The Witch hunt: A Misogynous Persecution.

This article does not reflect the opinions of the FeminUN student group, but of their respective authors.

The demonological myth, that is, the belief in the existence of sects of sorcerers devoted to the cult of the Devil, was established in the last years of the fourteenth century (Bigalli, 2006). During the time of transition from the middle ages to the modern, the unity of the church was weakened due to the multiple crises that the passage from one age to another implies. The crisis of the feudal system and the consolidation of modern states correspond to those phenomena that sowed fear and uncertainty in people. Because of this, the ecclesiastical authorities, wanting to dissipate that fear, transferred the responsibility for the crises, in part, to women; delegitimizing them and thus establishing a common enemy (Beteta, 2012).

Thus, it was during the fifteenth century that legal treaties were established, backed by the international law of the time, where the crime of witchcraft was outlawed and the stereotype of the witch emerged. In 1484 Pope Innocent IV, through the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, appointed two inquisitors, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Institoris, to repress the crime of witchcraft. (Salman, 1993). Two years later, backed by pontifical sanction, these two men published the Malleus Maleficarum, a legal treatise in which witchcraft was directly attributed to women. Why?

In that work, an evil (the Devil) is absolutized, justifying the divine need to neutralize all those who oppose God. That is to say, these inquisitors carried out an "intellectual" legal construction -in quotes, since its reading allows us to conclude the absence of any rational and non-judgmental argument- that was elaborated based on the Catholic religion since its reason for attributing witchcraft to the woman found her foundation in the Old Testament. Proposition number fifty-four of the Malleus Maleficarum established the following:

“54. The majority of those who practice witchcraft are women, this is because - formed defectively from a curved rib of Adam - they are inferior to men (...) Although it was the devil who led Eve to sin, it was Eve who seduced Adam ; Eve's sin would not have led us to the death of soul and body, if Adam's fault had not followed, to which Eve dragged him and not the devil. “Fémina” comes from “fe” and “minus”, because women have always had less faith.”

On the one hand, from the previous provision, which shows in part the high level of misogyny with which the treaty was written, it can be inferred that women are blamed for the fall of men. In addition, according to the authors' logic, women were more sensitive to demonic temptation due to their rebellious nature and congenital inferiority, not only because they were created from Adam's rib, but also because their submission was based on the fact that when God expelled them from the Paradise, the woman, among other punishments, imposed that "(...) your desire will be for your husband and he will rule (dominate) you." On the other hand, provision fifty-four of the treatise refers to one of the two stories found in Genesis, that is, that of Eve. The other story is the one where Lilith was the first woman, who was created jointly with Adam and she stayed with him for a while, but she abandoned him insisting on wanting to enjoy complete equality. Because she refused to go back to Adam, God condemned her to live as a demon and in her place, he created Eve.

The two stories were the basis for the Malleus Maleficarum, a punitive discourse that legitimized genocidal practices, it was a legal construction to validate a war of the sexes in order to perpetuate that guilt attributed to women by Christian tradition. Among some examples, the authors of the treatise insisted that witches, through curses, could “(...) injure men in everything, prevent genital erection, cause abortions and sterility in other women, devour children in cauldrons , unleash plagues, bewitch men and animals with a single glance, change the hearts of men from love to hate, move through the air and cause diseases” (Bigalli, 2006). The above reasons, among others, were enough to spread bloody laws throughout Europe that claimed the lives of thousands of women, who, for the most part, were from impoverished classes. Medieval philosophers such as Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas doubted the evil nature of witches, and instead attributed it to the action of the Devil, who acted through them. They considered that the "imperfect" condition of women, which resulted in the designation of infidelity as an exclusively female weakness due to Eva's legacy that stigmatizes her sexuality; It was only a means to inflict evil on men (Beteta), however, it did not prevent a massacre from being constituted that ended the human dignity of women.

Thus, we see how in the social imaginary the practice of witchcraft was related to "feminine" nature, since women who left their assigned roles (reproductive and submissive) and instead, those non-conformists, curious and indomitable who, for example, had knowledge and ideas of their own were qualified as agents of Satan. For example, in the cases prosecuted by the Holy Court of the Inquisition of Cartagena between 1610 and 1660, this type of situation was recorded, driven by those misogynistic Catholic concepts, where women, at that time deprived of education, but who were midwives, herbalists and healers were persecuted. It was so inconceivable that women were capable of intelligence that it was more reasonable to brand them as witches in order to then (i) exterminate them or; (ii) exclude them from the branches of professional work.

Thus, we see how in the social imaginary the practice of witchcraft was related to "feminine" nature, since women who left their assigned roles (reproductive and submissive) and instead, those non-conformists, curious and indomitable who, for example, had knowledge and ideas of their own were qualified as agents of Satan. For example, in the cases prosecuted by the Holy Court of the Inquisition of Cartagena between 1610 and 1660, this type of situation was recorded, driven by those misogynistic Catholic concepts, where women, at that time deprived of education, but who were midwives, herbalists and healers were persecuted. It was so inconceivable that women were capable of intelligence that it was more reasonable to brand them as witches in order to then (i) exterminate them or; (ii) exclude them from the branches of professional work.

If the reasons for the persecution of witches were already misogynistic enough, the procedure to which the accused were subjected revealed "(...) a misogyny without parallel in history and cannot be explained from any specific crime" (Federici, 2004). The process was exactly portrayed in the recent film Akelarre (2020) by Pablo Agüero, where the inquisitors, regardless of the age of the accused, stripped them naked and shaved them completely on a table, since it was believed that the Devil hid in their hair, after pain was inflicted on them with sharp tools in search of the sign with which the devil marked them. Unfortunately, very often, they were raped because they justified that it was necessary to determine, as proof of their innocence, whether they were virgins or not. Lastly, his execution had to be public in order to make the crime hated. Even, according to provision 77 of the Malleus Maleficarum, the daughters of witches should also be suspected of imitating maternal crimes, since the entire generation was infected. (Bigali, 2006). In short, it was an exclusively female crime that unlimitedly exceeded the punitive power exercised by the State because, it should not be forgotten, that the accusations and the numerous trials were possible with the cooperation of the State.

To date, the number of how many were murdered is imprecise, due to the elimination of the verdicts of the trials, but Barstow concludes in his investigation Witchcraze (1994) that there were about 100,000 women in a span of three centuries. The truth is that the witch hunt was a political persecution orchestrated especially by the Catholic Church, who created a whole legal and ideological machinery to exterminate those women who went beyond the standards of femininity. The political impetus was so great, due to the fact that both Catholic and Protestant nations, at war with each other in everything else, came together and shared arguments to persecute witches. In short, it was a war against women, a cruel and extremely misogynistic coordinated attempt to demonize them in order to maintain institutional control over them.

Written by Valentina Ortega Carvajal & Sara García Ruidiaz.

Translated by Gabriela Díaz Vásquez.

References

Barstow, Anne Llewellyn (1994). Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, Our Legacy of Violence Against Women, Nueva York, Pandora Harper Collins.

Beteta, Yolanda (2012). Entre conjuros y pactos diabólicos. La proyección simbólica de las mujeres en el discurso demonológico. Universidad de Madrid (s/f). Recuperado de https://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/33/01/63beteta.pdf

Bigalli, Carlos (2006). El Malleus Maleficarum. Subjetividad y Procesos Cognitivos. Pág. 92-11. Recuperado de https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/2785101.pdf

Buitrago, Roxana (2008). Cuerpos Enclaustrados: Construcción del cuerpo femenino en el Caribe colombiano 1610-1660. Universidad del Norte. Recuperado de https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=2863388

Federici, Silvia (2004). Calibán y la bruja. Recuperado de https://traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/Caliban%20y%20la%20bruja-TdS.pdf

Jean-Michel, Sallman (1993). La bruja en Historia de las mujeres en Occidente, Vol. 2: Edad Media. Editorial Taurus.