuck off, which is, after all,
worn a big deal, nothing to get inquisitioning about. So
our guy, Heinrich, He's like, all right, fine, I'll go
to Skydad's main man, the Pope, and get his permission
to do some fucking witch hunting. And you know, earlier
I was like talking about all these popes that were like,
witches aren't real. There's a problem with investing absolute power
(03:26):
into specific individuals. It's the monarchy problem. And besides the
moral problem, there's the specific problem of well, if you
have a different guy, then he might have a different
point of view and he might have a bad take,
and then all of a sudden, the bad take is
the rules. So in fourteen eighty four, Pope Innocent to
(03:47):
the eighth proves his own name to not have been
much of a nominative deterministic thing. Because he is not
so innocent. He writes a papal bull which is basically
a decree, because in Catholicism they just rename everything, And
this decree says that witchcraft counts as heresy. It says, quote,
many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation
(04:11):
and strain from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils,
incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and
other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have
slain infants. Yet in the mother's womb, as also the
offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth,
(04:33):
the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees,
nay men and women, beasts of burthen herd beasts, as
well as animals of other kinds, vineyards orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat,
and all other cereals. This is all one sentence. I
don't even I'm not even gonna quote the entire sentence.
There's a lot of anywhere you might think there's a period,
(04:54):
there's a semicolon. These wretches, furthermore, afflict and torment men
and women, beasts of burthen herd, beasts as well as
animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and
sore diseases both internal and external. They hinder men from
performing the sexual act and women from conceiving. That's like
(05:15):
only half the sentence. That's yeah. Anyway, So the papal
bull is like, I'm afraid of them witches. They make
men impotent, and they also do all of these other things.
And Okay, one of the things that's horrible about talking
about all this like witchcraft stuff and this witch trial stuff.
So like we're really seeing the return to this. Honestly,
(05:35):
like the evangelical embrace of the pro life thing really
has this vibe of like they're all a bunch of
baby murderers, and I don't know, there's gonna be some
other fun comparisons coming up later about suddenly people believing
in real wild stuff, especially because the Protestants, once they
(05:57):
come on the scene, they're gonna like specifically believe Eve
they're way more that. Yes, of course sex is bad,
but it's still like, you got to be having it,
so therefore you've got to be married, and you can
only be married in ways that are procreative.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Anyway, I've read in a couple places, but like anecdotal sources,
that the clergy was really mad about this particular degree
because they were like, no, we have a long standing
tradition of not giving a shit about witches, and then
here's this pope and isent the eighth being like blah
blah blah, witches this and that, and they're like, that's bullshit,
(06:33):
none of that's real. But all the clergy didn't stop
this from influencing the Pope's pet misogynist murderer, the aforementioned inquisitor,
Heinrich Kramer. Kramer went on to kill fifty people over
the next five years, after he'd been given permission specifically
to do so by the Pope. Why did he so
desperately want to hunt witches, Well, it sounds like it
(06:55):
was because he was low key stalking this local woman,
Helena Schubern. He was obsessed with her, and she didn't
like him. She didn't go to church, perhaps because she
was avoiding him, or maybe she just didn't like going
to church. One day, she was supposedly walking past Kramer
and spat and said, fie on you, you bad monk. May
the falling evil take you, which is a pretty sick
(07:17):
like I don't want the falling evil to take me.
That sounds scary, Like what even is that? Is it
just the slow embrace of darkness? Who knows? Anyway, maybe
maybe other people know.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I don't know what the falling evil is. It just
sounds cool and spooky.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
However, it's not a good idea to say this to inquisitors.
She was put on trial for witchcraft. She was acquitted.
Kramer got so mad about it that he invented the
modern witch hunt. The local bishop was like, you are
senile and crazy, get out of here. And this is
presumably when he went to the Pope for permission to
murder people. But I've like read the timeline in different ways,
(07:52):
so I wasn't exactly sure how to put it together.
And so then he's like murdering people and he's like, hell, yeah,
this is the rules. I'm in cel murder man. He
wrote the most influential book on witch hunting, even though
it actually strayed. This is going to shock you. It
actually strayed from most of the accepted inquisitorial material, and
the Catholic Church would soon disavow this book. This book
(08:15):
is The Hammer of Witches, and it influenced secular courts,
but not religious courts by and large, So this like
wasn't being used by the Church inquisition. This was being
used by local secular courts. That book, The Hammer of Witches,
is a misogynistic tone about why women are uniquely weakned
evil and that they should be tortured and burned at
(08:36):
the stake. It's bad. It presents the idea that witchcraft
is heretical, which is actually a secular crime at the time,
so this is why secular courts are doing their witch hunting.
It also contains some pretty elaborate forgery. It claims that
a respective theological institution supported it, and like even has
like all the signatures and then like signatures of notaries
and things like that on it. But it's almost certainly
(08:58):
all a forgery. It seems as though everyone at that
institution hated this book. It's possible that the book was
banned after three years by the church in fourteen ninety,
but this is disputed. It seems like people believed it
was banned.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
But the I don't know whatever.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I'm not going to get into the weird details about
the list of banned books and when they were published.
But Kramer himself was condemned in fourteen ninety for doing
shit unethically and illegally, and from then on, as best
as I can tell, he wasn't personally allowed to murder
people anymore. His book, though, continued to go through dozens
of editions, leading to uncountable more deaths. Eventually, the book
(09:37):
pretended had a second author, basically like one of the
printings they were like, it's by two people, like a
respective theologian's name was added to it, even though we
probably didn't approve of it. The Hammer of Witches says
quote the witches deserve the heaviest punishment above all the
criminals in the world. It was obsessed with the sex
(09:58):
lives of evil women. Sexuality is the literal basis of witchcraft,
according to this book, and the devil fucks power into people.
If you don't fuck the devil, you don't get as
cool magic powers In the book, Kramer writes, the devil
has power over those who follow their lusts. As for
why women are particularly prone to witchcraft, it's because women
(10:19):
are more carnal. Of course, we also have bad memories,
which is why we're undisciplined and impulsive. We're vain, our
voice is a siren song, and we ruin men. He writes,
woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch,
and deadly to keep. And all witchcraft comes from carnal lusts,
(10:42):
which in women are insatiable. Oh and also, plus, Jesus
was a boy, so boys are clearly more holy. Yeah,
obviously hasn't heard of my home. Jesus is a transman theory,
although you know, maybe he's just being trans inclusive. Jesus
is a transman theory, being that, well, if you don't
have an earthly father, you have xx chromosomes. Anyway, this
(11:05):
is not necessarily always true, but whatever this is, go
with it. So, according to Kramer, witches meet the devil
at the witch's sabbath, swear an oath to him, and
make an ointment from dead baptized babies. Earlier works on
these sabbaths were a bit more pornographic describing how people
would kiss Satan on the asshole and such, and the
(11:26):
Sabbath was more of a lustful orgy in the earlier books,
But in The Hammer of Witches, neither the witches nor
the devil actually enjoy the sex. It's just a solemn
duty in the name of evil. Like lie back and
think of Satan. But after her initiation into evil, the
witch likes fucking lots of people, probably everyone but Kramer.
This whole book is so so incel coded. Just looking
(11:49):
at an impure woman can corrupt a man, since eyes
are the mirror of the soul. Also, only the witches
can see the devil during these ceremonies, and observers see
only the women lying on their backs orgasamine, which makes
me wonder if people weren't just like watching women masturbating
in the forest or whatever, which seems like a perfectly
fine and healthy pastime. Get together with your you know,
(12:10):
gal pals, and go masturbating the woods. The sexual powers
of witches are endless. They can cause lust in men,
They can destroy relationships. They can turn dicks into other
things or steal them outright. They can make a man
no longer attracted to a given woman. They can also
cause impotence or sterility. Some witches would collect dicks and
(12:32):
keep them in a bird's nest where they lived off
of corn and oats, like they were little baby bird dicks.
And according to this book, all accused witches are guilty,
and the ones who don't confess are damned. The ones
who do confess are you know, saved by being burned alive.
It's real good, much like the good that comes from
(12:56):
giving all of your money to the people who gave
us money. That's what you should do. You totally shouldn't
either subscribe to cooler zone media and therefore not have ads,
or just press the forward fifteen seconds but in like
four or five times.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
You probably know how many times to put it. Here's
the ads and we're back.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
So this book is bad, but also its impact on
the witch trials has been overstated. Like I mentioned before,
interest in the witch trials really kicked off during the
nineteen seventies or so, and there wasn't as much research
available back then. The Hammer of Witches was likely the
only tone available in print in English at the time,
and so people read it and were like, oh, the
(13:44):
witch hunts were pretty much just misogyny. But this book
didn't really cause the witch trials? So what caused the
witch trials? There are a bunch of different hypotheses. Most
of them are wrong. I'm going to talk about one
of the more can convincing ones for a moment before
I get to the one that I find most convincing.
This next one I don't think is like wrong. It's
(14:05):
just we's wrong in some ways. But whatever, it has
a lot of good truth in it. It's worth understanding.
A Marxist feminist named Sylvia Federici wrote what is in
my Circles the single most important book about witches and
the witch Trials. It's called Caliban and the Witch. It
covers a reasonably wide range of topics, but the core
(14:26):
of its argument, as I understand it, is this the
witch trials represent the patriarchal oppression of women, the excizing
of women from the healing arts like you've got the
good learned doctors who are men and who went to
man only school, and in the early modern era, they
become the only acceptable form of healing, so more organic
and folk practices were being shoved out and criminalized. Federici
(14:50):
ties this idea into the idea of primitive accumulation. This
is a concept in Marxism that, while I'm not a Marxist,
I think is worth understanding because I overall think that
Marx had incredibly important contributions to the study of economics.
Even if I disagree with whatever. You don't need to
know why disagree with Marx. Just listen to like half
(15:10):
the episodes I do. Primitive accumulation might be better translated
these days as original accumulation, because the word primitive has
different connotations than it did when the idea was coined.
It originally kind of meant like original, like oh, this
is the first version of this. The primitive form of
it just means the original form of it. It's not
like the accumulation from primitive people, although that happens. By
(15:35):
the reason that it sounds confusing this because we'll get
to it. Primitive accumulation. Basically, wealth has to come from somewhere,
right in Marxist economic theory simplified here the labor theory
of value. Wealth comes from the labor of the working class.
But what about the raw materials? Those are gathered through
primitive accumulation, which is to say, the extraction of value
(15:56):
from the natural world. Colonialism does this right, show up
somewhere and cut down all their trees and send them
off to England and suddenly have extracted all the value
from Ireland. This is the thing that comes before capitalism.
Marx came up with the idea of primitive accumulation to
counteract the Adam Smith pro capitalist idea that what started
capitalism was that the industrious worker eventually built up more
(16:19):
value than the lazy worker did, and so this is
how the lazy worker ended up a worker and the
other guy ended up an owner. Marx was like, no,
it was because the proto capitalist just like robed the
shit out of everything and everyone, or to quote him
directly from capital and of course he's going to use
outdated racial terminology here. The discovery of gold and silver
in America, the extirpation enslavement and entoument in minds of
(16:43):
the Aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a
warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signaled a
rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. So basically,
primitive accumulation is like run around privatize everything, and you know,
ties into the enclosure of the comments that I talk
(17:04):
about all the time and things. Anyway, Marxist feminists, especially
those in developing nations, started talking about how basically this
accumulation continues today based on the unpaid work of women,
that the whole of capitalism is upheld by unpaid domestic labor,
reproductive labor as it's called, which is another weird phrase
because it makes you think that they mean like making babies,
(17:27):
but they actually mean reproducing social conditions. I think that, honestly,
all this terminology needs to be renamed, because otherwise this
is never going to come across to people.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
The unpaid stuff that greases the whole economy is the
reproductive labor doing the dishes and child rearing, and the
unpaid labor of teaching kids as compared to the paid
labor of teaching kids, all of that stuff. A German
woman named Mariah Maiz wrote a book called Patriarchy and
Accumulation on a World Scale that is like and behind
(17:58):
this accumulation is a genocidal or like what happened to
women in the witch hunts of Europe. And I'm under
the impression Mariah Meis was writing this when people for
good reason, when the research hadn't been done, and people
thought that we were talking about like millions and millions
of women being killed instead of like, eh, thirty thousand
or whatever. This is the idea that Sylvia Federici is
(18:19):
expanding upon, the idea that primitive accumulation continues to this day,
and one of the places it does so is women.
And one of the big examples of this is the
witch hunts. That which cannot be controlled will be exterminated, which,
to be clear, is absolutely what the Catholic Inquisition was
all about. Convert what you can, exterminate what you can't.
(18:41):
So Federici talks about the witch hunts as a war
against women who don't participate properly in capitalism. She also
describes the medieval world as a world in revolt against
the masters, against nobility in the church, future veterans of
the pod, the peasant revolts were kicking off all over
the place, and heretical Christian sects that believe in it autonomy,
basically communism, free love, and all kinds of cool shit
(19:03):
were just everywhere you looked, and some of them were like,
I don't know, heretical Christian sects that were only mildly
better than the Catholic Church or whatever. But it's fine. Again,
this is the kind of stuff that the Inquisition absolutely
wanted to destroy and existed to destroy. Those movements, Federici says,
(19:24):
were often led by women. Then you've got the Black Death,
and suddenly there weren't so many workers, and wages go
up and rents go down, and there was this spirit
of revolt in the possibility of change. Maybe the workers
would finally throw off their chains. But then capitalism showed
up as a counter revolution, something that shut down this
other revolution that was happening. To quote Federici, capitalism was
(19:48):
the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the
bishops and popes to a century's long social conflict that
in the end shook their power. Capitalism was the counter
revolution that to destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from
the anti feudal struggle, possibilities which, if realized, might have
spared us the immense destruction of lives in the natural
(20:09):
environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.
So basically shit had to change, but rather than change
in a cool way, a counter revolution made it change
in a bad way. Serfdom is out rent and wage
labor is in and so this new status quo emerged,
and it wanted to deal with the wild other anyone
(20:29):
living outside this growing capitalism, basically including women and children
in colonial subjects, they didn't get to have wages, and
so they had to be contained as wild others. We've
talked about this a few times on the show before,
about how in the European medieval conception women like now
we tend to think that this misogynist thing is to
(20:50):
assume that women are like servile and demur whatever. But
instead the medieval conception of women was that they are
chaotic and outside of good civilized Christian values, which is
of course pretty cool. This is an excuse for centuries
of misogyny. But this framework that women are wild, uncontrollable
people makes like, I don't know, makes womanhood both like
(21:12):
cys and trans like all the more interesting to me.
To declare my womanhood is to declare my affinity to
the wild world or whatever, much like I've declared my
affinity to the thing that I just said. I hated
capitalism because they gave me some money to run their ads,
and I wanted to eat food, so I run the ads.
(21:35):
Here they are anyway, we're back. The rise of capitalism
in this read is tied to the rise of patriarchy
and stronger gender roles. But I've read criticism of Federici
pointing out that she's not doing enough work here talking
(21:57):
about the patriarchal forms that preceded capitalism. And also when
she was talking about being like and then the popes
and the lords did a capitalism, I don't she might
be better read about this than me. I'm not sure,
But overall I would say that it's like the merchant
class that really wanted capitalism, and like the lords and
the popes like really didn't because it undermined their power.
(22:19):
So it's imperfect, but right. So you have this idea
that rise of capitalism is the rise of patriarchy and
stronger gender roles. By this read, instead of the power
being held by a whole surf family, it is now
a rental agreement between the head of the household, the
man and the landlord. Now that ownership is important, women's
(22:39):
inability to own things is suddenly a big problem. We've
talked a few times on the show about how the
invention of the white race is part of the colonial
project's way of pitting working class people against each other, like, hey,
mister English working class man, you may be starving, but
at least you're better than a black man or an irishman.
And then soon enough, hey mister irishman, you're white now too. Whiteness.
(23:00):
It's like basically whiteness as a way to destroy class solidarity. Well,
patriarchy offered something similar in Federici's take, as Karl Krisplebedeb
put it, Federici explains how the rebelliousness of male workers
was channeled into sexual violence, women's bodies providing a pleasant
diversion and safety valve to relieve social pressure. Drawing on
(23:23):
Jacques Roussaud's research about prostitution in the fifteenth century France,
she describes a literal rape movement whereby sexual assaults on
any poor woman were now tolerated by the authorities, essentially decriminalized.
This was potentially when the sphere of men's work in
women's work was codified, with men in the productive labor
sphere the money economy and women in the reproductive labor sphere,
(23:46):
the non money economy, that basically working class men were
offered the chance to be better than someone, to therefore
have gender solidarity with other men instead of class solidarity
with other oppressed people. This book, Caliban and the Witch,
is incredibly influential, and there are parts of it that
I'm sure will hold up probably forever. There are other
(24:06):
parts that are not really holding up to more recent scholarship,
especially as relates to the witch hunts specifically, there just
isn't evidence that witch hunts targeted women healers. The witch
hunts didn't tend to target the cunning folk, the service magicians.
A lot of the accusers or expert witnesses were the midwives,
the herbalists, the cunning folk, the service magicians. Women did
(24:30):
an awful lot of the accusing as well. In numerous countries,
more men than women were targeted as witches, and perhaps
most importantly, witch hunts weren't really They weren't this top
down thing. The witch hunts were basically church and secular
authorities giving in to popular pressure, the popular demand for
(24:50):
witch hunts. The witch hunts primarily targeted women because some
of their orchestrators were misogynists, and because the witch hunts
were about power dynamics, more bro loose women serving girls,
or just unpopular women or even two popular women were
easy targets. Author Christina Larner put it, quote witchcraft accusations
(25:12):
were sex related, not sex specific. Doctor Wanda Waporska, author
of Witchcraft and Early Modern Poland fifteen hundred eighteen hundred,
said in an interview with the New Statesmen about the
Polish witch trials, the majority of women accused were servants
in a precarious situation, living in someone else's house and
(25:33):
subject to the power dynamic that brings It's not always
easy to discover the age of the accused, but a
wide range of women and men were accused from varying
social backgrounds, of various ages and different family situations. Waporska
went on to say, quote, although many have tried to
claim an overarching reason for the witchcraft persecution, from ergotism
(25:55):
to the little Ice age, from misogyny to the persecution
of midwives, as more research emerges in a rich tapestry
of regional studies, it's clear that a mono causal explanation
is impossible. But while the causes of individual trials were
all over the place. There was potentially a single institutional
(26:17):
reason why the trials were happening at all, or specifically
where they were happening, and the chain of events that
caused that to happen was on October thirty first, fifteen seventeen.
I'm writing this on October thirty first, spooky, a man
named Martin Luther nailed ninety five theses onto the door
(26:39):
of a church in Germany. And for once the Catholic
Church would be faced with a heresy they couldn't immediately crush.
Protestantism was born. Germany, the birthplace of Protestantism, was where
around forty percent of which trials would take place orchestrated
by both Protestants and Catholics alike. Why. In twenty seventeen,
(27:03):
two economists Peter L. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ put
forth a theory in the Economic Journal that, well, I'll
just quote their introduction quote. We argue that the Great
European Witch Trials reflected a non price competition between the
Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally
(27:24):
contested parts of Christendom. Analyzes of new data covering more
than forty three thousand people tried for witchcraft across twenty
one European countries over a period of five and a
half centuries, and more than four hundred early modern Catholic
Protestant conflicts support our theory. More intense religious market contestation
(27:44):
led to more intense witch trial activity. Basically, the people
wanted to be saved from witches. They've been clamoring for
this for one thousand years. Or they wanted the fun
of a big show trial, and they wanted to get
to accuse people and shit, and you know, the Church
kept telling them, no, they're not allowed to do the
random murder. But much like politicians campaigning in swing states,
(28:07):
both Protestants and Catholics were like, yeah, okay, what do
you want, We'll do it. And they would put on big,
expensive show trials and say we're the ones who can
save you from witches. Stick with us. This is pretty
easily understandable just by looking at the locations of the trials.
Wherever Catholicism had a strong monopoly, they didn't burn many
(28:30):
witches at all. Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, really unburning, Germany,
France firetimes. The other thing these trials were trying to prove,
of course, was like, hey, we can fuck you up,
you know, like we're good at exerting power. You should
probably stick with us. People wanted to accuse the other
(28:50):
side of heresy and witchcraft as much as possible. At first,
the Church had tried to brand luther a heretic, but
so many rulers had converted to Lutheranism that the Church
couldn't touch it. The monopoly was broken. Inquisitors weren't allowed
into Lutheran lands. Eventually, in order to like make peace,
in fifteen fifty five, the Holy Roman Empire decriminalized Lutheranism
(29:11):
to bring peace to the land. This wasn't freedom of
religion for people, as far as I can tell, but
just for various princes to determine what religion everyone in
their land had to be, so like freedom of religion
for princes. Since the Catholic Church couldn't crush Lutherism, they
had to try other things to exert their dominance, like
you know, witch trials. The competition between the two faiths
(29:32):
went beyond who can burn the most people alive. Of course,
both rushed to build schools. Protestants were like ten percent
off the top of the tithe is cheaper than Catholicism,
all of its indulgences and weird, expensive things. And Catholics
were like, you like saints, We'll give you more saints,
all the saints you can pray to. The Catholics were like,
(29:54):
the Protestants are heretics. The Protestants were like, the Catholics
themselves are witches. Look at their weird rituals transubstantiation. Really
you think that bread literally turns to flesh in your stomach.
So both sides burn people and burn people. Luther himself
advocated burning witches. A fifteen thirty two law declared witchcraft
(30:16):
a crime in Germany, punishable by burning at the stake
if it hurts someone. By fifteen seventy two, Augustus of
Saxony said burn every witch, even for fortune telling. On
both sides, a ton of clergy were like, hey, can
we can we not? What the hell are we doing?
Why are we burning people? This seems bad, but it
(30:37):
took centuries for those voices to be heard. This pissing
match between the Catholics and the Protestants is far and
away the most convincing hypothesis to me. But of course
Federici makes some interesting points about how it ties into
the rise of capitalism and the war on women and
the war on everything outside the new social order. There
are a few other hypotheses floating around as well, and
(30:57):
I'm sure they're sometimes out accurate and had some influence.
Some people blame bad weather. There was a mini ice
age at the time and people were suffering, and some
of those people thought that witches could control the weather.
Imagine something so silly as that. That's my reference to
the fact that currently there's people who claim that either
the Democrats or the Jews are like controlling the weather
(31:20):
because nothing has changed, which is bad because this all
led to hundreds of years of burning people alive. Anyway,
statistical analysis shows there's no correlation between bad weather and
witch trials. There is some correlation between economic downturns and
witch hunting, which makes sense the popular clamor goes up
when wages go down. Sure, a few people have tried
(31:43):
to suggest why Ireland didn't have many witch trials. NIVEH. Boyce,
writing for The Irish Examiner, suggests that this is because
Ireland had pretty cozy feelings about quote so called witchcraft
practices at the time, and no one was mad at
anyone for believing in fairy wells or anything. Sylvia Federici
would say it was because Ireland still had a strong
(32:04):
communal economy, with collective land ownership and strong informal and
familial social safety nets in place. I also think you
could say something about how Ireland was during the early
modern period, a colonized place, more than part of Europe proper,
at least economically. But I admit, as much as I
want to believe that Ireland is just cool and good,
(32:25):
the most likely reason is that it was firmly Catholic.
No need to burn any witches anywhere but the Swing
States anyway, Hopefully none of that seems on the nose.
About the future you're listening to this in where whatever.
If you're listening to as like five years from now,
this will seem quaint. But how are the camps that
(32:46):
you're stuck in? Or maybe we've created a socialist utopia
or something else.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Who knows.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
No one knows the future but you in the future.
That's the song that I always close this pod, asked with, Oh,
maybe I should have guests more often, otherwise I'll just
keep singing to you all. No one wants that. But
what you do want are my plugs, which is that.
I have another podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying,
(33:14):
comes out every Friday and is put out by anarchist
publishing collective I'm part of called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness,
and Live Like the World Is Dying is about individual
and community preparedness. I have a bunch of co hosts
and they've been doing most of the work while I'm
on tour. Well they do a lot of yeah, they
do probably most of the work.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
I'm just one of the hosts. But you can listen
to me talking about making go bags and getting ready
for bad stuff because for some reason, I think that
that's important. Anyway, to go just poison people, know, go
live your best life.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool People who
did cool stuff. I'm your host, Marcare Kildrey, and every
week I cover people being cool, except when I have
special episodes like today, where instead I cover things I
think are cool, and I think witches are cool or
at least interesting. The actual definition of witches I came
(00:24):
up with earlier, where you like, do magic to hurt
people or whatever, Like, I don't know, that's like not
actually particularly cool. That's like saying like violence is cool,
Like violence is sometimes useful or necessary, but overall it's
like nothing to be proud of, right, because it's mostly
done in bad ways. So I guess that's actually how
I probably feel about what would definitionally be understood is witchcraft,
(00:46):
but the concept of witches as we currently talk about
them super cool. Except this episode isn't really about the
current version of witches. It's more about how we got there,
and specifically how the concept of the witch was developed
by a bunch of misogynists and church people both Protestant
(01:11):
and Catholic, in order to keep power relations going. And
that's bad, but reclaimed stuff is good. It seems obvious
that I think that I'm a punk punk is an
example of a reclaimed slur so, which is an example
of a reclaimed category of crime that has now become
(01:32):
an identity for people. Anyway, this is part two. If
you go back to part one, you'll hear me talk
about how which is kind of weren't real except service
magicians were and some of them did witchcraft, so actually,
which is kind of were real. Also, no one knows,
but we're going to talk about the inquisition. There's a
(01:54):
money python joke I could do here, but I'm not
going to. It's a leave it as an exercise for
the audience too. Imagine the money python joke. Also, this
is a solo episode. You probably figured that out by now.
There's no Sophie, there's no guest. There's a Rory.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Hi. Rory.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Rory is our audio engineer. Anyway, where were we The
Hammer of Witches, which is a pretty.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
It's a pretty cool name for like real evil book.
And it's like, like evil is cool and spooky. This
is like evil evil. This is like, you know, uh,
exercising institutional power to destroy people. That this is like
the biggest most dangerous in cell book ever written, which
is kind of impressive. Okay, so the story of the
(02:41):
Hammer of Witches. That's not the entire episode, it's going
to be part of it. There was this asshole guy
named Heinrich Kramer. He joined the Dominican Order, and soon
enough he's an inquisitor. This is like, uh, you know,
fourteen hundreds. He shows up in Germany and is like, hello,
I am an inquisitor and I'm specifically mad about witches
because I hate women. And local authorities are like, no,
(03:04):
we don't really need you. Fuck off, which is, after all,
worn a big deal, nothing to get inquisitioning about. So
our guy, Heinrich, He's like, all right, fine, I'll go
to Skydad's main man, the Pope, and get his permission
to do some fucking witch hunting. And you know, earlier
I was like talking about all these popes that were like,
witches aren't real. There's a problem with investing absolute power
(03:26):
into specific individuals. It's the monarchy problem. And besides the
moral problem, there's the specific problem of well, if you
have a different guy, then he might have a different
point of view and he might have a bad take,
and then all of a sudden, the bad take is
the rules. So in fourteen eighty four, Pope Innocent to
(03:47):
the eighth proves his own name to not have been
much of a nominative deterministic thing. Because he is not
so innocent. He writes a papal bull which is basically
a decree, because in Catholicism they just rename everything, And
this decree says that witchcraft counts as heresy. It says, quote,
many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation
(04:11):
and strain from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils,
incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and
other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have
slain infants. Yet in the mother's womb, as also the
offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth,
(04:33):
the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees,
nay men and women, beasts of burthen herd beasts, as
well as animals of other kinds, vineyards orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat,
and all other cereals. This is all one sentence. I
don't even I'm not even gonna quote the entire sentence.
There's a lot of anywhere you might think there's a period,
(04:54):
there's a semicolon. These wretches, furthermore, afflict and torment men
and women, beasts of burthen herd, beasts as well as
animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and
sore diseases both internal and external. They hinder men from
performing the sexual act and women from conceiving. That's like
(05:15):
only half the sentence. That's yeah. Anyway, So the papal
bull is like, I'm afraid of them witches. They make
men impotent, and they also do all of these other things.
And Okay, one of the things that's horrible about talking
about all this like witchcraft stuff and this witch trial stuff.
So like we're really seeing the return to this. Honestly,
(05:35):
like the evangelical embrace of the pro life thing really
has this vibe of like they're all a bunch of
baby murderers, and I don't know, there's gonna be some
other fun comparisons coming up later about suddenly people believing
in real wild stuff, especially because the Protestants, once they
(05:57):
come on the scene, they're gonna like specifically believe Eve
they're way more that. Yes, of course sex is bad,
but it's still like, you got to be having it,
so therefore you've got to be married, and you can
only be married in ways that are procreative.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And blah blah blah.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Anyway, I've read in a couple places, but like anecdotal sources,
that the clergy was really mad about this particular degree
because they were like, no, we have a long standing
tradition of not giving a shit about witches, and then
here's this pope and isent the eighth being like blah
blah blah, witches this and that, and they're like, that's bullshit,
(06:33):
none of that's real. But all the clergy didn't stop
this from influencing the Pope's pet misogynist murderer, the aforementioned inquisitor,
Heinrich Kramer. Kramer went on to kill fifty people over
the next five years, after he'd been given permission specifically
to do so by the Pope. Why did he so
desperately want to hunt witches, Well, it sounds like it
(06:55):
was because he was low key stalking this local woman,
Helena Schubern. He was obsessed with her, and she didn't
like him. She didn't go to church, perhaps because she
was avoiding him, or maybe she just didn't like going
to church. One day, she was supposedly walking past Kramer
and spat and said, fie on you, you bad monk. May
the falling evil take you, which is a pretty sick
(07:17):
like I don't want the falling evil to take me.
That sounds scary, Like what even is that? Is it
just the slow embrace of darkness? Who knows? Anyway, maybe
maybe other people know.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I don't know what the falling evil is. It just
sounds cool and spooky.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
However, it's not a good idea to say this to inquisitors.
She was put on trial for witchcraft. She was acquitted.
Kramer got so mad about it that he invented the
modern witch hunt. The local bishop was like, you are
senile and crazy, get out of here. And this is
presumably when he went to the Pope for permission to
murder people. But I've like read the timeline in different ways,
(07:52):
so I wasn't exactly sure how to put it together.
And so then he's like murdering people and he's like, hell, yeah,
this is the rules. I'm in cel murder man. He
wrote the most influential book on witch hunting, even though
it actually strayed. This is going to shock you. It
actually strayed from most of the accepted inquisitorial material, and
the Catholic Church would soon disavow this book. This book
(08:15):
is The Hammer of Witches, and it influenced secular courts,
but not religious courts by and large, So this like
wasn't being used by the Church inquisition. This was being
used by local secular courts. That book, The Hammer of Witches,
is a misogynistic tone about why women are uniquely weakned
evil and that they should be tortured and burned at
(08:36):
the stake. It's bad. It presents the idea that witchcraft
is heretical, which is actually a secular crime at the time,
so this is why secular courts are doing their witch hunting.
It also contains some pretty elaborate forgery. It claims that
a respective theological institution supported it, and like even has
like all the signatures and then like signatures of notaries
and things like that on it. But it's almost certainly
(08:58):
all a forgery. It seems as though everyone at that
institution hated this book. It's possible that the book was
banned after three years by the church in fourteen ninety,
but this is disputed. It seems like people believed it
was banned.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
But the I don't know whatever.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
I'm not going to get into the weird details about
the list of banned books and when they were published.
But Kramer himself was condemned in fourteen ninety for doing
shit unethically and illegally, and from then on, as best
as I can tell, he wasn't personally allowed to murder
people anymore. His book, though, continued to go through dozens
of editions, leading to uncountable more deaths. Eventually, the book
(09:37):
pretended had a second author, basically like one of the
printings they were like, it's by two people, like a
respective theologian's name was added to it, even though we
probably didn't approve of it. The Hammer of Witches says
quote the witches deserve the heaviest punishment above all the
criminals in the world. It was obsessed with the sex
(09:58):
lives of evil women. Sexuality is the literal basis of witchcraft,
according to this book, and the devil fucks power into people.
If you don't fuck the devil, you don't get as
cool magic powers In the book, Kramer writes, the devil
has power over those who follow their lusts. As for
why women are particularly prone to witchcraft, it's because women
(10:19):
are more carnal. Of course, we also have bad memories,
which is why we're undisciplined and impulsive. We're vain, our
voice is a siren song, and we ruin men. He writes,
woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch,
and deadly to keep. And all witchcraft comes from carnal lusts,
(10:42):
which in women are insatiable. Oh and also, plus, Jesus
was a boy, so boys are clearly more holy. Yeah,
obviously hasn't heard of my home. Jesus is a transman theory,
although you know, maybe he's just being trans inclusive. Jesus
is a transman theory, being that, well, if you don't
have an earthly father, you have xx chromosomes. Anyway, this
(11:05):
is not necessarily always true, but whatever this is, go
with it. So, according to Kramer, witches meet the devil
at the witch's sabbath, swear an oath to him, and
make an ointment from dead baptized babies. Earlier works on
these sabbaths were a bit more pornographic describing how people
would kiss Satan on the asshole and such, and the
(11:26):
Sabbath was more of a lustful orgy in the earlier books,
But in The Hammer of Witches, neither the witches nor
the devil actually enjoy the sex. It's just a solemn
duty in the name of evil. Like lie back and
think of Satan. But after her initiation into evil, the
witch likes fucking lots of people, probably everyone but Kramer.
This whole book is so so incel coded. Just looking
(11:49):
at an impure woman can corrupt a man, since eyes
are the mirror of the soul. Also, only the witches
can see the devil during these ceremonies, and observers see
only the women lying on their backs orgasamine, which makes
me wonder if people weren't just like watching women masturbating
in the forest or whatever, which seems like a perfectly
fine and healthy pastime. Get together with your you know,
(12:10):
gal pals, and go masturbating the woods. The sexual powers
of witches are endless. They can cause lust in men,
They can destroy relationships. They can turn dicks into other
things or steal them outright. They can make a man
no longer attracted to a given woman. They can also
cause impotence or sterility. Some witches would collect dicks and
(12:32):
keep them in a bird's nest where they lived off
of corn and oats, like they were little baby bird dicks.
And according to this book, all accused witches are guilty,
and the ones who don't confess are damned. The ones
who do confess are you know, saved by being burned alive.
It's real good, much like the good that comes from
(12:56):
giving all of your money to the people who gave
us money. That's what you should do. You totally shouldn't
either subscribe to cooler zone media and therefore not have ads,
or just press the forward fifteen seconds but in like
four or five times.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
You probably know how many times to put it. Here's
the ads and we're back.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
So this book is bad, but also its impact on
the witch trials has been overstated. Like I mentioned before,
interest in the witch trials really kicked off during the
nineteen seventies or so, and there wasn't as much research
available back then. The Hammer of Witches was likely the
only tone available in print in English at the time,
and so people read it and were like, oh, the
(13:44):
witch hunts were pretty much just misogyny. But this book
didn't really cause the witch trials? So what caused the
witch trials? There are a bunch of different hypotheses. Most
of them are wrong. I'm going to talk about one
of the more can convincing ones for a moment before
I get to the one that I find most convincing.
This next one I don't think is like wrong. It's
(14:05):
just we's wrong in some ways. But whatever, it has
a lot of good truth in it. It's worth understanding.
A Marxist feminist named Sylvia Federici wrote what is in
my Circles the single most important book about witches and
the witch Trials. It's called Caliban and the Witch. It
covers a reasonably wide range of topics, but the core
(14:26):
of its argument, as I understand it, is this the
witch trials represent the patriarchal oppression of women, the excizing
of women from the healing arts like you've got the
good learned doctors who are men and who went to
man only school, and in the early modern era, they
become the only acceptable form of healing, so more organic
and folk practices were being shoved out and criminalized. Federici
(14:50):
ties this idea into the idea of primitive accumulation. This
is a concept in Marxism that, while I'm not a Marxist,
I think is worth understanding because I overall think that
Marx had incredibly important contributions to the study of economics.
Even if I disagree with whatever. You don't need to
know why disagree with Marx. Just listen to like half
(15:10):
the episodes I do. Primitive accumulation might be better translated
these days as original accumulation, because the word primitive has
different connotations than it did when the idea was coined.
It originally kind of meant like original, like oh, this
is the first version of this. The primitive form of
it just means the original form of it. It's not
like the accumulation from primitive people, although that happens. By
(15:35):
the reason that it sounds confusing this because we'll get
to it. Primitive accumulation. Basically, wealth has to come from somewhere,
right in Marxist economic theory simplified here the labor theory
of value. Wealth comes from the labor of the working class.
But what about the raw materials? Those are gathered through
primitive accumulation, which is to say, the extraction of value
(15:56):
from the natural world. Colonialism does this right, show up
somewhere and cut down all their trees and send them
off to England and suddenly have extracted all the value
from Ireland. This is the thing that comes before capitalism.
Marx came up with the idea of primitive accumulation to
counteract the Adam Smith pro capitalist idea that what started
capitalism was that the industrious worker eventually built up more
(16:19):
value than the lazy worker did, and so this is
how the lazy worker ended up a worker and the
other guy ended up an owner. Marx was like, no,
it was because the proto capitalist just like robed the
shit out of everything and everyone, or to quote him
directly from capital and of course he's going to use
outdated racial terminology here. The discovery of gold and silver
in America, the extirpation enslavement and entoument in minds of
(16:43):
the Aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting
of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a
warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signaled a
rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. So basically,
primitive accumulation is like run around privatize everything, and you know,
ties into the enclosure of the comments that I talk
(17:04):
about all the time and things. Anyway, Marxist feminists, especially
those in developing nations, started talking about how basically this
accumulation continues today based on the unpaid work of women,
that the whole of capitalism is upheld by unpaid domestic labor,
reproductive labor as it's called, which is another weird phrase
because it makes you think that they mean like making babies,
(17:27):
but they actually mean reproducing social conditions. I think that, honestly,
all this terminology needs to be renamed, because otherwise this
is never going to come across to people.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
The unpaid stuff that greases the whole economy is the
reproductive labor doing the dishes and child rearing, and the
unpaid labor of teaching kids as compared to the paid
labor of teaching kids, all of that stuff. A German
woman named Mariah Maiz wrote a book called Patriarchy and
Accumulation on a World Scale that is like and behind
(17:58):
this accumulation is a genocidal or like what happened to
women in the witch hunts of Europe. And I'm under
the impression Mariah Meis was writing this when people for
good reason, when the research hadn't been done, and people
thought that we were talking about like millions and millions
of women being killed instead of like, eh, thirty thousand
or whatever. This is the idea that Sylvia Federici is
(18:19):
expanding upon, the idea that primitive accumulation continues to this day,
and one of the places it does so is women.
And one of the big examples of this is the
witch hunts. That which cannot be controlled will be exterminated, which,
to be clear, is absolutely what the Catholic Inquisition was
all about. Convert what you can, exterminate what you can't.
(18:41):
So Federici talks about the witch hunts as a war
against women who don't participate properly in capitalism. She also
describes the medieval world as a world in revolt against
the masters, against nobility in the church, future veterans of
the pod, the peasant revolts were kicking off all over
the place, and heretical Christian sects that believe in it autonomy,
basically communism, free love, and all kinds of cool shit
(19:03):
were just everywhere you looked, and some of them were like,
I don't know, heretical Christian sects that were only mildly
better than the Catholic Church or whatever. But it's fine. Again,
this is the kind of stuff that the Inquisition absolutely
wanted to destroy and existed to destroy. Those movements, Federici says,
(19:24):
were often led by women. Then you've got the Black Death,
and suddenly there weren't so many workers, and wages go
up and rents go down, and there was this spirit
of revolt in the possibility of change. Maybe the workers
would finally throw off their chains. But then capitalism showed
up as a counter revolution, something that shut down this
other revolution that was happening. To quote Federici, capitalism was
(19:48):
the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the
bishops and popes to a century's long social conflict that
in the end shook their power. Capitalism was the counter
revolution that to destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from
the anti feudal struggle, possibilities which, if realized, might have
spared us the immense destruction of lives in the natural
(20:09):
environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.
So basically shit had to change, but rather than change
in a cool way, a counter revolution made it change
in a bad way. Serfdom is out rent and wage
labor is in and so this new status quo emerged,
and it wanted to deal with the wild other anyone
(20:29):
living outside this growing capitalism, basically including women and children
in colonial subjects, they didn't get to have wages, and
so they had to be contained as wild others. We've
talked about this a few times on the show before,
about how in the European medieval conception women like now
we tend to think that this misogynist thing is to
(20:50):
assume that women are like servile and demur whatever. But
instead the medieval conception of women was that they are
chaotic and outside of good civilized Christian values, which is
of course pretty cool. This is an excuse for centuries
of misogyny. But this framework that women are wild, uncontrollable
people makes like, I don't know, makes womanhood both like
(21:12):
cys and trans like all the more interesting to me.
To declare my womanhood is to declare my affinity to
the wild world or whatever, much like I've declared my
affinity to the thing that I just said. I hated
capitalism because they gave me some money to run their ads,
and I wanted to eat food, so I run the ads.
(21:35):
Here they are anyway, we're back. The rise of capitalism
in this read is tied to the rise of patriarchy
and stronger gender roles. But I've read criticism of Federici
pointing out that she's not doing enough work here talking
(21:57):
about the patriarchal forms that preceded capitalism. And also when
she was talking about being like and then the popes
and the lords did a capitalism, I don't she might
be better read about this than me. I'm not sure,
But overall I would say that it's like the merchant
class that really wanted capitalism, and like the lords and
the popes like really didn't because it undermined their power.
(22:19):
So it's imperfect, but right. So you have this idea
that rise of capitalism is the rise of patriarchy and
stronger gender roles. By this read, instead of the power
being held by a whole surf family, it is now
a rental agreement between the head of the household, the
man and the landlord. Now that ownership is important, women's
(22:39):
inability to own things is suddenly a big problem. We've
talked a few times on the show about how the
invention of the white race is part of the colonial
project's way of pitting working class people against each other, like, hey,
mister English working class man, you may be starving, but
at least you're better than a black man or an irishman.
And then soon enough, hey mister irishman, you're white now too. Whiteness.
(23:00):
It's like basically whiteness as a way to destroy class solidarity. Well,
patriarchy offered something similar in Federici's take, as Karl Krisplebedeb
put it, Federici explains how the rebelliousness of male workers
was channeled into sexual violence, women's bodies providing a pleasant
diversion and safety valve to relieve social pressure. Drawing on
(23:23):
Jacques Roussaud's research about prostitution in the fifteenth century France,
she describes a literal rape movement whereby sexual assaults on
any poor woman were now tolerated by the authorities, essentially decriminalized.
This was potentially when the sphere of men's work in
women's work was codified, with men in the productive labor
sphere the money economy and women in the reproductive labor sphere,
(23:46):
the non money economy, that basically working class men were
offered the chance to be better than someone, to therefore
have gender solidarity with other men instead of class solidarity
with other oppressed people. This book, Caliban and the Witch,
is incredibly influential, and there are parts of it that
I'm sure will hold up probably forever. There are other
(24:06):
parts that are not really holding up to more recent scholarship,
especially as relates to the witch hunts specifically, there just
isn't evidence that witch hunts targeted women healers. The witch
hunts didn't tend to target the cunning folk, the service magicians.
A lot of the accusers or expert witnesses were the midwives,
the herbalists, the cunning folk, the service magicians. Women did
(24:30):
an awful lot of the accusing as well. In numerous countries,
more men than women were targeted as witches, and perhaps
most importantly, witch hunts weren't really They weren't this top
down thing. The witch hunts were basically church and secular
authorities giving in to popular pressure, the popular demand for
(24:50):
witch hunts. The witch hunts primarily targeted women because some
of their orchestrators were misogynists, and because the witch hunts
were about power dynamics, more bro loose women serving girls,
or just unpopular women or even two popular women were
easy targets. Author Christina Larner put it, quote witchcraft accusations
(25:12):
were sex related, not sex specific. Doctor Wanda Waporska, author
of Witchcraft and Early Modern Poland fifteen hundred eighteen hundred,
said in an interview with the New Statesmen about the
Polish witch trials, the majority of women accused were servants
in a precarious situation, living in someone else's house and
(25:33):
subject to the power dynamic that brings It's not always
easy to discover the age of the accused, but a
wide range of women and men were accused from varying
social backgrounds, of various ages and different family situations. Waporska
went on to say, quote, although many have tried to
claim an overarching reason for the witchcraft persecution, from ergotism
(25:55):
to the little Ice age, from misogyny to the persecution
of midwives, as more research emerges in a rich tapestry
of regional studies, it's clear that a mono causal explanation
is impossible. But while the causes of individual trials were
all over the place. There was potentially a single institutional
(26:17):
reason why the trials were happening at all, or specifically
where they were happening, and the chain of events that
caused that to happen was on October thirty first, fifteen seventeen.
I'm writing this on October thirty first, spooky, a man
named Martin Luther nailed ninety five theses onto the door
(26:39):
of a church in Germany. And for once the Catholic
Church would be faced with a heresy they couldn't immediately crush.
Protestantism was born. Germany, the birthplace of Protestantism, was where
around forty percent of which trials would take place orchestrated
by both Protestants and Catholics alike. Why. In twenty seventeen,
(27:03):
two economists Peter L. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ put
forth a theory in the Economic Journal that, well, I'll
just quote their introduction quote. We argue that the Great
European Witch Trials reflected a non price competition between the
Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally
(27:24):
contested parts of Christendom. Analyzes of new data covering more
than forty three thousand people tried for witchcraft across twenty
one European countries over a period of five and a
half centuries, and more than four hundred early modern Catholic
Protestant conflicts support our theory. More intense religious market contestation
(27:44):
led to more intense witch trial activity. Basically, the people
wanted to be saved from witches. They've been clamoring for
this for one thousand years. Or they wanted the fun
of a big show trial, and they wanted to get
to accuse people and shit, and you know, the Church
kept telling them, no, they're not allowed to do the
random murder. But much like politicians campaigning in swing states,
(28:07):
both Protestants and Catholics were like, yeah, okay, what do
you want, We'll do it. And they would put on big,
expensive show trials and say we're the ones who can
save you from witches. Stick with us. This is pretty
easily understandable just by looking at the locations of the trials.
Wherever Catholicism had a strong monopoly, they didn't burn many
(28:30):
witches at all. Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, really unburning, Germany,
France firetimes. The other thing these trials were trying to prove,
of course, was like, hey, we can fuck you up,
you know, like we're good at exerting power. You should
probably stick with us. People wanted to accuse the other
(28:50):
side of heresy and witchcraft as much as possible. At first,
the Church had tried to brand luther a heretic, but
so many rulers had converted to Lutheranism that the Church
couldn't touch it. The monopoly was broken. Inquisitors weren't allowed
into Lutheran lands. Eventually, in order to like make peace,
in fifteen fifty five, the Holy Roman Empire decriminalized Lutheranism
(29:11):
to bring peace to the land. This wasn't freedom of
religion for people, as far as I can tell, but
just for various princes to determine what religion everyone in
their land had to be, so like freedom of religion
for princes. Since the Catholic Church couldn't crush Lutherism, they
had to try other things to exert their dominance, like
you know, witch trials. The competition between the two faiths
(29:32):
went beyond who can burn the most people alive. Of course,
both rushed to build schools. Protestants were like ten percent
off the top of the tithe is cheaper than Catholicism,
all of its indulgences and weird, expensive things. And Catholics
were like, you like saints, We'll give you more saints,
all the saints you can pray to. The Catholics were like,
(29:54):
the Protestants are heretics. The Protestants were like, the Catholics
themselves are witches. Look at their weird rituals transubstantiation. Really
you think that bread literally turns to flesh in your stomach.
So both sides burn people and burn people. Luther himself
advocated burning witches. A fifteen thirty two law declared witchcraft
(30:16):
a crime in Germany, punishable by burning at the stake
if it hurts someone. By fifteen seventy two, Augustus of
Saxony said burn every witch, even for fortune telling. On
both sides, a ton of clergy were like, hey, can
we can we not? What the hell are we doing?
Why are we burning people? This seems bad, but it
(30:37):
took centuries for those voices to be heard. This pissing
match between the Catholics and the Protestants is far and
away the most convincing hypothesis to me. But of course
Federici makes some interesting points about how it ties into
the rise of capitalism and the war on women and
the war on everything outside the new social order. There
are a few other hypotheses floating around as well, and
(30:57):
I'm sure they're sometimes out accurate and had some influence.
Some people blame bad weather. There was a mini ice
age at the time and people were suffering, and some
of those people thought that witches could control the weather.
Imagine something so silly as that. That's my reference to
the fact that currently there's people who claim that either
the Democrats or the Jews are like controlling the weather
(31:20):
because nothing has changed, which is bad because this all
led to hundreds of years of burning people alive. Anyway,
statistical analysis shows there's no correlation between bad weather and
witch trials. There is some correlation between economic downturns and
witch hunting, which makes sense the popular clamor goes up
when wages go down. Sure, a few people have tried
(31:43):
to suggest why Ireland didn't have many witch trials. NIVEH. Boyce,
writing for The Irish Examiner, suggests that this is because
Ireland had pretty cozy feelings about quote so called witchcraft
practices at the time, and no one was mad at
anyone for believing in fairy wells or anything. Sylvia Federici
would say it was because Ireland still had a strong
(32:04):
communal economy, with collective land ownership and strong informal and
familial social safety nets in place. I also think you
could say something about how Ireland was during the early
modern period, a colonized place, more than part of Europe proper,
at least economically. But I admit, as much as I
want to believe that Ireland is just cool and good,
(32:25):
the most likely reason is that it was firmly Catholic.
No need to burn any witches anywhere but the Swing
States anyway, Hopefully none of that seems on the nose.
About the future you're listening to this in where whatever.
If you're listening to as like five years from now,
this will seem quaint. But how are the camps that
(32:46):
you're stuck in? Or maybe we've created a socialist utopia
or something else.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Who knows.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
No one knows the future but you in the future.
That's the song that I always close this pod, asked with, Oh,
maybe I should have guests more often, otherwise I'll just
keep singing to you all. No one wants that. But
what you do want are my plugs, which is that.
I have another podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying,
(33:14):
comes out every Friday and is put out by anarchist
publishing collective I'm part of called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness,
and Live Like the World Is Dying is about individual
and community preparedness. I have a bunch of co hosts
and they've been doing most of the work while I'm
on tour. Well they do a lot of yeah, they
do probably most of the work.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Anyway.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
I'm just one of the hosts. But you can listen
to me talking about making go bags and getting ready
for bad stuff because for some reason, I think that
that's important. Anyway, to go just poison people, know, go
live your best life.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
Popular Podcasts
True Crime Tonight
If you eat, sleep, and breathe true crime, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT is serving up your nightly fix. Five nights a week, KT STUDIOS & iHEART RADIO invite listeners to pull up a seat for an unfiltered look at the biggest cases making headlines, celebrity scandals, and the trials everyone is watching. With a mix of expert analysis, hot takes, and listener call-ins, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT goes beyond the headlines to uncover the twists, turns, and unanswered questions that keep us all obsessed—because, at TRUE CRIME TONIGHT, there’s a seat for everyone. Whether breaking down crime scene forensics, scrutinizing serial killers, or debating the most binge-worthy true crime docs, True Crime Tonight is the fresh, fast-paced, and slightly addictive home for true crime lovers.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.