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Episode 1: History of Witchcraft
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For our very first episode, we'll be taking a deep dive into the depressing History of Witchcraft. So get in and buckle those seat belts witches, this is going to be a wild ride through a very dark history.
We would be forever thankful if you left our podcast a 5-Star review. If you really loved the show and want more Get in Loser content, check out our Supercast & Buy Me a Coffee links below. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @GetinWitches, on TikTok @weredoingwitchcraft or email us at weredoingwitchcraft@gmail.com. You can support our show through our
Supercast: https://getinloserweredoingwitchcraft.supercast.com
Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/getinwitches
Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio- The Witch
- Witches: A Century of Murder (2015)- 2-part Netflix docuseries hosted by historian Suzannah Lipscomb.
- Witches of Salem (2019)- Travel Channel miniseries (re-enactment of historical events)
- Ancient Mysteries: Dark History of Witches (1996)- History Channel (the “modern day” portion at the very end is pretty dated and only covers about 2 minutes of Wicca. Historical portion was great though)
- Bergman, Jess. (2015) A Literary History of Witches: Scaring Men from Time Immemorial. https://lithub.com/a-literary-history-of-witches/
- The History of Witches: How Christianity & Misogyny Turned Revered Healers into Wicked Pariahs (2015, updated 2020). All That’s Interesting (Checked by: Leah Silverman). https://allthatsinteresting.com/history-of-witches
- A Brief History of Witches in America. (2017) Sulagna Misra. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87525/brief-history-witches-america
- https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/journey-into-witchcraft-beliefs/
- https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_superstitione*.html#:~:text=Plutarch's%20essay%20on%20Superstition%20is,originally%20prepared%20for%20public%20presentation.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100126061416/http://www.pinktink3.250x.com/essays/tablets.htm
- https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/history-of-witches
11. https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/paganism/history/modern_1.shtml
12. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Druid
13. https://lithub.com/a-literary-history-of-witches/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Do you feel drawn to learn more about spirituality, witchcraft, and the occult, but feel lost on where to start? Then welcome to Get In Loser where you're doing witchcraft, a podcast all about what it means to be a witch and where to get started on your journey. Join us as we navigate through various witchy topics and share what we have learned about the craft. So get in witches and join us as we discuss witchcraft throughout history. Also, a brief warning, as this episode includes foul language and mentions of death and torture.
The History of Witchcraft
00:00:34
Speaker
Anyways, it's making a podcast. We should have named it. Not weird. Two idiots making podcasts. New titles. We're changing it. Just update all of our stuff. Two idiots making a podcast.
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, change all the branding. So episode one. I'm so glad we're finally here. No, I'm excited. So what are you talking about? We're talking about the history of witchcraft. A dark, depressing, sad history of witchcraft with a sprinkle of positive. Just a little bit, not too much. We can't let you be too happy.
00:01:15
Speaker
just know it was all shit and all of it. That's the end. That's the end of the podcast. We wanted to start episode one with a very brief history of witchcraft because not only is it fascinating, but we also think it's important to highlight the history of the craft
00:01:30
Speaker
and understand just how far back beliefs in the occult stretch. So many people believe that witches and witchcraft are Christian inventions from a time where witch hysteria was prevalent and used as a tool to reinforce male-dominated authority, but there is countless documented evidence of witches, spells, and the occult that predate Christianity. So we're going to be looking at how witches and witchcraft throughout history have been looked at through both a negative and positive lens.
00:01:59
Speaker
So when we're talking about the negative views, this was often like demonizing witches, right? Or demonizing women. So they believed that witches were heretics who worked for or in league with the devil, or they made packs with the devil. The devil's horror, consort, or handmaiden were often turns used to describe the witch, and they were giving it that sexual element. They were hyper-sexualizing women and making it to be like witchcraft.
00:02:25
Speaker
They called them sorceresses, enchantresses, cannibals. So there was a human sacrifice, infant sacrifice, and consumption, which is just preposterous. And then sexual deviance. So again, going back into that sexual element, women were sexual, hypersexual, therefore they were witches.
00:02:45
Speaker
Um, gross. Yeah. Disgusting. It goes all throughout history and it's so gross. I fringed researching all of this and so gross. So then, um, the positive views, um, this kind of predated the witch trials or the, um, uh, what was the word, witch hysteria, right? So before all of that happened, witches were looked at as being wise or cunning women. King always had an advisor that was a witch.
00:03:15
Speaker
They had weird or wayward sisters that were their prophets.
Roles and Perceptions of Witches
00:03:20
Speaker
They helped to make decisions in a kingdom. Healers that were adept in herbs, potions, tonics. These were women that were too advanced for their time. So they were before the times of science and medicine. It was all superstition. So if they knew these things, they were considered to be witches. Midwives, they helped birth babies, but then later that became witchcraft.
00:03:43
Speaker
Like if you knew what was going on with a pregnancy or, you know, you used an old wives' tale to tell the sex of a baby, you were clearly a witch. Yeah, clearly. So something that I found that I couldn't find any like serious documentation on, but it came up multiple times in some of the research was cleansers. And I'm sure like a lot of this comes into what we do even today.
00:04:09
Speaker
for cleansing rituals, whether it's burning mugwort or sage. I've heard ringing a bell to clear stagnant energy. They used cleansers to rid homes of negative energy, but I couldn't find anything. So nothing to tell what they were doing, or who used them, or for the reasons that they used them, other than it was just to clear a negative energy.
00:04:33
Speaker
I wonder if that ties into that belief of what is it called? Is that miasma or something? That sounds terrible. I think it's called miasma. I could be making this up, but there was this whole belief like a couple hundred years ago or maybe even like a hundred years ago. So it's probably relatively new where like fresh air could cure your illness or some shit.
00:04:59
Speaker
So they do that in Germany, you know, I lived in Germany for several years. So in the mornings you were supposed to, so a lot of their windows will tilt backwards. And if you've ever lived in Europe, you probably know this. You don't have to open the window fully. You can tilt it. And that is to clear out like the stagnant air of the house. Um, they would hang their bedsheets and blankets and pillows and stuff out the windows too, to air them out and let the sun kill the bacteria.
00:05:25
Speaker
And this was like, some people, we had an elderly like couple that lived across the street and they would do this daily. So every day they would hang their blankets and pillows and stuff out the window and let the sun like kill the bacteria and air them out. But every morning, like you opened your windows to let fresh air into the house.
00:05:45
Speaker
Oh, I don't, like, I don't know if that's where it comes from. I just know that, that that's what we did when we lived in Germany. That, I mean, I feel like it makes sense though, because I mean, they say too, even with like COVID you're supposed to like your windows and shit. Yeah. It's good to hear it out.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah, air it out, cleanse the space. And then the last thing that I had on the positive view for this, at least for now, we do have a little more later, but women were looked at as divine, revered, or sacred, and a lot of times referred to as goddesses.
00:06:18
Speaker
And at this time, prior to witch hysteria, they looked at Hecatee, Freya, Circe, Lilith, Inanna, Isis, Ashara, and even sometimes Eve as falling into this category of being worthy of worship, looking to for guidance or whatever their daily tasks were, they would look to a revered woman.
00:06:40
Speaker
Throughout history, many witches were considered healers or hallowed members of their community. So like if, you know, back before, again, before witch hysteria, they would look to the village witch for if you had a son who had a fever or a husband who had pain, you went to the village witch and got advice or some form of medical help through herbs. So tinctures, tonics, teas, salves, these kinds of things.
00:07:08
Speaker
Oh, that's really interesting. Whenever you were going over the, how they would serve as King's advisors and stuff like that reminded me, I don't think that he, I don't know much about Nostradamus, but it reminded me of that show,
Witches in Pop Culture
00:07:22
Speaker
Rain. And like in the show, like they had a Nostradamus character and he was like an advisor to, I think it was the Queen might've been the King too.
00:07:32
Speaker
and he could like some sort of magic powers we could see into the future or something. Yeah, so I would always kind of like for this kind of more modern pop culture reference that would kind of make sense to this. Game of Thrones, the one, I think he was a Baratheon, I can't remember, but he had the Red Priestess and they followed like, yeah, they had like the, what was it, like the God of Light or something like that. Yeah.
00:07:58
Speaker
where she ended up burning a child at the stake. There's a lot of things wrong with this show, series, whatever, but he used her kind of as his advisor. She guided him through everything and she had weird rituals that she did as his advisor to help him in the end.
00:08:19
Speaker
I know there's other references, but I feel like that's a more modern one that most people will probably know because I feel like everybody watched Game of Thrones. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That is the truth. I haven't watched it in so long. It's hard for me to rewatch it just because the last two seasons were so bad.
00:08:36
Speaker
And he won't put out the last book. Like I'm somebody who read the books and then the show came out and I was like, first of all, there are so many things wrong with this show that just, you know, they demonize, like obviously Jamie Lannister was just not a great character period because they had that weird like sister brother sexual thing, but he was a very complex character in the books and he never once raped Cersei, but in the show,
00:09:03
Speaker
they definitely have a scene where he rapes his sister over their dead son. Whereas in the books, they do have sex during that, but it was very consensual. There was no rape. Yeah. I read the books too. I must have, I don't even remember. It's been so long. I loved those books, but you know.
00:09:22
Speaker
uh he's too busy playing bubble soccer to uh put out the last one so we're just in suspense forever i think somebody should just write a really amazing like fan fiction right especially since he said that he wasn't going to change what they did which is stupid because that would never happen yeah he said he would like maybe change how they got there but he wouldn't change the ending
00:09:47
Speaker
And that made me very sad because it did not end well. It did not end well. No. Or Jon Snow. He really does know nothing. I know. I know. To end up like go through all that shit, die, come back to life, and be in prison. Can we talk about that cliffhanger though? Yeah. Jon Snow's death.
00:10:07
Speaker
That was the worst. And like, as I remember it ended, I can't remember exactly if that ended one of the books. I think
Ancient Witch Figures and Influence
00:10:14
Speaker
it did. But then like, I didn't have the next book or something. And I was just like, this book like right now. But in the fact that they would do that too, in the show, I knew it was coming and it still was painful. It really was. It was terrible. Yeah. Poor Jon Snow. And beautiful Kit Harrington. Oh, yes. Let's be honest.
00:10:34
Speaker
All right. Anyway, back on topic. Yeah. Okay. So in the Middle East, ancient civilizations worshiped powerful female deities. So there were rituals that women would practice where they would like, you know, maybe get up and light a candle or say a prayer and thank the goddess for things. And while all, not maybe not all, but while some people practiced it, women were just the more
00:11:00
Speaker
ritualistic about it. So it would be like every morning I got up I lit a candle and I think whichever goddess I was worshiping at this time. Priestesses were trained in sacred arts and were known as wise women and they were some of the earliest manifestations of what we recognize as the witch today. Wise women made house calls, they delivered babies,
00:11:20
Speaker
dealt with things like infertility or impotence, and they were seen as positive figures in society. So just going back to a time when if you had an ailment, an illness, a pain or whatever, you would go to that person in your village that you knew practiced what they believed to be witchcraft at the time, and you would get, you know, a tonic, a tincture of salve or whatever to help cure these ailments.
00:11:43
Speaker
wasn't like a stigma to it. It was, I have a problem. This person can solve it. So let me go ask them. It wasn't like, keep it hush hush, like during Puritan times, don't let them know that I got an herb from a from a witch. Because then I'll be hanged with the witch kind of thing. It was just everybody was like, Oh, yeah, this person knows how to fix these problems. Let me go to them.
00:12:03
Speaker
And then back to what we were talking about with serving as the king's advisors, kings required their counsel. So there wasn't a king that didn't have an advisor that was considered a witch. They helped them make decisions, talk things through. They did rituals to give the armies
00:12:21
Speaker
or warriors, whatever they call them back. They gave them kind of a positive, like, I'm going out to battle, but this ritual has been done to ensure that we have a good outcome. They just never went out without a wise woman's ritual being performed first. And then again, babies could not be born without their presence. So Kings needed a witch on their advisory so that when their heirs were born, they had somebody there to deliver the baby. It's just, you know, Kings always had a witch. What a fucking awesome time to be alive.
00:12:51
Speaker
and be a witch, right? Let me deliver the king's baby. And also let me, let me do this ritual so that his, uh, his armies go out and they have a good war because my king needs to run this kingdom. And how else do we topple a kingdom, but to kill their king. So we need a witch to make sure that doesn't happen. So in, um, less pleasant, which news or history, I guess, let's back to the depression, back to the depressing, less pleasant news. Um, why do I keep saying news? I'm trying to say history.
00:13:21
Speaker
During the time of Julius Caesar so this is roughly around third century BCE, he encountered the jury, and you know we are going to have a future episode on Druidism and the Druids but just
00:13:37
Speaker
briefly, a little bit about them. The Druids derived from the Celtic word meaning knower of the oak tree. And the Druids acted as priests, teachers, and judges, and they received 20 years of training where they learned the lore of the gods, astronomy, natural philosophy, and they studied the ancient verse.
00:13:56
Speaker
Supposedly they offered human sacrifices, but I'm not sure how true this information is because the thing about the Druids is everything that we know comes from what has been documented about them. There's no actual documentations that they have put down, no history that they have left. So really all records that we have come from
00:14:17
Speaker
for instance, Julius Caesar, who wrote extensively about them and I believe honestly was probably just scared because they believed differently than what he believed. And because of that, obviously, I'm assuming that they were perceived in a very negative light. I mean, as we know, history is written by the victors and because the Druids were suppressed
00:14:38
Speaker
um by the Roman emperor under Tiberius we will never really know if like human sacrifices were a thing or if it was something invented by the Romans as a way to justify their actions um and so which really sucks because yeah if this is I feel like this was a theme that I ran into a lot when we were doing research for this is that they would mention things but there would be no known documentation
00:15:04
Speaker
more, which, and I know it's something we're going to talk about later in this episode, but like things that are documented as the first in, I'm doing quotations. I know you guys can't see that I'm doing quotations, but things that are documented as the first known
00:15:19
Speaker
cases of witchcraft or like mentions of witchcraft are noted to be documents that came out in the 1400s. And so I have a hard time believing that that is the first time that something was actually documented. It's just, it seems to be a common theme for this, this history, this specific history.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And especially to considering like during that time would have been the start of all the witch hysteria. I feel like you can't really trust any of the first known documents that are out, you know, kind of moving on from that to more of a
00:15:55
Speaker
I guess fictional representation of witchcraft and throughout history which is our scene in Homer's The Odyssey. There's discussions like we had mentioned earlier of Cersei. She is a goddess of magic and she is described in Homer's Odyssey as a nymph daughter of Helios who was banished for using magic to turn a rival into a monster. In Homer's Odyssey the character Cersei is seen as lustrous with lovely braids and she turns Odysseus' men into
00:16:24
Speaker
pigs. And while it's obviously just a work of fiction, often fiction can near reality or derive its inspiration from reality. So really, I mean, because of that, I don't think that Homer just plucked the term witch or goddess or sorcerer or just magic in general from the air. He wasn't the one who created any of these words. So obviously he's
00:16:47
Speaker
Picking different themes that were already present in society. Yeah. And during that time. So yeah, somewhere. I mean, not really all around that time, hundreds of years later.
00:17:00
Speaker
Like around that time. Two days later, hundreds of years after that. So we're talking like 180 Plutarch released his treaties on superstition, which in it, he refers to witchcraft as an attempt to prove superstition is worse than atheism. And they talk about magic charms or spells rushing about and beating of drums and pure purifications and dirty sanctification.
00:17:28
Speaker
I'd like to know a little bit more about exactly what he's referring to. What are these dirty sanctifications? Maybe I want to be involved. Barbarists and outlandish penances and mortifications at the shrines. What he's trying to say throughout this entire long, I couldn't even read it all because it was just so much. This whole thing that he put out, he is basically saying that superstition provides
00:17:57
Speaker
the seeds from which atheism springs and superstitious actions are ridiculous. And basically, there should be no gods at all than gods who accept with pleasure such acts of worship. Nice. Which, you know, he sounds like he lived the most boring life ever. I mean, real fun at a party. Real fun.
00:18:17
Speaker
But again, this goes back to what I was saying with the documentation portion of it. I was trying to find what is the oldest documentation of witchcraft. And if you look at the library of Congress, they literally say that the oldest documentation of witchcraft period is the Malleus Maleficarum. And that wasn't until like the end of the 1400s. But here we have, we have 100 AD.
00:18:40
Speaker
documentation. The history is so skewed. It really is. Yeah. Yeah. And it's really frustrating because it's like, especially whenever you're looking at it as a way to like research it, to educate others and then to, I mean, not even just educate others, but even just educating yourself.
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah. Even trying to find out what is the history of this thing that I love, this thing that I'm into, this thing that is the way that I live my life, what is the history of it? And you can't get accurate answers. Right. Yeah. You just know that it is. Yeah. And then you hear all the negative shit about it instead of... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is all the great positive things. No. You're just an over hyper-sexualized woman. Right. Yeah. Who's the downfall of everything.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yes.
Witchcraft in Historical Texts
00:19:28
Speaker
Yeah. Doing your impure purifications and dirty sanctification. Dirty sanctification. Dirty sanctification. I'm going to need to look these up. Yeah. I need to know exactly what he's talking about. I need to get in on these dirty sanctifications. Yes. One of the coolest things though that I found whenever I was researching this topic was about the Greek
00:19:54
Speaker
curse tablets. And I didn't even know that they were a thing. And as I was reading about them, I was just like, this is hilarious. And I kind of want to find one or, yeah, I mean, it's just, I just want to make them myself and then I'll bury them too. So these are called, um, Kataris, not to be confused with like a Tari, but a Tari, a Tari. There's a K in there. Yes.
00:20:18
Speaker
These were small tablets with a curse written onto it to ask gods and spirits to put a curse on a person or an object. The actual translation of the word guitar is curses that bind tight. Basically what they would do is if somebody wanted to write a Qatari about a court case or if
00:20:39
Speaker
like they were in trouble with the law or something and they were going to court, they would write a curse and put it on this little tablet and they would bury it either like in a graveyard or someplace that I guess would just make sense. So like in front of the courthouse or in front of somebody's home and they would ask spirits to basically like make them botch their performance in court, forget their words, become dizzy. Oh my gosh.
00:21:05
Speaker
And I guess like they found, they found since like 1993 over 1,000 first tablets. Yeah, just cursing everybody left and right. Like buried like in graves.
00:21:22
Speaker
near sanctuaries, bodies of water, um, or like I said, places of relevance to the curse or the victim. So I'm just like, man, why, when did this ever stop being a thing? Did it stop? Do people still do this? Right. Isn't it so funny thinking about like all these ancient Greek people like writing like, okay, you know what? This asshole pissed me off today.
00:21:46
Speaker
Look, today Becky said I looked fat. So here's her first topic. It's like the Greek version of the burn book. Yeah. And you wish for something shitty to happen to that person. And you just wait until something shitty happens and you're like, I did this. Yeah, I did this. Yeah. That's great. We should bring it back. We really should. So moving forward from that, we have my favorite topic, the Bible.
00:22:16
Speaker
So in around 931 BC to 721 BC, you have these histories in the Bible where Christians today will say, oh, witchcraft is bad. And I can't tell you the amount of, when researching this, the amount of anti-witch, just everything that I came across, whether it was book, article, whatever, and how to pray the witch away from you, and hilarious.
00:22:44
Speaker
So in book one Samuel of the Bible, King Solomon has been noted to seek out the witch of Endor and to raise the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel to help defeat the Philistine army. And Samuel's guidance was sought on the outcome of the war. So the witch does. She goes, she raises the dead souls to be able to like confer with them, I guess.
00:23:08
Speaker
And so she raises Samuel and he tells King Saul that the outcome's not going to be good, right? You're going to go to war, but it's not going to be a good outcome. And what happens? He dies in battle the next day. I find it right. They probably blamed it on the witch.
00:23:26
Speaker
Well, you know, they did. They did. It was the witch's fault. But then you go like Old Testament, Exodus 20 to 18 says thou shall not suffer the witch to live. And that's kind of like the theme that Christianity runs with, right? They forget that Samuel or not Samuel Saul, King Saul goes and hunts down this witch to help him raise this prophet.
00:23:49
Speaker
to tell him what the outcome's gonna be, right? They're like, that never happened. No, no, thou shalt not suffer the witch to live. Right, yeah. And I wonder if like things would have turned out differently if the witch was like, oh yeah, you're totally gonna win. And then one gave him like a pump and put it into the universe. Right, yeah. But instead he was like, can you raise the prophet and ask him? And the prophet was like, yeah, bro, it's not looking good. Yeah, not looking good.
00:24:15
Speaker
And he's just like, you know nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Jon Snow. Jon Snow. Yeah. You know nothing. Look at you. You're dead. You're dead. You should have not suffered a witch to live. The Bible kills me. I'm sorry. It's a mess. It's a whole mess. It is. It is. It's a whole thing. So that is like more ancient history.
Witch Hunts and Trials
00:24:43
Speaker
like super ancient history. And then we move into like the 1400s and the 1600s. And this is probably the most depressing of which history.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Hope you took your happy pills today. It's gonna get real sad up in this bitch. Yeah, yeah. So 14s and or 14 to 1600s is when we see which hysteria. So I'm going to say this one more time because this is the part that we're on now. Oldest documentation is a weird term to me for the Library of Congress to have used. But
00:25:20
Speaker
I'm going to use it because that's what they said and they were my source for this. So the oldest historical documentation of witchcraft, according to the Library of Congress, is the Malleus Maleficarum, which basically translates into the hammer of witches. And it was published in 1487. The second one, and I'm sorry if I butcher this because I don't speak Latin.
00:25:48
Speaker
How dare I? So the second oldest, according to the Library of Congress, is the Dei Lemus at Pythonisis Mulieribus. Wow. And that comes out to be of witches and fortune tellers or diviner women. And that one was published in 1489, so two years later.
00:26:08
Speaker
Both of these books are held in the Library of Congress's rare book and special collections divisions and are noted to be the oldest documentation, which I don't believe, but because it says it and it's Library of Congress, I'm putting it out there. That's what they said. So the Malleus Nala Fikarum, if anyone has ever looked at the history of witches, you know what that is. If you have read or watched
00:26:33
Speaker
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman, which I tell everyone to read. I've told Sam to read it like 17 times, probably just today alone. Just today. By Neil Gaiman has the Malleus Maleficarum in it, along with the Witch Hunter general or the Witch Finder general, which we'll talk about later too.
00:26:52
Speaker
So this was a book published by, and I didn't write down, it was either two priests or two monks. I can't remember off the top of my head, but basically they wrote this and published it. And it was meant to be a guide on how to recognize, hunt, interrogate, torture, and kill a witch.
00:27:12
Speaker
And so it was published and nobody really thought anything about it. Some people looked at it and they were like, whatever. This book ends up being condemned by the Catholic Church in 1490. That's why I think it's priests, but I think I read that it was monks. I'm not 100% sure on that one. I would have to go back and look, but basically they write it.
00:27:31
Speaker
gets published and the Catholic Church is like, yeah, no, we can't get behind this in 1490. And they condemn it. Well, this book actually goes on to become a legal documentation for people during witch hunt hysteria. And they use the book throughout the 15th and 17th century.
00:27:48
Speaker
even though it was condemned and said to be like, this is not something that you should use. And it's something that's like really important to note with this book is that it was the first one to note a specific gender with witchcraft. And a quote that I took out of it says, what else is a woman but a foe to friendship? They are evil, lecherous, vain, and lustful. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in a woman insatiable.
00:28:16
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So somebody was shot down by a woman. Hate a woman from here on out. Hate all women. All women are witches because they're all insatiable. Their lust can't be sated. So what's the dick? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:35
Speaker
And this is what they use to actually hunt down witches, like supposed witches, which we all know that most of the people that were accused, convicted, and executed for witchcraft during this time were innocent people. So moving forward with this,
00:28:52
Speaker
With the witch hunts, they often occurred as a way to explain everyday occurrences. This could be illnesses, deaths, a bad crop, or even just weather, right? So like, if you're, you and your neighbor had a disagreement, and the neighbor comes over, and you know, you guys can't hash it out, and they leave angry, and then the next morning you wake up and your cow's dead,
00:29:14
Speaker
they would then turn around and accuse that neighbor saying, oh, they killed my cow with witchcraft because they were mad at me. And then that neighbor would end up going to prison, go to trial, and then be tried as a witch. And then depending on that outcome, they either lived or died, which is just wild. That is wild. Can you imagine?
00:29:34
Speaker
The fuck? Why would I, if I was going to kill your cow, like I'm going to eat it too. I would just kill you. I want that steak. Especially during that time too. I mean, I'm sure I don't remember my history like that. We know the bubonic play and all that sort of went around the same time too. People probably starving. Your fucking cow is not just going to drop dead because a witch is just like, and I hate you today. Your cow died.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, but I mean, they would do that. They would be like, oh, little Billy's sick. That must be Susie down the street practicing witchcraft. It's just, it's a wild, the way that they went through this is wild. So this kind of in England, at least starts with King James the first, right? This, I had never, like, I knew about like the witch trials and stuff. I never knew how deep it went. And when I started reading some of this stuff, it was like.
00:30:26
Speaker
What mind blown, right? So King James I marries Queen Anne of Denmark. And Queen Anne, you know, gets her entourage, her court, packs her two ships up with her stuff, and she's moving to England from Denmark to go be with her husband. And on the way there, they hit bad weather, right? So the storm hits, and one of the ships capsizes,
00:30:51
Speaker
just completely not ships gone underwater. The ship that Queen Anne was on was badly damaged and they knew that they could not make the rest of the trek to England because it was farther to continue on and go to England than it was to turn around and go back to Denmark. And they knew what they were going through going back to Denmark. They didn't know what the weather was going forward to England.
00:31:12
Speaker
So they turn around, go back to Denmark, and she sends a courier to let King James the first to know, like, hey, I tried to make it. I couldn't. The weather's bad. So he's like, well, I got to go get my bride. So he loads up a ship and goes to Denmark. And of course hits bad weather on the way, but he makes it. He gets to Denmark and he starts to hear, there wasn't witch hysteria in Denmark yet, but there were already kind of accusations going on.
00:31:37
Speaker
If something was unexplainable to a person, they thought, I'm being cursed by someone. And so King James I was already a super paranoid man. He thought everyone and everything was out to kill him and take his kingdom. Because how else do you take a kingdom but kill the king? So he was just super paranoid about it. So he hears this and he's like, well, obviously, Queen Anne hit bad weather. That was a witch's doing.
00:32:03
Speaker
And so they start interrogating people that were known to dislike Queen Anne or dislike him in England. And eventually through this process, a small group of women confessed and said, yep, we are witches. We controlled the weather because we didn't want Queen Anne to get to England to you. So we did it. And these women end up going to prison, but they weren't executed. They died in prison. So King James and Queen Anne leave.
00:32:29
Speaker
go to England and he brings witch hysteria back to England with him because he's so paranoid about everything so every little thing that happened it was obviously this is a witch that's out to get me they're cursing me they're you know trying to topple the kingdom they don't want me in charge anymore
00:32:45
Speaker
whatever the situation. So this is kind of where we start seeing the witch hysteria come into play. This is when the Malleus Maleficarum is brought in and eventually it's used as a guide where thousands of people are executed as a result.
00:33:01
Speaker
of being accused of witchcraft. So throughout Europe, many people were accused of being witches and they confessed under torture. Witch hunts became common. They targeted women, especially a single woman or a widow, and those that were kind of in the margins of society. So they looked at the poor, the lame, again, the widows, or if you had like a boisterous personality, you were a witch.
00:33:25
Speaker
Of course. Honestly, it was anything. If you were a woman, they could find a reason to pen you as a witch. Between the 1500s and 1660, it was estimated that about 80,000 witches were put to the death in Europe, and they were accused of working with the devil and filled with lust. So going back to that, hyper-sexualized or adding a sexual element into it, if a woman was sexual in any way, she was a witch, clearly.
00:33:51
Speaker
So to avoid being accused of witchcraft, neighbors would turn on each other. They would look at it as, well, if I accuse someone else of being a witch before someone accuses me of being a witch, then I'm not going to be accused of being a witch and I'm safe. So they would pick people that they didn't get along with, people they didn't know. They would just accuse them so that it kept them safe.
00:34:10
Speaker
The towns ended up turning on their poor, their outcasts, their singled and widowed, and anyone they just disliked in general. And then this comes where like British Reformation kind of transformed England from Catholic to Protestant. So during this time, people were persecuted who didn't fit desired religious profiles. So if you didn't do exactly what you were supposed to do in church, you were a witch, or you were consorting with the devil. If you weren't doing exactly what they want, if they could not control you, then clearly you were a witch.
00:34:40
Speaker
John Stern, this, okay, this comes into like my favorite part of the history, right? They have something going on in the town, like things that they're considered. This is unexplainable. I don't know why my crops are doing bad. I don't know why my plow horse died and now I can't plow my fields to plant my crops. Like something's going on. So they have this town meeting.
00:35:00
Speaker
And you know, back then when they had a meeting or whatever, everybody in the town went. The wives, the husbands, the children, children were presents for all of these things that we're going to see moving on in the future. People from like two towns over would come and give input. So they're having this meeting and they're talking about weird things going on and they can't explain it. And John Stern, he's a simple landowner.
00:35:21
Speaker
He just lives in the town and he owns a piece of land and he's a man. He has no background in law, no background as a sheriff or a deputy. He just, he's just there. He just lives there. So of course that's like nothing else. No, there's nothing else that leads to what happens.
00:35:39
Speaker
John Stern comes forward and he says, hello, sir, in charge. I forget what they called their people in charge back then. But basically, sir, in charge, I have these letters, right? And these letters are from people that live in this town that are talking about who they've seen practicing witchcraft.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I think this is the reason that these things are happening. And the Surin charge takes the letters and he reads them and he's like, you know what, John Stern, I think you're right. Here's a warrant. You now have a warrant to go and hunt witches. With no training. No training. No, nothing. He just owns a piece of land. He's a man. He has a penis. He owns a piece of land. Oh yeah. He's given a warrant. That's super qualified.
00:36:17
Speaker
Right, and the only stipulation in his warrant is that he is not allowed to torture a confession. He can only interrogate, and then if they confess, turn them in, and then they'll go through the trial. So John Stern's like, thanks, sir, in charge. I'm leaving now. Enter Matthew Hopkins, a young Matthew Hopkins who is 10 years younger than John Stern. He's a teenager. He says, hi, Mr. Stern, I'd like to be your apprentice.
00:36:44
Speaker
My father is a pastor and I have these skills because I was raised by my father and I'd love to help you. And John Stern's like, heck yeah, let's do this. And so John Stern and Matthew Hopkins turned this into a lucrative business. They are making money off of this.
00:37:01
Speaker
And throughout the time that they're doing this, their first trial of turning women in for being witches, they had the most convictions of any one trial just in a day. They had 15 people convicted of witchcraft and executed.
00:37:17
Speaker
Oh my god. And at this point, this is the most at one time that went through a trial together and were convicted. And throughout this, Matthew Hawkins appoints himself as the witch finder general. And John Stern is the witch hunter or they called him the witch pricker. I couldn't figure out why. I couldn't find any documentation of to like what that actually meant. But he was known as either the witch hunter or the witch pricker.
00:37:42
Speaker
and they would go from town to town and the town would pay them money to root out witches, accuse them, put them through a trial, and then they earned a very large, I couldn't find an exact sum, but they earned a very large amount of money for every single one that was found guilty.
00:38:01
Speaker
So of course innocent people were going to be found guilty because how else were they going to get paid? Towns were raising their taxes to be able to pay John Stern and Matthew Hopkins to come into their town and hunt out witches and convict them and execute them. So they were being paid a huge amount of money for this.
00:38:21
Speaker
So this goes on for quite a while and a bunch of people, like tons of people are accused. Some, some are found not guilty, but for the most part, these people came out as convicted witches and most of them were executed either by hanging or by burning at the stake, which is like, you know, that is like the, the number one, when you talk about like witch history, people's like, oh, burned at the stake. Great. So as this goes on, um, anyone who spoke out against him was obviously accused of witchcraft.
00:38:50
Speaker
So there is a Reverend, Reverend John Gold. He comes out after a while and he's like, this doesn't seem right. This seems sus. So he comes out and starts speaking out against Matthew Hawkins, which is a bold move, right? Because they didn't care if someone was a priest or a Reverend or whatever.
00:39:08
Speaker
They would accuse them too. There were actual priests that were executed for witchcraft during this time. So Reverend Gold comes out and he's like, he's a fraud. They're doing this for your money. And, you know, you're raising taxes on the townspeople to be able to pay him to come in and tell you who's a witch.
00:39:24
Speaker
If there are witches, you should know who they are because they're in your town. You know these people. So he comes out and he's like speaking and people are like, yeah, actually, I agree with you. And so at this point, Matthew Hopkins decides I'm going to go on the defense and I'm going to go on the attack and I'm going to publish this pamphlet that says why I'm not a fraud.
00:39:43
Speaker
and why what I'm doing is God's work. And he entitles this pamphlet, A Discovery of Witches, and this is his actual downfall because he put so many lies in this pamphlet that the average person could look at it and be like, he seems like a crazy pants. Like, this isn't real. And so people started to look at him and be like, you, sir, are a fraud.
00:40:05
Speaker
And before they could even take him to trial for the things that he did, he dies of tuberculosis. Of course. So he never actually got held accountable. But it is estimated that Matthew Hopkins himself ended up leading more than 200 people to their execution. Just himself, not the stuff that he did with John Stern. Just his own convictions and executions was 200 plus convicted witches.
00:40:31
Speaker
That's terrible. Yeah, horrible, right? During this time also, if you looked at France and Germany, they had some of the worst persecution rates of the time. 16th century Würzburg, which is in Germany, condemned over 600 people to death just in their town at one time, not like multiples. Okay, this is a total sum.
00:40:53
Speaker
one visit from the Inquisitor condemned 600 people and executed them. Of that 619 of them were priests, 41 of them were children. Jesus, children executed for witchcraft. And many towns within the area, if the Inquisitor came through just to protect themselves, the men would
00:41:14
Speaker
accuse all women in the town. All the women are joint witches and they would execute every woman in their town. Like I don't know how we have a human race today. Right. You need women. What a terrible time to be alive. Did men not understand how that worked? It was more from what I could get from this period of time, it was more of how do I keep myself
00:41:42
Speaker
from being accused. Well, I accuse other people. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine? Because you know, like these men too, they had mothers and wives, daughters and daughters. And they're just like, all of you. You're all witches. Yeah. Bye.
00:42:05
Speaker
wild, but I also loved it. I loved reading all of these things because it is wild. It's just the fact that we got to a point in history where people were like, you know what? To save myself, burn all the women. Right, yeah. Just to be on the safe side. It won't really affect my conscience if I burn Susie down the street because I don't know her, so she's clearly a witch. Yeah, clearly. Her name starts with an S, so. Yeah.
00:42:32
Speaker
as for witches. That makes no sense. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And now you're a witch because you said that it makes sense. And if it does make sense to you, you're clearly a witch. Yeah, clearly. Now when you were talking about all of the, literally it could be you
00:42:51
Speaker
are too poor or you have too much money or you're crippled or something like that, then it reminded me of that Parks and Recreation whenever the guy from South America came and he's just like, right to jail. If you look at me to jail, I'm like, you're poor, jail. Have too much money, right to jail, right to jail.
00:43:15
Speaker
No, but I mean, that was basically it. It was like, you're a woman, you're a witch, you're single, definitely a witch, you're a sexual deviant. Right to witch. Yeah. Your husband died? Oh, witch. You have one leg? Witch. Witch. Yeah.
00:43:35
Speaker
I don't remember which documentary it was, but there was a woman. She was widowed, poor. She lived on the outskirts of town and she had one leg and they used all of these against her and condemned her and they hung her.
00:43:48
Speaker
they like in the documentary they reenacted like the actual document that they read so there was like actual like physical documentation of what happened to this woman from that time like the court case and they read it and reenacted it and it was like them having to lift this crippled woman who has one leg up onto a stool while they're putting a noose around her neck and pushing her off
00:44:10
Speaker
Oh my God. Yes. Yes. And it was, she was accused because her husband died. She was poor. She lived on the outskirts of town and she had one leg. So that was her, the one leg was considered her devil's mark, which is what they, you know, they, if they accuse someone a lot of times, which I think I have this written down in the torture portion, but they would strip women naked and front of the entire town looking for
00:44:35
Speaker
some mark on their skin or a blemish and they would call it their devil's mark or their witch's mark. And that meant that they made a pact with the devil and they had sex with the devil. And during like consumating the pact of them becoming a witch and doing the devil's work, he marked them in some way. And if the average person has at least one mark on their skin, whether it's a freckle, a mole, a scar, whatever,
00:45:02
Speaker
But they used that as she has one leg, therefore she's a witch. That's her devil's mark. That's insane. And what about all the men with scars? Yeah. Who knows what else? Just swimming. And actually it's funny that you say that because I didn't see any of that in history used.
00:45:20
Speaker
like anything that I read, none of that was used on men. It was always women where they looked for a devil's mark or a witch's mark. I never saw any documentation in the stuff that I read that they ever did that to men. With men, they usually ended up torturing a confession out of them. With women, they would get to the torturing part. Yeah. Let's strip you down and humiliate you in front of everybody that you know. In front of the entire town and everyone's pet dogs. Yeah.
00:45:49
Speaker
Because they came to the meetings too. Of course. Yeah. Their children, the dogs, the cows. Your third cousin from three towns over. Yeah. Just as bad as what's going on in Europe. Obviously a lot of people, whenever they think about witches and witch trials and witch hysteria,
00:46:06
Speaker
America always has to come in and try to steal a thunder. We can try to do it. We can outshine everybody. Outshine everyone and do it with the worst. All right. So during the Puritan times, anything that stepped out of their beliefs was blamed on witchcraft and consorting with the devil. So
00:46:27
Speaker
Illnesses or fits were said to be a witch's curse. Often the accused were single, widowed, old, poor, quarrelsome reputations. That is a hard word to say. They were either crippled or had some other deformity or abnormality, had aggressive personalities and mostly women, although
00:46:50
Speaker
some men were also executed as witches. So back to that whole right to jail. Yep. Right to jail. Right to jail. You breathed to jail. Yeah. And it's, it's just wild to me that like beliefs can be so ingrained into a person that it's like, Oh no, this is what we believe. And so
00:47:12
Speaker
there is no other there's no gray area it's black or white you're either god-fearing person or you're working with the devil and there's no like can i just be a good person no and live to jail no right to jail to jail
00:47:28
Speaker
Yeah. The Salem witch trials and everything that went on in Massachusetts could be like an entire like podcast series, but essentially Elizabeth Paris and Abigail Williams, they began suffering from fits, body contortions, uncontrolled screaming. And really at the time it was obviously had to be a witch. Had to be. They were somehow.
00:47:52
Speaker
Who else did it like that? Yeah. No one. Um, I think it's important to note too, that like, when we say fits, like when they say, Oh, they were having fits. These are things that, so this is more a time when superstition outweighed science. And so when a person was said to be having fits, that could have been epilepsy. It could have been mental health issues, whether it be schizophrenia or hallucinations or whatever.
00:48:20
Speaker
Like that's what they categorized as fits. So these are actually like scientific reasons to why a person is having these issues. I even read one that was talking about it was the child was nine, right? And you're living, think about a Puritan timeframe where you're living where you have to go to church for hours on end on Sunday.
00:48:40
Speaker
you can't step out of line because if you do, you're clearly a witch. Children have energy. So if they're running around the room and they have wild imaginations, that's a fit. And they're clearly under a witch's curse. So I think it's important that people realize that this is what they considered witchcraft during this time.
00:49:00
Speaker
That's terrible. And it couldn't even just, I'm angry at you and I'm expressing my anger. Clearly. Oh, which is cursed. Right to jail. Right to jail. You're fucked. Raise your voice at me. You little shit. You're a witch. You're not going to mind me in the supermarket. Okay. You know what?
00:49:21
Speaker
But this is actually what happened. We have to laugh through the tears because it is so sad. But you know what? You have to bring some humor to some dark situations. You have to. That's how we survive.
00:49:33
Speaker
But I mean, even with the uncontrolled screaming and the body contortions and the fits that these two girls were having, now they're thinking that they could have totally been caused by a fungus that caused spasms and delusions. So I mean, don't eat the fucking mushrooms in the woods guys. Like just.
00:49:53
Speaker
But you know, I think this is also a time when people are so poor and starving that like they are harvesting their own food. So who's to say they didn't pick the wrong herb or the wrong mushroom. Right. Yeah. And then, yeah. And we'll have more on an episode two about Salem witch trials and, and everything. Yeah. So, I mean, but essentially during this time, mass hysteria ensued after all of this uncontrolled screaming and fits and. Yeah.
00:50:22
Speaker
Well, and yeah, well, and they, so they go to this whole trial. And I know that like now in a lot of documentation or even just like documentaries on this, they, they believe that a lot of it was because women were so oppressed during this Puritan time. Like you were nobody without a husband, your husband owned land, your husband made money. So you were just there to bear children and serve him. They believe that a lot of the mass hysteria that happened in the courtroom
00:50:52
Speaker
which we'll probably talk about more in the next episode, but they go to trial and there's this whole show about it, right? So one girl will start saying, oh, she's choking me. I can't breathe. And then everybody starts, I can't breathe. I can't breathe. So it's like a way for them to be able to have this outlet to let
00:51:12
Speaker
to be who they are or whatever without somebody oppressing what they're doing. So it was like they could act out and do these crazy things and they wouldn't get in trouble for it because, well, we're under a witch's curse.
00:51:27
Speaker
That was like a thing that I saw in multiple documentaries where they're like, this was probably exactly what was happening because they were so oppressed that this was the one time that they could lash out or act out and not get in trouble for it because it wasn't their fault. It was a witch's fault.
00:51:43
Speaker
But yeah, when it was all said and done, 150 people were accused and 18 were put to death, six men were accused and executed as well. And obviously, as we mentioned before, it's important to note that none of these people were actually witches, not that even if they were, it would have been a thing that obviously would have
00:52:03
Speaker
been okay to torture and kill them and put them to trial, but none of these people were actually witches. No, these are innocent people that just lived in the wrong time or looked the wrong way at this time. Yeah, it's crazy. And then I also saw too, whenever I was researching witchcraft in America and the history of it,
00:52:26
Speaker
Um, there's not a lot listed, but the first actual documented person in America to be executed for witchcraft was a young girl named. I mean, she wasn't young. I think she was like a teenager or something, but it happened in Windsor, Connecticut, and her name was Alice Young and it was in 1644. Nope, that's wrong.
00:52:44
Speaker
1647. There's not a whole lot about her, which really sucks. Like there's no, I couldn't find really a lot about her or her family or why, which is really sad. I found that a lot of, a lot of this history is that way. You can find a lot about the witch hysteria in England, copious amounts of information about that. But
00:53:08
Speaker
The problem that I ran into with a lot of that was so much of it was conflicting. You would read one article that would say, you know, this amount of people were executed. Then you would read another article that would say a completely different number. So it was just, a lot of this was hard to find actual, like real hard data for it. So that's a hard one because you can't, you can't really say much on it, but you want to note that these things happened. And she probably, you know, was executed for something ridiculous. Yeah. Even being like, I hate you.
00:53:38
Speaker
You fucked up something of mine and I'm angry at you. Yeah, there was one. I watch, I like to do like a mixed medium when I research. So I'll do like YouTube videos or, you know, history channel or discovery channel documentaries. And one of them, I don't remember which one. Basically it tells the story of a young girl who she was walking through the woods and she comes across a peddler and he has these wares for sale, but he's trying to get to where he's going by a certain time.
00:54:06
Speaker
And she is very demanding. She wants something that he has and he's come to the market and you can buy it. And she's like, nope, not going to do that. You're going to give it to me now. And he won't. Well, they get worked up. They get into this heated argument and she whispers things under her, under her breath to make him feel uneasy. Like she was cursing him.
00:54:26
Speaker
while on the way to the market after leaving, the man dies. And someone that was present when that happened, he ended up having a heart attack and dying. And he was an old man, so it's likely that he just died for being old, you know? Like he's old, he had a heart attack, his heart gave out. But because someone else was present and they saw the altercation between them, they went and told the town that a witch cursed him in the woods and the girl ends up being executed.
00:54:52
Speaker
Of course, moving forward from all of that depressive stuff, we're going into more fun depressive stuff, which is the means of torture that they use for witches. So when we talked about John Stern and Matthew Hopkins, I made sure to note that
00:55:09
Speaker
in the warrant that Stern was given. It was written that he wasn't allowed to torture people to get them to confess witchcraft. And Hopkins and Stern basically found a way around this by not doing that themselves. They would have someone else torture them. Or during this time, it was also not considered torture to deprive someone of sleep. So a lot of people that ended up confessing would have been kept up for days on end
00:55:35
Speaker
There was one documented case and he was actually a priest, a man, a priest who was accused of witchcraft. They kept him up for four days straight. And every time he would start to fall asleep, they would pick him up and make him run across the room. And then eventually by day four, he's like, I can't live my life like this. I need a nap. He was like, sure, I'm a witch. Does that mean this stops? And so they tell him like, oh, we need you to confess to also working with the devil.
00:56:01
Speaker
And he was like, no, I'm a priest. Like I will not taint my soul that way. So they get him to say he's a witch, but he, 100% is like, I never made a pact with the devil. And so they're like, okay, they find him guilty. They're going to execute him. And Stern basically says, I can get a priest to come and reside over your execution and read your rights. And he's like, I don't trust you. Like I'm a man of God and I'm innocent and you have accused me of witchcraft and you're going to kill me for that.
00:56:28
Speaker
I'll read my own rights." So they led him to the gallows, they let him have his Bible in his hands, and he read his own rights as they were standing him up on a stool and putting a noose around his neck after they kept him up for days on end to get him to confess that he was a witch.
00:56:43
Speaker
That's terrible. Anybody would confess. Yeah. So there's actually like, I read so many actual documented cases of this happening where they would, if the person would start to fall asleep, they'd make a loud noise or they would yell, which, or whatever, to keep them awake until they eventually confessed, which is, you know, sleep deprivation is now considered a form of torture. Back then that was not considered torture. So a lot of times they did use that in place of actual torture.
00:57:08
Speaker
But some of the other methods they used, they had this thing called the pilly winks, which is also known as a thumbscrew. And it's basically two boards with a screw on each end and they would place your hand in between this and they would tighten it.
00:57:23
Speaker
and they would ask you, are you a witch? And if you said no, they would tighten it more. And most people walked away from this particular torture device with a completely maimed, unusable hand. If they got out of this alive and they were not seen to be a witch and they were not executed or thrown in prison, they were not able to use that hand by the end of this. Another one that was just completely disgusting but also fascinated me was wrenching. I had never heard of this one. Basically, it's two people
00:57:53
Speaker
that were interrogating the witch would take a rope and wrap it around their head and stand on opposite ends and they would pull and then they would ask, are you a witch? And you would say no, and they would pull and they would just keep pulling and pulling and pulling until basically you confessed and you walked away with simply rope burn on your face and head, or they crushed your skull.
00:58:15
Speaker
Oh, gross. Yeah. Yeah. And they even had like a mechanism later that they used for it where they could tighten screws to pull the ropes tighter and tighter and tighter until they just crushed your whole head. Who even would think of these things? Like I could never think of. Oh, you know what? I would love to see you.
00:58:31
Speaker
I mean, tie a rope around someone's head. You think they're terrible. Humans are terrible, especially left to our own devices. Garroting, I think is how you say it, is basically a form of strangulation, but it's done with a wire. And so most of the time, as they would tighten the cord, it would cut into the flesh. And a lot of people, it would sever windpipes or
00:58:59
Speaker
um arteries or whatever and they also again they had a screw mechanism so later on so they would just put you into this thing and then tighten and tighten and tighten until it would basically decapitate some people um starvation and dehydration are just common ones that were used they i mean they didn't require anything you just withheld water and food and eventually people would start losing their shit because they're really hungry and really thirsty
00:59:24
Speaker
I would not last a day. No, look, I drink water like a gallon and a half full on a day I would literally die. So, and then swimming the witch and this one. This one's always funny to me because if you've watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
00:59:42
Speaker
they have an entire witch scene where they accuse a woman of being a witch and they're like, look at her nose. And she's like, they put this nose on me. And it ends up being like a fake nose. They come to terms that like, okay, well, I can't remember exactly how they say it, but it's basically like a duck floats in water.
01:00:01
Speaker
If she floats, she's a witch. So they like put her in the water and she ends up, they're like, oh, she's a witch. And they go through the whole thing. Well, swimming the witch is basically where they would bind your hands and feet together and toss you in a body of water. If you float, you're a witch. And so they would pull you out and either, you know, hang you or burn you at the stake or beat you to death or whatever, you know, whatever they chose that day. If you sunk, you were innocent.
01:00:27
Speaker
And majority of the people that were innocent died because they were tied up and in the bottom of the water, like under the water. And most of the time they died before anyone could pull them out. So they looked at it as, well, yeah, they died, but they died an innocent soul. So they still got to be with the Lord. Because that makes sense.
01:00:48
Speaker
Yeah, so swimming the witch, that's where that one comes from. And then your typical beating, hanging, burning at the stake, which we've already talked about. Something else that I found really cool from this part of the research is that the term, the third degree, comes from this period of time, from the witch hysteria period of time. There were apparently three degrees of torture.
01:01:09
Speaker
So the first kind of, it was just like your basic interrogation and just putting people through really stressful situations. Your second elevated a little bit, trying to get that confession. And usually the third degree killed the witch is how they looked at it. So when people say, Oh, you're giving me the third degree, that's actually where that comes from. It's not like a big thing in witch history, but
01:01:32
Speaker
I liked that little tidbit. I mean, you know, I like, I mean, even though it comes from a very terrible, terrible part. Yeah. It's relevant today. It's relevant. Well, going on to a little bit lighter of a topic. I had the doom and gloom first. Yeah, the doom and gloom comes first. Thankfully, we're able to move on to something a little bit lighter. So
01:01:56
Speaker
In the late 1800s, throughout this time there was a revival across Europe for people who wanted to rediscover their indigenous cultures to include Saxon and Norse traditions and traditional village songs and dances, traditional tales were written down and recorded,
01:02:11
Speaker
and old festivals were celebrated. And there was a pretty famous lady, her name was Madame Helena, probably going to butcher it. Blavatsky. Blavatsky. Blavatsky. I've listened to so many podcasts that use a lot of the history of Madame Blavatsky.
01:02:28
Speaker
really? Oh, it was new for me. So you're gonna have to let me know if I'm like butchering what she does. But in 1875, she founded the Theosophical Society. And this was based on teachings on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Neoplatonic thought, and ancient Egyptian religion, which
01:02:49
Speaker
are all pagan philosophies that were polytheistic and worship nature. So obviously helping with that revival to kind of get back to ancient traditions and traditional practices that for a while were lost and not written down because right to Jew, so straight to Jew. So, and then in early 20th century Guido von Litz
01:03:14
Speaker
He pioneered the study of runes. Basically what we're doing today whenever we read runes and stuff comes from his studies.
01:03:22
Speaker
And then obviously too, we'll have more episodes and just information on Wicca, but just as like a general kind of blurb about it in 1950s, Gerald Gardner, he is the founder of Wicca
Revival of Witchcraft in the 20th Century
01:03:37
Speaker
as well. Just in general, um, as found in the 1950s, which a lot of people may not know because while it is a quote unquote new religion, it.
01:03:46
Speaker
stems from very ancient practices and ancient beliefs. And so essentially he claimed he spoke for one of several covens of English witches that practice a pagan religion dating back to Stone Age times. He named it after the Anglo-Saxon term for craft of the wise and it follows the tenet of harm none. Wicca practices use herbs and other natural elements to promote healing, harmony, love, and wisdom. So just a little bit about that. Much more lighthearted than the torture.
01:04:15
Speaker
much more lighthearted. We need all the love and harmony and healing. So moving out of that, in the 60s and 70s we kind of started seeing this more like a revival of witchcraft. So I found these cute things and I don't know if you got a chance to look at them when I sent them to you, but in the early, there was a women's magazine in the early 1900s
01:04:37
Speaker
that gave Halloween party advice. And they came up with these cute little Halloween postcards with women depicted on them being witchy, but they were all like beautiful women. It wasn't that the green skin with the word on the nose and no cackling over a cauldron. Like they actually made it really cute. And they were saying, you know, maybe for Halloween this year, you do a mixed sex courtship ritual and it made Halloween more palatable to what they called the decades new woman.
01:05:06
Speaker
um, while depicting witches as being beautiful, alluring. And this continued into the 1960s when they came out with the TV show Bewitched. Which was a gem. It was. I was gonna say, I don't know if you ever watched it, but I, as a child, watched that with my grandparents. My grandparents absolutely loved Bewitched. You know, we watch it all the time. I absolutely loved it. And
01:05:28
Speaker
I actually went back recently and watched the first like the pilot episode of it before she tells them like when they get married before she tells them that she's a witch. It was so cute. So this was more the time of radical social change, right? So paganism shaped by Hinduism and Taoism and the Eastern religions and philosophies helped to shape pagan and witchcraft practices that we know today.
01:05:51
Speaker
The Native American, Afro-American traditions were explored and then rediscovered within North America. Feminism and eco-activists drawn to paganism had views of the great goddess, had inner strength and dignity, powerful and independent women. They recognized nature as being sacred, which is kind of rooted more in what you talked about earlier with the Druids and with some of like Madame Blavatsky's stuff. And this is more what we're seeing today.
01:06:21
Speaker
And then another like little gem that I found was the women's international terrorist conspiracy from hell. So they were an activist group in the, that was founded in the sixties and their acronym was witch. And so they had two other names that they were known by also same acronym witch. So they were either the women inspired to tell their collective history or the women interested in toppling consumerism holidays.
01:06:49
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, so they were focused on social change versus just toppling the patriarchy. They wanted to see these actual changes happening, not just like the downfall of the patriarchy. They considered any one that came before them that was touted as a witch or condemned as a witch to be the first guerilla fighters against women's oppression, and they would carry out witch-like publicity stunts. So they would protest in the streets or they would, in quotations,
01:07:15
Speaker
hex Wall Street, or give out garlic cloves to people that they pass in the streets along with little cards and the cards would say, we are which we are women, we are liberation, we are we. Oh my god. That sounds amazing. Right? Everything that I read on them, these women are amazing.
01:07:35
Speaker
And then moving into the 70s is when we start seeing which collective started gathering more openly. It wasn't so taboo. Like, of course there's still a lot of negative, what's the word, like negative outlook. It's not the word I was going to use, but we're just going to go with that one.
01:07:50
Speaker
the negative outlook on being a witch. Stigma. Yeah, stigma. There you go. I was like, I don't know where I was going with this. But yeah, so you see them like gathering more openly. And then there was also, I don't know if I made this note or you did, but the dyanic Wicca and dyanic witchcraft were women only covens. If you made the note and you have more to share, I'm sorry, feel free to share.
01:08:16
Speaker
Oh, no, I know. Okay. I think I might have just noted it. Like I wanted to make sure that we did put that in here that during the seventies, there were women only covens that were just, it was okay to do that. There was still kind of that weird taboo, like, Oh, you know, they're gathering and practicing witchcraft because of like Christian beliefs. But it was a thing as like, as far back as the seventies where it was just, it's okay, we're going to do this now.
01:08:42
Speaker
In 1973, the American Council of Witches was founded and they convened in April 1974. So they were the group that drafted the set of common principles of Wicca and witchcraft in America. Sadly, they disbanded the same year because they couldn't come to an agreement outside of the 13 principles of Wicca and the League. So they got those done and then they were like, now we agree on nothing. And so they ended.
01:09:09
Speaker
And then in 1978, Wiccan principles were actually put into a book for the army called religious requirements and practices of certain selective groups and it's a handbook for chaplains. That's amazing. That's a big deal for military.
01:09:26
Speaker
they for the longest time I think Wiccan was the only one that you could put in and I know that when I was in my religious preference just as an A because it was like you could either be a Christian or a Buddhist or a Wiccan which at the time I didn't really know anything about it and other like Christian beliefs
01:09:47
Speaker
But it wasn't like you couldn't say like, oh, I'm a pagan. But you can now, because I know my husband, he came home all excited one day because he actually was able to change his religious preference to pagan in military like documentation. So yeah, that happened in 1978 for the military. And then in the 80s, we see this rise of actual in-person meetings or outdoor events that are hosted at hotel event centers for pagan groups.
01:10:15
Speaker
So people were actually just like, hey, we're pagan and we're here and we're going to have a meeting. Exactly. Hiding it in their houses. And then we had, you know, in the nineties, we have the internet became a thing. And so this allowed for online groups to just spread like wildfire. Like if anyone was craft curious, they could be like, let me Google this on the internet. I don't know. Was it Google back then? I think it was like AOL back then, but I can't remember what are.
01:10:44
Speaker
Bing. Bing. It was going with the dog? Was that Bing? I don't remember. There were so many weird ones. Yeah, anyways, you could go on and you could search it. And this could take you to chat rooms or whatever with other people who were also craft curious or people who practiced, but you know, they didn't have an outlet to share it. And then at this point, this is when people start turning more to science.
01:11:08
Speaker
away from the supernatural. So you're not accusing your neighbor of being a witch for whatever reason, for your cow dying, for Little Billy having a fever like that died out.
Witchcraft in Modern Media
01:11:19
Speaker
And by the earliest 20th century is kind of when we started seeing different connotations of the witch.
01:11:25
Speaker
And a lot of this came from Hollywood taking these Christian beliefs and running with them so which is being evil women. They were green skin and cackled over cauldrons and always had a black cat and were pointy hats and capes and whatever and like as time goes on.
01:11:43
Speaker
pop culture sensationalizes the witch. So you, every horror movie, well, not every, obviously there's different monsters, but there are so many horror movies out there now that there's, you know, they're based on witches, the Blair Witch, or there is a horror movie just called The Witch. And it's centered on a young girl as she's coming into puberty. And as she comes into puberty, she gets her power and she exactly runs on people. So you're seeing a lot of that in Hollywood and you see it in books, like I've
01:12:12
Speaker
I've talked about good omens a million times, but you see like Harry Potter that was like sensationalized everywhere, right? Everybody knows Harry Potter. Even if you've never read it, you've probably seen at least one of the movies and you know the basis of it.
01:12:27
Speaker
but you know that it's like centered around witchcraft. So at this point, it's cool to be into it, not necessarily, there's still a stigma to like practicing or being a witch, but it's cool to read or it's cool to watch or- Yeah, it's not like you're going to go right to jail for a little bit different. No more right to jail, but it's gonna be like, maybe you're a weirdo. Yeah. And then we both came across a quote
01:12:54
Speaker
Yes, it's amazing. It's absolutely beautiful. I don't know if you wanted to read it. Sure, I can read it. So this quote came from Jess Bergman from a literary history of witches in 2015. And it says, and while there's a broad spectrum of witch stories out there, there's a through line common to them all.
01:13:14
Speaker
which is our women whose embodiment of femininity in some way transgresses society's accepted boundaries. They are too old, too powerful, too sexually aggressive, too vain, too undesirable. What a way to sum it up. And it goes back. It goes back into everything that we talked about in this history. I mean, it even adds the sexually aggressive. It's always like surrounded around
01:13:39
Speaker
hyper-sexualized women or women that just don't fit society's norms. We're just going to persecute them. Straight to jail. Sexually aggressive. Ride to jail.
01:13:53
Speaker
That's it for this episode of Get End Loser, We're Doing Witchcraft. You can find our source material for this episode linked in the show notes. If you love the episode, we'd appreciate if you left us a five-star review wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you really, really like the show and you want to get more Get End Loser content, check out our Supercast link provided in the show notes, or you can search our show on the Supercast website.
01:14:20
Speaker
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01:14:36
Speaker
You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at GetInWitches or send us an email at weirdoingwitchcraft at gmail.com. Check us out next week where we will sit down and explore the stigma surrounding witchcraft and non-Judeo-Christian beliefs and how witches and witchcraft are portrayed in the media. Until then, Blessed Be Witches!