After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Real Origins of Witches

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Have you ever wondered what the ancient origins of witchcraft is? How did the black-hat-broomstick stereotype emerge? And what causes the waves of witch trials throughout history, right up to the present day?Ronald Hutton is back on After Dark to discuss the history of the witch, in an episode from our sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets. This podcast was mixed and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here.

Welcome to True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Something out of the dark that's appeared in love. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? Vengeance felt good. Seeing these people pay for what they've done felt righteous. True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Wherever you get your podcasts. Dia duit, agus fáilte go after dark, myths, misdeeds and the paranormal. It's me, Anthony,

and I'm just jumping on today to say what you're about to hear is probably a little different from most After Dark episodes. Now, I'll get into that in a minute, but as we have your attention, we just wanted to send you a little message from myself and Maddy and our producers Charlotte and Freddie. When we first launched After Dark just about a month ago just over a month ago now of course we wanted people to listen of course we had high hopes for how many people would tune in and enjoy the content but we could not have been prepared for the reception for your feedback and for the listenership that we have already just in a month, essentially. We couldn't have been prepared for the feedback that you gave us. So we just want to take this moment to say thank you so much for your

dedicated listenership. We really, really appreciate it. And we hope to keep continuing to bring you content and information and histories that you love and that you're having conversations about online, which we see those conversations and we take part in them sometimes. So thank you for really growing that community and we're really, really excited what the future holds for After Dark and all our content that's to come. We had an incredible episode planned for you for today, and it was a history that I had grown up with, and it was a history that I was aware of, and it was something that I was passionate to tell on this platform. It was an Irish history. It had some difficult subject matters in there,

but I thought it was a history that was worth telling. However, as I'm sure if you're listening from Ireland, or perhaps you've heard if you're listening from elsewhere in the world, events in Ireland last week have really changed that for us at the moment. And the episode that we were going to bring you today is just not right for this moment in time. We'll bring it to you again at another time, but we're going to rest it for the time being. Now, because you all enjoyed our episode with Professor Ronald Hutton when we spoke to him about the origins of Halloween, we have got him back on today to talk about the history of the witch instead. So I hope you really enjoy this episode. Professor Hutton talks about the witch from the ancient times right up until

the present day. So it's a really long expanse of history that he goes into. And he'll be telling us where the belief in witchcraft comes from, and how the stereotypical image of the witch has evolved over the centuries. Now, this is an interview from our sister podcast, Betwixt the Sheets, History of Sex, Scandal and Society, which is hosted by the brilliant Dr. Kate Lister. So you'll be hearing her chat with Ronald this time around. Also, there is some discussion in this episode about torture, which some people may find upsetting. So if that's not for you today, feel free to check out some of our other episodes, perhaps on the Loch Ness Monster or on Banshees.

Oh, I particularly like the Banshees episode. And Loch Ness too. I'll be back with Maddy on Thursday with an episode on Amelia Dyer, the prolific Victorian baby farmer. So look out for that. We're so excited to bring that history to you. But for now, enjoy this episode on the history of the witch with Dr. Kate Lister

and Professor Ronald in Denmark. It's another day of, well, rain. It's raining quite heavily. It's been relentlessly pouring, actually rain. It's raining quite heavily. It's been relentlessly pouring actually for days and days and days and this year's harvest looks like it's going to be an absolute washout. Women in the community are frightened, not only because they are fearing the future, facing a lack of food and stability and everyone just being soggier than they wanted to be, but because there is a habit, a custom to blame women for bad weather and diseases. And what would be a fitting punishment

for such a crime? Well, execution, of course, for using their evil powers against society. But the King of Denmark has just received a letter from Pope Gregory VII, no less. The Pope is demanding that he stop blaming women for storms and epidemics. He's called it a barbaric custom. Hurrah! He said it's stopping people from realising that the bad luck is actually a divine punishment. Slightly less hurrah, but still. But despite the Pope's words, this is not the last that we will see of women being blamed for witchcraft. In fact, it's quite early on in what would become known as the witchcraft trials, when thousands and thousands

of people will be accused of and executed for the crime of witchcraft. But how do you even describe a witch? Is it just pointy hats and broomsticks? Is that what they thought a witch looked like back in the day? Where does the concept come from? And do times of unrest really result in witch trials? Spoiler alert, they do seem to do that actually yes in fact i think we might actually be overdue a new witch trial craze i hope we don't bring that one back hello and welcome back to betwixt the sheets it's only ronald hutton how are you doing very glad to be with you is how i'm doing i had so much fun talking to you the last time we were talking about Christmas. Yeah.

So I suppose almost a year ago-ish. But did you have a nice Christmas? I was very envious. You were saying that you were going to do like all these customs of seeing out the old year, bringing in the new one. It was lovely. It was just myself and my partner, which makes things very easy. Oh, that sounds lovely.

And we have got you back on because we're gearing up for another annual festivity, Halloween. And we're here to talk to you about the history of the witch. Can I ask you a really starter question that might seem really obvious, but when you actually think about it, it's not that easy to define. What is a witch? That is a really hard question now, because there are at least four different definitions of a witch in circulation in the modern world. Two of them are very old, and two of them are Victorian. The two that are very old are first, that a witch is somebody who uses magic to harm other human beings is malevolent or devil.

Right. And this is probably the oldest definition. It's the one most commonly used among English speakers for about 1,500 years. And the other is that a witch is somebody who uses magic for any purpose, including healing and helping people. Although people who use that sense have always been people who don't really believe in magic themselves. They tend to distinguish those who use magic to help people as white witches or good witches. But to people who believed in magic, which is about 90% of the population until the 19th century, a witch was a very bad word and a bad name indeed.

And the two modern senses are a witch is a feisty woman who has an independent life and is persecuted by the patriarchy for not fitting in. And finally, that a witch is a practitioner of a pagan feminist nature venerating religion. And there are plenty of witches around these days who'd fit into that category. Which one do you go with when you're doing your research and you're writing your books? Well, I have to go with all of them, according to what I'm writing about at the time. So if we did it with one of the really ancient definitions, that it was bad magic, did they have a concept of good magic? And they didn't have any idea that it could be a good witch? People who used magic and believed in it tended not to call good magicians witches. They called them wise folk or cunning

folk and by a variety of other local names. That makes sense. So that's a good definition to be working with. But are there some shared common characteristics between all those definitions? I'm presuming that they don't all have black pointy hats. Black pointy hats came in in the 18th century, and particularly for bad witches. Oh, where's that come from? Why a pointy hat? Why the 18th century?

They're simply part of the common costume of working-class country women in the 17th century. So you're labelling somebody with that kind of hat a commoner from the countryside. I didn't know that. That makes perfect sense. Do you want to know where broomsticks come from? I absolutely want to know where broomsticks come from. That's older and it's more fundamental. Right back at the end of the Middle Ages, this new idea appeared that the devil had been licensed by God to test human faith by enabling evil human beings to work bad magic with the aid of demons, as long as they worshiped Satan. And this was a completely mad idea. There was no truth behind

it whatsoever. but it gradually swept Europe and created the notorious early modern witch trials. And in order to worship Satan, the presumed witches had to get there. And because they often had to travel long distances to get together, it was presumed they had to fly there. And the idea came in, in early 15th century Switzerland, and then spread that Satan gave a special ointment to his nasty witches who worshipped him. And they would smear it on an item of furniture. And they would then ride that item of furniture because it could then fly. For a lot of them, it was simply a stick. But for some, it was a broomstick. Now, for others, it's a tub. For others, it's a chair. For others, it's a table. For others, it's a fence.

But the broomstick became easiest to illustrate in pictures. Oh my. So women are supposed to be rubbing oil on bits of furniture to worship Satan? Yeah, not just women. Not just women, no. A lot of men were accused at first. In fact, as many men as women initially. The reason why women end up accused overwhelmingly in other bits of Europe is worth discussing. Oh, absolutely. Because the idea of witches, the concept of the witch is, as your research has shown, it's very ancient. It's in the Bible, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. They crop up in ancient. But we don't seem to have been executing them, or were we? Well, we were, but very rarely. Other ancient people

did execute witches. The Anglo-Saxons weren't that keen on it. I'll explain why. First, the ancient people who executed witches. The people of Mesopotamia, that's Iraq, Syria, Palestine, feared and executed witches, which is why you get that tag in the Bible, because it's a Hebrew document from Palestine. And you may remember the horrid old test for a witch that you throw the suspect in water, and if they sink, they're innocent, and if they float, they're guilty. Well, the water test is first found in the Code of Hammurabi, who's a Babylonian king ruling almost 4,000 years ago. So this stuff runs very deep. Coming further west, the Romans were great witch hunters, the pagan Romans, on a bigger scale than Christian Europe was later.

So, two, three hundred years before the Christian era ever started, the Romans were holding witch trials in which they put to death two to three thousand people at once, which is a bigger number than anything found in Christian Europe. And the Germans, the pagan Germans, believed that witch women would fly around at night somehow and suck the vital life out of men, taking their organs out in the night. And they'd then hold cannibal feasts on these together. So the idea of the witch's sabbath is really quite ancient. Now, what Christianity does is actually damp down witch hunting initially, not because Christians are particularly nice in that respect, but because they have a theoretical problem. If you believe in a single, all-powerful, always present, and totally good God, why is he going to enable wicked people to work magic to hurt others? Good point. to work magic to hurt others. Good point. So what in practice happened was that Christianity outlawed the idea of the German night-flying cannibal witch, stopped those trials, stopped

most big witch trials, but allowed people to be accused if the person accusing felt they tried to use magic to hurt them. There's no link with Satan particularly. It's a one-to-one individual thing, not a collective conspiracy. And the burden of proof was put on the accuser, which makes it quite hard to get a conviction. Now, occasionally in places like Russia and Poland, local people would blame things like famines and floods on local witches and turn on suspects and put them to death. But this was actually quite rare. And what changes around about 1400 is this new idea comes in, to which I have referred, which bends Christianity in its thought, that Satan has actually got around the problem by being allowed by God to launch a crusade using magic-wielding,

demon-aided, satanic witches to capsize Christendom. And that starts a panic. It unleashes all these ancient beliefs and fears, which had never gone away, and now allows them to be backed by the law and the church. So was the idea that God had just let this happen, that he just said, okay, Satan, you can give that one a whirl? Yeah, late medieval Christianity gets the idea that God's in a bad mood. Right. gets the idea that God's in a bad mood. There are all sorts of things happening that didn't happen earlier, like Islam taking pretty well a quarter of Europe in the late Middle Ages as the

Turks invade and conquer the entire Balkans and Greece, Hungary, and Romania, as we have it now. and Romania, as we have it now. And also you get climate change. The climate gets a lot worse. It gets colder and wetter, long, cold winters, wet summers, bad harvests. People get hungry. And epidemic arrives in a way it hasn't done for half a millennium in the shape of the Black Death. And it stays.

half millennium in the shape of the Black Death. And it stays. Bubonic plague hangs around and keeps on rebooting and killing a quarter or so of a population every generation. So at one point, the Christian church was saying, please stop persecuting witches. If I remember correctly, there was a pope who had to write a letter to someone to say, please stop executing witches because of the bad weather. But then suddenly things start to change and shift. And now it seems like it's a viable, credible Christian threat. Yeah. You see the fear creeping into Christianity over a few hundred years, more and more fear of Satan, more and more fear of more and more demons. fear of Satan, more and more fear of more and more demons. And that intersects with the fear of magic, which the people have never lost. It's not a rapid thing. It's a slow development. But when the

idea of the Satanic Crusade comes in, it's taken up big time in certain communities which hear the preaching, mostly in the Alps, Northern Italy, the Rhineland, the Pyrenees. And it hangs around there for 150 years. And then round about 1560, 1580, it breaks loose and sweeps across Europe. And most of the people executed as witches die in just one long lifetime. That's 1560 to 1640, so it's about 80 years. Then it burns out. I'll be back with Ronald and witches after this short break. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors,

I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'd always thought that sort of the role of the Malifus Malificarum that was published that that sort of it's often packaged as if that little spark that started the witch trials. But listening to you, it sounds more like it was on a slow burn anyway. And the publication of that book was part of a longer narrative. You're exactly right. It's a slow burning fuse about 150 years long. And then boom. Boom. And for anyone listening who's never heard of the Maleficarum, can you tell us a little bit

about what that is and why it's significant to the witch history? It's significant to our modern imagination because it got republished in a very racy, abridged translation of the early 20th century. And it's incredibly readable. It's incredibly readable. It's viciously misogynist. And it has all sorts of urban legends in it. So it's the perfect book for those who want to believe that early modern witch hunters were all demented, misogynist churchmen with a good line in fake stories, it's only one of a number of witch hunting treatises. It's not the most influential in the long term. It's one of the first to be printed, so it gets around a bit more. It's significant, but its significance originally is nothing like that which it's been given in the 20th century. That's fascinating. So the story about witches putting penises in trees,

that probably wasn't widespread, believe me. No, it sounds like a North Italian folk legend or joke. But of course, it's the kind of stuff that's in the Balaeus and it's incredibly racy. It is. And it's bonkers. It's a completely bonkers text. And just listening to you say there that it wasn't that influential, that it wasn't representative of exactly what was going on there.

That suddenly makes sense because I've never understood how people, even back in the day when these beliefs were widespread, could have read that and thought, well, that makes perfect sense to me. It's actually written by a failed witch hunter. Oh, well, now that makes sense. It's actually written by a failed witch hunter. Oh, well, now that makes sense. To defend himself. He's an aging dipsomaniac friar. And he goes to southern Germany, starts a witch hunt there, and succeeds in executing two women.

And buoyed up with this, he crosses the Alps to Innsbruck in Austria, in the Tyrol, and tries to start a bigger witch hunt. But the local authorities, including the bishop, gang up on him and run him out of town as a demented nuisance. And it's so humiliating. He then writes this book in order to defend himself and gets the Pope to put a preface saying this kind of stuff might be right and then publishes it. And that's it. Yeah, and then it's out there.

So for your research and for your money, you would say that the witch trials, the witch crazes would have happened even if that book had never been published. Oh, absolutely. They'd already started. It's published about 60 years after the witch trials had got going. Right. I didn't know that. And it is reprinted quite a lot, but it's not a standard manual or text for witch hunters.

Yeah. It's just one of a number. So what do you think caused this? Because it's been rumbling for a very long time, but then something happens and suddenly we've got witch trials all across Europe, not just here by any measure. And then in places like Iceland, 90% of the people who were killed were men. I think that's fascinating. Yes, it blows up because of the Reformation, because of the sudden collapse of Western Christianity into these two completely irreconcilable permanent blocks of

Catholic and Protestant. For about half a century, that's the first half of the 16th century, basically, around about 1520, 1560, the two sides look as though they might make up. And there's actually a decline in witch trials because people are busy trying to reconcile Protestant and Catholic. But the big period of the witch trials is the big period of Protestant and Catholic trying to annihilate each other. So it's not just the period of the witch trials, it's the period of the wars of religion and of mammoth religious persecution, massacres, mammoth religious persecution, massacres, burnings, tortures, and so on. And the classic witch hunter is actually quite rare. You tend to get one big witch hunt in each place that has them in Europe. It's very rare to have two ever. So it's something which communities try once. And the classic witch hunter is a bunch of

people or a particular person in charge who are fanatics for their particular Christian religion, Protestant or Catholic. And they have an agenda to clean up their area and make it perfectly Christian and godly. So Essex, for example, has more witch trials than most other English counties put together because it happens to have a bunch of justices of the peace, magistrates, local gems, who are vehement evangelical Protestants. And they have this hit list. They're out to wipe out Catholics, pubs, ale houses, village feasts and revels, vagrants and beggars, and also to relieve the poor and provide work for people. So there's a positive side. And hunting witches is rather a low item on this list. But because they're so active, they do a lot of it anyway.

So witch hunting is not really a single mission. It's part of a clean up program, an agenda all over Europe. The question of why women or why men is a lot harder to answer because it goes a lot deeper. And the answer seems to be that it depends upon ancient stereotypes of what a magician is supposed to be in your area. Now, across most of Europe in ancient times, it's believed that men can learn magic, but they have to get it from somebody else.

They have to get it from books or from teachers, whereas women can just do it. They have it in them, which is why the great prophetesses, the people to whom you turn when you don't know what's going on, tend to be female, like the Pythoness at Delphi, the Delphic Oracle, the Sybil at Cumae, the great Irish and German prophetesses like Fedelm and Valeda. And so when the idea of satanic conspiracy comes along, for most Europeans, it's a lot easier to suspect women because their thought just have magic in them. They can just let it rip with help. This is not the case in areas of Europe where men are the natural magicians. Iceland is one, because up there, magic is often worked with runes, which are written symbols, and men know about those.

So that's why 93% of the victims in Iceland, in a vicious little little witch hunt are men. Men are in the majority initially in Finland and permanently in the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, because their shamanism is the magical system. That's somebody going into trance to connect with natural spirits and work magic with them. And mostly shamans are men in that area. In Normandy, it's shepherds who are the magical people. I've read about that. And I always wondered, why was it shepherds? Is it because shepherds are associated with magic? Because they're associated with nature. They live on the margin of communities. And so they're thought to be able to communicate with natural magic. So they are the magicians. In Austria, it's vagrants,

wandering people. And they are turned to as magicians and they get blamed as witches when the witch stereotype comes in. Even in nations that have majority of women, like Switzerland, there can be quite a lot of men. And in Switzerland, it's 40%, 4-0% of the victims are male. So an overall predominance of women conceals an awful lot of local variation in this. And there are areas that just don't hunt witches, like the Highlands of Scotland, local belief onto which the new satanic witch stereotype gets projected. So witch trials happen at times of widespread unrest. And in many ways, I feel like we could be overdue for one. We should have had another one by now. We've had horrendous times of unrest. But the witch craze, it never really went away, did it?

It's very easy to think of something that it was a long time ago, we don't do it, but belief in witches and witchcraft has persisted. It has. Mercifully, it's died out, or rather it's been strenuously and with great difficulty wiped out by the educated elites in a lot of the Western world. out by the educated elites in a lot of the Western world. But there's still this uneasy sense that magic might be real among a lot of people that could be ignited. And the North American Deliverance Ministry of Evangelical Protestants believes firmly in the reality of

demons. After all, they're in the Bible. Oh, yes. And believes in casting them out of people. And some of these ministers, in fact, quite a lot of them, also believe the demons are sent by witches. But so far, they go after the demons and not after the witches. But there's still a basis of belief there for a revived witch hunt. I think it's extremely unlikely. I'm not too worried about this, but it's interesting that even in the West,

the beliefs linger. And across most of the rest of the world, witch hunting is on the increase among societies in which fear of bad magic is also present and it's never died out. If you want to attend a witch trial at the present day, just go to Ghana or Cameroon or the Ivory Coast or Malawi, because they've all got laws now against witchcraft. And people are prosecuted. And folk magicians, cunning folk, wise folk,

witch doctors in the English parlance for Africa are used as expert witnesses to hunt and find witches. And over most of the rest of Africa, they don't have laws against witchcraft, but murders of presumed witches are a really serious problem. The Tanzanian Ministry of the Interior estimated that in four years of the 1990s, around 5,000 people were burnt to death by their neighbors in central Tanzania, suspected of being witches. The rate hasn't gone down much since. And witch hunting is also a serious problem in Latin America, across South Asia, from the Middle East right through India to Indonesia and the Western Pacific. That's New Guinea and Papua and the Western Pacific Islands.

And that's an awful lot of the planet. Yeah, it is, isn't it? Wow, I had no idea it was that widespread. Don't worry, we're doing something. I wrote a book about this to draw attention to the problem. And there were a lot of other people who formed something called the Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network. And it held a conference at Lancaster University a few years ago. There were two keynote speakers invited. I was one. And the United Nations representative was the other. And the conference

drafted a UN resolution to ban witch hunting, which was passed by the United Nations in 2021. We got it. And the Pan-African Parliament drafted a set of guidelines in March this year to implement the resolution and deter witch hunting. So far, it's had very little effect, but it's a start. At least the international community is collectively and officially turning against witch hunting. Absolutely. Who was the last person to be imprisoned and executed as a witch in this country? We aren't exactly sure. It's probably a woman in Exeter in 1685 because she was tried and condemned, but we don't actually have a clear record of her execution. So the last executions of which we have really good evidence are also in Exeter. Somerset and

Devon are the last great area of witch hunting in the country in the late 17th century. 1682 in Exeter, three women from Biddeford in the north of Devon are executed as witches. Can I ask you one final question that I've never got an answer to, but I would like to know the answer to it. but I would like to know the answer to it. I have heard read or it's been put forward that the Salem witch trials were in part as a result of ergot poisoning and it's been suggested that might have had something to do with the witch trials. Has that been disproven now? It was never proved. Ah, right, there we go. It's a kind of catchy idea that people can produce but it doesn't actually relate to the evidence. Ergot occurs in rye, R-Y-E. It's a particular cereal crop, which most areas of Europe and New England don't grow.

They grow barley, wheat, oats. So they're not going to get ergot. And you find witch trials all sorts of places which don't have rye. And there's no reason to believe that even in areas that had rye, the ergot fungus suddenly became incredibly common around about 1400. Right. Okay. Well, that's that out then. Yeah, it really does need to go out. And there are lots of theories that are partially correct and for certain areas, but this one just doesn't work. That's not one of them. Ronald, you are always amazing to talk to. And my actual final, final question is, are you going to be doing anything for Halloween? Do you do anything for Halloween? Or do you turn all the lights off

and pretend you're not in? I'm going to a couple of parties on the surrounding weekends. On Halloween itself, prosaically, I'm hosting a guest lecture in London. Perfect. And then I should get a Chinese takeaway and go home. That sounds amazing. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You have been a treat, not a trick, a treat. Thank you. So have you. Well, we hope that you have enjoyed listening to this episode on the history of witches with

Professor Ronald Hutton. He is just a wealth of information, and particularly when it comes to the history of witchcraft or the occult. I'll be back with Maddy for our usual amazing episodes on Thursday. But we do have a request of our listeners. You may have heard over the last couple of episodes we've been asking people to send in some details that might relate to any local mysteries, local misdeeds, or local hauntings that have happened in the past, or that might be occurring right now, potentially even in your family home. We have received some incredible material already. It has been fascinating. There is one particular case, well two, but one particular case that has caught my imagination and I'm currently thinking of ways, along with Maddy, that we can put this together

for you guys. So that will be coming your way at some time in the future. But if you have something that you think we should investigate, that we should use our historical research skills to unpack, then please send that to afterdarkathistoryhit.com. That's afterdarkathistoryhit.com. Until next time, from After Dark Towers, have a wonderful week, and we'll see you again on Thursday. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds. the greatest secret missions of all time. Suddenly out of the darkness appeared Bin Laden. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? Vengeance felt good.

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