FOUR
Witch-Hunting and the Fear of the Power of Women

She stands alone, in the twilight, in an empty space, holding in her hands a skein of blue yarn that weaves around her to embrace a cluster of homes, which, because of this, appear almost as a continuation of her body. Trazando el Camino (1990) is among the many paintings that Rodolfo Morales, one of Mexico’s best twentieth century artists, has dedicated to the main theme of his work: the female body as the material and social fabric holding the community together. Morales’s painting is a counterpoint to the image of the witch, as with her quiet look and embroidered apron the woman it represents looks almost angelic. Yet something magical and secretive about her recalls the female ‘conspiracy’ that was the historical justification for the witch hunts that bloodied Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, perhaps providing a clue to some of the mysteries at the heart of this persecution that historians have yet to solve.

Why were the witch hunts primarily directed against women? How does one explain that for three centuries thousands of women in Europe became the personification of ‘the enemy within’ and absolute evil? And how to reconcile the all-powerful, almost mythical portrait that inquisitors and demonologists painted of their victims—as creatures of hell, terrorists, man-eaters, servants of the Devil wildly riding the skies on their broomsticks—with the defenseless figures of the actual women who were charged with these crimes and then horribly tortured and burned at the stake?

A first answer to these questions traces the persecution of the ‘witches’ back to the dislocations caused by the development of capitalism, in particular the disintegration of the communal forms of agriculture that had prevailed in feudal Europe and the pauperization into which the rise of a monetary economy and land dispossession plunged broad sectors of both the rural and urban populations. According to this theory, women were those most likely to be victimized because they were the most ‘disempowered’ by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion and who constituted the bulk of the accused. In other words, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social power, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better-o! at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized begging and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.

This theory, first articulated by Alan Macfarlane in his Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, certainly applies to many witch trials. There is undoubtedly a direct relation between many cases of witch-hunting and the process of the ‘enclosures,’ as demonstrated by the social composition of the accused, the charges made against them, and the common characterization of the witch as a poor old woman, living alone, dependent on donations from her neighbors, bitterly resenting her marginalization, and often threatening and cursing those who refused to help her, who inevitably accused her of being responsiblefor all their misadventures. This picture, however, does not explain how such wretched creatures could inspire so much fear. It also does not account for the fact that many among the accused were charged with sexual transgressions and reproductive crimes (such as infanticide and causing male impotence), and among the condemned there were women who had achieved a certain degree of power in the community, working as folk healers and midwives or exercising magical practices, such as finding lost objects and divination.

Besides resistance to pauperization and social marginalization, what threats did ‘witches’ pose in the eyes of those who planned to exterminate them? Answering this question requires that we recapture not only the social conflicts that the development of capitalism generated, but its radical transformation of every aspect of social life, beginning with the reproductive/gender relations that had characterized the medieval world.

Capitalism was born out of the strategies that the feudal elite—the Church and the landed and merchant classes— implemented in response to the struggles of the rural and urban proletariat that by the fourteenth century were placing their rule in crisis. It was a ‘counterrevolution,’ not only suffocating in blood the new demands for freedom but turning the world upside down through the creation of a new system of production requiring a di!erent conception of work, wealth, and value that was useful for more intense forms of exploitation. As such, from its inception the capitalist class was confronted with a double challenge. On one hand, it had to defeat the threat posed by the expropriated commoners turned vagabonds, beggars, and landless laborers ready to revolt against the new masters, especially in the period between 1##0 and 1%#0, when inflation caused by the arrival of gold and silver from theNew World “was accelerating to uncontrollable proportions,” causing food prices to skyrocket, while wages were correspondingly declining.! In that context, the presence in many peasant communities of old women, resentful of their dismal state, going from door to door muttering words of vengeance, could certainly be feared as a breeder of conspiratorial plots.

On the other hand, as a mode of production positing ‘industry’ as the main source of the accumulation, capitalism could not take hold without forging a new type of individual and a new social discipline boosting the productive capacity of labor. This involved a historic battle against anything posing a limit to the full exploitation of the laborer, starting with the web of relations that tied the individuals to the natural world, to other people, and to their own bodies. Key to this process was the destruction of the magical conception of the body that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, which attributed to it powers that the capitalist class could not exploit, that were incompatible with the transformation of the laborers into work machines, and that could even enhance their resistance to it. These were the shamanic powers that precapitalist, agricultural societies have attributed to all or to special individuals, and that in Europe survived despite centuries of Christianization, often being assimilated into Christian rituals and beliefs.

It is in this context that the attack on women as ‘witches’ should be located. Because of their unique relation to the process of reproduction, women in many precapitalist societies have been credited with a special understanding of the secrets of nature, presumably enabling them to procure life and death and discover the hidden property of things. Practicing magic (as healers, folk doctors, herbalists, midwives, makers of love-philters) was also for many women a source of employment and undoubtedly a source of power, although it exposed them to revenge when their remedies failed.

This is one reason why women became the primary targets in the capitalist attempt to construct a more mechanized conception of the world. The ‘rationalization’ of the natural world—the precondition for a more regimented work discipline and for the scientific revolution—passed through the destruction of the ‘witch.’ Even the unspeakable tortures to which the accused women were subjected acquire a di!erent meaning when we conceive them as a form of exorcism against their powers.

In this context we must also reconsider the portrayal of women’s sexuality as something diabolical, the quintessence of female ‘magic,’ which is central to the definition of witchcraft. The classic interpretation of this phenomenon blames it on the inquisitors’ sexual prurience and sadism born out of their repressive ascetic lives. But, although the participation of ecclesiastics in the witch hunt was fundamental to the construction of its ideological scaffold, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the witch hunt was most intense in Europe, the majority of witch trials were conducted by lay magistrates and paid for and organized by city governments. Thus, we must ask what female sexuality represented in the eyes of the new capitalist elite in view of their social-reformation project and institution of a stricter discipline of labor.

A preliminary answer, drawn from the regulations introduced in most of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with regard to sex, marriage, adultery, and procreation, is that female sexuality was both seen as a social threat and, if properly channeled, a powerful economic force. Like the Fathers of the Church and the Dominican authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486),& the nascent capitalist class needed to degrade female sexuality and pleasure. Eros, sexual attraction, hasalways been suspect in the eyes of political elites, as an uncontrollable force. Plato’s account of the e!ects of love in the Symposium gives an ontological dimension to this view. Love is the great magician, the demon that unites earth and sky and makes humans so round, so whole in their being, that once united they cannot be defeated. The Fathers of the Church, who in the fourth century AD went to the African desert to escape the corruption of urban life and presumably the enticements of Eros, had to acknowledge its power, being tormented by a desire that they could only imagine to be inspired by the Devil. Since that time, the need to protect the cohesiveness of the Church as a patriarchal, masculine clan and to prevent its property from being dissipated because of clerical weakness in the face of female power, led the clergy to paint the female sex as an instrument of the Devil—the more pleasant to the eye, the more deadly to the soul. This is the leitmotif of every demonology, starting with the Malleus Maleficarum, possibly the most misogynous text ever written. Whether Catholic, Protestant, or Puritan, the rising bourgeoisie continued this tradition, but with a twist, as the repression of female desire was placed at the service of utilitarian goals such as the satisfaction of men’s sexual needs and more importantly the procreation of an abundant workforce. Once exorcised, denied its subversive potential through the witch hunt, female sexuality could be recuperated in a matrimonial context and for procreative ends.

Compared with the Christian praise of chastity and asceticism, the sexual norm instituted by the burgher/ capitalist class with the Protestant reintegration of sex into matrimonial life as a ‘remedy to concupiscence’ and the recognition of a legitimate role for women in the community as wives and mothers has often been portrayed as a break with the past. But what capitalism reintegrated into the realm of acceptable female social behavior was a tamed, domesticated form of sexuality, instrumental to the reproduction of labor power and the pacification of the workforce. In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence. Typical of the new bourgeois sexual morality was Martin Luther’s injunction to the nuns to leave the convents and get married, as marriage and the production of an abundant prole was in his view women’s fulfillment of God’s will and their ‘highest vocation.’ “Let them bear children to death,” he apparently declared. “They are created for that.”! No sixteenth-century political or religious authority expressed this sentiment as crudely as Luther, but the restriction of women’s sexuality to marriage and procreation, together with wifely unconditional obedience, was instituted in every country—regardless of its religious creed—as the pillar of social morality and political stability. And, indeed, of no crime were ‘witches’ as frequently accused as ‘lewd behavior,’ generally associated with infanticide and an inherent hostility to the reproduction of life.

Outside these parameters, outside of marriage, procreation, and male/institutional control, for the capitalists as well, female sexuality has historically represented a social danger, a threat to the discipline of work, a power over others, and an obstacle to the maintenance of social hierarchies and class relations. This was especially the case in the sixteenth century, when the structures that in feudal society had regulated sexual conduct and the sexual exchange between women and men entered into crisis and a new phenomenon emerged, both in the cities and rural areas, that of unattached women, living alone, often practicing prostitution.

Not surprisingly, the charge of sexual perversion was as central to the trials organized by lay authorities as to those initiated and directed by the Inquisition. Here too, beneath the fantastic charge of copulation with the Devil, we find the fear that women could bewitch men with their ‘glamour,’ bring them under their power, and inspire in them such desire as to cause them to forget all social distances and obligations. Such was the case, according to Guido Ruggiero’s Binding Passions (!99#), with the courtesans in sixteenth-century Venice who managed to contract marriages with noblemen but were then accused of being witches.

The fear of women’s uncontrolled sexuality explains the popularity in the demonologies of the myth of Circe, the legendary enchantress who by her magical arts transformed the men lusting after her into animals. It also accounts for the many speculations by the same demonologies concerning the power of women’s eyes to move men without a touch, simply by the force of their ‘glamour’ and ‘fascination.’ Also, the ‘pact’ that the witches were accused of making with the Devil, which generally involved a monetary exchange, manifests the concern for women’s ability to gain money from men that underlies the condemnation of prostitution.

Thus, no effort was spared to paint female sexuality as something dangerous for men and to humiliate women in such a way as to curb their desire to use their bodies to attract them. Never in history have women been subjected to such a massive, internationally organized, legally approved, religiously blessed assault on their bodies. On the flimsiest evidence, generally nothing more than a denunciation, thousands were arrested, stripped naked, completely shaved, and then pricked with long needles in every part of their bodies in search of the ‘Devil’s mark,’ often in the presence of men, from the executioner tothe local notables and priests. And this was by no means the end of their torments. The most sadistic tortures ever invented were inflicted on the body of the woman accused, which provided an ideal laboratory for the development of a science of pain and torture.

As I wrote in Caliban and the Witch, the witch hunt instituted a regime of terror on all women, from which emerged the new model of femininity to which women had to conform to be socially accepted in the developing capitalist society: sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination to the male world, accepting as natural the confinement to a sphere of activities that in capitalism has been completely devalued.

Women were terrorized through fantastic accusations, horrendous torture, and public executions because their social power had to be destroyed—a power that in the eyes of their persecutors was obviously significant, even in the case of older women. Old women, in fact, could seduce the younger into their evils ways and would likely transmit forbidden knowledge, like that of abortion-inducing plants, and carry the collective memory of their community. As Robert Muchembled has reminded us, elderly women were the ones who remembered the promises made, the faith betrayed, the extent of property (especially in land), the customary agreements, and who was responsible for violating them. Like the blue yarn in Trazando el Camino, old women going from house to house circulated stories and secrets, binding passions and weaving together past and present events. As such they were a disturbing, fearinspiring presence for a reforming elite of modernizers bent on destroying the past, controlling people’s behavior down to their instinctual life, and undoing customary relations and obligations.

The portrayal of women’s earthly challenges to the power structures as a demonic conspiracy is aphenomenon that has played out over and over in history down to our times. The McCarthy ‘witch hunt’ against communism and the ‘War on Terror’ have both relied on such dynamics. The exaggeration of ‘crimes’ to mythical proportions so as to justify horrendous punishments is an elective means to terrorize a whole society, isolate the victims, discourage resistance, and make masses of people afraid to engage in practices that until then were considered normal.

The witch was the communist and terrorist of her time, which required a ‘civilizing’ drive to produce the new ‘subjectivity’ and sexual division of labor on which the capitalist work discipline would rely. The witch hunts were the means by which women in Europe were educated about their new social tasks and a massive defeat was inflicted on Europe’s ‘lower classes,’ who needed to learn about the power of the state to desist from any form of resistance to its rule. At the stakes not only were the bodies of the ‘witches’ destroyed, so was a whole world of social relations that had been the basis of women’s social power and a vast body of knowledge that women had transmitted from mother to daughter over the generations— knowledge of herbs, of the means of contraception or abortion, of what magic to use to obtain the love of men.

This is what was consumed on every village square with the execution of the women accused, who would be exhibited in the most abject state: tied up with iron chains and given to the fire. When in our imagination we multiply this scene by the thousands, we begin to understand what the witch hunt meant for Europe, in terms of not only its motifs but also its effects.