“The sexy one can be recuperated by patriarchal culture – why wouldn’t it like a sexy witch? But when the hag becomes sexy, then that becomes threatening.” “What’s really disturbing about the hag is when she becomes sexual, and when the sexy one loses her youth, she becomes the hag,” Spooner said. The representations of the witch as sexy or hag-like are two sides of the same coin, metaphors for the two things society, both then and now, fears most in women – sexual liberation and aging. Witches in England and in the United States are characterized by the other type of Halloween costume you’ll find on the shelves – the one with the pointy hat, broomstick and warty hooked nose – the hag.Īt the center of the Pendle Witch coven trial of 1612 in Lancashire County, England – perhaps the best-known coven trial in English legal history – were two elderly widows in their 70s: Anne Whittle (aka Chattox) and Elizabeth Southerns (aka Demdike), both blind and appearing to come straight from the pages of a fairy tale. Witchcraft is represented differently in different countries, so while (in Europe) it was much more sexualized, representations in Britain were not at all.” “It was a Protestant country, and that was not considered humane. “The burning witch is not accurate of England at all,” Spooner said. In conservative England and later in New England during the Salem witch trials of 1692- 93, hanging was preferred to burning. Both also used the inflated claim that there were 9 million victims of the witch trials – an estimate made by German scholar Gottfried Christian Voigt in 1784 – and so have been condemned because of historical inaccuracy. “It became a story in which a lot of other concerns could be addressed, about marginalization, exclusion and persecution.”īoth publications implied that the witches were a threat to the patriarchal institutions of the church and what passed for orthodox medicine, and they were brought down accordingly. “The witch became very important for feminists from the ’60s and ’70s, right up until now,” Spooner said. In 1973, second-wave feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put forward in a pamphlet the idea that the persecuted women were traditional healers and midwives. Matilda Joslyn Gage, a writer involved in the suffrage movement, published a book in 1893 that claimed witches were pagan priestesses worshipping the Great Goddess. It’s easy to see why modern feminism claimed witches as its martyrs. “It’s representing that in a very physical and literal way, and it retains its power now.” “The image of the burning witch is very symbolic, particularly for people at that time who would have believed in hell and eternal flames,” said Catherine Spooner, a professor at Lancaster University in England and an expert on witches. The confessions that led up to it were often elicited through sexually humiliating torture techniques, such as in Italy, where accused women were forced to sit on red- hot stools, preventing them from performing sexual acts with the devil.
In Europe, it was the preferred way to kill a witch because it was more painful. Of course, they weren’t all women – only around 85 percent.Įxecution by burning – evoking hellfire and flames of passion – was deemed appropriate punishment for such crimes.
Of course, they weren’t all women – only around 85 percent. Far from being written off as the god-fearing, woman-hating crackpot he clearly was, Kramer gained a bit of a following.Īn estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed during the witch trials of the early modern period. This, wrote Kramer before providing detailed methods to catch the temptresses, was a matter of common report. The charges levied against these insatiable women included making men’s genitals disappear or stealing them, keeping them in nests or boxes and feeding them oats and corn. witchcraft came from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” The handbook explained that witchcraft is a woman’s crime because woman is “more carnal than man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. Last year, online retailer Amazon was forced to pull a range of hyper-sexualized Halloween costumes for girls as young as age 4 from its online marketplace – an extreme example of the increasing sexualization of Halloween.Ī fearsome, hook-nosed, broomstick-riding hag happily still offers respite, but for every scary witch costume, there is an array of sexy enchantress costumes available too.įar from originating in student Halloween bar crawls, the sexualized witch can be identified as early as 1486 when Heinrich Kramer, a German Catholic clergyman, wrote “Malleus Maleficarum,” a handbook for witch hunters.
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