Witch hunt: the story of the massacre of women

Table of Contents

… crying, spinning, deceiving is said to be specific to women …

“Malleus maleficarum”, part III, question XV

Neither saints, nor whores, but only women. And is this perhaps a fault? It is so for the obsolete religious and moral concepts, it is so as an expedient of the social control of subjects considered by the strong as well as the weaker powers. Women. To criminalize, blame, only to justify every action in the name of legality and safety. But then whose?

Of those same powers that waver when the woman does not respect the role that it has been entrusted to it, when it does not fulfill its duty, when it is not limited to being an object, and a passive subject, as someone else has decided.

And so, when we weren’t whores, we were witches. We were for the Inquisition, we were for the bubble Ad extirpanda with which Pope Innocent IV authorized the torture of heretics, an extended practice, later, against witchcraft. The witch hunt had begun.

The witch hunt

The witch hunt was perhaps one of the chapters darkest and most ferocious of all our history. Along with us also sorcerers and heretics, but we were the ones to manipulate everything. Women and witches. Unfortunate, poor and illiterate, marginalized in society, perhaps unaware of witchcraft, occult rites and spells, of sabbaths and spells.

Young girls and adult women forced to the so-called ordalia of water. Bound and thrown into a river they could only beg to sink, because if they remained afloat they were possessed by the devil. And what awaited them was perhaps worse than death.

In conclusion, all these things come from the carnal lust that is insatiable in them[…] no wonder there are more women than men among those infected with the witch heresy […]And blessed be the Most High who has hitherto preserved the male sex from so great a scourge!

“Malleus maleficarum”, part I, question VI.

The numbers

Three centuries of witch hunts have meant 60,000 executions, following the 110,000 trials celebrated by the Inquisition. 80% of those sentenced to death were women.

The Catholic fervor, accompanied and endorsed by the social one, it aimed not only to combat heresy but also to control the masses, to limit their freedom, to dominate them. The recurrent and disastrous epidemics turned into religious warnings and eternal threats of punishment: it was sinners, heretics and witches to blame.

The women, the witches. The evil of humanity

Woman was the evil of humanity. She was the lusty one, the one subdued and attracted to the devil. Even when the lust concerned a man, the blame was always placed on the woman: it was the witches who had the power. Among the accusations made against them, there were also those of causing impotence among men, causing abortions and even making their genitals disappear.

Women had this great power following a pact with the devil. They were accused of sexual crimes, natural disasters and being architects of the health of others. And when they united, and organized, they formed a real sect against religion.

To make them confess they had to be tortured. And they did, because going to death was less terrible of that torture, a liberation.

We judges and assessors […]to get the truth from your own mouth […]we declare and judge that on such day at such hour you must be subjected to interrogation and torment […]is stripped of other honest and reputable women; this for the reason that some witchcraft could be sewn into the clothes […] and if he does not want to confess, give a mandate to the ministers to tie him (the accused) to the rope or other instruments [… ]thirdly, the caution to be observed […]it’s about shaving every part of the body: for the same reason you take off your clothes …

“Malleus maleficarum”, part III, question XIV.

According to the historian and psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg, the witch hunt was the consequence of serious cases of mass neurosis and psychopathies, he who spoke of those centuries as a widespread asylum. But in reality the phenomenon did not start from the peasant and poor class, even if it developed there. The architects of the massacre were the Church and the State, and that sadistic Malleus maleficarum, probably the most misogynistic text ever written in history, which justified condemnations, torture, assassinations and atrocities, did the rest.

Women, most feared or most hated

From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, from Spain, to Germany, passing through Italy and France, up to England, one of the greatest crimes against women was committed. Old women, young people and girls, poor and illiterate, tortured, drowned or burned at the stake. It was lascivious lovers of the devil, those that caused great damage, that stole milk and that I rode goats. They were all women, highly feared or most hated.

For every magician or necromancer, ten thousand women are found, for the deceptions of the devil, because of the nature of women, because women are more cruel, for their vainglory, for the tendency to sin and for their love and hate.

There are many scholars who over the centuries have questioned why it was especially women who were persecuted and tormented. Why they had become the victims of the state and the church, the infernal creatures and subservient to the devil? According to Alan Macfarlane in his Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, women became victims of this phenomenon because they rebelled against downgrading and social exclusion during a period of great social change.

But they really were such a great threat to society to the point of having to justify this extermination? The truth is that women were, and are, many things. The only ones to understand and discover the secrets of nature and life. Women, in those days, looked after the population, gave birth to children and raised them, they were also able to create “potions” with medicinal herbs. In short, they held power.

And, in all this, we cannot fail to consider the vision of female sexuality at that time, which was precisely something diabolical. This is a conception which, unfortunately, still has its aftermath in contemporary culture. A social, cultural and religious threat, as all the laws introduced in Europe on sex, marriage, adultery and procreation also demonstrate.

So here is that witchcraft became the most practical and fastest expedient to eliminate uncomfortable women of society. The old and lonely ones, the libertine ones and those who manifested their sexuality, those who practiced abortion. The same ones that were accused by the same families and communities in which they lived.

And they couldn’t be a threat. It had to be relegated to the marriage context and addressed for procreative purposes. And so it was when his scary part was exorcised. When the witches were hunted, killed and destroyed. When women were annihilated.