Historian Debunks The Biggest Witchcraft Myths on Reddit

Over 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft.

Why were most accused witches women?

What's an example of a modern-day witch hunt?

There are a lot of misunderstandings on the internet

about witch hunts.

I'm Mikki Brock, professor and historian.

Let's take a deep dive and set the record straight.

Jumping over to see what the folks at r/HighStrangeness

are saying about witches.

Secret-Parsnip5071.

These are just incredible names.

Secret-Parsnip asks,

Why were people accused of being witches?

You know, the answer is simple.

People were accused of witchcraft

because their neighbors thought they were a witch.

We often have this temptation

to say they were accused of witchcraft

because someone was jealous of them, wanted their money,

because there was a family feud that was going on.

And I don't wanna suggest

that those things weren't important.

They could be important.

But people typically accused their neighbors of witchcraft

because they thought their neighbor

had done witchcraft to them.

Genuinely, they believed that.

Something went wrong on their farm,

something went wrong in their family,

and there was someone in their life

who had maybe already amassed this reputation,

who'd been kind of whispered about

and named in the taverns on the streets.

And they could say, Hey, this bad thing

is probably attributable to them.

Now then, we might ask,

what sorts of people were most likely to be accused

by their neighbor of witchcraft?

And that's what we get into: questions of gender.

Over on Reddit AskHistorians,

Why were most accused witches women?

And that's when we start to talk about things

like the story that's told in Genesis 3

about Eve being initially tempted by the devil

and Eve being to blame for the entire downfall of mankind.

That's when we get into questions about

are women more carnal, more susceptible.

That's when we get into questions about the objects.

The things that are usually associated with witchcraft

are often things within the female domain.

For example, people often say about witches

that they're creating sort of potions or a poisoned beer

or something that makes a child sick.

These were things that were in the domestic domain,

the household, the sphere of women.

Women's work often put them in a collision course

with the potential allegation for witchcraft.

Back on Reddit's AskHistorians,

Ser_Drunken_the_Tall asks, How did the Salem witch trials

become the face of historical witch hunts

when European witch trials took place earlier

and were more numerous?

That is a great question.

Most people know about Salem,

and they know that it took the lives of 20 people,

19 hanged and one pressed to death.

But what most people don't know about is the fact that Salem

was part of a European-wide phenomenon

in which over 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft

and about 50,000 of them,

the vast majority of women, lost their lives.

So why, when we think of the witch,

do we think of this little town in colonial New England

and not this broader European story?

Well, part of this has to do, of course,

with the prominence of America in pop culture.

We know about The Crucible.

Arthur Miller, right, made the Salem witch trials famous.

And we have examples of lots of different types of media,

movies, storybooks,

TV shows referencing the Salem witch trials.

And we just have less of this emphasis

on the European witch hunts than we do on Salem.

And we like to think of America as exceptional,

but it was really, in reality,

part of a much more European story,

and that's how they should be understood.

Let's jump over to Reddit history

because we need to talk about

why the witch hunts occur at all.

User diff2 asks, What were the motivations

behind the public during the witch hunts?

That's a great question.

And the answer is complicated

because the motivations were many,

but I'll try to boil it down.

One of the things that really motivated the public was fear.

They were afraid of harm.

They were afraid of their cattle dying

or their child becoming injured

or not having enough food to get through the winter

at a time when life could be really hard.

And they believed that there were people in their community

who practiced malevolent magic to harm them.

And for the authorities,

it wasn't just about fear of harmful magic.

It was about fear of the devil

underpinning all of these actions of supposed witches.

The ideas, too, about witchcraft

took a long time to develop.

They didn't just come out of the ether.

People had to become afraid over time.

And that's partially because

once you had one or two witch hunts here and there,

that provided further fodder for fear

that witches were active in your community.

So I think that's a really big part of it, right?

Small-scale witch hunts,

they begin with one personal example of harm.

So let's say you think your neighbor gave you the stink eye,

gave you a face, cursed under their breath,

and the next day a strange patch of crops dies,

or your husband turns out to be impotent.

That's how small-scale witch hunts start, right?

Just one person gets accused,

but then maybe that person gets tortured.

Then maybe they name other witches.

And then you, as an ordinary villager, are convinced

that it's not just one or two witches in your community,

but this entire demonic conspiracy.

Let's scroll down to the comments.

Here, two users have a disagreement

that I think I can weigh in on.

octothorne says, Witchcraft accusations in Europe

were driven by greed and jealousy

since the accused person's property would be confiscated

and divided among the local authorities.

Thibaudborny responds that economic motivation

was not a surefire or defining characteristic

of the overall witch craze,

and the accusations could easily backfire.

So what's the truth here?

Well, I have to say in this case,

I'm gonna give it to Thibaudborny.

Accusations could backfire,

and there's not evidence that witchcraft allegations

was financially profitable.

In fact, actually, witch hunts were expensive.

You had to pay the jailer, right?

You had to pay various local law enforcement.

You had to pay the public executioner.

You had to buy all the raw materials

of a witchcraft execution,

the rope for a hanging or the wood for a burning.

And we have actually some records of really grisly accounts

of just how much it cost for the coal and the tar

and the other instruments of death.

So profit is not a motive here.

The comment, too, is also right

in saying that these things could backfire.

It is absolutely the case in certain places,

the British Isles, for example,

that if you brought an allegation against your neighbor

and said, She's a witch,

that neighbor could have the ability to countersue

and say, This is a case of slander.

I'm not a witch.

And in fact, you owe me some sort of fine or penalty

because of having this allegation

that's affected my livelihood and my life.

Speaking of hell and other dark things,

let's take a look at a hot take over on Reddit MensRights.

The user asks, The feminist theory

that the European witch hunts were caused by misogyny

can't be true because in many places,

most convicted witches were men.

It's not rocket science.

So I have to sort of correct you on this one.

If we look at Europe as a whole, the average is clear.

The numbers are clear.

80% of those accused of witchcraft were women.

So yes, there were male witches,

and there were a few places, Normandy, Estonia, Iceland,

where the majority of those accused were men.

But here's the thing: in places that had a majority

of men accused as witches, the witch hunts were mild.

They never got intense.

They never led to the fires burning for months

as more and more witches were sent to the pyre.

They did not involve the types of intensive

demonic conspiracies you find in other places in Europe.

Where men were the majority of the accused,

the witch trials did not turn into panics.

And that's because, fundamentally, when people worried about

what sort of person was likely to be a witch

in most parts of Europe, they envisioned a woman

because they thought women were more susceptible

to the wiles of the devil, to demonic temptation,

hearkening back to ideas about Eve

that would prove profoundly deadly.

So if we go over on the religion subreddit,

TheJokesterWarlock, great name, asks,

What was the original reason

for witch hunts in Christianity?

And that is such a good question.

So the story of Christianity from really the Middle Ages on

is a story of institutionalization, right?

The church growing in its power and its structure

and trying to really establish what the dogmatic norms are

to try to draw tight boundaries

about what counts as orthodoxy and what's heterodox, right?

What's outside the bounds of appropriate religious practice.

And as part of this, there's tremendous worry about heretics

and this fear that heretics are those who don't just hold

weird religious beliefs, but also might be worshiping Satan.

And at the same time, there's a real attempt

in the medieval period to try to control magic

and prevent people from engaging with the supernatural

in all of these ways,

partially because people start to think that all magic,

black or white, good or bad, regardless of the intent,

involves a pact with the devil.

And if all magic involves a pact with the devil,

then ordinary people can do it.

They don't have to be learned.

And all of those medieval developments

within Western Christendom really set the stage

for the witch hunts of the coming centuries.

But how did all of those ideas add up

to thousands of people being killed?

Over on r/history, 6horrigoth really wants to know,

How is it that there were witch trials happening

in different parts of the world around the same time?

That is such a good question.

How do you get witch trials from Salem

in the American colonial context

to Lorraine in France to parts of Russia?

How do you get this sort of European-wide phenomenon

that even crosses the Atlantic?

Part of this relates to the spread of the printing press,

the fact that demonological works

that report on these witchcraft trials can be printed

and spread across different parts of Europe.

And even though, of course,

these are different nations, right?

Scotland is a different place than Spain,

is a different place than Germany.

Elites were, broadly speaking,

reading much of the same thing.

Many of them could read in different languages.

A lot of these texts are written in Latin or French,

or things that people can engage with.

So there is this evolving body of knowledge

that makes the witch stereotype,

at least in the minds of elites,

this sort of demonic witch, makes it transferable.

And if you are, say, living in a little Scottish town

and someone in your neighborhood

is acting a little bit funny, a little bit weird,

and you go tell your cleric,

and you say, I'm a little worried.

I think, you know, what has happened to my cow

is a product of this person.

What should we do?

That learned clergyman very well may have been exposed

to writings about witch hunts in Germany.

And they can look at that local event

and say, Wait a second.

I think this is part of this broader conspiracy

of witchcraft that's everywhere.

And that makes it even scarier, right?

If anybody has heard of demonology,

then they've probably heard

of the Malleus Maleficarum, right?

The Hammer of Witches, written in 1486,

this witch-hunting manual that went on to become

the most notorious piece of writing

probably in much of European history.

And the Malleus Maleficarum is a really interesting text

for a whole host of reasons,

not least that it's virulently misogynist,

but it's also kind of a creative text

of Malleus Maleficarum.

It also sort of has folk tales.

It has a story about penis trees.

You can look it up; this is true.

And it is able to catch people's attention.

It also talks about flying witches.

It also talks about judicial processes,

but it's an important text in that it gets reprinted,

and it helps to solidify early on

this demonic witch stereotype.

And this gets distributed in other places in Europe.

And if someone wants to know who a witch is,

how to find one, why are they likely to be women,

now they have a place they can go to.

We can Google it.

They could read the Malleus.

Here's a question over at AskHistorians.

Choice-Standard-6350 asks,

Did witches think that they were witches?

And the reason I love this question

is because one of the things that historians do best

is say when we don't know for certain.

It's hard to answer this stuff,

partially because the experiences and the emotions

of accused witches are often unrecoverable to us.

The only testimonies we often have

from the accused are confessions.

Confessions often extracted under duress,

under torture or the threat of it,

things like sleep deprivation,

physical tortures and so forth.

So we can't really take the confession

of a witch at face value.

My history professor taught us that witches in England

largely believed they were witches.

I don't think that's right.

I don't think we can take these confessions at face value.

There might have been, you know, the odd witch or two

who, over the course of being tortured

and asked questions about, Were you a witch?

Were you a witch?

Where did you meet the devil?

Why did you do this dastardly thing?

started to believe that about themselves.

We know psychologically that that can happen,

but most witches, from the evidence we have,

probably did not think that they were witches.

So what did actual trials look like when you were accused?

Over on Reddit AskHistorians, ironheart777:

It's 17th-century Western Europe,

and I've been falsely accused of being a witch.

Can I expect a reasonably fair trial

or am I doomed to be executed?

If I have the luxury of a trial,

what would most likely be the best course of defense?

So this depends a lot on where you are.

There's often this idea

that if you're accused of witchcraft,

you're totally screwed.

And, you know, in some times and places,

that can kinda be true, but there was a really robust

and well-developed system of trials

and the law in early modern Europe.

There were laws on the books about who witches were,

what they did, how to prosecute them,

and there were well-worn practices

for actually adjudicating that question of, is this person

who's been accused of witchcraft actually a witch?

So when did the panic die down and what happened afterwards?

Over on AskHistorians, peepjynx says,

How soon after the Salem witch trials

did people realize it was not about witches?

So we have two good questions there, right?

When did the trials end, and what happens next?

In Salem and elsewhere.

So if we're looking at the broad chronology

of European witch hunting, the witch hunts start to decline

in the second half of the 17th century.

England sends its last witch to the gallows

in the 1680s, for example.

In Scotland, it's 1720s.

And into the 18th century, you still have sporadic trials,

and it's starting to decline really for three reasons.

People are becoming skeptical about the use of torture

and more critical of what sorts of evidence

are admissible in court.

You start to have intellectual changes

where people start to wonder if you really need the devil

to explain what happens in the world

or whether there are natural causes for that.

And then you have states that become less invested

in the project of witch hunting

because there's more religious tolerance,

there's less competition between Protestants and Catholics,

less need to prove that you are the best

and most good godly kingdom.

All those shifts kind of pave the way eventually

for the witch trials to die down.

What comes after that in Salem or elsewhere?

Almost immediately after in Salem,

really within the next 20 years,

people are calling for the exoneration of their loved ones,

and they're petitioning the court to that end.

Now that's unusual, that 20-year turnover

where your descendants are saying,

Listen, you said my mother was a witch.

She wasn't, and I wanna clear her good name.

That doesn't typically happen.

What does happen is people continue to believe in witches,

but they find other ways

of mediating disputes in their communities,

and they find other answers for the misfortunes

that are part of lived experience.

The last stop is on r/AskReddit.

What's an example of a modern-day witch-hunt type situation

where the accusers have little to no evidence

against the accused?

Love this question.

The first thing that I want to say very clearly

is that people in positions of power,

often men who claim to be victims of witch hunts,

are misusing the term because the term witch hunt

often means an allegation of a crime that's not possible

and that the accused did not commit.

So I'm often struck when we hear people crying witch hunt,

This is the greatest witch hunt ever!

I'm not gonna name names.

They are not using that term in a way

that remotely accords with the historical record

in which people who were marginalized,

people who did not have the levers of power

at their disposal, were labeled in this way.

So to the question then, if it's not powerful men

who are the victims of the witch hunt, who is it?

I think if we're talking about a modern witch hunt,

the way that certain communities in the US

and elsewhere are branded as other

and demonized accordingly is that modern example.

So the way often that trans communities are treated,

the way immigrant communities are treated,

the language that is used by politicians sometimes

to describe these folks as evil or unnatural

or dangerous or poisonous or whatever,

that sort of language is dehumanizing language.

That sort of language is also demonizing language,

and demonization and dehumanization

are two sides of the same coin.

So anytime you hear a politician say,

That group is evil, that group isn't fully human,

that group doesn't deserve our respect,

you should know that they are stirring

the very, very dangerous cocktail of the witch hunts.

Okay, that's enough Reddit for me today.

Thank you for joining me

on this journey down the rabbit hole.

[light warbling electronic music]