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Show Notes
This new episode of “Witch Hunt” features Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, discussing her research on service magic in 14th to 17th century Great Britain with Salem witch trial descendants Josh Hutchinson and Sarah Jack. She explains the concept of service magic, its practices, and the difference between service magicians and witches. Dr. Stanmore also touches on the impact of religious changes and laws on magic practices. Various aspects of magic, including healing methods, divination techniques, and the use of magic in daily life are delved into. Additionally, she shares about her soon to release book, “Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic” and her collaboration on the Seven County Witch Hunt Project, which looks at the Matthew Hopkins witch trials of the 1640s. The discussion concludes with a reflection on the legacy of witch hunts and their impact on families and communities. Anyone can submit written testimony for MA Bill H.1803. Simply write a short letter stating why this bill is important to: Judiciary Committee at 24 Beacon Street, Room 136, Boston, MA 02133 or by e-mail to michael.musto@mahouse.gov. 
Recommended Reading
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, by Dr. Tabitha Stanmore
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
Websites of Note
Why Witch Hunts are not just a Dark Chapter from the Past
The International Network against Accusations of Witchcraft and Associated Harmful Practices
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 asks how and why we hunt witches and how we can stop. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm a descendant of several people accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: And I have grandmothers who were tried for witchcraft in Salem, Boston, and Hartford.
Josh Hutchinson: On Witch Hunt, we talk about the witch trials of old and the epidemic of witch hunts today.
Sarah Jack: Witch hunts have occurred in all parts of the world, and they've never stopped.
Josh Hutchinson: Today, witch hunts continue to occur in all corners of the globe, resulting in banishment, torture, and even death.
Sarah Jack: In this episode, we're focusing [00:01:00] on the witchcraft of the past.
Josh Hutchinson: Specifically we're dialed into the service magic of 14th to 17th century Great Britain.
Sarah Jack: Our guest, Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, tells us about her upcoming book, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic.
Josh Hutchinson: She explains what service magic is and how it was used in the past.
Sarah Jack: Listen on for a great discussion about what types of service magic were practiced and who practiced them.
Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Stanmore even explains the methods used.
Sarah Jack: And we hear about what she is working on next.
Josh Hutchinson: So sit back and enjoy another mind-expanding episode of Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: We welcome Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, author and social historian of magic, witchcraft, and researcher at the University of Exeter, working with Professor Marion Gibson on the Seven County Witch Hunt Project.
Tabitha Stanmore: My name is Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, [00:02:00] and I am a research fellow at the University of Exeter, currently researching the Matthew Hopkins Witch Trials of the 1640s. But my PhD research was in service magic or practical magic in the late medieval, early modern period stretching from 1350 to 1650, which is what my first academic book was about and what the book that I have coming out this year is also about.
Sarah Jack: Does your new book have a title?
Tabitha Stanmore: Yes, it's Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic.
Josh Hutchinson: So looking forward to that. That comes out in May?
Tabitha Stanmore: It comes out in May, May 2nd in the UK and May 28th in the US. and yeah, it should be very exciting. I hope it's going to be very exciting. I've seen the book covers and I'm going to get the actual, physical copies in my hand at some point next week, which is, I just can't believe it's real, actually, it's great.
Josh Hutchinson: Excellent. Yeah. I've pre ordered a [00:03:00] copy, and I'm just waiting and waiting.
Tabitha Stanmore: Oh, that's so kind.
Tabitha Stanmore: Thank you.
Sarah Jack: What do we need to know about the time period and location of your service magic research?
Tabitha Stanmore: So my research focuses on the 14th through 17th century. So that's roughly 1350 when more records start becoming available, and so it's much easier to trace the line of magic in society from that point. And I finish up in 1650 because that is the period where the world really starts changing again in a dramatic way, and after the end of the 17th century, or even middle of the 17th century, society has changed so much that it's not a very useful comparative point anymore, especially in the location that I look at, which is England. And, obviously, 1650, that is the end of the English Civil Wars, which saw the beheading of Charles I, and the, the beginning of the Commonwealth, or, the [00:04:00] Commonwealth, the brief point where England didn't have a monarchy.
Tabitha Stanmore: So I decided it was a good point to stop because at that point we get a real, massive change in society and a massive change in the way that people were living their lives and approaching things and this kind of rise of, I suppose science isn't quite the right word, but skepticism in a new way, which means that the idea of magic changes at that point.
Tabitha Stanmore: But also, 300 years is enough to be getting on with, so 1350 1650, is a, it's a really formative period, I think, for English society, but also a really key point for magical practice in England, and where it starts, it really features very strongly in how people live their day to day lives and try to incorporate both the supernatural and religion and, I suppose, rational skepticism in their daily lives, as well.
Josh Hutchinson: What exactly is service magic?
Tabitha Stanmore: Service [00:05:00] magic is a term that has, I suppose it's relatively new. It's only about 10 years or so that we've been using the term service magic. And it's basically magic, practical magic, that was sold to people in exchange for a fee. So it's literally what it sounds like actually. It's something that you buy and sell. It's a commodity, but it's a supernatural commodity. Basically it's the kind of thing that you use in order to solve everyday problems.
Tabitha Stanmore: Let's say you've had your favorite horse stolen and you don't know who's taken it and you don't know where it's gone. You might go to a magician or somebody who has very strong sort of magical or supernatural skills and ask them to perform a spell to locate either the horse or the person who stole it, so that you can then confront the supposed thief and demand your horse back. Or maybe you'll even ask a magician to perform a spell to force the horse to return, by whatever magical means necessary.
Tabitha Stanmore: It sounds quite [00:06:00] fantastical, but it was something which was incredibly common for people in the medieval and early modern periods, becauseinsurance hadn't really been, hadn't become a widespread thing at that point. A lot of people were living in a very sort of subsisting kind of way, which meant that if you lost something that was valuable, you needed to get it back, and there weren't many other ways of doing it, and you couldn't afford to just lose something. Turning to magic and having people who had the skills to use magic in this way were very, very highly prized.
Sarah Jack: How does service magic differ from witchcraft?
Tabitha Stanmore: That's a great question. If you asked a modern magical practitioner how they differed, I would probably expect them to say that there isn't very much difference at all, because I think with terms like cunning folk or magician or witch, they're almost synonymous in most people's minds nowadays. They are people who are wise, they're people who have supernatural powers that most people don't have access to, [00:07:00] they're people who embrace the supernatural powers that other people fear.
Tabitha Stanmore: But in the 17th century, 16th century, 15th century, the service magicians and witches would have been seen as very, very different people. And the reason for that is because in the medieval or early modern mind, there was an idea that there are two sources or maybe three sources of power that you can tap into if you deal with the supernatural. The first one is religious or divine power. And that's the kind of thing that priests are using on a daily basis, because they have this incredibly powerful supernatural entity, which ultimately that's what God is. He is literally above nature, can break the laws of nature at will. And that's something that religious people, priests especially, can tap into and use in order to change the world. Cunning folk would often say that they used the same kind of power.
Tabitha Stanmore: They'd [00:08:00] say that their spells were prayers. They're calling on the divine, or they're calling on saints to make things happen. They might also say that they were using fairies or pixies or some other kind of pseudonatural, but also supernatural entity to help them do whatever they were doing, especially if that was something like finding stolen goods. Going and asking the fairies was a very common way of finding out where your stolen spoon or your stolen horse had gone.
Tabitha Stanmore: So they're using very benign practices in order to do useful things,these cunning folk, and also priests. Witches, on the other hand, were seen as people who were using dark forces to do bad, negative things. So a witch was seen as somebody who had probably sold their soul to the devil, or at least was using demonic forces, and they were using these demonic forces to do harm in some way, whether that was killing people, destroying crops, in one case making somebody's mill fall down on a completely [00:09:00] still day when it shouldn't have happened at all, and all of a sudden the mill just collapses right in front of the miller. How does that happen? There is no logical explanation. It must be demonic, and it must be somebody bearing a grudge and using their demonic power to cause this harm.
Tabitha Stanmore: So there was a very clear separation in people's minds most of the time between a beneficent cunning person and a malevolent witch. That does all get very muddied when you start looking at theologians and particularly zealous priests and especially when you get into the Puritan movement of the late 16th and 17th centuries, where priests andvery, very godly people would argue that there is no in-between.
Tabitha Stanmore: Basically, you can't have somebody who's using supernatural powers that clearly aren't being brought by God, unless they are using demons, and people like George Gifford, who was a Puritan preacher living in the late 16th century, argued very strongly that nobody who claims to be able [00:10:00] to just heal by, I don't know,just saying some words over somebody could possibly be using God's divine intervention. So they must be using demons. And therefore you do get this mixing of cunning folk and witchcraft, but for most people they would be very, very separate things.
Sarah Jack: Thank you so much.
Josh Hutchinson: I like the period that you cover, because it's so dynamic. There's so much change in it, referenced a little, the change in attitudes toward the source of magical power that a service magician might get. And, in addition to the attitudes, the laws changed. When the Acts Against Conjuration or Witchcraft came in, how did that impact the service magic industry?
Tabitha Stanmore: That's a great question, and it's super interesting, because in some ways, not very much. The Acts Against Conjuration and Witchcraft, and you've absolutely, you're right to use those terms, because they're often called the [00:11:00] Witchcraft Acts, and actually, witchcraft only gets mentioned in the second half of all of these acts, and the first part is very much about conjurations and practical service magic.
Tabitha Stanmore: So some of the things that service magicians would commonly be asked to do was healing, finding lost goods, treasure hunting, making people fall in love. And three out of those four things are mentioned in the Acts Against Conjuration. Treasure hunting was seen as a massive no no, partly because officially any gold or silver found in the ground belonged to the crown. So using magic to be able to dig this stuff up was actually stealing from the crown, which is one of the reasons I think it got mentioned in these acts. So that was very, very heavily penalized in the first act against conjurations, brought in under Henry VIII. It was actually punishable by death,as well as provoking people to unlawful love, and finding lost goods and receiving money for finding lost goods through magical meansis, name checked as very, very bad things that people shouldn't be doing.
Tabitha Stanmore: From my own [00:12:00] research, it doesn't look like anybody actually stopped doing any of these things as a result of this legislation, partly I think because some of the law, the first law against conjurations say under Henry VIII, was so harsh that even magistrates weren't particularly keen on prosecuting this because nobody wants to be sentenced to death for, digging up a field, but also because these services were just so useful.If people don't have any other way of finding their stolen horse, then prosecuting that and stamping out that kind of service just isn't going to last very long. So yeah, it didn't really stop anything from happening in that sense, but there is still a growing sense of concern about what sorts of powers cunning folk might have, because they are lumped together in the Witchcraft and Conjurations Act with witches. And then there's that question of, oh, if you can do this kind of magic, then can you also do this negative kind of magic? So that sort of brings a cultural shift. But in terms of [00:13:00] how often magic was practiced, it probably didn't change it very much.
Tabitha Stanmore: What I will say is that one of the other massive changes that happens in this period between 1350 and 1650 is the Reformation, so the change of the state religion from Catholicism to Protestantism or Anglicanism, as it later becomes. And that does spark a big change in magic, basically because orthodox or acceptable Catholic practices all of a sudden become seen as superstition.Appealing to saints, using prayers to heal, that kind of thing, they all start being seen as quite suspicious under Protestant, doctrine. at that point you start seeing priests potentially who were doing perfectly orthodox things five years ago suddenly being seen as potential magicians who are using their nefarious, popish knowledge to form spells and possibly being in league with the devil as a result of that, because obviously there's a very heavy idea among different Protestant sects that the [00:14:00] Catholics are actually in league with the devil. So that's a really interesting way that the kind of religion suddenly becomes sacrilege and therefore possibly magic, at least in the eyes of some people.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm wondering if that change influenced the number of service magician, magician service practitioners out there, because before the Reformation in the Catholic Church, you can go to the priest for certain things to have objects blessed and your home blessed. And now you can't go to the priest for that anymore. He's not going to do some of the Catholic rituals. So you have to go to somebody still. So I'm just wondering, did that have an influence maybe on increasing the number of lay practitioners?
Tabitha Stanmore: It's a really interesting question. there's some really interesting research by Francis Young, about what happened to monks After the on both before and after the Reformation, because the monasteries are dissolved. All [00:15:00] of a sudden you have a lot of very highly trained religious people who have an ability to read Latin, they understand things like exorcism rituals, they understandall the rituals that, around essentially conjuring and appeasing God. And they are released into society. Some of them obviously go to the continent andjoin monastic institutions in Catholic countries.
Tabitha Stanmore: Other ones stay in England, at which point, you know what, what does happen to them? And it's very possible that some of them did, yeah, end up going out to become magicians for hire, essentially. Whether that's how they saw themselves is debatable. I mean, probably not. But it does mean that, yeah, you do have an alternative option to this kind of like orthodox I'm sure you're all familiar with the idea of Protestant priests, that people obviously turn to for religious help, but also potentially magical help as well.
Tabitha Stanmore: And you do also see a very strong competition going on both before and after the Reformation between cunning folk and priests, with priests going, ' please [00:16:00] can my parishioners stop visiting all of these cunning folk?' They're taking away my business. Because obviously one thing that priests often did wasadminister to the spiritual needs of their community, and that includes the things like blessing fields, helping people to be fertile again, possibly by blessing water and letting people drink it, which kind of borders on superstition even for the Catholicism, but if people are going off to a cunning person instead to get this help or to get healing or spells or prayers, then it is actually taking away from both the income and the use of the church, which was dealt with in two ways.
Tabitha Stanmore: One way was priests complaining and saying, no, this shouldn't be done. We should be stopping this. We should be trying to stamp out this kind of magic. Or priests leaning into it and just selling spells themselves. Which I just, I love. I think it's really wonderful. It's got the adaptability of people and the kind of the grey area between religion and magic. But really clearly shouldn't come through in those kind of examples.
Sarah Jack: What are some [00:17:00] other primary uses of service magic?
Tabitha Stanmore: Healing is definitely the most common, by a long way. And again, before we started recording, we mentioned that everybody on this call currently has a cold, and they don't seem to be going anywhere. and that's, that's obviously true of all of history, right? There's always been sickness. There's always been annoying illnesses that can't be shifted or life-threatening diseases. And especially before the advent of things like antibiotics or vaccines, there is a sort of an endemic sickness, among the population.
Tabitha Stanmore: So a medicine isn't particularly effective a lot of the time. It's very good at treating symptoms. It's not necessarily very good at treating disease. So turning to magic again, kind of makes a lot of sense in that situation, especially when you're using prayer spells. So you're very much appealing to a higher power to say, St. Justinian, for example, please, cure my toothache.It might be the only thing that works, frankly. [00:18:00] So healing was incredibly common. That was one of the things that cunning folk were asked to do the most. Another one was protection, protection in battle, protection for sailors when they are out at sea, to protect them from storms.And I think the most touching one is the amount that magic was used in love spell in. in situations about spells used for love, whether that's making people fall in love with each other or actually breaking people up, potentially, because you're so in love with somebody and they've gone and married somebody else. What are you going to do about that? It's probably a spell that you can use to break that couple up so that you can get that person. And, yeah, again, that's a very, very common use, which was very likely prosecuted a lot of the time, because a lot of the time love magic, it's about community cohesion. It's about keeping people together, especially the number of spells that are often, directed at making a husband and wife get along better, whether that's making the husband less cantankerous or making the wife fall in love with her husband again.[00:19:00] Those kinds of things, they were often available and very simple spells a lot of the time, which kind of, again, I think shows quite how common they must have been.
Tabitha Stanmore: There's one woman in the 15th century who apparently used to wash her husband's shirts in holy water because apparently that made him meek and pliable for the rest of the week. And she must have heard that spell from somewhere. She was also sharing it with her neighbors and passing on that knowledge, which I guess isn't so much service magic. But it is a very obvious use of magic that people needed, and I don't know how many people took up her advice, but she certainly seemed to think it would work, and had been doing it for years by the time she finally got reported to the authorities as potentially not using holy water in the way it was intended.
Josh Hutchinson: One of the uses you talk about is divination. What are some of the key methods used to divine?
Tabitha Stanmore: There are so many, and again, it's fascinating to see how much things [00:20:00] evolve and get adapted according to people's needs, and clearlythey're in trial and error with these spells. One of my favorite forms of divination, which sounds deeply impractical but I love, is the bread and knives method, and that's basically where you take a loaf of bread, and you stick two knives into the sides of the loaf in a cross shape, and then you put a peg in the top of the loaf, and then you, I think you turn it upside down, and then you hold the peg between your hands, and you ask a yes or no question, and basically the bread will spin one way for no and one way for yes. I've only found two instances of it being used. And I think, again, it's because it's so impractical. I did try it once to see if it would work. And you need some really stale bread, you need some very sharp knives, you need a very short hand, so you don't just drop it on your foot. But it's really interesting, because it's a method that is [00:21:00] replicated with different tools, but they all sort of work on the same principle, which is, you ask a binary question, as I say, a yes or no, or is my child going to be a boy or a girl, so one way for boy, one way for girl, or, I don't know. Am I going to get married soon? Yes or no? That kind of thing. And the cross shape I think is quite important, because it's again, it's drawing on that higher power and in this case, probably Jesus. And it's something which is simple, but only certain people, again, could possibly practice it, because you do need somebody who's got that sort of power within them, much like anybody could buy a pack of tarot cards today, but only some people are very good at reading them and have an affinity with them. You get the same kind of thing going on with divination methods. So as I say,the loaf and knives method fell out of popularity probably quite quickly. It appears in the 14th century, doesn't really appear in any other centuries, and mostly around the London area, as well, and doesn't seem to have spread very far after that.
Tabitha Stanmore: More common versions of the same [00:22:00] basic principle are the Sieve and Shears, which is, again, lots of different methods, but basically you take a pair of kind of sheep shearing shears or large scissors and put a sieve on top of those and then ask questions once the sieve is balanced on the top. And again, the sieve will tilt one way for yes, one way for no, and this is much more practical. You're not going to destroy a loaf of bread every time you attempt it. And you're also going to be able to, pretty much anybody will be able to use this method because everybody would probably own a pair of shears and everybody would own a sieve.
Tabitha Stanmore: The fancier version of this divination method is the book and key, and that is one that pretty much only priests used or people who had a very high level of education, because it would use either a Psalter or a Bible, and you'd place a big heavy key inside of the book. And you'd hold the book in between your two bald fists, and then you would ask your [00:23:00] question. And often if it was finding stolen goods that you were trying to find out with this method, then you would start by saying something like, 'by St. Peter and St. Paul, Tony's stolen my horse.' And if the key fell out, then that would be the right answer.But yeah, as I say, this is something that only some people will be able to do, because not everybody had access to printed works and especially not something as sacred as a Bible. And that's by St. Peter and St. Paul, you're definitely summoning divine intervention to make this work. Again, condemned by the church. Still used by the church . And again, a simpler method of that, is just taking a Bible and just opening it at a random page. And the first line from the gospel that you see is the answer to your question, which,some will call that just basic religion or just guesswork, but people would definitely see it as a very reliable form of divination, depending on the answer. So these are some of my favourite ones. I could go on about this forever as you can probably [00:24:00] tell, so let me know if you want any more.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, I'm so glad you explained the Sieve and Shears and the Book and Key. Those actually turn up in New England in the Salem Witch Trials. Both of those methods are said to be used.
Tabitha Stanmore: Yeah, it's definitely an import, that.
Josh Hutchinson: And what are some key methods of healing?
Tabitha Stanmore: One of my favourite methods, which probably wouldn't have worked very well at all, comes from the 14th century, and it's probably quite a lot older than that. And it's basically, again, very strongly religious, it involved saying a short phrase in Latin, something similar to, 'as Mary sufferedin the birth of Jesus, may this person's suffering end,' essentially, or something like that. And while saying that, you would put your fingers into the wound that somebody had sustained, and [00:25:00] make the sign of a cross. Which, given that a lot of these spells do actually have a very strong logic behind them, this one makes no sense to me, because you're just going to be opening up that wound. But I suppose the idea is that you are also inserting some sort of um, ,cleansing in it, because of the, the mercy that Christ showed, to humanity, and the idea of the cleansing of sins and that kind of thing. You might be trying to cleanse the wound by putting the power of the cross inside it.
Tabitha Stanmore: More effective methods, potentially, were ones that involved writing spells onto food, pieces of food, sometimes things like communion wafers, sometimes bread, sometimes cheese, and giving that to the sick person to eat.
Tabitha Stanmore: And I say it would be more effective partly because we all recognise that the placebo effect exists, and so that kind of, that knowledge that you are being cared for and that sort of hope that will be attached to that spell, might well be exactly what you [00:26:00] need, basically, to kind of power you through and overcome your illness.
Tabitha Stanmore: Again, it is something that not everybody could do, sometimes you need to know the right words, and some people just had a better understanding of healing and whether or not this was a lost cause, and often, spells would be combined with other healing methods as well. And that's something that you see with magical drinks, which were also given as a method of healing. Again, they would normally come with some kind of chant that you would do over the the potion.
Tabitha Stanmore: But the things that went into the potions were often things which would be very helpful for curing the disease in the first place. So things like honey, things like garlic, aqua vitae, which is a catch all term for all sorts of different sort of medical concoctions that involve a lot of different herbs. And and often these herbs would have either anesthetic effects or antibacterial effects, as well. So they could genuinely do good, even without the kind of the placebo effect or without the magic that's been [00:27:00] mixed into them.
Tabitha Stanmore: Often healing spells do combine belief, that kind of, the idea of divine power or some other kind of higher power, as well as very strong experience that the cunning person would possess and use as part of their healing. And again, you see that combination in diagnostic services. A lot of cunning healers would try to diagnose somebody's illness, especially if it was something which had come on very suddenly or was just not going away and there wasn't an obvious cause for it. They'd try to diagnose whether or not somebody had been touched by a fairy or whether they'd been bewitched by a malevolent witch. And they do this by taking the patient's belt or girdle and measuring it. And they basically measure it between their extended thumb and their elbow and see, they actually never explain exactly what they see when they're measuring this girdle.[00:28:00]
Tabitha Stanmore: But what I'm guessing is that they're seeing how much weight the person has lost,and if it has been a dramatic weight loss over a very short period of time, then often they would come to the conclusion that this person had been touched by a fairy and they had some kind of terrible wasting sickness. And in that case the cure would be to try to appease the fairies, it would be to try to drive out the curse that somebody had put on the person or try to somehow otherwise fortify the person so they could get through the illness, but they'd use this diagnostic tool to say what the illness is in the first place and also whether the person had any hope of survival.
Tabitha Stanmore: And cunning folk would choose their cases accordingly. If they didn't think this person had any chance of surviving, they would be honest about that. They'd say, 'look, I'm sorry, this person's too far gone, the fairies have got him, there's nothing I can do.' But if there was some hope that they, a person could be saved, and they suspected that it was [00:29:00] witchcraft especially, then one of the things that they would start by doing is potentially performing counter witchcraft.
Tabitha Stanmore: So a very common method for that would be to take a flask of the patient's urine, and this is from the 17th century onwards, it's not particularly common in the 16th century, but it's a continental European import into England. But yeah, you take a flask of the person's urine, you'd put pins and a piece of red fabric or potentially something in the shape of a heart into that flask and then you would stopper it up and you would boil it in the fire or bury it somewhere, and the idea is that that would cause so much pain to the person who would cast the spell in the first place that it would basically rebound and then the witch would be obliged to lift the curse, or at least you'd be able to identify who the witch was and then force them to lift the curse, either by scratching and drawing blood, because that removes some of their power, or by just [00:30:00] intimidating them until they lifted the curse.
Tabitha Stanmore: So there's lots and lots of different tools in a cunning person's arsenal.
Sarah Jack: Would somebody inquire for the services of a magic practitioner to do a curse or harm their neighbor or family or spouse?
Tabitha Stanmore: Yes, although it very much depends on the intention behind it, whether your community would condemn you as somebody who is trying to use witchcraft or not. Again, going back to the stolen goods example, it would be relatively common to say, 'oh, my horse has been stolen, I am going to go to a cunning person and get that cunning person to curse the thief until the horse comes back.' And that wasn't seen as witchcraft, because it's more like restoring justice than doing harm for no reason. And that's quite an important distinction in people's minds. Because again, if you're doing something, if you're causing harm for the right reason, then you [00:31:00] can potentially ask for God's intervention in that, you can potentially ask fairies or whatever. You don't need to be using devilish or malevolent powers to be able to do that.
Tabitha Stanmore: So yeah, so if you're using a cunning person to, even if you're causing, you want them to cause real serious harm or pain, so long as it's for a good reason, it's okay. If you're just doing it because you're just filled with spite, that's when it tips into witchcraft, which does take a little bit of moral arithmetic, but it kind of works.
Josh Hutchinson: I'm not gonna lie, when I started this research, I did not expect it to go in the direction it did. And I, it's really changed my perspective on, on the early modern period, on the witch trials, on witchcraft and people's belief systems and everything else, because it's so different to what I expected.
Tabitha Stanmore: And I didn't realize quite how much magic there was going on, until I started this.
Josh Hutchinson:
Josh Hutchinson: You talked earlier about some [00:32:00] of the healing. They would write things down on food or paper and swallow it. And what were some of the other ways that Christian scripture and teachings were used in magic?
Tabitha Stanmore: I suppose one of the most famous ways, when you think about it, is exorcism rituals, because one of the things that ritual magicians in particular, so very learned magicians who had knowledge of Latin and other sort of sacred languages, one of the things that they could do with their knowledge was repurpose Orthodox Christian knowledge,and, as I say, rituals.Exorcisms obviously are intended to conjure a demon out of a person or an item, but the same method and more or less exactly the same words can be used to conjure a demon into something, whether that is a person, [00:33:00] which doesn't happen too often, thank goodness, but much more commonly into a magic circle, for example.
Tabitha Stanmore: So, that use of scripture, again, often by priests or people who trained as priests and then left their training early so they didn't actually have to take orders or monks would use this power, in order to summon demons and bend them to their will. And the things that they use the demons for vary from incredibly noble to hilarious. For example, on the noble end there is the ability to understand the secrets of the universe and understand the nature of God. So think Dr. Faustus style. He's reached the end of human knowledge, now he wants to understand the secrets of the universe, so he summons a demon, makes a deal, and, well, he thinks that he's forced a demon to tell him all these things. And ritual magicians who were careful about their work [00:34:00] definitely thought that they hadsubjugated a demon to their will, in order to answer their questions aboutthe higher powers.
Tabitha Stanmore: On the funnier end of the spectrum was summoning a demon, or even an angel, in order to learn Latin really fast so that you could get out of your lessons quicker, or summon a demon into a magic ring to make you better at gambling. Or even, potentially, summon a demon, make them look like an incredibly beautiful woman so that you can sleep with them. Real spectrum of human interests there, all of which come down to using Christian scripture in ways that it probably wasn't designed for, but the point of this is that scripture, especially when it was written in Latin, was seen to have power in its own right.
Tabitha Stanmore: It's not almost not even just the divine power. It's the fact that these sounds, these syllables, this conjunction of words in itself is enough. You don't really need to understand it to be able to [00:35:00] use it, which actually is why in some medieval, late medieval, medical texts from the 13th and 14th centuries, you have instructions from the author saying, 'do not share this particular healing charm,' which is sometimes written down in a medical text. 'Don't share this with the wider population because they'll misuse it, because you don't have to understand it in order to make it work.' Bit gatekeepery, but in some cases you can understand why.
Josh Hutchinson: That reminds me of Harry Potter, you still have that, that Latin as magical language kind of thing in our society today. There's these magical words, abracadabra or avaracadabra, if you're a Harry Potter fan.
Josh Hutchinson: Absolutely. And I actually, that's something that always bothered me about the Harry Potter books. Like at no point do they actually learn the theory of magic. And I feel like that's a massive oversight, Yeah, they don't know how it works. They're just. They're cooking the [00:36:00] meal with the ingredients, but they don't know how it all comes together.
Tabitha Stanmore: Exactly. Yeah. It's rote learning and it's lazy, frankly.
Sarah Jack: Right now, I believe you're working on the Seven County Witch Hunt Project. Is that right?
Tabitha Stanmore: Yes, yeah it is. Yeah, so it's a three year, Leverhulme-funded research project with Professor Marion Gibson. I think it's really exciting. So we're looking at what we're calling England's mass witch hunt. So it was the largest witch hunt in England, as far as we know, and it took place during the English Civil War in the 1640s. And it's estimated that about 300 people were accused across seven counties, and of that, over 100 were executed. The thing that this project is trying to pin down is all of the details within that. We don't know exactly how many people were prosecuted, we don't know how many people were executed, we don't know the names of some of those people, and we certainly [00:37:00] don't know the backgrounds of those people either, or what kind of roles they played in their communities, or the kinds of psychological scars that the communities possibly ended up with as a result of these hunts.
Tabitha Stanmore: There's been an over focus, I think, on Matthew Hopkins, the so-called Witchfinder General, and his, co-searcher, John Stearne. And yeah, this project is trying to reorient our knowledge and our focus to look at the accused themselves and their families. So one thing I'm looking at within that, and I'd love to come back onto your podcast at some point and talk about this because I'm very excited about it, is, the children of suspected witches. Because as far as I know, we haven't, nobody's really looked into that in any detail. We do tend to look at the children of witches if they subsequently get accused of witchcraft. But, for example, we have 300 people who were accused, and almost all of those had children. [00:38:00] And we don't know the fates of those, what, did they stay within their communities? Did they end up going to prison alongside their parents? Did they carry a taint for the rest of their lives of being the children of witches? Or were they able to reinvent themselves? We just don't know. And I think that's a massive oversight and one that could tell us quite a lot about early modern witchcraft and the early modern capacity to forgive and forget, which at the moment is just a massive question mark,in our knowledge of the past.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. We definitely want you to come back and talk to us about that and anything else you want to talk to us about. We looked a little into children of the Connecticut witch trial victims. It's very fascinating what ends up happening with the families, like Sarah and I have ancestors who were accused. And so we know a little bit about what happened with our ancestors' families. And it's like you said, that trauma [00:39:00] is there no matter what the result of the accusation is. There's an impact.
Tabitha Stanmore: Absolutely. Yeah. Sorry. I definitely should have been a bit clearer about that. Within England, we don't know very much about the fates, but yeah, it's really exciting to see how much we actually do know about some of the legacies. in, in the U. S. for sure. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating and well done for being alive now.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you. Yeah. Some of my ancestors and Sarah's, were acquitted and released and managed to recover and raise their families and everything. Others weren't as fortunate, but their children lived on and carried their names on.
Tabitha Stanmore: Honestly, the more I look into the early modern period, the more amazed I am that anybody survived it, really. um,
Josh Hutchinson: Just surviving to get born in the first place was so harrowing. Yeah.
Tabitha Stanmore: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. it's absolutely amazing. it's real testament to [00:40:00] human, I don't know, resourcefulness, hope, I'm not sure, but yeah, it's really amazing.
Sarah Jack:
Sarah Jack: And now for a Minute with Mary.
Mary-Louise Bingham: There was a woman living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, British America, indicted for the capital crime of witchcraft in 1665. She is only known to us today as Female Gleason. The reason we know of her existence at all is because her surname is mentioned in the book, Entertaining Satan, authored by John Putnam Demos.
Mary-Louise Bingham: I am sad that I have not yet found a court document stating her given name. I am also sad that her given name was not passed down through the generations. Her very being was almost erased from history. Today, I can assure you that the members of the Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project are conducting the necessary research to discover Female Gleason's given name. It will be with great joy to speak her full name [00:41:00] when she is cleared for the crimes she did not commit.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunt, a non profit 501c3 organization. Weekly News Update What impact can the United Nations Human Rights Council have? The United Nations Human Rights Council is an intergovernmental body within the United Nations system that strengthens the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe.
Sarah Jack: The work of the United Nations Human Rights Council includes promotion and protection of human rights, addressing violations and setting standards, encouraging compliance, and standards, promoting prevention, and continuing global dialogue. The preamble of the United Nations Charter states, 'We the peoples of the United Nations are determined to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and [00:42:00] of nations large and small.'
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts staunchly stands for the right of human dignity for all. We believe that this right, inerrant to every person, underpins all rights and freedoms. Harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks is a violation against human dignity. End Witch Hunts implores states and individuals to uphold and protect human dignity. We all must work to safeguard individuals from torture, degrading treatment, and discrimination. We are dedicated to these principles and advocate for their universal adoption and implementation.
Sarah Jack: Witch hunts are a harmful reality that persists, and as a part of our podcast community, you play a crucial role in the collective advocacy. Thank you for tuning in, sharing our episodes, continuing the conversation with your sphere of influence, and asking leaders to take action. We must continue to cultivate the societal values of compassion, understanding, and [00:43:00] justice. It is our collective responsibility as a world community to unite against the inhumane treatment of every individual anywhere in the world, including anyone accused of causing witchcraft harm. Spread awareness. Share this information with your friends, family, and on social media. Use your voice to let others know about the urgency of combating witchcraft accusations and persecution. Support advocacy groups. You can learn all about them on our website and in our advocacy podcast episodes. Contact authorities. Raise your voice by reaching out to relevant authorities and leadership. Urge them to take swift and decisive action to ensure justice for victims and accountability for all involved.
Sarah Jack: End Witch Hunts actively supports exoneration and memorial efforts that aim to honor victims and raise witch hunt awareness. Sign our petition at change.org/witchtrials to urge the state of Massachusetts to amend legislation [00:44:00] acknowledging all Salem Witch Trial victims. 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 the 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 toward rectifying this injustice and delivering more comprehensive justice. This legislation holds the power to provide more long overdue formal acknowledgement to overlooked victims.
Sarah Jack: Join the Massachusetts Witch Trial Justice Project and House [00:45:00] 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's important to this address, which will also be in the show notes: Judiciary Committee at 24 Beacon Street, room 1 36, 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 @ M A H O U S E dot G O V. Let's persist in elevating the voices of both historical and contemporary victims of witch hunts.
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Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, [00:46:00] Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
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Josh Hutchinson: And remember to tell your friends about the show.
Sarah Jack: Support our effort to end witch hunts. Visit endwitchhunts.org to learn more.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.