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The 405th Anniversary of Ben Johnson's Comedy 'The Devil Is An Ass' with Prof. D. Purkiss - Ep 5
118 Plays3 years ago
This Spooky Season episode is inspired by the 405th Anniversary of Ben Johnson's Comedy 'The Devil is an Ass', which appeared first on stage on the 1st October 1616. This play was and is rather special, as it mocks superstition and witchcraft belief, and makes The Devil himself and his lesser demons appear rather behind the times. In the Enlightened Age of the 1600s, the denizens of hell just don't know how to tempt like they once did. This discussion contains everything from the Witchcraft Trials including mention of Pendle, landscapes of superstition, the folklore of archaeology, symbolism within the persecution, and much, much more! Joining me this episode is Prof. D. Purkiss a lecturer in English Literature and History at the University of Oxford.
WARNING: This episode does discuss the witchcraft persecution and some aspects of ritual sacrifice. It goes with the topic, but some people might find these aspects a little disturbing.
Music
Intro/Outro Music - Creative Commons - "Fantasia Fantasia" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Flipside' and Guest Speaker
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Flipside. This is, as always, the podcast that brings to you important discussions about the past, prompted by specific historical events. This month I'm joined by Professor Diane Perkis of the University of Oxford. Professor Perkis has diverse research interests and lectures in both history and English literature.
00:00:44
Speaker
These research interests include the English Civil War, children's literature, folklore and fairy tales, writer's block and the writing process, and also the supernatural and especially witchcraft.
00:00:59
Speaker
Two books of hers that I would particularly like to highlight as they go in line with what we'll be discussing today is The Witch in History, Early Modern and Late 20th Century Representations, which was published by Rutledge in 1996.
00:01:16
Speaker
And Troublesome Things, a history of fairies and fairy stories, which was published by Alan Lane in 2000. It's truly wonderful that Professor Perkiss is here to discuss with us today, and we can't thank her enough for this episode, which was a delight to record.
The Inspiration Behind the Episode
00:01:36
Speaker
Now, I guess you'll all want to know what inspired this month's episode. And as it's spooky season, I don't think it will come as a surprise that this month's episode is inspired by the 405th anniversary from the 1st of October 1616 of Ben Johnson's comedy The Devil is an Ass, which was produced at Blackfriars Theatre by the King's Men. Okay, so maybe the specifics are a little surprising.
00:02:05
Speaker
I'm guessing not many people have heard of this play. But it is very interesting. Because, in 1666, a time when I'm guessing most of us would assume that belief in superstition was still quite prevalent, this play pokes fun at an audience which presumably believes in witchcraft.
00:02:28
Speaker
And it specifically pokes fun at a specific witchcraft trial that of the Middlesex juries, which we'll mention today.
Witchcraft Trials and Societal Beliefs
00:02:38
Speaker
So without further ado, I guess we should start with what were the witch trials? Who was involved in such proceedings? Were there individuals that mocked witchcraft belief? And was this a common or scandalous opinion?
00:02:55
Speaker
Did superstition persist? Particularly as your perspective, Professor Perkins, might be quite different from mine as someone who lectures primarily in English literature. Up to a point, my first degree is double honours in English and history. My doctoral thesis was also really a sort of partially historical thing. So I think of myself as a bit of a sort of too
00:03:23
Speaker
faced individual with regard to the disciplines. And my sense is that the thing that English brings to thinking about witchcraft and the witch trials is close reading of the texts we have. Historians often like to arrive at big general narratives where they want to connect it with particular individuals and what they do, where everyone tends to be assumed to be behaving rationally.
00:03:53
Speaker
But what I think my work on witchcraft has often been about is digging down into the evidence we have and trying to find patterns in the trial literature, such as one I found that seemed to be really important is the way that witchcraft accusations are actually mostly made by women against other women.
00:04:19
Speaker
largely because they tend to concern women's fear of activities. So women do housework, they bring up children, they also act as servants who supplement those things.
Women's Role in Witchcraft Accusations
00:04:33
Speaker
And when those things go wrong, as they very often do, women look around and they find a likely cause in the Malafikian mother neighbour that might maybe reflect
00:04:47
Speaker
feelings of their own that they struggle with because they're not ideologically approved. So one very clear example of that for me is the idea that your child's been possessed or bewitched by somebody who's supposed to be doing the child care for you, someone you're paying to do the child care like a nanny, or it was called the lying in maid, someone who helped you immediately after the birth of your child. And we all know in the modern world,
00:05:17
Speaker
that relations between mothers and nannies, mothers and child minders, are rarely straightforward. Each tends to judge the other and form opinions about who's doing the best job. They often have differences of opinion over quite the heartfelt stuff. Very typically a middle-class mother will want the nanny to sieve courgettes
00:05:40
Speaker
and make a wonderfully healthy meal and then Annie will think there's nothing wrong with angel delight. I had angel delight, stuff like that. Similarly, it's well understood that it's totally not allowed to dislike your own child or to be furious with your child or to wish you'd never had it from time to time and get those feelings of perfectly normal given that your child is the one depriving your sleep.
00:06:04
Speaker
Your child is the one that's taking up all your time. Children are very disobedient and hard to control, all those sorts of feelings. So what do you do with those feelings? You pour them into a story about your wicked neighbor, Mrs. So-and-so, who's responsible now, not only for everything wrong with your child that you've failed to fix, but perhaps also everything wrong with you as a mother.
Archaeology's Insight into Witchcraft
00:06:33
Speaker
and you'd be perfect if it weren't for her. If only she'd go, it would all be wonderful. So looking for patterns like that and thinking about, I suppose, women's lives in particular, and this is where I'm going to say even historians who kind of pride themselves on a feminist approach, in my view, don't always take a very feminist approach, if it's okay if I say that.
00:06:57
Speaker
They're often much more interested in the persecutors. They try and work out why are men so misogynist, which isn't an answerable question really. And the short answer is they are because culture teaches them to be. The long answer is they are because they don't want to give up power. But that's not what the witch trials were about. The witch trials were about women against women.
00:07:19
Speaker
and woman-on-woman violence. And midwives, for example, who kind of get lionized in feminist accounts were actually on the side of the persecutors and were going around investigating women and seeing if they had witch marks. They weren't saying, oh my God, what's wrong with you? This is just normal, female, sexualized bonding. They were saying, oh, bad witches.
00:07:40
Speaker
It's not the case that there's a lot of feminist solidarity lying around in the early modern period. Indeed, being oppressed can actually do the opposite. It can make you feel you're in competition with other people. And you then tend to look around for somebody weak that you can take out rather than somebody much stronger. Yeah. So my take on the witch trials is therefore that they were a legislative opportunity for a thoroughly oppressed group of people to turn on one another.
00:08:10
Speaker
and use stories about the supernatural to manage the unmanageable feelings that being a housewife and mother probably created in a very seriously patriarchal time. interestingly we probably end up with the opposite end of the evidence spectrum in terms of archaeology
00:08:32
Speaker
And that's not to say that evidence for witchcraft trials or indeed superstition is particularly prevalent in archaeology. You are essentially looking at a few very specific cases or some rare aspects of material culture. But what we do have is occasionally a skeleton is
00:09:00
Speaker
retrieved which has been treated a certain way in death.
Case Study: The Burial of Meg Shelton
00:09:05
Speaker
Some older archaeological treatises call these deviant burials. Now it isn't very often that these deviant burials are attached to witches
00:09:17
Speaker
More often we will see vampire belief in Europe which has had an effect on burial practice. However, there is one potential case that immediately springs to mind and that is a grave which is rather strange at Woodplumpton.
00:09:37
Speaker
in Lancashire and that is a grave which is said to be occupied by Meg Shelton who died in 1705 and it is known as the witch's grave. There are many tales about Meg when she was alive
00:09:54
Speaker
tales which involve her shapeshifting in order to steal food, or indeed to cause mischief in her village of Singleton and later Woodplumpton. Her death is rather grisly, she was apparently crushed against a wall by a barrel. Now what's unusual about Meg's burial is firstly that as a witch she is even buried in consecrated ground. More on that in a moment.
00:10:22
Speaker
but also that the manner of her burial is slightly unusual. Apparently after her death Meg proceeded to dig her way out of her grave on more than one occasion.
00:10:37
Speaker
This led to her apparently being buried head first with an enormous boulder on top of her grave to prevent any further escapes. Perhaps people had just attempted to exhume her and that was why it looked like she'd been trying to escape. But in any case, there is still an enormous boulder on top of that grave in Woodplumpton graveyard.
00:11:01
Speaker
And Meg isn't the only unusual case. In Fife in Scotland, Lilius Addie, a woman who was later known as Torriburn Witch, was buried under a huge slab of stone on a beach. In both these cases, the women were known at the time as witches or have been recorded as witches.
00:11:25
Speaker
What's difficult for us archaeologists is sometimes we find graves which are marked by massive slabs of stone and where in the grave context the skeleton is also facing downwards and we don't always have that context of knowing that this individual was known as a witch. In these cases it could simply be a punishment after death for a sin or an imagined sin.
Demographics of Witch Trial Accusations
00:11:54
Speaker
like suicide. Of course, what else we get as archaeologists is an absence in consecrated spaces when they're excavated. A famous example I can think of off the top of my head is St Mary's Church, where the infamous Nutter family grave is
00:12:15
Speaker
And of course, the Nutter family lost Alice Nutter in the Pendle witch trials as she was convicted and executed in 1612. And Alice Nutter is most likely not buried in that grave, because witches typically would not be buried in consecrated ground. In this sense, we have a witch's grave.
00:12:41
Speaker
or something known as a witch's grave now, in which there is an absence
00:12:47
Speaker
of evidence. Pendle is a particularly bad example of a witch trial just so that our international listeners know. 11 people, it's pretty serious. And seriously nasty as well, given how old some of them were. Not sure if you've looked at this archaeologically, but do you have a sense of the average age of the bodies of people that you identify as witches in particular periods?
00:13:12
Speaker
So from what I understand, what we have archaeologically in terms of an age profile is mainly middle-aged to elderly individuals, which I think on the whole agrees with historical accounts. It is also mostly women.
00:13:35
Speaker
though there are a few men, though men seem to be more associated with other sorts of superstitious persecution and indeed other folkloric characters, so to speak.
Community Superstitions and Archaeological Evidence
00:13:50
Speaker
From what I understand, there are also some interesting pathologies in terms of these individuals often appear
00:13:58
Speaker
at least slightly malnourished. They are most of the time not individuals you would associate with upper echelons of society. There's a sort of halcyon moment in the 15th century where some quite posh people do get accused.
00:14:15
Speaker
But it doesn't persevere into the main era of witchcraft persecutions. You have a very few cases, and in fact, there's a gentle woman involved in the Pendle cases, I expect you know, where it gets as far as the lesser gentry. But you're really not having, you know, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, hailed and caught and accused of witchcraft, instead her servant is accused, and that's quite a common pattern.
00:14:40
Speaker
I believe it's the Nutter family who are the landed gentry in the Pendle case. They're the gentle family involved in the Pendle trial, and they're one of the reasons that it's aroused a lot of novelistic interest. I'm not sure if you've ever read Harrison Ainsworth's novel, or indeed
00:15:05
Speaker
on the grounds that she's more interesting or we can intuit more about her. I kind of disagree with that. I actually find the act pendul, which is old Demdike and old Chateau, the most interesting. That in Janet Divas. I just think it's so interesting that one of the effects of witch trials, right up to Salem even, is to empower children and servants and to testify against people who normally rule their lives.
00:15:31
Speaker
which is interestingly not something that we can really pick up on archaeologically because obviously these individuals don't end up in the archaeological record as symbols of the witch trials.
00:15:48
Speaker
not like their victims often do. I would suppose what we end up with though in terms of the persecutors is the method of burial, which will tell you about what a community thinks about a deceased individual. Burials like suicide burials where they're pinned to the ground with stakes, where the goal would seem to be some sort of Timothy Taylor type thing, where it's about preventing them from rejoining the community malevolently.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yes, the difficulty is that sometimes these texts that we create based on burial data also kind of infer that the individuals, the communities that are having to enact these mutilations almost upon the bodies of people who are from those communities are also victims in a way.
00:16:47
Speaker
Because they are having to do that to feel safe. That is presuming that there is actual belief in these superstitions and these supernatural creatures or creations. Rather than perpetrators. I suppose in a way that's an accurate way of summing up how they see themselves.
00:17:11
Speaker
I mean, people who persecute witches that are very dedicated to it really fall into a number of identifiable categories. And there are true believers. There are witch hunters like Matthew Hopkins who are trying to make a buck and probably enjoying the power. But the majority of witchcraft cases involve people who clearly do believe that this person actually killed their child or their husband or their pig or made their dairying business fall down.
00:17:42
Speaker
So I suppose that is the victim, really. I think this is something that needs more work done into it, perhaps, the psychological impact of these post-death, pre-burial processes upon bodies when associated with supernatural forces.
Persistence of Magical Beliefs
00:18:04
Speaker
I mean, we're talking about witches at the minute, but the perfect example of this would be the European vampire craze. Although this is a tradition which goes before that craze, so to speak, because we have examples from the fifth century of a Roman graveyard whereby a
00:18:28
Speaker
10-year-old that died of presumably malaria as there is evidence of that pathologically, where the child has been interred with a large stone in their mouth to presumably prevent this child from returning to life and spreading malarial disease. And these are what have been termed vampire burials.
00:18:56
Speaker
The example I just mentioned is from the rather spookily named Le Necropoli de Bambini, which is the cemetery of the babies in Italy.
00:19:10
Speaker
And that is a rather tame example actually, perhaps because it's so early. When you get to the time of the vampire craze in Europe, particularly in Poland, there are examples where the skeleton has been completely disarticulated.
00:19:29
Speaker
And by that, I mean that these poor, possibly and probably members of the family or close members of community have completely dismembered a body in order to prevent it rising from its grave. Exactly. And a lot of those kinds of accusations can be a psychic relief, but it's quite short-lived because the actual process
00:19:59
Speaker
pursuing the accusation, testifying in court, or getting a male relative to do it for you. I mean, all of that's quite grueling. Plus, the more involved you are, the more likely it is to redound on you. The more likely it is that someone's going to name you in a minute.
00:20:15
Speaker
That was the case most particularly in the UK that I can think of in the Pendle Witch Trials with Jeanette Devis, who was somewhat the star witness at nine years old against her own mother, Elizabeth Devis, and indeed her grandmother as well. Jeanette was so small at that stage that I believe she was placed on a table so that everyone could see her.
00:20:40
Speaker
And she continuously stated that she had evidence that her mother was a witch for three or four years. She mentioned her mother having a familiar called Ball who appeared in the shape of a brown dog. And on the strength of this, her mother was executed. But then...
00:21:00
Speaker
at some somewhat less infamous witch trials in Pandal in 1634, Jeanette herself was accused of being a witch. Except in her case, her accusers, Edmund Robinson and his father, were determined to be lying, and so she was acquitted.
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. The one where Charles is the first intervenes personally. And by saying that she doesn't believe a word of it, interestingly, we tend to sort of want to pin it on the upper classes as well. There's actually a point, there are several points really, where judges are actually trying to shake off juries in this respect and trying to say, come on, this is not, there's no such thing. The jury's like, well, no, there is your worship. Yeah, you long folk. You think, you know, but you know, we up north, we've always known
00:21:50
Speaker
It's also just really interesting because one of the things that we also see happening, which is really relevant to burial practice, is the decline of that protective magic that the medieval Catholic Church offers, where you've got a ton of built-in rituals that are licensed and are supposed to keep you safe. Being buried in consecrated ground is the obvious example of that.
00:22:17
Speaker
So when you get told by the new pastor that all this is a lot of superstitious nonsense and paganism and he can do nothing for you, it's a natural to sort of pivot to, in some cases, even older methods to try and manage the situation because your sense of threat doesn't go away. It remains active. And that's what's interesting is that
00:22:42
Speaker
desperate efforts at rigorous ideological control, a lot of the witch trials suggest its failure, suggest the failure of the Puritan Church, perhaps especially noticeably anywhere in Scotland, north of Edinburgh, to really sort of convince people of this
00:23:03
Speaker
completely secular, material world where God's there.
Folklore's Influence on Modern Superstitions
00:23:08
Speaker
He's authentically up there. Hellgates for you if you don't agree with the Kirk. And that's pretty much it for the supernatural. And they're all like, no, there are fairies. And then you're like, oh, no, no, there's no fairies. It's just demons. Yeah, demons or fairies, as we've always called them. So, I mean, a lot of stuff actually turns out to be very hard.
00:23:32
Speaker
to kill stone dead, presumably because it's performing an important function in people's lives.
00:23:40
Speaker
Interestingly, the other side of things we get in archaeology is home magics, or talismans, and material cultures specifically created to protect against magic, but have their own superstitious, almost magical basis. In particular, I'm thinking of witch bottles.
00:24:03
Speaker
which were particularly prevalent in the 17th century and normally consist of a glass or stoneware vessel which has been filled with contents such as pins or nails and sometimes disturbingly urine nail clippings and thorns.
00:24:22
Speaker
These are then squirreled away somewhere in a building, often in places such as hearths or beneath floors, in church yards, in some cases in ditches and riverbanks. The Holywell witch bottle was for example found just off Shoreditch High Street and in this case
00:24:45
Speaker
some large red brick floor tiles had been removed and a large hole dug beneath in the doorway of a basement or a latrine. The witch bottle had then been placed upright in the hole and the hole then backfilled with earth and the tiles carefully relayed but on a slightly different alignment.
00:25:07
Speaker
which meant when the archaeologists saw it, they were certain immediately that that area had been disturbed. And that's another point. It's often quite difficult for archaeologists to determine what is an item of folk magic. And this is one way that that can be done by identifying ritual placement within home or domestic contexts. It's often really difficult to determine if something is
00:25:37
Speaker
ritual. And that's often an amusing phrase which archaeologists write upon their reports and they give a slight smile to themselves because there's often a bit of a joke that, you know, if you don't know what something is, well, let's call it ritual. I will maintain that that is because it's often extremely difficult
00:25:59
Speaker
to determine if something is a ritual deposit, or in this case, an aspect of folkloric magic. It sometimes seems as if by placing and creating these items of folkloric magic and placing them within the bounds of their homes, people were rebelling against what
00:26:23
Speaker
people in power wanted to be the accepted narrative, which was a narrative necessarily without superstitious belief.
00:26:38
Speaker
And I live in a village and even today it's really clear that people will go on doing what what makes sense to them, kind of oblivious of what Vika says, sometimes with an indulgent smile even at Vika.
00:26:54
Speaker
And it's, you know, it's well known. And if anything, I feel like I went to an event at All Souls last month to celebrate and in a way sort of recognize 50 years of Keith Thomas' book, Religion and the Decline of Magic.
00:27:11
Speaker
And if there was a consensus among the participants, it was that actually he'd overstated the decline. In fact, one of the presentations was literally called magic and the decline of religion and was making the point that actually in this long combat between, I suppose, what we could call orthodox
00:27:33
Speaker
religion and the fringes, the undercurrents, the substrates. The substrates were looking like they might be outlasting the organised.
00:27:44
Speaker
I would agree with that and say that I think it's the smaller aspects of folkloric magic and superstition which have managed to outlast organized religion in some aspects. Things like witch bottles, which although might not be produced now, were still being produced in the early 1900s.
00:28:11
Speaker
in some aspects and also traditions like having bells on front doors because whenever you open the front door the clear clarity sound of the bell rings away evil and negativity and prevents it from entering your home space.
Theatre's Role in Superstition and Society
00:28:30
Speaker
Traditions like every child's belief and some adult's belief actually in fairy rings, rings of toadstools or other fungi, that occur naturally because there's something beneath the ground which they follow, but still have those connotations of doorways into the world of the fairy.
00:28:55
Speaker
Okay guys this discussion turned into a bit of a stream of consciousness recording and those are often the best ways to do this but I'm gonna have to Insert a little ad break here. So when you get back, we'll just be continuing the discussion as we were Catch you again in a moment
00:29:16
Speaker
If you're listening to this, then you're getting something out of the Archaeology Podcast Network. We've got volunteers from around the world helping bring these podcasts to you. We want to do more though, and we can do it with your support. For 7.99 US dollars per month, you can support us and get a little in return. For details, go to arcpodnet.com slash members. That's arcpodnet.com slash members to support archaeological education and outreach. Yeah, yeah, quite. And all around my village, horseshoes are still very big.
00:29:46
Speaker
Strong opinions about the fact that they should be inverted. This is regional. There are places where you have to have them so the luck doesn't run out and places where you have to have them sort of framingly. But we're framingly and there are rules. It's really important to people.
00:30:04
Speaker
And it's interesting to me, therefore, that what goes along with that is also the survival of which beliefs, and the relatively recent-ish case in Long Compton in 1893,
00:30:20
Speaker
of a woman who stabbed on her way home from the village shop because the person stabbing her believes she's a witch who's made his harvest unproductive. Robin Briggs says that there's a case of a witch lynching in Normandy in the 1970s where the lynch party used a 12-ball shotgun
00:30:41
Speaker
So, I mean, it's farcical to think that it's over in the way that people do. And we're now seeing this interesting, if historically, a little bit wonky revival of the identity of witches with people trying to hex Donald Trump and the prolific tarot of TikTok and that kind of, I mean, OK, that's nearly all of it dating from the 19th century, but
00:31:10
Speaker
sort of trying in a way to incorporate some of those older traditions into a coherent spiritual life outside the remit of organized religion.
00:31:22
Speaker
So we can definitely say in the case is now that witchcraft and superstition are closely linked with theatre and entertainment. But can we say that in a past context when repercussions could be significantly more severe? Could we, for example, say that the witch trials themselves became aspects of theatre, of entertainment for people?
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think they're intensely theatrical. I actually had a doctoral student who did a defill thesis, which is really a sort of witrification of Lorna
00:32:05
Speaker
modern drama was, among other things, intended to train people for legal encounters, most particularly jury service. So the very large number of witch trials that take place on the early modern stage, or witchy trials, if you like. So there's one in Shakespeare, and it's not in the play people expect. It's in Othello, where Othello is accused of witchcraft, is the only direct
00:32:31
Speaker
the theatricalisation of an actual trial and has to defend himself and interestingly does so by saying that he's exotic and that what he's done is told exotic stories and we're clearly meant to buy it and the court buys it too but later
00:32:54
Speaker
it emerges that he has a magical view of the handkerchief that Desdemona faithfully loses that stolen from her, that he thinks that it was woven by an Egyptian from mummy cloth. So he ends up sort of buying into the very thing that the place seems to be out to debunk. And then similarly, it's very clear that my thesis is probably fairly well known, which is that
00:33:23
Speaker
Actually, a lot of witches on stage are funny, but it's quite black humor. It's sort of Beketi and dark humor. So the witches in Macbeth are funny, but they're scary as well. I mean, it's comic when they say at the end of the cauldron recipe scene, cool it with the baboon's blood as if they were on the bake off. But but it's also genuinely scary that they are basically inviting tyranny and misrule.
00:33:52
Speaker
and that they're conjuring with bits of discarded babies and leftover bits of unbelievers and enemies to Christendom and all those things are scary. So it's sort of
00:34:07
Speaker
It's a very powerful position by contrast in other plays like The Witch of Edmonton, The Witch is Very Powerless. She's actually kind of a sympathetic character because she's one of those very frequently encountered characters who's more orthodox for Puritanism. She sells her soul but just gets anything from it, rather like Dr Faustus, who gets very little out of his bargain.
00:34:30
Speaker
So those players are there to sort of say, you don't sell your soul to the devil, he's a cheat. Whereas the witches in Macbeth, I think if you were a poor elderly woman who would say one legged and one eyed, you might well say to yourself, you know, I've got the name. How about if I also had the game?
00:34:49
Speaker
And my lovely longtime friend Miranda Chater is strongly of the opinion that people who are suspected of witchcraft could use that identity to effectively blackmail their neighbors for 20 years by more or less threatening to hex them and their children if they didn't give the witch a side of bacon or a cup of flour or whatever the witch asked them for.
00:35:12
Speaker
So bringing into this discussion the play that inspired it, which is The Devil is an Ass by Ben Johnson, which is a Jacobean comedy first performed, as I said earlier, in 1616. But if we particularly talk about the discussion between this lesser devil, demon, and the devil himself,
00:35:36
Speaker
In that scene it almost seems like the devils and demons are struggling to keep up to date with this enlightened world in which they're trying to enact their evil. And sort of embarrassing really. It's a play that I always think of as full of dad jokes.
00:35:58
Speaker
that Satan is sort of the devil is sort of like this pathetic, slightly wrongheaded emoji user on an antiquated social media side. He wants to be sort of down with the homies. There's no worse look for an academic. And I think, yeah, I think Ben Johnson is definitely
00:36:22
Speaker
laughing at the superstitions of rural believers through that persona of the devil. But at the same time, he's also suggesting in a way that perhaps is a bit like the Witch of Edmonton, that there are even more stupid people in the world who could still be taken in even by a fairly dense devil.
00:36:45
Speaker
Now, Ben Johnson's comedy is allegedly inspired by the 1598 incident with Will Summers, whereby Summers relates that he has potentially offended a witch and then he falls into rather dramatic convulsions. So, Summers was essentially play acting, being cursed,
00:37:13
Speaker
And he confessed that much apparently before an ecclesiastical commission and reenacted his convulsions for them. But the churchman, because his acting was so good, decided that his possession or his curse had to be genuinely demonic.
00:37:33
Speaker
Now, Summers confessed again that it was a further act of his, but it had taken in those churchmen. And I believe one of them, Darryl, was degraded from the clergy and imprisoned in 1599 because of being taken in by this. Now, this is all allegedly
00:37:59
Speaker
what inspired. The devil is an ass, but Darryl apparently said that if neither possession nor witchcraft contrary to that hath been so long generally and confidently affirmed, why should we think that there are devils?
Supernatural Elements in Theatre
00:38:16
Speaker
If no devils, no god. And he does make a good point there about the foundations of belief.
00:38:24
Speaker
She's well understood in pamphlet literature, because you've got Edward Jordan's crucial pamphlet analyzing a possessed girl called Mary Glover, where he tries to demonstrate that actually, she's not possessed.
00:38:39
Speaker
is just hysterical, meaning it's a physical melody. It's not supernatural. So that kind of thinking was very much with them, but the converse was also out there. So I'm very famously, there was that
00:38:56
Speaker
performance of Dr. Faustus in Exeter, where the actors all rushed off the stage because they were convinced that there was one devil too many among them. So that can happen as well, the opposite. The conviction that magic is like the theatre can also lead to the conviction that theatre can do magic. It is almost like there is a symbiotic relationship between the theatre and superstition, in that maybe one exists lesser without the other.
00:39:25
Speaker
that they're needed to enrich the quality of each other or the believability. And I must admit the initial impression I got with the devil as an ass is that it almost needed that verifiable backstory in order to justify its questioning nature. Yeah. Yeah. And it almost, it's almost that
00:39:52
Speaker
The theatre increasingly wants the supernatural to be a way of drawing in audiences to spectacle and to the special increasingly powerful spectacles available at the indoor theatres. So even a play like The Tempest.
00:40:12
Speaker
is largely written around the special effects. It's like the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. And so in that sense, because you weren't allowed to stay
00:40:29
Speaker
the workaround was actually to write plays about the devil, weird though it sounds. And that element of spectacle appears in the actual witchcraft trial settings as well, I think. And correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it seems that those trials which were more successful, so to speak,
00:40:53
Speaker
were the ones which had that element of spectacle. That's something different to contribute, like the Pendle trial which had the testimony of 9-year-old Jeanette Davis against her own family members.
00:41:09
Speaker
And it's also that there's something intrinsically spectacle based about witchcraft anyway because it's well understood and Edward Cook says this even when he's being Lord Chancellor that
00:41:28
Speaker
accept the confession of the accused and the words of the opponent. So it is quite theatre-like, where everyone shows up and makes a speech, but also they then sought different kinds of ocular proofs, including the search for which marks
00:41:45
Speaker
the search for which he implements around the place, the search for a familiar, which became important from the 1620s onwards. Before that, the belief still existed, but the attempt to rope the familiar into a system of forensic proof is maybe later. It's just interesting that they go on trying to find some real solid evidence because they're still never 100 percent comfortable with the fact that
00:42:15
Speaker
It's one old woman's word against another, and they're both at best minors in the eyes of the law.
00:42:24
Speaker
And it was silly old women. I mean, you're going to read Reginald Scott's discovery of witchcraft, which historians adore because it's skeptical. And it's like, we love Reginald Scott because he's just like us. He's skeptical like we are. And I mean, actually, it's from a position of saying that the problem with witchcraft isn't that it's misogynist or that it persecutes elderly people, but that it goes against Protestant religion. And yes, he's fascinated by it all.
00:42:52
Speaker
And yeah, another fun switcher really is that we have a surviving manuscript, which is a printing of Scott's book that some cunning man picked up and evidently used as a charm book, because Scott sedulously records all the charms. Dramatists borrow lengthily from Scott Middleton's The Witch, has whole unmediated chunks from Discovery of Witchcraft. And then despite this skeptical tradition, it's perfectly okay for a cunning man to use it to actually deploy those charms.
00:43:21
Speaker
Bringing it full circle almost, a lot of the people who were accused of witchcraft were individuals that provided a service to the community which they couldn't get from organised religion. They were individuals that did supplement superstitious belief but it was because the community themselves held superstitious belief close to their hearts.
00:43:46
Speaker
These were individuals that provided charms or medical help against ailments or against bad luck. Going on further in this discussion, I was wondering about the nature of the relationship between superstition communities and the landscapes in which they reside.
00:44:11
Speaker
For example, it is a lot of the time it would seem these rural communities which are the focus of these witchcraft trials. Now, whether that is because the rurality or the rural nature of these communities meant that superstition could flourish more, or whether it was actually these rural communities sought out entertainment in a way.
Witch Trials as Theatrical Events
00:44:42
Speaker
or occupied themselves more with accusations against other people in that community in order to spark entertainment.
00:44:55
Speaker
I was wondering what your thoughts were on that. I mean, the most prominent landscape I think of in terms of witchcraft and witch trials is again Pendle, which is dominated by Pendle Hill, which before the witch trials had certain superstitious beliefs associated with it.
00:45:18
Speaker
For what it's worth, my sense is that Pendle Hill is a perfect example of an area that comes to seem scary and demonic because it's wasteland. Even the ocean is regarded as dodgy at best because you can't plow it or sow it or keep animals on it.
00:45:40
Speaker
anywhere that wasn't sort of dominated overtly by human agency tended to be seen as potentially dominated by the devil. People constantly reminded themselves of the phrase, the rulers of the darkness of this world.
00:46:00
Speaker
So anywhere that you hadn't physically put under the plow or anywhere that you hadn't pastured your sheep on was likely to seem too hostile and I mean you can go back as far as Beowulf where very clearly Grendel is a swamp thing so you're coming back now to bog burials as well
00:46:22
Speaker
Clearly, you are sticking dangerous beings in that kind of ground rather than close at hand. And the idea is really that that kind of place is where they come from too. There's a fun little Scottish superstition here that's relevant called the Goodman's Croft, where they set aside an unploughed acre of land, which they called the Goodman's Croft, and it was supposed to be Satan's bit of the parish.
00:46:51
Speaker
Okay, so the idea was they sort of bought him off with an unplowed bit of land on the grounds that then he wouldn't take bits of land and make them not fertile. The underlying assumption is always therefore that anything that isn't very arable or usable or fertile.
00:47:09
Speaker
is already the haunt of dark powers. So it necessarily makes sense of why Pendle, plus there's a social aspect too, and that is that Pendle was one of the dark corners of the land, as Puritan ministers called it. The whole of Lancashire was a hotbed of recusancy, and this was well understood.
00:47:32
Speaker
So what people meant by the dark corners of the land were literally places where their particular idea of civilization, which usually involved, you know, Puritanism, reliable streets, relatively orthodox housing. Anything that wasn't that was up to be seen as the devil's domain anyhow. And by the time of the Pendle trial,
00:48:00
Speaker
It was also very well understood in radical Puritan circles that the whole of the Catholic Church was really Satan worship. That brings a couple of things immediately to mind actually, the first of which is just the nature of boundaries.
00:48:15
Speaker
which seem to be particularly important in terms of superstitious belief. The way that communities divided up land, not necessarily always between what is usable arable land and what is waste land,
00:48:34
Speaker
But what is a safe space? What is known? And what is an unknown environment? For example, woodland specifically is often considered a hotbed of superstitious characters. A lot of the superstitious characters we know of are associated with specific environments.
00:48:58
Speaker
just immediately coming to mind is wisps and bogs slash marshlands and being drawn into that dangerous area through the promise of something which appears safe and appears light because light and fire are often actually associated with
00:49:24
Speaker
the antithesis of bad superstitious relief, almost as a sort of cleansing agent. And that is also what the Wisp uses to draw you in, is this thing which appears safe, this light.
00:49:41
Speaker
And the second thing actually is something which I arguably know more about, which is prehistory. And this thought of wasteland or marginal environments immediately made me think of the way the bodies of water were potentially thought about and interacted with in the Bronze Age.
00:50:06
Speaker
where items were ritually deposited, sometimes ritually killed, and then deposited within bodies of water, as if these bodies of water were thought of as an repository via which things could make their way into an afterlife, or actually doorways
Significance of Magical Objects in Archaeology
00:50:29
Speaker
into afterlife settings themselves.
00:50:34
Speaker
Right, so not a way of giving the afterlife an object, but a way of ensuring the longevity of the object itself. Yes, so the example which immediately comes to mind is the Dud Kingston Lock Horde, which dates to about 1,000 to 800 BC, which puts it bang smack in the middle of the late Bronze Age.
00:51:00
Speaker
And that actually has quite a few pieces of bronze. So it was found in the lock and that obviously brings up the question why was this hoard deposited in the lock in the first place? But also the majority of the pieces within the hoard have been ritually destroyed. So they've been broken, they've been torn up.
00:51:27
Speaker
In the hoard there are about 29 damaged or broken swords or blades and 28 broken spearheads. There's also rather incongruously a handle of a bronze bucket. Similar hoards have been found so there's the one at Peel Hill in South Lanarkshire which is a hoard of broken and burnt weapons.
00:51:53
Speaker
and they've been interpreted actually as deliberate sacrifices, particularly in the case of weapons. Most of the items, as we've already said, of the duddingstone lock hoard have been bent, broken or burnt in some way. Now this material was still usable so
00:52:18
Speaker
Even if they'd all been accidentally broken or damaged in this way, then it would still be presumably more logical for them to reuse the material. So it is significant abandonment of resources within the lock itself.
00:52:40
Speaker
Right. So it's not like you're just storing it to you. So you're running hypothetically from the Vikings or someone and you stick it in the bog to hide it. Actual act of sort of renunciation. Well, it's going to be a secho in Arthurian mythology as well, where the whole force of the Excalibur myth is that it comes from water.
00:53:05
Speaker
caliber is a water sword, almost that it partakes of the longevity of the water itself and its power. Now, interestingly, there's some controversial arguments over whether this should be termed the killing of a weapon or a sword, because obviously that weapon has potentially taken life. It is therefore, in some respects, dangerous.
00:53:34
Speaker
And so, when the owner of that weapon dies, perhaps it has been argued that the weapon itself has to also be killed because of its connection with death and with its owner, who presumably had some sort of control over the weapon itself.
00:53:59
Speaker
Interesting. So the owner is presumed to have been the one preventing the object from what? Running a mark?
00:54:08
Speaker
being violent on its own, I'm just curious. So I would say that this is still quite a controversial theory because of the lack of evidence behind it, but presumably because that weapon has a quality of death about it, and death is in some cultures necessarily bad.
00:54:32
Speaker
It could just be another instance of scholarship trying to come up with a ritual reason and that's often a difficult thing to do for a waste of what could be perfectly good resources.
00:54:50
Speaker
like a curse, like the sword that Tolkien gives to Turin Turamba in the first age, where it's actually it turns out that the sword is really angry with him because he's used it unjustly. And so when he turns to kill himself with it, the sword says, great, that's just what I want to do. I want to shed your blood.
00:55:08
Speaker
It has also been brought back to a sense of belonging in that some items perhaps can only belong to their first owner, particularly with weapons. But also there are examples where other items have had this happen to them, where they've been deposited in this certain way within a body of water.
00:55:33
Speaker
The Duddington Lockhord, for example, also has that bucket handle and there are examples of ritually deposited plough shares, for example, particularly in southern England. Okay guys, we're popping off for another ad break here. Just remember that this will be continuing this discussion just as we were when we get back. As always, thanks for listening, you wonderful people, and we'll catch you again in a moment.
00:56:04
Speaker
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00:56:24
Speaker
Yeah, and it makes sense because objects, even at any time before the industrial age, are understood to be more porous than we tend to think they are. I mean, my sword is much more my sword in earlier periods than it would be now, even if I was a keen fencer. That, again, just speaks to quite a human experience. Most people get very upset if their car has to be junked because they've spent so long in it, they behave towards it as if it were a pet.
00:56:53
Speaker
And it's quite common in modern folklore for people to feel that photocopiers or printers are spiteful and are kind of working against them. So we haven't completely shed these beliefs, but we don't now have a structure into which to put them.
00:57:10
Speaker
So, and we no longer have any kind of tradition really of destroying the belongings of the dead. And we would probably, there'd probably be some pushback from the average modern person that it was actually disrespecting the dead person that you would only do that if you wanted in some sense to ensure that the dead person was completely gone and completely forgotten.
00:57:33
Speaker
It's like the disparity of argument in terms of bog bodies or who bog bodies were prior to their deposition. Were they hated criminal individuals who were thrice killed in order to get some sort of justice?
00:57:50
Speaker
Were they ritually starved prior to their execution because they were being punished or was that a stage in a ceremonial process for someone who was an honoured individual in society? Were these individuals selected purposefully because of their qualities in life to be offerings in death?
00:58:17
Speaker
Were they, in actual fact, and this is a more modern theory, so-called social outcasts or witches, this all in an environment, let us not forget, which is a boundary environment, which is an environment which could be seen as hostile. Yeah. And it's also a wasteland environment. So it's fought with
00:58:43
Speaker
It's also fought with danger because it's neither one thing nor another. A bog is scary because it's not quite a lake and it's not quite a field. And anything that's sort of betwixt and between categories is up to be treated with a great deal of caution. You're thinking about
00:59:01
Speaker
man, I can tell, because there's that book by Anne Ross who argues that he was a druid prince. And everyone else is like, no, he was a criminal and was punished by being tribally killed. The triply killed thing is interesting, though. And again, it's a common feature of witch-related execution. So in Scotland, for example, not only is the witch burned, but she strangled first.
00:59:28
Speaker
It's sort of a mercy killing, but it's also something else. It's also sort of asking, well, what will really put an end to this, the physical threat?
00:59:40
Speaker
within her body. And I mean, execution by strangulation has a lot of sort of folkloric and mythic significances, particularly for Norse cultures. It's not just a substitute for beheading, it's also about breath and ensuring the stoppage of breath
01:00:04
Speaker
In some cases, it's very overtly an offering to Odin, who was himself kind of killed by hanging and then survived. So in some kind of sense, the persistence of the strangulation and then the burning of the body suggests that however hard the Kirk tried, it was still really ritualistic, whereas in
01:00:29
Speaker
England, as I'm always sort of saying, in fiction you find witches are being burned all the time, but actually they were all hanged. So it's a sort of effort to almost demystify it. But it also meant that their bodies remained on the gallows for some time. And there's some sort of interesting
01:00:51
Speaker
that connects within a further flurry of superstitions connected with the rope of executed people and particularly their hands, the hand of glory superstition, which also persists till the 19th century. And I think the Whitby Museum has a 19th century one complete with a tallow candle allegedly made of human tallow.
01:01:15
Speaker
It does indeed, and I think it is the only alleged hand of glory known to survive, definitely in the UK. And it was found in the wall of a thatched cottage in Castleton.
01:01:31
Speaker
So a hand of glory for those of you who might not know was supposed to be a very carefully prepared right hand which would be cut from the body of a felon who was still hanging from the gallows. And this would then be used by burglars to send sleepers in a house, a house which they wanted to rob, into a coma from which they would be unable to ever wake.
01:02:00
Speaker
Thinking about the argument you were making actually, I've never thought about this before, but the process of ducking and the notion of the trial by water also has those sort of connotations, right?
Rituals Reflecting Societal Control
01:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, the idea of the waters that didn't float because the waters rejected you, that the water refuses the satanic, magical, diabolic body of the witch, and some kind of sense of that being a signifier of nature itself rejecting her.
01:02:37
Speaker
And it's also interesting in relation to the very weird practice that really was much more associated with Matthew Hopkins than anyone else, which is watching with the witch, which also crops up in, for instance, Taming of the Shrew and various other sort of wife baiting plays. There's a lost play called Keep the Widow Waking.
01:03:01
Speaker
which is all about taming your wife or your intended by not letting them sleep. And this was what they really did do with falcons. If you kept the bird awake for long enough, the goal was to get it to the point where it was so tired, it would jump to your hand and take food.
01:03:18
Speaker
So it literally was a method of taming the wild and therefore it's interesting that it ends up being applied to the witch. The witch can also be subdued by sleeplessness and there's a sexual or marital relation there that's quite uncomfortable and it's clearly not about desire but about mastery.
01:03:42
Speaker
Focusing in on that rejection by nature to accept the body of a witch
01:03:49
Speaker
when they are undergoing the process of ducking? Could it not also hark back to that older tradition? I'm talking about the prehistoric idea of water being a portal or a gateway into an afterlife. Could it not also speak to a witch being rejected from an afterlife?
01:04:15
Speaker
And the process of ducking itself, obviously they knew that an individual who was innocent, who was being ducked by their philosophy surrounding the process would die and therefore be accepted into an afterlife through the body of water. Now I'm thinking about Neil Price's interpretation of that really famous
01:04:43
Speaker
human sacrifice among the roost reported by Eden Falman, the Islamic 10th century Islamic traveler. This is super scary. If you haven't read Neil Price's The Viking Way due, because it's one of my favorite archaeology texts, there's a second edition now, so you no longer have to pay thousands of pounds for it like you once did. What's brilliant, I think, is that he suggests that it basically involves
01:05:11
Speaker
the ritual treatment of a particular slave girl. So the Lord dies. One of the slaves is singled out for special treatment. And all the women of the tribe give her their jewelry, and she gets better food than everyone else. She's treated like a princess. But she's also big, it turns out, sort of fattened for the slaughter. And she has voluntary sex with all the leading men of the tribe by the Lord's body.
01:05:40
Speaker
And then there's this sequel, which is really horrific and violent, where all the men at the tribe break her and it has to be clearly violent and terrible. And she's then killed, sort of triply killed. She's strangled and stabbed at the same time. And then she goes on the burning boat with the master and the two of them are burned together.
01:06:05
Speaker
And I think what Price argues, I hope I'm summarising Price and not someone else, is that this whole ritual exists to differentiate her from the Lord. That his passage to paradise can be best guaranteed by showing someone who'll never get there.
01:06:23
Speaker
and by, in a way, being constantly compared with and paired with someone who'll never get that. But also maybe explaining why people need witches, why society always needs a demon person. I mean, it's partly just straightforwardly political. Really, what's going on is I think Wolfgang Barringer points out as a little ice age, which has made everyone's harvests a bit worse and made crops like wheat only marginally successful in the British Isles.
01:06:53
Speaker
So how do we explain this apparent change? Why are our vines no longer flourishing, etc?
01:07:03
Speaker
than say the vast land grab that's known as the dissolution of the monasteries where rents are hiked up massively by the nobles and gentry who get the land.
Physical Disabilities and Witchcraft Accusations
01:07:13
Speaker
We don't want to sort of start talking about awkward things like that, nor do we want to imply that there's any trouble at the top that might lead to these curses, but we can pin the latest hailstorm on this one-eyed lady. I don't know whether archaeology has looked at all that
01:07:28
Speaker
There's a weird bodily pattern in witchcraft about being lopsided, having a limp or having one eye or having one leg or having a missing bit on one side.
01:07:41
Speaker
You know, I can't think of an example of the top of my head from the witch craze, the time period of the witch trials themselves, though I'm sure there are examples. What I am thinking of though is perhaps the antithesis of that, which is the fact that there are a number of
01:08:04
Speaker
shamanic burials, burials which are from prehistory which have been excavated which appear to contain shamans. There's one from around 12,000 years ago which contains a female shaman or medicine woman which was found in Israel.
01:08:27
Speaker
And she has a lot of grave goods. She seems quite wealthy and she was buried with all honor it would seem. She's been identified by archaeologists as a shaman because of the totemic animals which are contained within the grave.
01:08:46
Speaker
But for our purposes what's very interesting is that she appears to have had a spinal disability which would have caused her a significant limp and during this period that would mean that she would have to have had quite a degree of dedicated care within her community.
01:09:08
Speaker
because she was kept alive to old age. She was about 45 years old at death and that is quite a significant age for the time period in question. But what's particularly interesting is that in prehistory there seems to be quite common in terms of individuals who are identified as having some sort of shamanic purpose.
01:09:35
Speaker
of having that particular role within a community. There are quite a few examples of these individuals having disabilities. On the other side of things, I think there are a few examples that I can think of where individuals in the 1600s and 1700s who have been accused of being witches
01:10:02
Speaker
have some form of underlying pathology, not necessarily a disability so to speak. There is a burial in a slave cemetery in Newton Plantation in Barbados, which is from this 1600s-1700s time period. It has been suggested that she was potentially seen as a dangerous individual,
01:10:29
Speaker
potentially a witch. And in terms of the pathology of that example, she does have a high lead content in her bones.
01:10:39
Speaker
which would indicate lead poisoning, which can cause odd behaviours such as paralysis and seizures and changes in mood which would have led to an individual being ostracised. So there are examples of pathologies like that, like lead poisoning and rickets for example, but it's difficult.
01:11:09
Speaker
It's very difficult archaeologically to find and determine these things unless someone has been recorded in that plot as being a witch or if there are extremely special contextual circumstances around that particular
01:11:33
Speaker
And also the descriptions, even in the early modern period, are unreliable because they're trying to describe what they think, the characteristics of which are archetypally. They're not trying to describe what misses so and so.
01:11:47
Speaker
in Chelmsford who was accused last week actually looks like the pattern in early modern trials where the majority of the accused are elderly post-menopausal women from the very lowest social class, basically beggars, typically not really properly admitted into the community in the sense of not having an obvious male protector figure. It is uncomfortable and
01:12:12
Speaker
I think that it's also always worth remembering that early modern culture really understood any physical problem as the result of moral action or failure. So I mean, even going blind, poor John Wilton, who was highly educated with a Cambridge degree, had to spend huge amounts of energy defending himself against the idea that going blind was proof that he'd done something terrible.
01:12:43
Speaker
I suppose that even without masses of archaeological evidence, I would agree that pathologies and distinct visual aspects for individuals during the witch craze
01:12:58
Speaker
in the 1600s and 1700s definitely contributed towards persecution. But I would also argue that it's not only what happened with the witch craze. I would say that the other superstitious and folkloric crazes of the time on the continent in Europe, particularly the werewolf craze, for example, in Switzerland,
01:13:28
Speaker
also shared aspects of that physical, visual disability being grounds potentially for not just societal ostracization, but also persecution in relation to superstition.
Superstition's Role in Society
01:13:48
Speaker
Which is like a hypermasculine version.
01:13:52
Speaker
of the dysfunctional post-menopausal female body. I mean, very clearly it was understood and believed that an infertile female body was the biological equivalent of a wasteland. It wasn't for anything and it wasn't doing anything.
01:14:12
Speaker
And so I suppose that connects with predatory animals, which also don't have a clear purpose. They seem to be just there to annoy you and to ruin your own labors. So it sort of links in in the sense that these are animals that can't be tamed or managed in the same way that Pendle Hill can't be farmed.
01:14:38
Speaker
In terms of the visual aspect, I suppose the only difference I would be able to point out would be that maybe the rhetoric surrounding werewolf accusations was slightly more direct in that these individuals often described as looking animalistic or acting animalistically. But I suppose with
01:15:05
Speaker
witchcraft accusations and descriptions, that's a little less direct, perhaps in terms of them being described as having some control over animals or having verbal interactions with animals, which would give them that animalistic aspect. Yeah, like the familiar particularly, but also magical control over my pig so that it dies.
01:15:35
Speaker
And it's also interesting that the range of animals named as familiars, I was partly based on size, but it does correlate a little bit with sort of small nuisance animals like rats, mice and flies, rather than dogs say. I mean, despite the which of Edmonton play and indeed the pamphlet, a dog is unusual even in Scotland.
01:15:59
Speaker
And it was just good for dramatization. The dog is a really significant character when you see the play. But there's also something creepily sexual about Elizabeth Sawyer's relationship with the dog that suggests that she's too into it. She's too animal herself.
01:16:17
Speaker
And so then part of the fizon is that sort of, oh my God, our parents might have had sex. What if old people are still doing it? Yikes kind of sense that goes with that. Where the sex is very clearly divorced from reproductivity and therefore can't be justified.
01:16:32
Speaker
So do you think there are distinct differences in the way that the animalistic element is presented in these two different crazes associated with superstition then? Yeah, but I think there are links too and commonalities. Commonality would be across this idea of the useless or the untamed.
01:16:55
Speaker
as problematic because until the romantic period, it is, you know, anything wild that you haven't wrangled and that you aren't coping with is horrifying. And and as a result of that, even to this day, people will feel like a bramble is terribly untidy, even if it's nice and produces blackberries and bad. So we still categorize some plants as weeds and others as as fruitful flower type plants.
01:17:24
Speaker
In all those sorts of ways, the wolf and the witch share a certain failed utility in a rural setting. They're not producing babies. They're not producing food. They're not really doing anything. They're surplus to requirements. Therefore, the thinking goes, they must be preying on everybody else's efforts.
01:17:49
Speaker
It's interesting how it can all hark back to land fertility and the struggle for resources in a changing and difficult environment or climate. I suppose it is just motivated in part by the pressures of a subsistence agricultural system or a subsistence culture in general. Yeah, I think, yeah, absolutely.
01:18:18
Speaker
to produce food is massively problematized by huge climate change.
Modern Political Rhetoric and Witchcraft Language
01:18:23
Speaker
We're about to go through all this again. And I don't know if I'll even live to see the worst of it, but if I do, I won't be at all surprised if it produces some of the phenomena of the kind
01:18:37
Speaker
of this in A, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and B, not sure if you know this, but Hillary Clinton was routinely believed to be possessed by a demon by the Christian riot in America and was repeatedly called a witch. So this is, you know, if you're not getting enough, somebody else, a post-menopausal woman, must be taking more than their fair share. It's that kind of thinking.
01:19:03
Speaker
But then you end up on the opposite end of the spectrum with political figures who will cry witch hunt. And it's often not female political figures either. So it is interesting how witchcraft rhetoric can be used in both sides of an argument or debate in modern political contexts. I think you have Donald Trump who definitely saw himself as a victim of witchcraft persecution.
01:19:32
Speaker
But I blame Martha Miller for that, if I can digress slightly. I think the Crucible is an absolutely, well, let's say, diabolical play in that it wants to credit the Salem witch trials to female sexuality and adolescent female sexuality at that. In reality, Abigail Williams, as you probably know, is 10 years old.
01:19:52
Speaker
So one thing we can probably rule out as a likely cause of her testimony was that she was in love with John Proctor and hoping that he would give her a tumble. And I think it's quite disgraceful and deeply misogynist. And it hands over the idea of which persecution to men so that white men can see themselves as the migrants principle victims. I get that he was writing about McCarthyism. I'm not sure Trump does. But nevertheless, I feel like it's
01:20:21
Speaker
an absolute swindle that we can only take something seriously if men become among its victims and if women become the main accusers. That's what Trump meant.
01:20:32
Speaker
Yes, and unfortunately that play goes too far in terms of the rhetoric it uses in terms of fertility as well, particularly in agricultural imagery. Because it was a case of ergot poisoning and it uses other naturalistic descriptors and imagery, which are just not, they're problematic at best.
01:20:59
Speaker
Yeah, oh, don't get me started on the naturalistic interpretations, which are just a big cop out. And I mean, a lot of the historiographic uses of the witch trials is, oh, look how sophisticated we are in comparison with these benighted people long ago. Those people are so primitive compared to us. Thank God we have historians like ourselves with bright, shiny university degrees to explain things.
01:21:24
Speaker
This is yet another month where we're not going to have time for that usual tangent time guys, but I think that we definitely have enough to think about and we have been truly blessed in this discussion.
01:21:39
Speaker
It's our individual beliefs, our communal beliefs, and our association and involvement in superstitious practices which have made human societies undeniably human throughout our history.
01:21:59
Speaker
And all of these beliefs, all of these practices we've discussed today are part of our shared history. The brutality of the events we've discussed and the sheer unfairness of many of them.
01:22:17
Speaker
is a blot on our history, but some of the other things, the more benign things, well, they were a way to rebellion for people who might not have had that much of a voice in their
01:22:34
Speaker
in their world. It's a sobering thought now though, isn't it? That when we dress up as a stereotypical witch on Halloween, we're actually feeding into centuries worth of vitriol of the other in our societies.
01:22:56
Speaker
And in some way, if we're not careful, we're celebrating persecution of those who are different. I'm not trying to spoil the fun, but you need to know the history. So with that, happy Halloween, happy spooky season, happy Samhain, happy All Hallows Eve. Wherever you are, however you celebrate or don't celebrate, well, thanks for listening.
01:23:24
Speaker
You can find this podcast every month on APN and on any other major streaming platform. That means Apple, Google podcasts, Spotify, you know the drill by now. Our special thanks go to Professor Diane Perkiss, who really brought her A-game to this episode. So that's that. And well, without further ado, I will see you on the flip side, guys.
01:24:13
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:24:38
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.