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What are the biggest witchcraft myths? Historian of Witchcraft & Demonology Mikki Brock deep-dives into Reddit to separate witchcraft fact from fiction. Watch as Mikki covers the Salem witch trials, the original witch hunts and what modern-day witch hunts look like.
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00:00Over 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft.
00:03Why were most accused witches women?
00:06What's an example of a modern day witch hunt?
00:09There are a lot of misunderstandings
00:10on the internet about witch hunts.
00:12I'm Mickey Brock, professor and historian.
00:15Let's take a deep dive and set the record straight.
00:18Jumping over to see what the folks at
00:21Our High Strangeness are saying about witches,
00:26SecretParsnip5071, these are just incredible names.
00:28SecretParsnip asks, why were people accused of being witches?
00:33You know, the answer is simple.
00:34People were accused of witchcraft
00:36because their neighbors thought they were a witch.
00:38We often have this temptation to say
00:41they were accused of witchcraft
00:42because someone was jealous of them, wanted their money,
00:45because there was a family feud that was going on.
00:48And I don't want to suggest
00:49that those things weren't important.
00:50They could be important.
00:52But people typically accused their neighbors of witchcraft
00:54because they thought their neighbor
00:56had done witchcraft to them.
00:57Genuinely, they believed that.
00:59Something went wrong on their farm.
01:01Something went wrong in their family.
01:03And there was someone in their life
01:04who had maybe already amassed this reputation,
01:06who'd been kind of whispered about
01:08and named in the taverns on the streets.
01:10And they could say,
01:11hey, this bad thing is probably attributable to them.
01:14Now, then we might ask,
01:15what sorts of people were most likely to be accused
01:18by their neighbor of witchcraft?
01:20And that's what we get into questions of gender.
01:23Over on Reddit Ask Historians,
01:25why were most accused witches women?
01:28And that's when we start to talk about things like
01:31the story that's told in Genesis 3
01:34about Eve being initially tempted by the devil
01:37and Eve being to blame for the entire downfall of mankind.
01:41That's when we get into questions about,
01:43are women more carnal, more susceptible?
01:45That's when we get into questions about the objects,
01:48the things that are usually associated with witchcraft,
01:52are often things within the female domain.
01:54For example, people often say about witches
01:56that they're creating sort of potions or a poisoned beer
02:01or something that makes a child sick.
02:04These were things that were in the domestic domain,
02:07the household, the sphere of women.
02:08Women's work often put them in a collision course
02:12with the potential allegation for witchcraft.
02:15Back on Reddit's Ask Historians,
02:17Sir Drunken the Tall asks,
02:19How did the Salem witch trials become the face
02:22of historical witch hunts
02:23when European witch trials took place earlier
02:25and were more numerous?
02:26That is a great question.
02:28Most people know about Salem
02:30and they know that it took the lives of 20 people,
02:3319 hanged and one pressed to death.
02:36But what most people don't know about
02:37is the fact that Salem was part of a European-wide phenomenon
02:41in which over 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft
02:45and about 50,000 of them,
02:46the vast majority of women lost their lives.
02:49So why, when we think of the witch,
02:51do we think of this little town in colonial New England
02:53and not this broader European story?
02:56Well, part of this has to do, of course,
02:58with the prominence of America in pop culture.
03:00We know about the crucible.
03:02Arthur Miller, right, made the Salem witch trials famous.
03:05And we have examples of lots of different types of media,
03:09movies, storybooks, TV shows, referencing the Salem witch trials.
03:13And we just have less of this emphasis on the European witch hunts
03:17than we do on Salem.
03:18And we like to think of America as exceptional,
03:21but it was really, in reality, part of a much more European story.
03:25And that's how they should be understood.
03:27Let's jump over to Reddit history,
03:29because we need to talk about why the witch hunts occur at all.
03:33User diff2 asks,
03:35What were the motivations behind the public during the witch hunts?
03:38That's a great question.
03:39And the answer is complicated because the motivations were many.
03:43But I'll try to boil it down.
03:44One of the things that really motivated the public was fear.
03:48They were afraid of harm.
03:50They were afraid of their cattle dying or their child becoming injured
03:55or not having enough food to get through the winter
03:57at a time when life could be really hard.
03:59And they believed that there were people in their community
04:01who practiced malevolent magic to harm them.
04:05And for the authorities, it wasn't just about fear of harmful magic.
04:08It was about fear of the devil underpinning all of these actions of supposed witches.
04:14The ideas, too, about witchcraft took a long time to develop.
04:18They didn't just come out of the ether.
04:20People had to become afraid over time.
04:23And that's partially because once you had one or two witch hunts here and there,
04:27that provided further fodder for fear that witches were active in your community.
04:32So I think that's a really big part of it, right?
04:34Small-scale witch hunts, they begin with one personal example of harm.
04:39So let's say you think your neighbor gave you the stink eye, gave you a face,
04:44cursed under their breath, and the next day a strange patch of crops dies
04:48or your husband turns out to be impotent.
04:50That's how small-scale witch hunts start, right?
04:53Just one person gets accused, but then maybe that person gets tortured.
04:57Then maybe they name other witches.
04:58And then you, as an ordinary villager, are convinced that it's not just one or two witches
05:03in your community, but this entire demonic conspiracy.
05:06Let's scroll down to the comments.
05:08Here, two users have a disagreement that I think I can weigh in on.
05:12Octothorn says,
05:13"...witchcraft accusations in Europe were driven by greed and jealousy,
05:17since the accused person's property would be confiscated and divided among the local authorities."
05:22Taibod Borny responds,
05:23"...that economic motivation was not a surefire or defining characteristic of the overall witch craze,
05:29and the accusations could easily backfire."
05:31So what's the truth here?
05:32Well, I have to say, in this case, I'm going to give it to Taibod Borny.
05:36Accusations could backfire.
05:38And there's not evidence that witchcraft allegations was financially profitable.
05:43In fact, actually, witch hunts were expensive.
05:45You had to pay the jailer, right?
05:47You had to pay various local law enforcement.
05:49You had to pay the public executioner.
05:51You had to buy all the raw materials of a witchcraft execution,
05:55the rope for a hanging or the wood for a burning.
05:58And we have actually some records of really grisly accounts of just how much it cost
06:03for the coal and the tar and the other instruments of death.
06:07So profit is not a motive here.
06:10The comment, too, is also right in saying that these things could backfire.
06:14It is absolutely the case in certain places, the British Isles, for example,
06:18that if you brought an allegation against your neighbor and said she's a witch,
06:22that neighbor could have the ability to countersue and say,
06:25this is a case of slander.
06:26I'm not a witch.
06:27And in fact, you owe me some sort of fine or penalty because of having this allegation
06:33that's affected my livelihood and my life.
06:35Speaking of hell and other dark things,
06:38let's take a look at a hot take over on Reddit Men's Rights.
06:42The user asks, the feminist theory that the European witch hunts were caused by misogyny
06:47can't be true because in many places, most convicted witches were men.
06:51It's not rocket science.
06:52So I have to sort of correct you on this one.
06:55If we look at Europe as a whole, the average is clear.
06:59The numbers are clear.
07:0080% of those accused of witchcraft were women.
07:03So yes, there were male witches.
07:06And there were a few places, Normandy, Estonia, Iceland,
07:09where the majority of those accused were men.
07:12But here's the thing.
07:13In places that had a majority of men accused as witches, the witch hunts were mild.
07:19They never got intense.
07:20They never led to the fires burning for months as more and more witches were sent to the pyre.
07:27They did not involve the types of intensive demonic conspiracies you find in other places in Europe.
07:32Where men were the majority of the accused, the witch trials did not turn into panics.
07:37And that's because fundamentally, when people worried about
07:40what sort of person was likely to be a witch in most parts of Europe,
07:45they envisioned a woman because they thought women were more susceptible to the wiles of the devil,
07:51to demonic temptation, hearkening back to ideas about Eve that would prove profoundly deadly.
07:57So if we go over on the religion subreddit,
08:00the jokester warlock, great name, asks,
08:03what was the original reason for witch hunts in Christianity?
08:07And that is such a good question.
08:09So the story of Christianity from really the Middle Ages on is a story of institutionalization,
08:16right?
08:16The church growing in its power and its structure and trying to really establish what the dogmatic norms
08:22are to try to draw tight boundaries about what counts as orthodoxy and what's heterodox,
08:28what's outside the bounds of appropriate religious practice.
08:31And as part of this, there's tremendous worry about heretics and this fear that heretics are
08:36those who don't just hold weird religious beliefs, but also might be worshiping Satan.
08:40And at the same time, there's a real attempt in the medieval period to try to control
08:45magic and prevent people from engaging with the supernatural in all of these ways,
08:50partially because people start to think that all magic, black or white,
08:53good or bad, regardless of the intent, involves a pact with the devil.
08:57And if all magic involves with pact with the devil, then ordinary people can do it.
09:01They don't have to be learned.
09:03And all of those medieval developments within Western Christendom
09:06really set the stage for the witch hunts of the coming centuries.
09:10But how did all of those ideas add up to thousands of people being killed?
09:15Over on Our History, Six Horror Goth really wants to know,
09:19how is it that there were witch trials happening in different parts of the world
09:22around the same time?
09:24That is such a good question.
09:25How do you get witch trials from Salem in the American colonial context to
09:30Lorraine in France to parts of Russia?
09:34How do you get this sort of European-wide phenomenon that even crosses the Atlantic?
09:39Part of this relates to the spread of the printing press.
09:42The fact that demonological works that report on these witchcraft trials
09:46can be printed and spread across different parts of Europe.
09:50And even though, of course, these are different nations, right?
09:53Scotland is a different place than Spain, is a different place than Germany.
09:56Elites were, broadly speaking, reading much of the same thing.
10:00Many of them could read in different languages.
10:02A lot of these texts are written in Latin or French or things that people can engage with.
10:06So there is this evolving body of knowledge that makes the witch stereotype,
10:10at least in the minds of elites, this sort of demonic witch, makes it transferable.
10:15And if you are, say, living in a little Scottish town and someone in your neighborhood
10:20is acting a little bit funny, a little bit weird, and you go tell your cleric and you say,
10:24I'm a little worried.
10:25I think, you know, what has happened to my cow is a product of this person.
10:29What should we do?
10:30That learned clergyman very well may have been exposed
10:33to writings about witch hunts in Germany.
10:36And they can look at that local event and say,
10:39wait a second.
10:40I think this is part of this broader conspiracy of witchcraft that's everywhere.
10:45And that makes it even scarier, right?
10:48If anybody has heard of demonology, then they've probably heard of the Malleus Maleficarum, right?
10:53The hammer of witches written in 1486, this witch hunting manual that went on to become
11:00the most notorious piece of writing probably in much of European history.
11:05And the Malleus Maleficarum is a really interesting text for a whole host of reasons,
11:09not least that it's virulently misogynist.
11:12But it's also kind of a creative text of Malleus Maleficarum.
11:14It also sort of has folk tales.
11:16It has a story about penis trees.
11:18You can look it up.
11:18This is true.
11:19And it is able to catch people's attention.
11:21It also talks about flying witches.
11:23It also talks about judicial processes.
11:25But it's an important text in that it gets reprinted.
11:28And it helps to solidify early on this demonic witch stereotype.
11:33And this gets distributed in other places in Europe.
11:37And if someone wants to know who are witches, how to find one, why are they likely to be women,
11:42now they have a place they can go to.
11:44We can Google it.
11:45They could read the Malleus.
11:46Here's a question over at AskHistorians.
11:51ChoiceStandard6350 asks, did witches think that they were witches?
11:55The reason I love this question is because one of the things that historians do best is say
11:59when we don't know for certain.
12:00It's hard to answer this stuff, partially because the experiences and the emotions of
12:05accused witches are often unrecoverable to us.
12:09The only testimonies we often have from the accused are confessions.
12:13Confessions often extracted under duress, under torture or the threat of it.
12:18Things like sleep deprivation, physical tortures, and so forth.
12:21So we can't really take the confession of a witch at face value.
12:25My history professor taught us that witches in England largely believed they were witches.
12:29I don't think that's right.
12:30I don't think we can take these confessions at face value.
12:33There might have been, you know, the odd witch or two who, over the course of being tortured
12:38and asked questions about were you a witch, were you a witch, where did you meet the devil,
12:43why did you do this dastardly thing, started to believe that about themselves.
12:46We know psychologically that that can happen.
12:48But most witches, from the evidence we have, probably did not think that they were witches.
12:54So what did actual trials look like when you were accused?
12:58Over on Reddit AskHistorians, Ironheart777, it's 17th century Western Europe and I've
13:04been falsely accused of being a witch.
13:06Can I expect a reasonably fair trial or am I doomed to be executed?
13:10If I have the luxury of a trial, what would most likely be the best course of defense?
13:15So this depends a lot on where you are.
13:18There's often this idea that if you're accused of witchcraft, you're totally screwed.
13:22And, you know, in some times and places that can kind of be true, but there was a really
13:27robust and well-developed system of trials and the law in early modern Europe.
13:33There were laws on the books about who witches were, what they did, how to prosecute them.
13:38And there were well-worn practices for actually adjudicating that question of,
13:43is this person who's been accused of witchcraft actually a witch?
13:45So when did the panic die down and what happened afterwards?
13:49Over on AskHistorians, Peep Jinx says,
13:52how soon after the Salem witch trials did people realize it was not about witches?
13:57So we have two good questions there, right?
14:00When did the trials end and what happens next in Salem and elsewhere?
14:04So if we're looking at the broad chronology of European witch hunting,
14:07the witch hunts start to decline in the second half of the 17th century.
14:12England sends its last witch to the gallows in the 1680s, for example.
14:16In Scotland, it's 1720s.
14:18And into the 18th century, you still have sporadic trials.
14:21And it's starting to decline really for three reasons.
14:24People are becoming skeptical about the use of torture and more critical of what sorts of
14:28evidence are admissible in court.
14:30You start to have intellectual changes where people start to wonder if you really need the
14:35devil to explain what happens in the world or whether there are natural causes for that.
14:40And then you have states that become less invested in the project of witch hunting
14:44because there's more religious tolerance.
14:46There's less competition between Protestants and Catholics,
14:49less need to prove that you are the best and most good godly kingdom.
14:54All those shifts kind of pave the way eventually for the witch trials to die down.
14:58What comes after that in Salem or elsewhere?
15:01Almost immediately after in Salem, really within the next 20 years,
15:05people are calling for the exoneration of their loved ones and they're petitioning the court to
15:10that end.
15:11Now that's unusual, that 20-year turnover where your descendants are saying,
15:15listen, you said my mother was a witch, she wasn't, and I want to clear her good name.
15:18That doesn't typically happen.
15:21What does happen is people continue to believe in witches, but they find other ways of mediating
15:27disputes in their communities and they find other answers for the misfortunes that are part of
15:32lived experience. The last stop is on raskreddit.
15:36What's an example of a modern day witch hunt type situation where the accusers have little to no
15:42evidence against the accused? Love this question. The first thing that I want to say very clearly
15:48is that people in positions of power, often men who claim to be victims of witch hunts,
15:54are misusing the term. Because the term witch hunt often means an allegation of a crime
16:00that's not possible and that the accused did not commit.
16:04So I'm often struck when we hear people crying witch hunt, this is the greatest witch hunt ever,
16:09I'm not going to name names, they are not using that term in a way that remotely accords with the
16:14historical record in which people who were marginalized, people who did not have the levers
16:20of power at their disposal, were labeled in this way. So to the question then, if it's not powerful
16:25men who were the victims of the witch hunt, who is it? I think we're talking about a modern witch
16:29hunt,
16:30the way that certain communities in the US and elsewhere are branded as other and demonized
16:36accordingly is that modern example. So the way often that trans communities are treated, the way
16:42immigrant communities are treated, the language that is used by politicians sometimes to describe
16:48these folks as evil or unnatural or dangers or poisonous or whatever, that sort of language
16:54is dehumanizing language. That sort of language is also demonizing language. And demonization
17:00and dehumanization are two sides of the same coin. So anytime you hear a politician say,
17:05that group is evil, that group isn't fully human, that group doesn't deserve our respect,
17:10you should know that they are stirring the very, very dangerous cocktail of the witch hunts.
17:15Okay, that's enough Reddit for me today. Thank you for joining me on this journey down the rabbit hole.