Witches

1508 woodcut of witches
Photo by FrauBucher

I recently found myself in conversation with a small child in the run-up to Halloween. “What is a witch?” the child asked, “and where do they live?” As a history tutor who teaches the European witch-hunt for at least four separate Oxford undergraduate papers, I knew what the scholarly answer might be. A witch is early modern (and late medieval) Europe’s projection of its own ultimate imagined Other, the inversion of all the values that society most appreciated – a witch worshipped the Devil instead of God, engaged in sexual orgies in lieu of continence, killed cattle, made people sick and messed with the weather, rather than living as a useful member of the community. The witch was the infertile, jealous woman who poisoned infants, instead of the nurturing Christian mother. A witch was the parody of all that early modern Europeans believed held their fragile world together. (You can read about all this, for example, in Witch Craze, by Oxford's new Regius Professor, Lyndal Roper).

Instead of saying that, I said: “A witch is a woman who rides through the sky on a broomstick.” And because of the Polish elements in my upbringing, on the question of place of abode I went on to say: “She lives on Lysa Góra (Bald Mountain), with her friends.” There is a popular Polish nursery rhyme that goes: ‘There once was a witch who lived in a hut made of butter, and that hut was full of wonders…’ I was a bit surprised that, put on the spot, I gave this 21C child a 16C definition of witchcraft, which could have been straight from the pages of a demonological treatise (albeit with the more graphic details excised). Was it because I thought the 16C answer would be more comprehensible to a three-year old than the 21C answer? (I did add that witches could be men too, and that they are not real, as concessions to modernity). But this conversation did bring home to me this Halloween that, however much historians analyse and research and deconstruct, certain elements of early modern culture do live on, stubbornly and surprisingly, in our own, and we too transmit and preserve and hand down that culture, if only in our oral and story-telling traditions. And interestingly, when the child then pointed and said: “I can see a witch walking on the roof of your house” I was, half a millennium after the European witch-hunt and after decades of brilliant modern witchcraft scholarship, a little bit spooked.