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Show Notes
Dr. Marion Gibson, highly esteemed historian returns to talk about her new book, ‘Witchcraft, A History in Thirteen Trials’. The importance of the book in bridging the gap between historical witchcraft trials and the concept of witch hunts existing today is emphasized. Learn how the stories of real victims presented in her book explore aspects of witchcraft from a 700-year period, touching on the evolution from being considered a magical crime to being a societal metaphor. Dr. Gibson also delves into the sexism inherent in witch trials, the impact of demonology on witch hunting, the impact of individual testimonies from witch trials and the enduring potency of witchcraft accusations in today’s society. Marion shares a glimpse of her future work around the Witchfinder General trials during the English Civil War.
Buy the book Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials by Marion Gibson
Buy the book The Witches of St. Osyth by Marion Gibson
Seven County Witch Hunts Project Blog
Papua New Guinea Sorcery and Witchcraft Accusation-Related Violence National Action Plan
Pan African Parliament Guidelines for Addressing Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks
The International Network against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices
Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past
Grassroots organizations working with The International Network
International Alliance to End Witch Hunts
Storymap explaining the dynamics of sorcery accusation related violence
Transcript
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, the podcast that explores the past, present, and future of witch hunting. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Join us as we explore fascinating tales of witch hunts from the ancient to the modern day, delving into the societal, religious, and psychological factors that fueled them.
Josh Hutchinson: Our podcast features expert interviews, in depth analysis, and compelling storytelling that bring to life the complex narratives surrounding these trials.
Sarah Jack: In this episode, we will be covering both historic and contemporary witch trials.
Josh Hutchinson: That's right. Today, we have the privilege of being joined by scholar Marion Gibson to discuss her captivating new book, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials.
Sarah Jack: Over the next hour, Gibson will be providing us with a fascinating overview of the evolution of witch hunting and persecution over 700 years, from the [00:01:00] earliest European witch trials in the late 15th century to contemporary cases today.
Josh Hutchinson: By closely examining 13 pivotal witchcraft trials throughout history, Gibson reveals how notions of magic and the stereotypical idea of the witch have been adapted to serve as a convenient enemy and outlet for broader societal fears and prejudices.
Sarah Jack: Gibson will explain how women who were seen as overly outspoken, sexually deviant, or simply unconventional were especially vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft across eras.
Josh Hutchinson: We'll learn how profoundly misogynistic witch hunting manuals helped spread dangerous ideas that enabled the targeting of women.
Sarah Jack: Our discussion will also cover how the myth of the witch disturbingly endures today, with continued cases of witchcraft-related violence globally, as well as powerful figures co-opting the term witch hunt for their own political motives.
Josh Hutchinson: You won't want to miss Gibson's insightful [00:02:00] commentary on the gendered and political dimensions of historic witch hunts and the unsettling parallels that can be drawn with present times. So get ready to journey through 700 years of fascinating witchcraft history.
Sarah Jack: Welcome to Witch Hunt, Marion Gibson, author and historical consultant on witchcraft and magic.
Josh Hutchinson: First of all, I just want to say thank you for writing this wonderful book, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. It fills a need that Sarah and I have talked about for something that bridges the gap between the historic witchcraft trials and the witch hunts going on today. So, thank you for doing that.
Marion Gibson: Oh, thank you. That's what I thought needed doing, really. I think you need to, when you've seen the horror of witch trials in the past, and you've read all the history books that you can read about those, it seems to me that it's time to consider how relevant this idea still is today. And one of the things we talked about when we [00:03:00] met last time time was actually, it's very relevant. People keep using the term witch hunts and we know that people are still literally being accused of witchcraft around the world today. So there seemed a need to me to bring the story of the historic witch trial right up to date.
Josh Hutchinson: And the cases you chose are just, they're so good at illustrating, not just individual cases, but the trends and grand themes that connect all of the history and the present together.
Marion Gibson: I'm glad that worked, yeah. Every now and again I find myself still in the process of selecting, if you know what I mean, because I took so long over it and agonized so much over, is this the right one? Is that the right one? Will this really fit? Will this carry the themes through the book? Is this too complicated for the reader because there are some twisty turny moments in the book where the definition of witchcraft shifts? So where it moves, for example, from being a [00:04:00] magical crime to being a crime imagined as one of fraud. And then again, in contemporary times, to being kind of metaphor for a whole bunch of other kinds of things that the society of the time deemed to be unacceptable. So I'm really glad. I'm really glad that I do seem to have pulled that off because it was one of the things that bothered me most writing the book.
Sarah Jack: You have pulled it off and it's going to expand minds and inform and so thank you and great job.
Marion Gibson: Good. Thank you. Oh, that's great. I just come here for validation, basically.
Sarah Jack: Good, good, good.
Josh Hutchinson: You sent the book to the right people.
Sarah Jack: Can you give us a brief overview of what Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials is?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, it is what it says on the tin, but that doesn't quite cover the scope of it, I think. It covers a 700 year period, which again was one of the things that I agonized and worried about writing the book, because [00:05:00] that's a very long period of time. Our first witch trial is in 1485. And our final witch trial is effectively still going on. It's the ongoing legal battle between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels and the many adversaries who were embroiled in that legal battle. So that is our last witch trial. And it tries to tell the story of the idea of the witch and the ways that the idea of the witch has been put on trial, both in formal courts and more informally in society, over the course of those 700 years, to give people a sense of what witchcraft meant in the past, the era of the witch trials, if you like, but then how the idea of the witch is still current today and the era of the witch trials really hasn't finished. So it tries to bring everything up to date and get people to think about what witch means now, and what a witch trial means now.
Josh Hutchinson: I want to get to what a witch is, but you point out in the introduction, [00:06:00] you first need to understand what magic is. So can you explain how would you define magic?
Marion Gibson: It's even harder than defining witches, isn't it? I think magic is a force which cannot be explained by other factors such as science, rationality, observable, physical, or material changes of that kind. But it's more than that, really. It's what people choose to define as magic. So in some cases, some of the phenomena that people have thought were magical in the past or think to be magical today can actually be explained in other ways. But people choose not to because they want to see those things as being magical. And of course, magic can be a positive or a negative thing. So if you accuse your neighbor of being a witch and doing magic, obviously that's a terribly negative thing. But you might also see magic as a positive thing. And one of the ways the witch turns up in contemporary culture is a kind of positive magician, [00:07:00] somebody who's sparkly and glamorous and exciting and maybe even a role model. Magic accompanies the idea of the witch throughout history, really.
Sarah Jack: And what does that lead the witch to be? What is the witch?
Marion Gibson: The witch is a very movable thing, but often defined as an enemy. So one of the places that the witch fits into society, even over such a long historical period, is that they are a very useful enemy. And if they, if you don't think they exist already, you need to invent them because they fill that gap in society where scapegoats and those who challenge authority, people who are subversive, people who are seen to be problematic, certain racial, religious, cultural others. Those people fit. So The witch is is useful when you want to say, I do believe the world is full of magic. It's full of spirits. It's a highly religious world. And I think that because God has his good people on one [00:08:00] side, therefore, Satan must have his bad people on the other side. And those people must be witches and they must be able to do real magic.
Marion Gibson: So the witch is useful more than anything else, useful throughout history.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the things I love about this book is that you're telling the individual stories of victims of persecution. What is the impact? How does that impact our perception of the events to learn the individual stories?
Marion Gibson: I think it's really important. I think it would be quite easy to write a long history of witchcraft where you said all the things that I say about how it's still relevant, et cetera, and how it's now a metaphor for other things. You could say all of that without the individual stories, butI don't think it would really land with people in the same way. And I don't think it would be nearly as engrossing. I find those personal stories the most engrossing and interesting part of writing a history. And I think if you don't feel [00:09:00] history, we talked about this a little bit with my last book, The Witches of St. Osyth, when I came on to talk about that. If you don't feel history, then you don't learn from history. You don't get the sense that, you know what, persecution is a bad thing. We might want to try to do less of it and work towards a world which is more equitable and just and so on. So it's really an attempt to engage people in the story as much as possible by showing individual people who were victimized as witches or who continue to be, and getting people to think but that could have been me, that could have been me in that position, or my neighbor who I care about, or my partner who I care about. I want people to have that sense of emotional investment, and I want as far as possible to give a voice back to the people who were persecuted in the past, and who perhaps were not at the time able to speak for themselves or certainly can't now.
Marion Gibson: I want people to feel those stories and feel like they're on the side of the persecuted [00:10:00] people, and they want to do something to make their stories better known and hopefully stop those kind of stories recurring again. So it's quite a big aim really, but I think the personal is really important.
Sarah Jack: The stories are so engrossing. I really felt the vulnerability of many of the characters. And Tituba has been on my mind a lot lately and how people view her. And I really felt her vulnerability when reading about her. Why are some of these people vulnerable? Why are they easy marks?
Marion Gibson: A lot of it is to do with gender. So about 75 percent of the people who we know were accused of witchcraft across all the jurisdictions that historians have studied were women. So that's a really important thing that seems to make people vulnerable to the accusation of witchcraft. But in her case, there's also the racial factor to be considered, so she's a Native American woman, and she's [00:11:00] positioned as the enemy of the colonists, the people living around her. So there's that. There's also her position within society, so she's an enslaved person and a servant, somewhere on the continuum between those positions, this very disempowered woman sits, depending on whose jurisdiction she's having to live within and how she's being treated by the community around her. All of those things matter. And she's positioned in that way because she's been translocated from one place to another. So sometimes factors like migration matter. Sometimes it's a forced migration, as in her case. In other cases, it's somebody who's perceived to be out of place in some way. And obviously these are all things that we see in today's society as making people more likely to be persecuted and scapegoated.
Josh Hutchinson: In the book, you talk a lot about demonology. What is that? And how did that shape witch hunting?
Marion Gibson: It's really the theory of witch hunting. And it's not [00:12:00] just a theory. It's a practical manual, if you like, for the finding of witches. So theory and practice, and it's stated, and this is where the first chapter of the book kicks off, really. It's stated that witches were the devil's people and they should be hunted down in society. They were more likely to be women than men, some of the first demonologists asserted.
Marion Gibson: And we start off with Heinrich Kramer, or Kramer, one of the first demonologists, somebody who people might have heard of because he wrote the witch hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches, which has become notorious since the 1480s when he wrote it for being not only Yeah, a manual for hatred and for hunting people, but particularly a very misogynistic manual.
Marion Gibson: So demonology didn't really have to go those ways. It didn't have to be as misogynistic as it was, but it seems inevitable in the context of a broadly patriarchal society that it would have gone that way. And people like [00:13:00] Heinrich Kramer make sure that it does. And the first witch trial in the book is his attempt to put into practice his demonology.
Marion Gibson: So he's thinking through these ideas, and he's presumably thinking about writing a manual for witch hunting, but he decides to put this into practice. And one of the trials that I talk about in chapter one is his attempt to do that. He finds a group of women and decides he's going to persecute them.
Marion Gibson: But demonology is really important. It underpins so many of the stories, particularly in part one of the book, which goes from the 1480s to the 1730s, really the period of the witch trials as people tend to think of it. And if it wasn't for demonology, those witch trials wouldn't be possible. So first of all, you need the theory and it's a conspiracy theory. It's about Satan's people in the world and how we must find them out. And here are the ways you identify them. And this is what you need to do to them. If it wasn't for that theory, the witch trials wouldn't have happened in quite the way that they did.
Sarah Jack: What do you attribute to [00:14:00] the level of misogyny that he was directed by writing that book?
Marion Gibson: It's hideous, isn't it? And it's really upsetting to contemplate just how misogynistic he was. It's partly perhaps to do with his position in society. He's a Dominican monk, so he's a celibate individual living in a basically patriarchal, closed, masculine community. But that didn't mean that he had to be misogynistic.Lots of people managed to live in those communities without being as misogynistic as he was. It makes you wonder about factors in his biography, which we don't know about, sadly. We know where he comes from, and we know some of his previous life.
Marion Gibson: He seems to be a deeply unpleasant individual. He was accused throughout his life of all sorts of nastiness, whether that was attacking academic colleagues, embezzlement, and his job was not a particularly attractive one. So he was responsible in part for the selling of indulgences, which is a way that rich people could [00:15:00] basically buy a piece of paper which bought them out of some time in purgatory, burning off their sins, as the theology of the time said that they would.
Marion Gibson: He just seems to have been a really quite unpleasant person, who was haunted by the idea that women were out to get men, and perhaps to get him specifically. But most certainly that he thought that they were ignorant, they were lustful, they were prone to believing the wrong things about God and Satan. They were malevolent and petty and strove to take out their frustrations on other people, primarily men. He identifies them as enemies in a whole variety of ways and it is inexplicable. You can always look at factors in people's life to say, 'that's why they hate that group or that's why they're just so unpleasant to everybody,' but at the end of the day, there is no real clue to why he was who he was. [00:16:00]
Marion Gibson: What is depressing is that a lot of people listened to him and credited what he was saying and thought of him as an expert. Some people questioned it, some people stood up against it, and I think one of the interesting things about that first chapter is that we look at the people who stood up against it, which include the people on trial, the women on trial, and things don't go quite the way that he might have hoped that they would have done, which I think is good because it gives the reader a nice surprise, a starting point for the book, which is not maybe quite what they'd expected.
Marion Gibson: But whilst people challenged him, a lot of people went along with what he said. And of course, that was one of the reasons why the witch trials take off. Sometimes all you need is one quite powerful individual to want to punch down on others. And unfortunately, the human imagination often goes along with that.
Marion Gibson: It was a book that made me think twice about whether I really thought people were at bottom good or bad. And the prevalence of that kind of hatred and the [00:17:00] way that it recurs throughout human history is a really depressing thing. And I think it's something that we really ought to think more about. There are always Heinrich Kramers.
Josh Hutchinson: And to your point that you needed demonology to have witch hunting, you had to have the science of how to do witch hunting, so you needed these books in order to do that. But specifically with the Malleus Maleficarum, if that book had never been written, do you think the European Witch Trials would have played out the same way?
Marion Gibson: That's a really interesting one. Scholars have argued a lot about whether that book is a really key one or not. I think it is. It's very difficult to get a clear sense of how books circulated in this period. We know that they did. And we know they circulated in manuscript and people translated them and passed them around.
Marion Gibson: And if you were a member of an academic community or a monastic community, you might make copies [00:18:00] of books, you might give them to your friends, you might give them as a gift to somebody, you might send them abroad to friends that you'd made through letter writing and things like that. So you can see the kind of network of circulation, but actually tracing the progress of an individual book is quite hard.
Marion Gibson: So scholars have said other demonologies are probably more important, particularly the less misogynistic, less radical ones, if you like. But nevertheless, the progress of the witch hunt suggests to me that all demonologies were important and that a very misogynistic demonology most certainly had a place in the spread of those ideas.
Marion Gibson: Look what the outcome was! Oh look, 75 percent of those who are accused are women. This cannot be really a coincidence. So I do think it was quite an important book and certainly the way it was rediscovered in the 20th century and translated into English for the first time, for example, makes me think that although it's long [00:19:00] pre history of publication and circulation, it's difficult to see the fact that people in the 20th century identified it as a key one and translated it and then talked about it a lot makes me think that actually it probably always was a key text and that we should pay quite a lot of attention to it. It's quite tempting to dismiss it as an outlier, but I'm not really sure that it was.
Josh Hutchinson: It's translated by one of your subjects in here, Montague Summers. Is his translation considered reliable? Is there any other academic translation of it?
Marion Gibson: Yeah, there is. His translation is not considered particularly reliable. He had his own biases and one of the reasons that he turns up in book is that he is fascinated by the idea of witchcraft and Satanism, and to some extent he's quite like Heinrich Kramer. He too is a Roman Catholic clergyman, or at least he presents himself as such. It's not entirely clear [00:20:00] exactly how he was ordained or how he went on that path. He regards himself as somebody who's quite a superior intellect and somebody who might know something about the spiritual world and might have some theories about things like ghosts and vampires and demons and so on.
Marion Gibson: I think he and Heinrich Kramer would have had some things to talk about had they met, but he's also very different, because he's gay and he's quite openly gay, which is a surprising thing for a clergyman and indeed any man in the England of his period. So he's really interesting. He sits on both sides of being, being a scapegoated witch, because he's accused of Satanism during the course of his life. Wow.
Marion Gibson: But on the other hand, being somebody who's very interested in persecuting other people and thus translating Kramer's book. So yeah, it's not a particularly reliable translation because of his own very complicated personal history and his own deep interest in these subjects, which I think [00:21:00] sometimes led him to over read or to propose a controversial interpretation of something Kramer had said.
Marion Gibson: If people want to look at Malleus Maleficarum, the best literal translation, that's one I talk about in the footnotes of the book, and it's by Christopher S. Mackay, and people should look for that one. He's also written a great book on Heinrich Kramer and the witch trial that I talk about in the first chapter. So if you want to know more about that and you feel like you want to read Malleus Maleficarum in a translation that gives you the best possible access to what Heinrich Kramer had to say, then I think it would probably be Mackay's book that I'd point you to.
Josh Hutchinson: Excellent. Yeah, I'm going to pick that up. I know it's going to be an infuriating experience.
Marion Gibson: It really is. Yeah. I get my students to look at it when I teach my module about witchcraft in history and literature, and every year, I go into the first class, it's the first class and I look at their faces and they're just like, what? [00:22:00] What? And sometimes people say to me, 'is this, you know, is this real? Did people really write?' Yeah, yeah, they really wrote this. Yes, they wrote it. They published it. This is what they had to say about the women of their period.
Marion Gibson: And their jaws really drop, especially students who quite often think, oh, well, you know, we've progressed such a long way since this time, I'm not really sure that we still need to be banging on about feminism and talking about the position of women in society. It is always quite satisfying to see those students think,' oh, wait, hang on a minute. No, people can say these kinds of things. And this kind of thing is still said in contemporary society from time to time. And shouldn't we talk about this in our classes?' So I always enjoy presenting it to people. And it will probably be quite a disturbing experience. Yeah. And it sort of should be, but no, I'm not recommending, I'm not recommending you get a mug of cocoa and sit down with your bedtime reading, because you won't enjoy it.[00:23:00]
Sarah Jack: Reading her trial and then thinking about him going on to write that, it really struck me. She couldn't pick up a pen and write her story and push it out into the world. And so here we are in 2023 fighting that story. The power of your pen, your writing is powerful. And it's going to be combating this mentality. So I feel excited about the era we are in, because women can write and express now, but then their words, what they were able to say, the limited power they had, and they got in trouble for it.
Marion Gibson: It's a powerful thing that, isn't it? Yeah. And again, it's quite deeply felt because particularly if you are a woman, you think about how you might have fared in that society. So Heinrich Kraemer, the [00:24:00] woman who is at the center of this Witch Trial in 1485 is a woman called Helena Scheuberin, and she's quite a wealthy woman probably, in a number of ways. She's a merchant's wife. She's had some education. She has some ideas about religion of her own, which is one of the reasons why she's able to stand up and fight back a bit against her persecutors, and she and her husband have access to sufficient money to, spoiler alert, hire a lawyer during the course of her trial.
Marion Gibson: So she's a really important prefigure, it seems to me, of the position of women in contemporary society. And I did find it powerful. And I did find myself thinking, 'you have to write this. You have to write this as a woman. You have to answer back. It may be too late for many of these people, but at least I can say something from my perspective and the perspective of other women. This wasn't right. You shouldn't have done this. This is what I think of you.' And I found that quite powerful. Looking back at my own female ancestors, I've been [00:25:00] going through some of the family records recently for other reasons. My great grandmother couldn't write. She couldn't write her own name. And that's incredibly recent. That's really very recent. And it makes you think about how important it is that women do have that voice and how important it is that we should try and use it to make sure that this kind of institutional misogyny that we see in the world around us doesn't continue to flourish.
Marion Gibson: So yeah, it felt like a powerful thing. It felt like an important book to write and it felt like I had to write it. It was important to try to set the record straight, even though, in many cases, it's many centuries too late. At least something was done, I guess.
Josh Hutchinson: It's definitely important to highlight that these were and still are male-dominated societies and who are they targeting with their witch trials, not usually men.
Marion Gibson: Not usually, [00:26:00] no. And when you look towards the end of the book, you see,in the African communities that I talk about, in the North American communities that I talk about at the end of the book, very often those who are accused are womenAnd they're persecuted, at least in part, for being women under the heading of being witches. So I think this is an argument that we absolutely still have not won. And we still do need feminism. We still do need women writers and male writers who are willing to tell those stories to keep telling them and to keep telling the story of the witch trial as a story of persecution of women specifically, as well as some men as well.
Josh Hutchinson: One thing I like to point out to people is that, in New England, at least 78 percent or so of the accused were women. And that you look at that and see, 22%, that's still a reasonable representation. There's [00:27:00] some men. Half of them were directly connected to a female suspect and they were accused after she was. It's even more misogynistic than when you first look at the 78%, I think.
Marion Gibson: Yes, I think so. That's very nicely put that the men who are drawn into the witch trials are very often drawn in because they're the husband or the son or an acquaintance in some way of a woman who is the primary accused. So yes, they are drawn in. Yes, it's a terrible fate for them, too. But one of the reasons that they are accused is because they're seen to be an associate and affiliates, somebody perhaps who is defending a woman who's been accused first.
Marion Gibson: I do think that is a really important point.
Josh Hutchinson: And then I was just thinking in there, A lot of the representations, the males, even though they're much more rare as suspects, they're given authority over the female witches.
Marion Gibson: Yes, they often [00:28:00] are, which is fascinating to see, isn't it? So even in the course of the accusations, you find that the essentially patriarchal assumptions of those who are doing the persecuting are replicated. It is quite fascinating, isn't it? Once you start to unpick and you look at the kind of qualitative experience behind the quantitative statistics, you find that it is even worse than it looks when you simply look at a table of figures. Absolutely.
Marion Gibson: That's why the individual stories are so important, I think, because you want to think about the experience of those people and why they were put in the positions that they were, and the stories that were told about them, and the stories that they managed to tell about themselves. So that it's not just the kind of hard data, if you like, of history that we're talking about. It's the lived experience of history, which often determines the outcome of events as we know.
Josh Hutchinson: We've talked about a little about why women are accused, but specifically you talk about how[00:29:00] women witches are seen as being unwomanly.
Marion Gibson: Yes, often they are. So women of all ages and classes get accused during the course of the book. So we have very poor women, who barely have enough to support themselves and their families. And we have relatively wealthy women, people like Helena, who we were talking about just now,and we even have noble women. So chapter two is about a Scottish witch trial. One of those who is accused and unfortunately ultimately condemned to death is a noble woman. So we've got all kinds of women, but one of the things that holds all those women's stories together is that they are thought of as insufficiently submissive or insufficiently modest or overly lustful or overly mouthy and difficult, women who fall out with people in their communities, women who are bad mothers or are thought to [00:30:00] be attacking other people's children and just are generally women who are, as you say, sufficiently unwomanly to have attracted the attention of their community. And that does come about in a whole variety of different ways. Maybe they are accused of having an affair with somebody else's husband, or maybe they have an illegitimate child, or maybe they've fallen out with a neighbor in a dispute over, it can be anything really, anything from child rearing to business practices. Maybe they're also notable in other ways.
Marion Gibson: So some of the women, there's a woman in one of the chapters about the English Civil War, who is a disabled woman, a woman who actually only has one leg. So maybe in her case, there's not only concern about her illegitimate child, she has a young daughter outside of marriage, but maybe also they're thinking about her appearance and the way that it's not a traditionally beautiful, attractive womanly appearance that is desirable to men. And therefore they [00:31:00] single her out for those reasons, as well.
Marion Gibson: So there's a whole variety of different ways that women can be thought by others to be unwomanly. And when you look at that again, you just see the unfairness of that stereotyping and the confinements of the image of the woman within these incredibly narrow boundaries to which they must conform or else they're going to find themselves in trouble.
Marion Gibson: And of course they could get into trouble in all sorts of different ways in the societies in which they live. But being accused of witchcraft seems to be quite a powerful tool alongside all the other accusations that might be made against them.
Sarah Jack: Women in leadership roles are labeled as witches by men.
Marion Gibson: Yes, they are. Yes, they are. Yeah. So again, that sort of sense that if you stick your head above the parapet, somebody's going to come along and want to knock it off then. That applies very much across the course of many of these stories. But again, we've got women who are incredibly [00:32:00] disempowered and women who are seen as leaders or who are seen as notable in their society in some way. So all of those kinds of people get accused. And because women are more likely to be leaders in modern society, really that idea has strengthened over time that a woman leader is fair game, can be accused of witchcraft. You know, that can be something as, it's as simple as drawing a cartoon of her or making a crass comment on social media, or it can be people literally believing that woman is a witch and deciding to attack her for those reasons.
Marion Gibson: Again, it's the idea that a woman is a witch is a very malleable kind of idea. You can twist it around any way you want to and make it apply to almost any woman. But if a woman stands out in society in some way, so much so that people consider her to be unwomanly, according to the definitions of their stereotype, then that does make her more likely to be accused.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. She's out of place [00:33:00] and it's because she's evil.
Marion Gibson: Yes, see, that must be it, mustn't it? There we go. There, that's all sorted now. Yeah, that's why women become eminent in their societies, isn't it? Because they're evil, obviously. And yes, it's funny, isn't it? Yeah, we find it laughable, but at the same time, we can see how all around us, that is unfortunately a really serious thing that many people think.
Marion Gibson: And really, I would so much rather that the book contributed to people questioning that. Every time a reader picks up a book, I do want them to think, 'hang on a minute, this actually is still the case, isn't it? I need to notice those instances a little bit more. I need to push back a little bit more against those and think a bit more about why that's that.'
Marion Gibson: Essentially fairly humorous thing might still be possible to be said. Why can we still make that joke? Why can we still make jokes about witches, which we should do because the idea of the witch is inherently laughable, but why can we still do it? And that's, [00:34:00] we can still do it because it still works in society. It still works in culture. We still know people do sometimes think these things.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, and now we see that powerful women get labeled as witches, powerful men take on the label of witch in that they're the victims of the witch hunt.
Marion Gibson: They do. This was a real gift, I have to say. But it was also one of the things that prompted me to shape the book the way I did. If you'd said to me in the early years of the 21st century, or the 1990s, when I first got interested in witches, if you said to me, people will be claiming in the society around you that they are the victims of a witch hunt, and they won't be the people that you expect. They will be powerful men in charge of the societies that they essentially run. I wouldn't have believed you. I would have thought that's nonsense, isn't it? Of course, they're not going to be doing that, but the fact that they are, this is something that's happened in Britain with Boris Johnson [00:35:00] claiming to be the victim of a witch hunt, just the same as with Donald Trump in the United States.
Marion Gibson: So this travels across cultures, it's not a uniquely American thing. We see this happening quite regularly now, and it was an absolute gift for structuring the book because it gave me the opportunity to demonstrate very, very clearly just how relevant the idea of the witch is, and to talk about that curious reversal whereby it's the wealthy, white male, powerful individuals who are doing the claiming to be the victims of a witch hunt, whereas in fact it's the people who stand against them who are much more likely to fit the traditional stereotype of the witch.
Sarah Jack: You talked about the malleability of the witch. How do we recognize and interrupt a witch hunt in progress?
Marion Gibson: I think I end the book with this, and I've put a checklist, really, at the end of the book so that people can think about this. I think if you are being [00:36:00] asked to persecute and scapegoat somebody and identify them as an enemy of society, and they are female, maybe of a different race to the majority of people in a particular society, maybe they're poorer than the majority of people in a particular society, maybe they stand out in some way and are regarded as being inherently subversive in some way, maybe they're disabled or set apart by their physicality in some way. You might want to consider whether what you're being asked to participate in is in fact a witch hunt.
Josh Hutchinson: So I think if you can look for some of those signs, they might be signs that actually that old human stereotype is reasserting itself.And you're involved with The International Network Against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices. What's important about being involved in that?
Marion Gibson: I think it's really important for historians to try and find ways that their work is relevant [00:37:00] today. That's the first thing and secondly, that network is important in trying to stop witchcraft accusations happening today. And there are of course other harmful practices that are involved as well. So for example, people being murdered in order to be used, their body parts, for example, to be used in magical processes. So really the network is about putting together not just a group of experts on witch trials, but also a group of experts on that earlier thing we talked about, magic and human belief in magic, which, there is nothing wrong with at all, but when it leads to harming other people to the extent of killing them even, then clearly that's something that we need to be challenging. So yeah, I'd recommend people have a look at the, the network and some of the people involved in it. People like Leo Igwe, for example, who is an activist against witchcraft persecution and the harmful practices associated with it and has personal experience of being scapegoated [00:38:00] in this way and trying to help people who have today been accused literally of witchcraft, of bewitching their neighbors and worshipping the devil and so on. So if people feel like they want to know more about the notion of witchcraft in contemporary society, want to try and do something about it, then I'd recommend looking at the Network and some of the people involved in it to find out more about that.
Sarah Jack: And you mentioned that Leo and others that are doing work like him are sometimes persecuted. They're misunderstood as being supporters of witchcraft, even. How does fear cloud perspectives on efforts to educate about witch hunting?
Marion Gibson: It's very easy, isn't it, to turn the word witch against somebody, which is one of the points of the book, really. Like I say, it can be used against more or less anybody. Of course, standing up for somebody who is accused of witchcraft can lead to you being accused of witchcraft too. And that's certainly something that we see in the [00:39:00] past, and it's something we see today with people like Leo.
Marion Gibson: And there are other examples that I talk about in the book, too. For example, two female professors who organized a conference at one of the campuses of the University of Nigeria were themselves accused of witchcraft, not ultimately to the extent of being tried, which is great. But they were still accused of witchcraft. And the academic conference about witchcraft persecution was represented by some of the religious spokespeople in the area as being a meeting of witches, a kind of witch's Sabbath, which made things very difficult for them. So that kind of misunderstanding and the harassment that arises from it is one of the things that the network is really keen to combat.
Josh Hutchinson: And we've also seen, in addition, you had that conference in Nigeria that was affected by this belief. We've seen in America, school classes, college courses be cancelled because they [00:40:00] had to do with witch trial history but were represented as teaching occult practices. And I've seen articles about there's a new course being offered by one of the universities in the UK, and they're coming under a little bit of fire, it seems like, for teaching witchcraft and occultism.
Marion Gibson: They are. That would be the university that I actually work at. Yes. The University of Exeter. That's absolutely right. and one of my colleagues has brought together this fascinating master of arts in Magic and Occult Science, I think something like that. And it's pretty obvious really, as soon as you look at the course description, this is about history. This is about the history of magic and she's also based within the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies. So it's specifically about Eastern Occultism and the way that many of the kind of discussions of magic and the [00:41:00] occult in early Eastern societies led to the sort of Western esotericism that people see now and some people practice, but other people just find a fascinating cultural phenomenon. So yeah, absolutely. There's been quite a lot of pushback about the advertisements for this course in some quarters, as if it were an attempt to, to teach people how to do magic and witchcraft, which of course, as academics, it is not our business to do.
Marion Gibson: So yeah, absolutely. These are still very live terms, aren't they? And we do see all the time challenges to particular books in libraries or challenges to courses which examine the history of witchcraft and magic, because people don't always understand that this is, it's just about history.
Marion Gibson: So it's, exactly the same as examining, I don't know, the history of the industrial revolution or the history of 17th century Puritanism or whatever, you can look at anything through the historical lens and find something valuable in it, but people don't always see that.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, it [00:42:00] really speaks to how powerful and dangerous witchcraft is perceived by some who fear it, that even a look at the history is dangerous.
Marion Gibson: Yes. It's almost as if it's going to contaminate you, isn't it? The very word witch or the idea of witchcraft or magic is going to harm you just by your association with it, or by having noticed it. That's a theme that comes up over and over again in the book, actually, the idea that, that witchcraft spreads like a virus the second you engage with it. It will draw you in and either you yourself will become a witch, which is a terrible thing, or you will be the victim of witchcraft, which is also a terrible thing. So there is this sense that it is, it's like a bacteria or a virus or a germ or something like that. And once set loose in society, it can't be put back into the box, if you like.
Sarah Jack: Well, this [00:43:00] is out of the box now too, and it's going to spread. I'm really excited.
Marion Gibson: I'm glad you've enjoyed it so much. I loved writing the book. It was very hard because, hey, it's a 700 year history of some really complicated stuff. And I found it really, really difficult. But I also thought that it was something that needed doing. We need this big history of the idea of witchcraft, because it's something that just hasn't gone away, and to that extent, I suppose it's more relevant in some ways than some of the other histories I've talked about. They too have this long legacy, but we've seen the vitality of the idea of witchcraft. And it's something that surprised me that it's come back into culture with such force and that so many people are interested in it from so many different perspectives.
Marion Gibson: And people are still using the word witch as a weapon, by the self assertion or attack on other people. So I think when you've got something that appears to be part of history, that's just medieval superstition [00:44:00] unites the past, don't worry about that, but you realize that it's actually still very powerful within your society, then that's something that particularly needs the attention of historians, it seems to me. So that's what the book tries to do, show people where it's still relevant and get people to pay attention to it where they see it arise.
Josh Hutchinson: It reminds me of something Wolfgang Berenger said in a documentary video released this summer, Why Witch Hunts Are Not Just a Dark Chapter of the Past. He said, 'there have never been so many witch hunts as there are today.' And people just don't realize that, so I thank you for raising the awareness of that.
Marion Gibson: Yeah, I think that's very true, what he says, particularly if you look at places like Southern Africa, if you look at Indonesia, if you look at Papua New Guinea, some of the places where witch hunting has become most endemic, you can see that actually witch [00:45:00] hunting is more popular than it's ever been. And that's partly because of the spread of different kinds of media.
Marion Gibson: We talked about demonology spreading through textbooks in the middle ages right through to the sort of 18th century or so, but of course now today it's the internet, it's social media, it's podcasts, it's videos, it's in some ways ancient technologies now like video cassettes and audio cassettes and CDs and people think of witchcraft also spreading through cell phones, through private conversations as if it could run through the air and infect people.
Marion Gibson: So all the new technologies, which some people would have thought would have put an end to the idea of witchcraft belief, have in fact just been incorporated into it. And so witchcraft belief and witchcraft trials spread now through new media, just as once they spread through the printed word when that was a new media phenomenon.
Marion Gibson: So yeah, it's, there are more witch trials than there have ever been. He's absolutely right about [00:46:00] that.
Sarah Jack: And that demonology theory is just right there, propelling the fear through modern technologies.
Marion Gibson: Yes, it is. It hasn't really changed that much. It's one of the great human ideas, in this case, a very bad one, that really hasn't changed that much over time. And it's still just as powerful, even though we might've tried to tell ourselves that it really wasn't, and that this was part of history and part of the past, and we'd moved on now, surely, hadn't we, but we hadn't and we need to think about why that is.
Josh Hutchinson: How do things change?
Marion Gibson: How do things change? How do things get better? That's a really difficult question. And I thought about it throughout the course of the book and I, maybe it's just because I'm old and tired, I don't know, but it struck me that they wouldn't. And that seems to me to be a horrifying insight, really, I've always lived as quite a positive person and thought, ah, things are getting better, but I think one of the things we've seen in the [00:47:00] past 10 years, say, is things slipping backwards?
Marion Gibson: So maybe over time things will get better. Maybe we will move on from witchcraft belief. Maybe society will become more just and equal and all the things that we want it to be. But I'm beginning to think that we have to push harder to make that happen because I think we had got quite complacent, or I had anyway, and thought that naturally things were getting better, right? There would be progress. Everything wasn't perfect, everything could get better, but we were broadly moving in the right direction in society. And then a whole slew of things happened that made me think, actually, this wasn't the case. So I'm not sure that it will get better, but I think we have to try.
Marion Gibson: And it takes every person's effort and everybody can do something. Yes, I think so. I think the fact that the stories I tell are individual ones shows [00:48:00] that because sometimes a witch trial can turn on the intervention of a single individual, perhaps somebody you wouldn't even expect. And that can make a huge difference for good or ill. So if we can, yeah, if we can try to be that person, if we can try to be one of those people, then perhaps there is some hope that things will get better and that people will stop being persecuted as witches, both in reality and in metaphor. It would be so nice if we could move on, wouldn't it? I, as much as anybody else, I value the idea of the witch in popular culture and I enjoy consuming fictions about witches, but if only it could be confined to the fictional realm, wouldn't that be a marvelous thing?
Sarah Jack: Absolutely.
Josh Hutchinson: Witchcraft: a History in Thirteen Trials, when is it out in the States and how can people get it?
Marion Gibson: It will be out mid January, so it's out in the UK at the moment, but there will be a lovely American edition with a fabulous cover with a little fiery red cat on it, which I hope people very much enjoy [00:49:00] when they see it. And it's coming out with Scribner, so it should be available in all good bookshops, as they say.
Sarah Jack: What is next for you?
Marion Gibson: Oh, I do know already, which is good. And guess what? It's about witches. I'm going to write a book about the Witchfinder General trials of the English Civil War, which you've probably talked about. Matthew Hopkins, John Stearne, a group of, a merry band of witch hunters, unfortunately, once again, persecuting people from about 1645 to 1647, mostly in eastern England, but a trial that, although it's confined to quite a small locality, is as big as the Salem trial and involves 200 to 300 suspects, possibly as many as 200 people executed, which is absolutely astonishing.
Marion Gibson: I don't think we talk about it enough. People will probably know some of those names. They might know the name Witchfinder General. But for the first time, because of digitization of records, we're able to [00:50:00] explore the whole series of the trials. And they move across seven counties. They are across two years and increasingly records are turning up, which casts new light on some of the people involved.
Marion Gibson: So what I'm going to try and do is tell the stories of some of those individuals, just as I've done in this book, and try to give them back their histories, their voices, and also just talk about, really talk about the national context, and to some extent, the international context, the way that trials like the Witchfinder General trials influence trials in North America, so Salem in particular.
Marion Gibson: But also the way it makes us reflect on, what we think Englishness is, what we think Britishness is, what we think those kinds of identities that subsequently traveled all around the world were. Because it's so easy, I think, for us to present ourselves as this wonderful, enlightened people who value fairness and justice and all the rest of it. But again, recent events have suggested actually we might have a slightly darker history, and it might be quite [00:51:00] important to talk about that. So it will be a book about the biggest English witch hunts and its repercussions all around the world. And that's the Witchfinder General Trials of the 1640s.
Sarah Jack: Fantastic.
Josh Hutchinson: You do give people a taste of that in Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. once you, everybody out there, once you've read Witchcraft: a History in Thirteen Trials, I know you'll just be salivating waiting for the next book to come out.
Marion Gibson: I can't wait to write it. Yeah. There's one of the chapters deals with parthenogenesis of that hunt and a particular individual who's accused. So yeah, if I can do for many of the other suspects what I've done for her, I should be very happy. Again, it's a very big project and it will take a little while, but I cannot wait to do this. I've already started on the research. In fact, I'm off to Essex, our Essex County here in England, next week to do some more work on it.
Sarah Jack: Wonderful.[00:52:00]
Josh Hutchinson: I want to recommend that everybody follow the project. You're on X as the Seven Counties Witch Project, right? Witch Trial Project.
Marion Gibson: That's right. Yeah. It's @witches7hunt, I think our address is.
Josh Hutchinson: And we'll have that link for everybody in the show description.
Marion Gibson: Please follow along. We do a regular blog, which explores our adventures in different archives.
Sarah Jack: And now, for a minute with Mary.
Mary-Louise Bingham: How do we know what we know? Historian Margo Burns has challenged her audiences many times with that question as part of her public presentations regarding the colonial New England witch trials. As I prepared to tell the story of the evening of the second arrest of Mary Esty for a past episode on this podcast, I contacted Margo. We spent two hours trying to figure out the route George Herrick rode the night of May 20th, [00:53:00] 1692, to apprehend Mary and bring her to Salem for her second examination. We pulled all the information from the best primary source, Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, of which Margo was the project manager with a top notch team who compiled and translated these documents over a 12 year period.
Mary-Louise Bingham: I would like to thank Margo for her time and expertise, and for challenging us lay historians to look to the primary sources so that our ancestor stories will be told with authority. Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts, a nonprofit 501(c)3, Weekly News Update. This podcast is a project of our nonprofit called End Witch Hunts. It is dedicated to the global collaboration to end witch hunting in all forms. We collaborate on and create projects that build awareness, [00:54:00] education, exoneration, justice, memorialization, and research of the phenomenon of witch hunting behavior. End Witch Hunts employs a three pronged approach to the problem, focusing on knowledge, memory, and advocacy through our various projects. Get involved. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn about the projects.
Sarah Jack: Martin Luther King Jr. said, "whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth."
Sarah Jack: Our mission is to actively enlighten the public on historical and contemporary dimensions of all witch trials. Today the issue of witch hunts represents a significant human rights crisis recognized by the United Nations Human Rights Council. This global concern calls upon nations and leaders to intensify their efforts in addressing harmful practices associated with witchcraft accusations. The United States can intensify their efforts, too. There are still witch trial victims here that need a formal apology and exoneration. [00:55:00]
Sarah Jack: Massachusetts Bill H 1803, an Act to Exonerate All Individuals Accused of Witchcraft During the Salem Witch Trials, is currently being reviewed by the Joint Committee on Judiciary in the Massachusetts General Court. They must choose to pass the bill onto the House by February 7th. Please consider submitting written testimony now as to why you support acknowledging all those who suffered in the Salem Witch Trials. This bill transcends the realm of mere legislation. It holds profound significance in the pursuit of human rights. Beyond the previously exonerated victims of the Salem Witch Trials, this bill sheds light on the vast scale of mass suffering that occurred. It represents a significant step towards rectifying this injustice and delivering more comprehensive justice. This legislation holds the power to provide more long-overdue formal acknowledgment to overlooked victims. It symbolizes a collective commitment to dismantling the historical and contemporary shackles of injustice and to find the way to a just and [00:56:00] humane world for all.
Sarah Jack: Join the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project and House Representative Andres Vargas in advocating for this crucial piece of legislation. Anyone can submit written testimony. Simply write a short letter stating why this bill is important. You can send it to this address, which will also be in the show notes.
Sarah Jack: Send to judiciary committee at 24 Beacon Street, room 136, Boston, Massachusetts 0 2 1 3 3 or by email to michael.musto@mahouse.gov. That's m i c h a e l dot m u s t o at m a h o u s e dot g o v.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Join us again next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Subscribe wherever you get podcasts
Sarah Jack: Visit us at aboutwitchhunts.com/.
Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends and family about the show.[00:57:00]
Sarah Jack: Support our efforts to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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