Part Two: Witches: Witches Were Pretty Cool Even Though They Didn't Really Exist

actually particularly cool. That's like saying like violence is cool, Like violence is sometimes useful or necessary, but overall it's like nothing to be proud of, right, because it's mostly done in bad ways. So I guess that's actually how I probably feel about what would definitionally be understood is witchcraft, but the concept of witches as we currently talk about them super cool. Except this episode isn't really about the

current version of witches. It's more about how we got there, and specifically how the concept of the witch was developed by a bunch of misogynists and church people both Protestant and Catholic, in order to keep power relations going. And that's bad, but reclaimed stuff is good. It seems obvious that I think that I'm a punk punk is an example of a reclaimed slur so, which is an example of a reclaimed category of crime that has now become

an identity for people. Anyway, this is part two. If you go back to part one, you'll hear me talk about how which is kind of weren't real except service magicians were and some of them did witchcraft, so actually, which is kind of were real. Also, no one knows, but we're going to talk about the inquisition. There's a money python joke I could do here, but I'm not going to. It's a leave it as an exercise for the audience too. Imagine the money python joke. Also, this

is a solo episode. You probably figured that out by now. There's no Sophie, there's no guest. There's a Rory.

enough he's an inquisitor. This is like, uh, you know, fourteen hundreds. He shows up in Germany and is like, hello, I am an inquisitor and I'm specifically mad about witches because I hate women. And local authorities are like, no, we don't really need you. Fuck off, which is, after all, worn a big deal, nothing to get inquisitioning about. So our guy, Heinrich, He's like, all right, fine, I'll go to Skydad's main man, the Pope, and get his permission

to do some fucking witch hunting. And you know, earlier I was like talking about all these popes that were like, witches aren't real. There's a problem with investing absolute power into specific individuals. It's the monarchy problem. And besides the moral problem, there's the specific problem of well, if you have a different guy, then he might have a different point of view and he might have a bad take, and then all of a sudden, the bad take is

the rules. So in fourteen eighty four, Pope Innocent to the eighth proves his own name to not have been much of a nominative deterministic thing. Because he is not so innocent. He writes a papal bull which is basically a decree, because in Catholicism they just rename everything, And

this decree says that witchcraft counts as heresy. It says, quote, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and strain from the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have

slain infants. Yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay men and women, beasts of burthen herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat, and all other cereals. This is all one sentence. I don't even I'm not even gonna quote the entire sentence. There's a lot of anywhere you might think there's a period,

there's a semicolon. These wretches, furthermore, afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen herd, beasts as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases both internal and external. They hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving. That's like only half the sentence. That's yeah. Anyway, So the papal bull is like, I'm afraid of them witches. They make men impotent, and they also do all of these other things.

And Okay, one of the things that's horrible about talking about all this like witchcraft stuff and this witch trial stuff.

So like we're really seeing the return to this. Honestly, like the evangelical embrace of the pro life thing really has this vibe of like they're all a bunch of baby murderers, and I don't know, there's gonna be some other fun comparisons coming up later about suddenly people believing in real wild stuff, especially because the Protestants, once they come on the scene, they're gonna like specifically believe Eve

they're way more that. Yes, of course sex is bad, but it's still like, you got to be having it, so therefore you've got to be married, and you can only be married in ways that are procreative.

Heinrich Kramer. Kramer went on to kill fifty people over the next five years, after he'd been given permission specifically to do so by the Pope. Why did he so desperately want to hunt witches, Well, it sounds like it was because he was low key stalking this local woman, Helena Schubern. He was obsessed with her, and she didn't like him. She didn't go to church, perhaps because she was avoiding him, or maybe she just didn't like going to church. One day, she was supposedly walking past Kramer

and spat and said, fie on you, you bad monk. May the falling evil take you, which is a pretty sick like I don't want the falling evil to take me. That sounds scary, Like what even is that? Is it just the slow embrace of darkness? Who knows? Anyway, maybe maybe other people know.

this is the rules. I'm in cel murder man. He wrote the most influential book on witch hunting, even though it actually strayed. This is going to shock you. It actually strayed from most of the accepted inquisitorial material, and the Catholic Church would soon disavow this book. This book is The Hammer of Witches, and it influenced secular courts, but not religious courts by and large, So this like wasn't being used by the Church inquisition. This was being

used by local secular courts. That book, The Hammer of Witches, is a misogynistic tone about why women are uniquely weakned evil and that they should be tortured and burned at the stake. It's bad. It presents the idea that witchcraft is heretical, which is actually a secular crime at the time, so this is why secular courts are doing their witch hunting.

It also contains some pretty elaborate forgery. It claims that a respective theological institution supported it, and like even has like all the signatures and then like signatures of notaries and things like that on it. But it's almost certainly all a forgery. It seems as though everyone at that institution hated this book. It's possible that the book was banned after three years by the church in fourteen ninety, but this is disputed. It seems like people believed it was banned.

of editions, leading to uncountable more deaths. Eventually, the book pretended had a second author, basically like one of the printings they were like, it's by two people, like a respective theologian's name was added to it, even though we probably didn't approve of it. The Hammer of Witches says quote the witches deserve the heaviest punishment above all the criminals in the world. It was obsessed with the sex

lives of evil women. Sexuality is the literal basis of witchcraft, according to this book, and the devil fucks power into people. If you don't fuck the devil, you don't get as cool magic powers In the book, Kramer writes, the devil has power over those who follow their lusts. As for why women are particularly prone to witchcraft, it's because women are more carnal. Of course, we also have bad memories, which is why we're undisciplined and impulsive. We're vain, our

voice is a siren song, and we ruin men. He writes, woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep. And all witchcraft comes from carnal lusts, which in women are insatiable. Oh and also, plus, Jesus was a boy, so boys are clearly more holy. Yeah, obviously hasn't heard of my home. Jesus is a transman theory, although you know, maybe he's just being trans inclusive. Jesus is a transman theory, being that, well, if you don't

have an earthly father, you have xx chromosomes. Anyway, this is not necessarily always true, but whatever this is, go with it. So, according to Kramer, witches meet the devil at the witch's sabbath, swear an oath to him, and

make an ointment from dead baptized babies. Earlier works on these sabbaths were a bit more pornographic describing how people would kiss Satan on the asshole and such, and the Sabbath was more of a lustful orgy in the earlier books, But in The Hammer of Witches, neither the witches nor the devil actually enjoy the sex. It's just a solemn duty in the name of evil. Like lie back and

think of Satan. But after her initiation into evil, the witch likes fucking lots of people, probably everyone but Kramer. This whole book is so so incel coded. Just looking at an impure woman can corrupt a man, since eyes

are the mirror of the soul. Also, only the witches can see the devil during these ceremonies, and observers see only the women lying on their backs orgasamine, which makes me wonder if people weren't just like watching women masturbating in the forest or whatever, which seems like a perfectly fine and healthy pastime. Get together with your you know, gal pals, and go masturbating the woods. The sexual powers of witches are endless. They can cause lust in men,

They can destroy relationships. They can turn dicks into other things or steal them outright. They can make a man no longer attracted to a given woman. They can also cause impotence or sterility. Some witches would collect dicks and keep them in a bird's nest where they lived off of corn and oats, like they were little baby bird dicks. And according to this book, all accused witches are guilty,

and the ones who don't confess are damned. The ones who do confess are you know, saved by being burned alive. It's real good, much like the good that comes from giving all of your money to the people who gave us money. That's what you should do. You totally shouldn't either subscribe to cooler zone media and therefore not have ads, or just press the forward fifteen seconds but in like four or five times.

witch trials? There are a bunch of different hypotheses. Most of them are wrong. I'm going to talk about one of the more can convincing ones for a moment before I get to the one that I find most convincing. This next one I don't think is like wrong. It's just we's wrong in some ways. But whatever, it has a lot of good truth in it. It's worth understanding. A Marxist feminist named Sylvia Federici wrote what is in my Circles the single most important book about witches and

the witch Trials. It's called Caliban and the Witch. It covers a reasonably wide range of topics, but the core of its argument, as I understand it, is this the witch trials represent the patriarchal oppression of women, the excizing of women from the healing arts like you've got the good learned doctors who are men and who went to man only school, and in the early modern era, they become the only acceptable form of healing, so more organic

and folk practices were being shoved out and criminalized. Federici ties this idea into the idea of primitive accumulation. This is a concept in Marxism that, while I'm not a Marxist, I think is worth understanding because I overall think that Marx had incredibly important contributions to the study of economics. Even if I disagree with whatever. You don't need to know why disagree with Marx. Just listen to like half

the episodes I do. Primitive accumulation might be better translated these days as original accumulation, because the word primitive has different connotations than it did when the idea was coined. It originally kind of meant like original, like oh, this is the first version of this. The primitive form of it just means the original form of it. It's not like the accumulation from primitive people, although that happens. By the reason that it sounds confusing this because we'll get

to it. Primitive accumulation. Basically, wealth has to come from somewhere, right in Marxist economic theory simplified here the labor theory of value. Wealth comes from the labor of the working class. But what about the raw materials? Those are gathered through primitive accumulation, which is to say, the extraction of value from the natural world. Colonialism does this right, show up somewhere and cut down all their trees and send them off to England and suddenly have extracted all the value

from Ireland. This is the thing that comes before capitalism. Marx came up with the idea of primitive accumulation to counteract the Adam Smith pro capitalist idea that what started capitalism was that the industrious worker eventually built up more value than the lazy worker did, and so this is how the lazy worker ended up a worker and the

other guy ended up an owner. Marx was like, no, it was because the proto capitalist just like robed the shit out of everything and everyone, or to quote him directly from capital and of course he's going to use

outdated racial terminology here. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation enslavement and entoument in minds of the Aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signaled a

rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. So basically, primitive accumulation is like run around privatize everything, and you know, ties into the enclosure of the comments that I talk

about all the time and things. Anyway, Marxist feminists, especially those in developing nations, started talking about how basically this accumulation continues today based on the unpaid work of women, that the whole of capitalism is upheld by unpaid domestic labor, reproductive labor as it's called, which is another weird phrase because it makes you think that they mean like making babies,

but they actually mean reproducing social conditions. I think that, honestly, all this terminology needs to be renamed, because otherwise this is never going to come across to people.

women in the witch hunts of Europe. And I'm under the impression Mariah Meis was writing this when people for good reason, when the research hadn't been done, and people thought that we were talking about like millions and millions of women being killed instead of like, eh, thirty thousand or whatever. This is the idea that Sylvia Federici is expanding upon, the idea that primitive accumulation continues to this day, and one of the places it does so is women.

And one of the big examples of this is the witch hunts. That which cannot be controlled will be exterminated, which, to be clear, is absolutely what the Catholic Inquisition was all about. Convert what you can, exterminate what you can't. So Federici talks about the witch hunts as a war

against women who don't participate properly in capitalism. She also describes the medieval world as a world in revolt against the masters, against nobility in the church, future veterans of the pod, the peasant revolts were kicking off all over the place, and heretical Christian sects that believe in it autonomy, basically communism, free love, and all kinds of cool shit were just everywhere you looked, and some of them were like, I don't know, heretical Christian sects that were only mildly

better than the Catholic Church or whatever. But it's fine. Again, this is the kind of stuff that the Inquisition absolutely wanted to destroy and existed to destroy. Those movements, Federici says, were often led by women. Then you've got the Black Death, and suddenly there weren't so many workers, and wages go up and rents go down, and there was this spirit of revolt in the possibility of change. Maybe the workers

would finally throw off their chains. But then capitalism showed up as a counter revolution, something that shut down this other revolution that was happening. To quote Federici, capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes to a century's long social conflict that

in the end shook their power. Capitalism was the counter revolution that to destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti feudal struggle, possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives in the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. So basically shit had to change, but rather than change in a cool way, a counter revolution made it change

in a bad way. Serfdom is out rent and wage labor is in and so this new status quo emerged, and it wanted to deal with the wild other anyone living outside this growing capitalism, basically including women and children in colonial subjects, they didn't get to have wages, and so they had to be contained as wild others. We've talked about this a few times on the show before, about how in the European medieval conception women like now we tend to think that this misogynist thing is to

assume that women are like servile and demur whatever. But instead the medieval conception of women was that they are chaotic and outside of good civilized Christian values, which is of course pretty cool. This is an excuse for centuries of misogyny. But this framework that women are wild, uncontrollable people makes like, I don't know, makes womanhood both like cys and trans like all the more interesting to me.

To declare my womanhood is to declare my affinity to the wild world or whatever, much like I've declared my affinity to the thing that I just said. I hated capitalism because they gave me some money to run their ads, and I wanted to eat food, so I run the ads. Here they are anyway, we're back. The rise of capitalism in this read is tied to the rise of patriarchy and stronger gender roles. But I've read criticism of Federici pointing out that she's not doing enough work here talking

about the patriarchal forms that preceded capitalism. And also when she was talking about being like and then the popes and the lords did a capitalism, I don't she might be better read about this than me. I'm not sure, But overall I would say that it's like the merchant class that really wanted capitalism, and like the lords and the popes like really didn't because it undermined their power. So it's imperfect, but right. So you have this idea that rise of capitalism is the rise of patriarchy and

stronger gender roles. By this read, instead of the power being held by a whole surf family, it is now a rental agreement between the head of the household, the man and the landlord. Now that ownership is important, women's

inability to own things is suddenly a big problem. We've talked a few times on the show about how the invention of the white race is part of the colonial project's way of pitting working class people against each other, like, hey, mister English working class man, you may be starving, but at least you're better than a black man or an irishman. And then soon enough, hey mister irishman, you're white now too. Whiteness.

It's like basically whiteness as a way to destroy class solidarity. Well, patriarchy offered something similar in Federici's take, as Karl Krisplebedeb put it, Federici explains how the rebelliousness of male workers was channeled into sexual violence, women's bodies providing a pleasant

diversion and safety valve to relieve social pressure. Drawing on Jacques Roussaud's research about prostitution in the fifteenth century France, she describes a literal rape movement whereby sexual assaults on any poor woman were now tolerated by the authorities, essentially decriminalized.

This was potentially when the sphere of men's work in women's work was codified, with men in the productive labor sphere the money economy and women in the reproductive labor sphere, the non money economy, that basically working class men were offered the chance to be better than someone, to therefore have gender solidarity with other men instead of class solidarity with other oppressed people. This book, Caliban and the Witch, is incredibly influential, and there are parts of it that

I'm sure will hold up probably forever. There are other parts that are not really holding up to more recent scholarship, especially as relates to the witch hunts specifically, there just isn't evidence that witch hunts targeted women healers. The witch hunts didn't tend to target the cunning folk, the service magicians. A lot of the accusers or expert witnesses were the midwives, the herbalists, the cunning folk, the service magicians. Women did

an awful lot of the accusing as well. In numerous countries, more men than women were targeted as witches, and perhaps most importantly, witch hunts weren't really They weren't this top down thing. The witch hunts were basically church and secular authorities giving in to popular pressure, the popular demand for

witch hunts. The witch hunts primarily targeted women because some of their orchestrators were misogynists, and because the witch hunts were about power dynamics, more bro loose women serving girls, or just unpopular women or even two popular women were easy targets. Author Christina Larner put it, quote witchcraft accusations

were sex related, not sex specific. Doctor Wanda Waporska, author of Witchcraft and Early Modern Poland fifteen hundred eighteen hundred, said in an interview with the New Statesmen about the Polish witch trials, the majority of women accused were servants in a precarious situation, living in someone else's house and subject to the power dynamic that brings It's not always easy to discover the age of the accused, but a wide range of women and men were accused from varying

social backgrounds, of various ages and different family situations. Waporska went on to say, quote, although many have tried to claim an overarching reason for the witchcraft persecution, from ergotism to the little Ice age, from misogyny to the persecution of midwives, as more research emerges in a rich tapestry of regional studies, it's clear that a mono causal explanation is impossible. But while the causes of individual trials were

all over the place. There was potentially a single institutional reason why the trials were happening at all, or specifically where they were happening, and the chain of events that caused that to happen was on October thirty first, fifteen seventeen. I'm writing this on October thirty first, spooky, a man named Martin Luther nailed ninety five theses onto the door of a church in Germany. And for once the Catholic Church would be faced with a heresy they couldn't immediately crush.

Protestantism was born. Germany, the birthplace of Protestantism, was where around forty percent of which trials would take place orchestrated by both Protestants and Catholics alike. Why. In twenty seventeen, two economists Peter L. Leeson and Jacob W. Russ put forth a theory in the Economic Journal that, well, I'll

just quote their introduction quote. We argue that the Great European Witch Trials reflected a non price competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches for religious market share in confessionally contested parts of Christendom. Analyzes of new data covering more than forty three thousand people tried for witchcraft across twenty one European countries over a period of five and a half centuries, and more than four hundred early modern Catholic

Protestant conflicts support our theory. More intense religious market contestation led to more intense witch trial activity. Basically, the people wanted to be saved from witches. They've been clamoring for this for one thousand years. Or they wanted the fun of a big show trial, and they wanted to get to accuse people and shit, and you know, the Church kept telling them, no, they're not allowed to do the

random murder. But much like politicians campaigning in swing states, both Protestants and Catholics were like, yeah, okay, what do you want, We'll do it. And they would put on big, expensive show trials and say we're the ones who can save you from witches. Stick with us. This is pretty easily understandable just by looking at the locations of the trials. Wherever Catholicism had a strong monopoly, they didn't burn many witches at all. Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, really unburning, Germany,

France firetimes. The other thing these trials were trying to prove, of course, was like, hey, we can fuck you up, you know, like we're good at exerting power. You should probably stick with us. People wanted to accuse the other side of heresy and witchcraft as much as possible. At first, the Church had tried to brand luther a heretic, but so many rulers had converted to Lutheranism that the Church couldn't touch it. The monopoly was broken. Inquisitors weren't allowed

into Lutheran lands. Eventually, in order to like make peace, in fifteen fifty five, the Holy Roman Empire decriminalized Lutheranism to bring peace to the land. This wasn't freedom of religion for people, as far as I can tell, but just for various princes to determine what religion everyone in their land had to be, so like freedom of religion for princes. Since the Catholic Church couldn't crush Lutherism, they had to try other things to exert their dominance, like

you know, witch trials. The competition between the two faiths went beyond who can burn the most people alive. Of course, both rushed to build schools. Protestants were like ten percent off the top of the tithe is cheaper than Catholicism, all of its indulgences and weird, expensive things. And Catholics were like, you like saints, We'll give you more saints, all the saints you can pray to. The Catholics were like, the Protestants are heretics. The Protestants were like, the Catholics

themselves are witches. Look at their weird rituals transubstantiation. Really you think that bread literally turns to flesh in your stomach. So both sides burn people and burn people. Luther himself advocated burning witches. A fifteen thirty two law declared witchcraft a crime in Germany, punishable by burning at the stake if it hurts someone. By fifteen seventy two, Augustus of Saxony said burn every witch, even for fortune telling. On both sides, a ton of clergy were like, hey, can

we can we not? What the hell are we doing? Why are we burning people? This seems bad, but it took centuries for those voices to be heard. This pissing match between the Catholics and the Protestants is far and away the most convincing hypothesis to me. But of course Federici makes some interesting points about how it ties into the rise of capitalism and the war on women and

the war on everything outside the new social order. There are a few other hypotheses floating around as well, and I'm sure they're sometimes out accurate and had some influence. Some people blame bad weather. There was a mini ice age at the time and people were suffering, and some of those people thought that witches could control the weather.

Imagine something so silly as that. That's my reference to the fact that currently there's people who claim that either the Democrats or the Jews are like controlling the weather because nothing has changed, which is bad because this all led to hundreds of years of burning people alive. Anyway, statistical analysis shows there's no correlation between bad weather and witch trials. There is some correlation between economic downturns and witch hunting, which makes sense the popular clamor goes up

when wages go down. Sure, a few people have tried to suggest why Ireland didn't have many witch trials. NIVEH. Boyce, writing for The Irish Examiner, suggests that this is because Ireland had pretty cozy feelings about quote so called witchcraft practices at the time, and no one was mad at anyone for believing in fairy wells or anything. Sylvia Federici would say it was because Ireland still had a strong communal economy, with collective land ownership and strong informal and

familial social safety nets in place. I also think you could say something about how Ireland was during the early modern period, a colonized place, more than part of Europe proper, at least economically. But I admit, as much as I want to believe that Ireland is just cool and good, the most likely reason is that it was firmly Catholic. No need to burn any witches anywhere but the Swing States anyway, Hopefully none of that seems on the nose.

About the future you're listening to this in where whatever. If you're listening to as like five years from now, this will seem quaint. But how are the camps that you're stuck in? Or maybe we've created a socialist utopia or something else.

I have another podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying, comes out every Friday and is put out by anarchist publishing collective I'm part of called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, and Live Like the World Is Dying is about individual and community preparedness. I have a bunch of co hosts and they've been doing most of the work while I'm on tour. Well they do a lot of yeah, they do probably most of the work.