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The Image of The Witch: How the Stereotype Was Made · The Occult Rejects

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  Speaker 1: Accusations of child murder and ritual inversion becoming more elaborate,
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  Speaker 1: and the local practitioner of harmful magic being absorbed into
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  Speaker 1: the image of a secret anti-Christian conspiracy. What the witch
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  Speaker 1: still lacks is a body that people can recognize, together
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: with transportation, props, and above all, images that can be
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  Speaker 1: repeated until audiences stop asking where those images came from,
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  Speaker 1: and almost immediately artists begin supplying exactly that. One of
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  Speaker 1: the most important surviving moments appears around 1451 in in
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  Speaker 1: an illustrated manuscript of Martin Lee Frank's Les Championnes des Dames,
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  Speaker 1: where two women are shown traveling through the air, one
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  Speaker 1: riding a broom and the other riding what appears to
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  Speaker 1: be a staff or stick. This image matters because it
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  Speaker 1: gives us one of the earliest securely identified visual connections
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  Speaker 1: between witch-like women and broomstick flight. But what makes it
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  Speaker 1: even more interesting is how little the women resemble the
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  Speaker 1: stereotype that would eventually descend from them. They are not
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  Speaker 1: wearing enormous black pointed hats, They are not accompanied by
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  Speaker 1: standardized black cats, and they are not dressed like the
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  Speaker 1: Halloween witch that now seems timeless to us. Instead, they
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  Speaker 1: look much like ordinary women whose otherwise mundane household implements
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  Speaker 1: have been transformed into supernatural vehicles. The women are identified
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  Speaker 1: with the Vadoise, language tied to accusations of heresy, which
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  Speaker 1: means that even here the broom does not simply emerge
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  Speaker 1: from some neutral folk tradition about rustic women flying through
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  Speaker 1: the countryside. It appears inside the same broader environment in
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  Speaker 1: which heresy, nocturnal travel, demonic deception, and the developing witch
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  Speaker 1: conspiracy are beginning to merge. And that context is extremely
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  Speaker 1: important because it prevents us from doing what modern witch
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  Speaker 1: history constantly does, which is take one striking object and
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  Speaker 1: immediately invent a clean ancient explanation for it. The broom
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  Speaker 1: itself was ordinary, belonging to domestic life, household labor, cleaning,
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  Speaker 1: and work overwhelmingly associated with women, which made it an
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  Speaker 1: almost perfect object for cultural inversion. because one of the
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  Speaker 1: recurring tricks of witch imagery is to take something familiar
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  Speaker 1: and make it threatening. A broom that should clean the
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  Speaker 1: home becomes a vehicle that carries a woman out of
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  Speaker 1: the home. A pot that should feed the household becomes
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  Speaker 1: a cauldron for poison. Herbs that should heal a seasoned
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  Speaker 1: food becomes ingredients in forbidden magic. A domestic animal becomes
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  Speaker 1: a demon familiar, and the woman who should supposedly maintain
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  Speaker 1: the boundaries of respectable domestic order becomes the person who
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  Speaker 1: escapes them at night. That relationship between ordinary female-coded objects
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  Speaker 1: and supernatural danger becomes one of the most persistent themes
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  Speaker 1: in the construction of the witch, because the image does
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  Speaker 1: not require the invention of completely alien objects when familiar
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  Speaker 1: ones can simply be reinterpreted, and the tarot works better
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  Speaker 1: precisely because the dangerous thing is already sitting in your kitchen.
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  Speaker 1: At almost exactly the moment this imagery is beginning to develop,
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  Speaker 1: Europe undergoes another transformation that will permanently change the witch's
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  Speaker 1: cultural life. Printing, a technological shift that dramatically expands how
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  Speaker 1: quickly the same text or image can circulate. Before the
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  Speaker 1: printing press, distributing ideas could certainly spread through sermons, manuscripts, rumor,
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  Speaker 1: legal proceedings, oral storytellings, and ecclesiastical networks, but manuscript culture
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  Speaker 1: placed real limits on how quickly identical texts and images
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  Speaker 1: could be duplicated. Print changes that equation dramatically because an
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  Speaker 1: image cannot be reproduced, sold, circulated, copied by another artist, simplified, exaggerated,
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  Speaker 1: detached from its original context, and eventually encountered by people
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  Speaker 1: who know absolutely nothing about the argument that surrounded it.
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  Speaker 1: That distinction matters enormously when we talk about propaganda, because
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  Speaker 1: an image does not have to carry the entire theology
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  Speaker 1: with it. A scholar can write 20 pages explaining why
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  Speaker 1: a particular supernatural claim should be treated cautiously. But if
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  Speaker 1: the book contains a striking picture of a woman flying
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  Speaker 1: through the air or gathering around a cauldron, the image
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  Speaker 1: can travel much farther in popular memory than the qualifications
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  Speaker 1: ever will, allowing the argument to remain complex while the
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  Speaker 1: picture becomes simple. And right in the middle of this transition,
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  Speaker 1: in 1486 and 1487, we get one of the most
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  Speaker 1: infamous books ever associated with European witch hunting, the Malleus Maleficarum,
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  Speaker 1: or Hammer of Witches. written principally by the Dominican Inquisitor
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  Speaker 1: Heinrich Kramer, whose obsessive treatment of witchcraft, women, sexuality, demonic power,
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  Speaker 1: and harmful magic would become enormously influential even though later
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  Speaker 1: popular culture has often exaggerated the book's role by pretending
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  Speaker 1: it somehow created the witch craze by itself. It did not,
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  Speaker 1: because the time Kramer wrote Malleus, the witch conspiracy was
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  Speaker 1: already developing, the idea of nocturnal assemblies was already circulating,
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  Speaker 1: Stories of demonic initiation already existed, accusations of child murder
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  Speaker 1: and ritual inversion already existed, and artists had already begun
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  Speaker 1: depicting women in supernatural flight. What Kramer does is not
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  Speaker 1: invent the witch from nothing, but systematize, intensify, and aggressively
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  Speaker 1: defend a particular demonological understanding of witchcraft, in which women
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  Speaker 1: occupy an especially vulnerable and dangerous position. The Malleus is
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  Speaker 1: notoriously misogynistic. although even that statement becomes more useful when
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  Speaker 1: we move beyond the lazy summary that medieval men hated
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  Speaker 1: women and look at the actual logic being built. Women
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  Speaker 1: are portrayed as supposedly weaker in faith, more susceptible to
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  Speaker 1: carnal desire, more easily deceived, more inclined toward vengeance, and
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  Speaker 1: therefore particularly vulnerable to demonic corruption. While sexual themes repeatedly
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  Speaker 1: appear in discussions of witchcraft, impotence, reproduction, intercourse with demons,
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  Speaker 1: and the supposed manipulation of male bodies. Female sexuality itself
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  Speaker 1: becomes part of the threat model, because the imagined witch
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  Speaker 1: does not merely harm crops or cattle. She disrupts reproduction, marriage, masculinity, childbirth,
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  Speaker 1: and the Christian social order that those institutions are supposed
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  Speaker 1: to support. This gendered demonology becomes one of the foundations
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  Speaker 1: beneath the later female witch stereotypes. But again, if we
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  Speaker 1: open the Malleus hoping to find the complete Halloween witch
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  Speaker 1: staring back at us, we would still be disappointed. Theology
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  Speaker 1: is giving the witch motives, crimes, and demonic relationships faster
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  Speaker 1: than visual culture is giving her a standard costume. Only
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  Speaker 1: a few years later, another work begins doing something that
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  Speaker 1: turns out to be just as culturally important. Because in 1489,
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  Speaker 1: the lawyer and writer Gulick Molitor published on witches and
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  Speaker 1: pythonic women. The work usually translated under titles referring to
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  Speaker 1: witches and divining women, and unlike the Malleus, Molitor's treatise
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  Speaker 1: became notable for its illustrations. These woodcuts show witches involved
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  Speaker 1: in acts such as supernatural flight, weather magic, transformations, and
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  Speaker 1: work around a cooking vessel or cauldron. And although Molitor
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  Speaker 1: himself could be skeptical about whether some spectacular claims should
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  Speaker 1: be understood literally, the images gave audiences something theology could not, scenes.
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  Speaker 1: Here the medium becomes almost as important as the message,
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  Speaker 1: because a reader can reject an argument while retaining an image,
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  Speaker 1: and the image can then be copied by somebody who
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  Speaker 1: has never read the original argument at all. Molitor can
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  Speaker 1: qualify a supernatural claim, but the woodcut still shows people
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  Speaker 1: what witchcraft looks like. That is the beginning of a
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  Speaker 1: cultural process we are going to see over and over again,
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  Speaker 1: because the image can survive the footnote. The monster can
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  Speaker 1: survive the qualification, and the picture can survive the skepticism
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  Speaker 1: until an image becomes recognizable enough that it no longer
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  Speaker 1: needs its original explanation and people begin understanding it through
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  Speaker 1: repetition alone. One of Molitor's most important images for our
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  Speaker 1: purposes shows witches gathered around a large vessel, and this
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  Speaker 1: is one of the earliest known visual depictions connecting witches
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  Speaker 1: with the cauldron-like scene that will later become inseparable from
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  Speaker 1: popular witch iconography. Yet the object itself is not an
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  Speaker 1: exotic object at all, but an ordinary piece of domestic
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  Speaker 1: equipment whose meaning has been reversed, which is why the
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  Speaker 1: cauldron deserves more attention than it usually receives. There is
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  Speaker 1: nothing inherently occult about boiling things in a pot, but
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  Speaker 1: once demonological culture decides that women are preparing poisons, magical ointments,
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  Speaker 1: infant remains, weather magic, and substances used for supernatural operations,
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  Speaker 1: the cooking vessel becomes a laboratory of evil. That transformation
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  Speaker 1: has enormous symbolic power, because it corrupts the household from
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  Speaker 1: the inside. The kitchen should preserve life, prepare food, and
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  Speaker 1: sustain the family, but the witch's kitchen supposedly manufactures death, sterility, poison,
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  Speaker 1: and demonic power. The woman who should nourish children becomes
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  Speaker 1: the woman accused of murdering them. The herbs that should
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  Speaker 1: heal become ingredients in Maleficent, and the pot that should
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  Speaker 1: contain dinner becomes a cauldron full of things that should
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  Speaker 1: never exist together. The witch is increasingly being defined through inversions.
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  Speaker 1: And that principle becomes even clearer around 1500 when Albrecht
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  Speaker 1: Durer produces one of the most strangest and most important
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  Speaker 1: early witch images, showing an aged naked woman riding backward
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  Speaker 1: on a goat, her body moving one way while other
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  Speaker 1: details in the scene seem to violate ordinary physical expectations,
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  Speaker 1: and the entire composition plays with reversal, disorder, and the
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  Speaker 1: breakdown of the natural world. The witch is not simply
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  Speaker 1: evil because she does bad things. She becomes visual evidence
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  Speaker 1: that the proper order of the universe has been inverted.
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  Speaker 1: That concept gives us one of the deepest keys to
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  Speaker 1: understanding why so many apparently unrelated accusations eventually collect around
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  Speaker 1: the witch. She becomes the anti-mother who harms children, the
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  Speaker 1: anti-wife who threatens sexuality and reproduction, the anti-Christian who worships
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  Speaker 1: the devil, the anti-healer who poisons, the anti-neighbor who secretly
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  Speaker 1: destroys the community, the anti-housekeeper whose domestic tools become instruments
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  Speaker 1: of supernatural disorder. And the anti-human figure who can supposedly
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  Speaker 1: move backward, transform shape, command animals, fly through the air,
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  Speaker 1: and cross boundaries ordinary bodies cannot cross. Once the witch
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  Speaker 1: becomes the embodiment of inversion, almost anything culturally defined as
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  Speaker 1: unnatural can be attached to her. And once printing allows
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  Speaker 1: those unnatural qualities to be pictured and repeated, the monster
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  Speaker 1: no longer needs to remain invisible. because theology has already
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  Speaker 1: created the enemy and European art is now teaching people
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  Speaker 1: how to see her. If Durer helps us understand the
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  Speaker 1: witch as a figure who symbolically turns the ordinary world backward,
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  Speaker 1: Hans Baldur Green takes the basic idea and pushes it
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  Speaker 1: into something far more erotic, violent, unstable, and visually sophisticated.
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  Speaker 1: Because in Baldur's work, the witch no longer appears merely
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  Speaker 1: as an isolated old woman performing some ambiguous act or
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  Speaker 1: forbidden magic. but instead becomes part of a charged female
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  Speaker 1: world filled with smoke, bodies, bones, animals, weather, sexuality, impossible motion,
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  Speaker 1: and the suggestion that women gathered together outside the control
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  Speaker 1: of ordinary social structures might possess powers capable of disturbing
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  Speaker 1: the natural and religious order itself. Baldung had trained in
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  Speaker 1: the artistic world surrounding Dürer, but his fascination with witchcraft
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  Speaker 1: becomes far more obsessive and, for our purposes, far more
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  Speaker 1: revealing because his witchcraft refuse to settle into one single
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  Speaker 1: visual type. Some of them are aged, wrinkled, and grotesque,
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  Speaker 1: while others are young, physically beautiful, overtly sexualized, and visually powerful.
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  Speaker 1: And that diversity matters enormously, because the modern Halloween witch
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  Speaker 1: has trained us to assume that the old crone was
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  Speaker 1: always the obvious or universal model. She was not. An
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  Speaker 1: early modern visual culture could imagine the dangerous magical woman
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  Speaker 1: just as easily as a beautiful, sexually threatening figure whose
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  Speaker 1: attractiveness intensified the anxiety surrounding her rather than diminishing it.
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  Speaker 1: That difference is useful because it reveals that the underlying
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  Speaker 1: fear was never simply about ugliness or old age, since
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  Speaker 1: the old witch and the young witch carried different kinds
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  Speaker 1: of cultural threat. The aged woman could be imagined as
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  Speaker 1: somebody who had moved beyond the social role that respectable
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  Speaker 1: society expected women to occupy, especially if she was widowed, poor, dependent, outspoken,
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  Speaker 1: socially marginal, or simply no longer useful within the narrow
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  Speaker 1: reproductive expectations imposed upon women. While the younger witch could
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  Speaker 1: embody a different cluster of fears surrounding sexuality, fertility, seduction, desire,
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  Speaker 1: and the possibility that beauty concealed destructive or demonic power.
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  Speaker 1: In both cases, what makes the figure dangerous is not
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  Speaker 1: merely that she supposedly performs magic, but that she possesses
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  Speaker 1: agency in a form that religious and social authorities can
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  Speaker 1: portray as disorderly, uncontrolled, and therefore threatening. Baldung's Weather Witches
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  Speaker 1: from 1523 is one of the most useful examples because
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  Speaker 1: the women were not presented as pathetic old hags crouching
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  Speaker 1: over some filthy cooking vessel, but as nude, physically attractive,
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  Speaker 1: sexually charged figures associated with the manipulation of weather itself.
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  Speaker 1: Which means the witch has now become powerful enough to
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  Speaker 1: reach beyond the household and apparently interfere with the sky. Storms, Hail,
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  Speaker 1: ruined harvests, dead livestock, damaged crops, failed fertility, spoiled food,
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  Speaker 1: and other forms of environmental or agricultural desire could all
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  Speaker 1: be folded into the language of Maleficent. And once that
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  Speaker 1: possibility takes hold in societies whose survival depends heavily on agriculture,
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  Speaker 1: the witch becomes an explanation for catastrophe that gives otherwise
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  Speaker 1: random suffering a human face, and therefore turns chaos into
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  Speaker 1: something morally intelligible. The psychological shift is extremely important. because
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  Speaker 1: misfortune becomes easier to interpret when it has an author.
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  Speaker 1: And while a storm may be frightening because it is
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  Speaker 1: chaotic and uncontrollable, a storm supposedly caused by a witch
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  Speaker 1: can be understood as the intentional act of an enemy.
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  Speaker 1: A failed harvest, an animal disease, infertility, or a sudden
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  Speaker 1: illness can become something more emotionally manageable once somebody can
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  Speaker 1: be blamed, investigated, punished, or removed, which means the witch
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  Speaker 1: gradually becomes more than a supernatural criminal and starts functioning
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  Speaker 1: as an explanation for the question that appears whenever communities
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  Speaker 1: suffer inexplicable loss. Why did this happen to us, and
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  Speaker 1: who wanted it to happen? That structure appears repeatedly in
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  Speaker 1: witch accusations, where illness, sterility, sudden death, spoiled milk, damaged crops,
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  Speaker 1: dead animals, impotence, miscarriages, and other forms of unexplained misfortune
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  Speaker 1: could be connected to quarrels, insults, failed charity, threats, gossip, grudges,
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  Speaker 1: or a socially difficult neighbor, and once those memories were
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  Speaker 1: rearranged through suspicion, an ordinary conflict could become retrospective evidence
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  Speaker 1: of occult aggression. A cow dies after someone argued with
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  Speaker 1: its owner, a child becomes sick after a woman has
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  Speaker 1: refused food, or a storm follows an angry exchange, and
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  Speaker 1: the coincidence becomes meaningful because the community already possesses a
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  Speaker 1: cultural explanation capable of turning bad luck into hostile intentions.
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  Speaker 1: Once learned demonology enters that process, the accusation becomes much
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  Speaker 1: larger than the local event that triggered it, because the
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  Speaker 1: woman who supposedly spoiled milk is no longer merely a
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  Speaker 1: troublesome neighbor, and the person accused of causing a storm
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  Speaker 1: is no longer simply somebody manipulating weather through illicit magic.
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  Speaker 1: The accused can now be imagined as a servant of Satan,
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  Speaker 1: and once the act is connected to hidden demonic organization,
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  Speaker 1: the local misfortune becomes evidence of a much larger spiritual
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  Speaker 1: war in which individual witches supposedly function as members of
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  Speaker 1: an underground enemy operating inside Christian society. That transformation is
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  Speaker 1: one of the reasons the witch's Sabbath becomes so important
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  Speaker 1: to the development of the stereotype. Because the Sabbath takes
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  Speaker 1: the idea of one suspicious person performing harmful magic and
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  Speaker 1: expands it into the image of a hidden collective whose
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  Speaker 1: members meet at night, travel from different locations, worship the devil,
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  Speaker 1: feast together, dance, engage in illicit sex, desecrate Christian symbols,
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  Speaker 1: harm children, receive magical instruction, and participate in rituals that
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  Speaker 1: reverse the moral structure of the surrounding world. The witch
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  Speaker 1: is no longer simply a deviant individual but a member
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  Speaker 1: of a counter-society. And the visual power of the Sabbath
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  Speaker 1: comes from the fact that it allows artists to show
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  Speaker 1: audiences an invisible organization that nobody could actually see in
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  Speaker 1: ordinary life. That is the real genius of Sabbath imagery,
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  Speaker 1: if we can use that word for something so grotesque.
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  Speaker 1: Because every conspiracy theory eventually faces the same basic problem
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  Speaker 1: of how to make an invisible enemy feel real to
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  Speaker 1: people who never seen it themselves. The solution is to
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  Speaker 1: create an image that claims to show the secret meeting
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  Speaker 1: the audience was never supposed to witness. And once that
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  Speaker 1: image exists, the absence of direct experience begins to matter
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  Speaker 1: less because the viewer has been given a ready-made mental
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  Speaker 1: picture of what the hidden world supposedly looks like when
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  Speaker 1: nobody respectable is present to observe it. Charles Zika's work
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  Speaker 1: on witch imagery becomes especially useful here because representations of
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: the Sabbath should not be treated as passive illustrations of
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: beliefs that already existed in complete form. Since those images
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: actively helped audiences imagine witchcraft as a collective social force.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: Charles Zika's work on witch imagery becomes especially useful here
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: because representations of the Sabbath should not be treated as
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  Speaker 1: passive illustrations of beliefs that already existed in complete form.
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  Speaker 1: since those images actively helped audiences imagine witchcraft as a
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  Speaker 1: collective social force. Crowded scenes filled with dancing bodies, animals, demons, smoke,
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  Speaker 1: ritual gestures, disorder, and the central presence of the devil
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  Speaker 1: make witchcraft look less like an isolated criminal act and
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  Speaker 1: more like a rival community with its own ceremonies, pleasures, hierarchies,
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  Speaker 1: and forms of belonging, which fundamentally changes the emotional scale
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  Speaker 1: of the threat. One witch can be imagined as a
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  Speaker 1: local criminal, but hundreds of witches meeting together suggested an
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  Speaker 1: organized enemy society. And once that idea becomes culturally plausible,
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  Speaker 1: vigilance can be justified as something necessary for the survival
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  Speaker 1: of the entire Christian community, rather than simply the prosecution
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  Speaker 1: of one alleged offender. The witch's dance becomes especially significant
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  Speaker 1: because ordinary communal dancing could symbolize celebration, courtship, seasonal festivity,
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  Speaker 1: social bonds, and legitimate community. So the same basic form
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  Speaker 1: becomes sinister when transferred into Sabbath imagery, where the dance
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: now represents the existence of a dark mirror society whose
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: members have their own bonds, pleasures, ceremonies, leaders, and collective identity.
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  Speaker 1: The witch therefore becomes dangerous not simply because she supposedly
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: rejects society, but because she is imagined as belonging to
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  Speaker 1: the wrong society and as Sabbath imagery grows more elaborate.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: the hidden world of witchcraft begins to acquire almost every
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: institution ordinary society possesses in reverse. The devil occupies the
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: place where Christian religious authority should be. Blasphemous rites replace
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  Speaker 1: legitimate worship. Illicit sexuality replaces sanctioned marriage. Murdered children replace
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  Speaker 1: protective offspring. Night replaces day. Secrecy replaces public religion. And
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  Speaker 1: the entire imagined community functions as the inverted version of
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  Speaker 1: the social order that demonologists believe Christianity was supposed to preserve.
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  Speaker 1: This logic of inversion also explains why apparently unrelated accusations
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: can accumulate so easily around the witch. Because once the
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: witch is understood as somebody who exists against the natural
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  Speaker 1: and Christian order, almost anything defined as unnatural, improper, deviant,
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  Speaker 1: or threatening can be attached to her without requiring a
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: single coherent origin. She can harm children because she is
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  Speaker 1: the opposite of the mother, destroy fertility because she is
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  Speaker 1: the opposite of reproductive order, poison because she is the
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  Speaker 1: opposite of the healer, worship the devil because she is
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  Speaker 1: the opposite of the Christian, fly because she violates limits
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  Speaker 1: of the body, manipulate weather because she violates the order
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  Speaker 1: of nature, and gather with other witches because she belongs
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  Speaker 1: to a hidden community opposed to the visible one. Print
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  Speaker 1: and repetition now close the self-reinforcing loop that had already
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: begun forming in Learned Demonology. Because somebody can see a
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  Speaker 1: print showing witches gathered around the devil, later hear a
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  Speaker 1: sermon describing similar gatherings, then encounter a pamphlet about local prosecution,
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  Speaker 1: hear rumors about confessions, and eventually see another image repeating
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  Speaker 1: many of the same details, at which point recurrence begins
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  Speaker 1: to feel like independent confirmation, even when those motifs are
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  Speaker 1: circulating through the same shared cultural system. The stories influence
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  Speaker 1: the artists, the artists influence the public, demonologists cite earlier demonologists,
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: judges ask questions shaped by existing theories, confessions are recorded
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: using categories the integrators already understand, pamphleteers emphasize the most
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: sensational details, and printers reproduce whatever attracts attention. So cultural
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: recycling gradually disguises itself as evidence. A story becomes an image,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: the image shapes an interrogation, the interrogation produces a confession,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: the confession becomes a pamphlet, and the pamphlet is then
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: treated as proof that the original story was correct, creating
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: a self-reinforcing loop in which repetition makes the invented structure
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: appear increasingly empirical. That cycle becomes far more dangerous once
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: printed trial literature begins attaching these demonological and visual stereotypes
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: to actual named human beings. because the imaginary witch is
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: no longer confined to theology, folklore, or art, but is
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: now being forced into living bodies through accusations, examinations, courtroom testimony, pamphlets,
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: and bodily searches. The culture no longer has to imagine
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: an anonymous supernatural enemy somewhere beyond the horizon, because it
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: can now point toward a neighbor, a widow, a beggar,
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: a healer, a difficult woman, a suspicious man, or anyone
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: else who can be made fit the existing models. And
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: once that happens, the monster acquires a name, a face,
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: an address, and eventually a trial date. The next stage
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: in the construction of the witch is therefore probably the
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: darkest one. Because once pamphlets, interrogators, witch finders, bodily examinations,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: and public executions begin forcing actual human beings into the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: framework that artists and demonologists have already constructed, European culture
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: stops merely imagining what the witch looks like and begins
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: searching for real people whose bodies animals, scars, reputations, and
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: misfortunes can be interpreted as evidence that the imaginary creature
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: has finally been found. One of the clearest places to
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: watch that process happen is in English trial pamphlets, where
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: the witch stops being an abstract theological category and becomes
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: a supposedly identifiable neighbor surrounded by names, animals, bodily signs,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: and sensational details that can be printed, sold, remembered, and reused.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: These pamphlets did more than report accusations because they also
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: taught readers what witchcraft was supposed to look like in practice,
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: which meant that a quarrel followed by illness, an oddly
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: behaving animal, an unexplained mark on somebody's body, or a
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: confession containing familiar demonological language could begin to resemble a
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: recognizable pattern precisely because the culture had already learned the
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: pattern from earlier stories. The 1566 Chelmsford proceedings surrounding Elizabeth
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: Francis and Agnes Waterhouse are especially useful because they immediately
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: destroy one of the most familiar pieces of modern witch imagery.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: Since the animal at the center of the story was
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: not a black cat at all, but a white spotted
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: cat called Satan or Satan. According to the printed account,
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: Francis claimed that the animal had been given to her
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: by her grandmother, that it spoke in a strange hollow voice,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: that it could perform services in exchange for blood, and
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: that it could be used as a weapon. and that
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: she eventually passed it to Agnes Waterhouse, after which the
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: creature was also described as taking the form of a toad.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Whether any part of that confession tells us what the
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: women themselves believed before interrogation is a separate historical problem.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: But as printed culture, the story was extraordinarily effective because
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: it gave the familiar spirit a name, a color, a
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: domestic setting, and a personality that readers could imagine far
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: more easily than an invisible demon. That distinction matters because
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: the familiar tradition in England was never originally reducible to
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: one standardized black cat, and the surviving accusations instead present
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: a bizarre menagerie of cats, dogs, toads, rabbits, lambs, polecats,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: and creatures that seem to hover somewhere between recognizable animals
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: and complete nightmare inventions. By the time Matthew Hopkins published
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: The Discovery of Witches in 1647, the printed frontispiece could
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: present alleged witches alongside a collection of named familiars whose
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: forms and names sound almost surreal, including Holt, Jomara, Vinegar Tom,
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: Sack and Sugar, Nues, and Grizzle Greedygut, with descriptions ranging
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: from a white kitten and a black rabbit to a
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: legless spaniel-like creature and something resembling a long-legged greyhound with
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: the head of an ox. The modern black cat therefore
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: represents another act of cultural compression, because a much broader
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: and stranger early modern familiar tradition was eventually reduced to
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: the one animal that later illustration, costume culture, and Halloween
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: found easiest to keep. The Familia also helped transform ordinary
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: bodies into supposed evidence, because English witchcraft theory increasingly imagined
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: that these spirits fed from a special teat or mark
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: on the witch, while related traditions described the devil's mark
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: left on the body as a sign of the demonic pact.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Once magistrates and searchers accepted that assumption, bodily examination could
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: become part of the prosecution process. and moles, scars, skin tags,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: unusual nipples, growths, insensitive patches, and other entirely normal forms
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: of human anatomical variation could be reclassified as physical proof
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: of an invisible crime. Modern scholarship on the devil's mark
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: is particularly useful here, because it shows that these searches
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: were not some fringe curiosity, but could become an accepted
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: evidentiary procedure whose supposed meaning depended on the cultural assumptions
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: brought to the examination in the first place. Scotland developed
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: the related practice of witch-pricking, in which supposed insensitive marks
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: were tested with pins, and one of the most famous practitioners,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: John Kikade of Haddington Shire, was active in the middle
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: of the 17th century before eventually being imprisoned on suspicion
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: of malpractice. Later stories sometimes claim that professional witch-pickers universally
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: tricked retractable bodkins to fake the results, but the surviving
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: evidence does not support turning that into another neat universal explanation.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: A recent scholarship on Kincaid specifically notes that a drawing
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: survives of an ordinary pin associated with his practice. Even here,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: where the history is already horrifying enough, later generations have
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: managed to add another layer of mythology on top of
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: the mythology that helped create the trials. This bodily search
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: is one of the places where the cartoon wart begins
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: to acquire a darker historical background, although it would be
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: too simple to claim that the Halloween wart descends directly
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: from one specific witch-mark doctrine. What matters is that European
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: culture had become accustomed to the idea that eternal evil
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: might announce itself through visible bodily irregularity, while artists simultaneously
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: exaggerated age, crooked posture, missing teeth, wrinkled skin, projecting chins,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: unusual noses, and other signs of physical difference until the
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: witch's body itself could function as a visual accusation. The
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: stereotype therefore became increasingly recognizable at exactly the same moment
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: that historical defendants remained visually ordinary, because there was no
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: reliable physical trade by which an actual accused witch could
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: have been identified before somebody had already decided to suspect them.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Theater then takes this increasingly recognizable vocabulary and gives it movement, sound, repetition,
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: and an audience, which Shakespeare's Macbeth first performed in the
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: early 17th century, becoming one of the most culturally durable examples.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Shakespeare's Weird Sisters Arrive Amid Thunder speak with familiar spirits
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: such as Grey Malkin and Paddock, gather around a cauldron,
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: throw grotesque animal and human ingredients into the pot, manipulate prophecy,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: and are described by Macbeth as secret black and midnight hags.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: Which means the play brings together weather, familiars, the cauldron,
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: bodily ambiguity, night, prophecy, poisonous ingredients, and political disorder inside
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: a theatrical experience that can be performed again and again
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: long after the specific demonological controversies surrounding the original production
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: have faded. The cauldron scene is particularly important because it
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: does not merely repeat earlier witch imagery, but helps make
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: the brewing witch performable, memorable, and endlessly reproducible, which later
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: theatrical history demonstrates how quickly a figure born inside an
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: atmosphere of genuine witch anxiety can migrate into entertainment. William
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: Devenot's restoration adaptation of Macbeth in 1664 transformed the Weird
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Sisters into spectacular singing and dancing stage figures. And for
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: more than a century, productions could play the witches partly
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: for comedy, with 18th century performers turning them into increasingly
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: theatrical characters rather than treating them exclusively as embodiments of
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: immediate supernatural terror. The supposed enemy of Christian society was
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: therefore already becoming a stage role why witchcraft prosecutions and
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: beliefs still remained within living memory. At almost exactly the
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: same historical moment Salvatore Rosa's Witches at Their Incantations, painted
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: around 1646, shows another extraordinary stage in that transformation, because
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: the painting piles together nearly every nightmare component the visual
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: tradition had accumulated. Naked witches, an aged crone, a cauldron,
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: a corpse hanging from a dead tree, magical instruments, a
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: wax effigy, a broom, a ritual circle, body parts, monsters, necromancy,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: and an infant being held toward the jaws of a
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: grotesque creature. Yet the painting was probably produced for a
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: wealthy Florentine collector, and according to Rose's own correspondence, it
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: was hung behind a curtain at the end of a
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: gallery so that it could be suddenly revealed to unsuspecting visitors.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: Which means that at a time when accusations of witchcraft
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: could still carry deadly consequences elsewhere in Europe, elite collectors
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: were already using witch imagery as a kind of intellectual
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: horror spectacle. That transition from accusation to spectacle is essential
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: because it explains how the witch survives even when the
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: institutions that prosecuted her begin to weaken, since a monster
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: that has already become visually compelling no longer needs a
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: courtroom in order to remain culturally useful. She can move
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: into paintings, theater, satire, fairy tale, children's literature, costume, and
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: eventually advertising, because the image has acquired a life separate
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: from the legal system that once treated similar claims as
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: evidence of a capital crime. It is also worth stopping
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: here to remember just how little unlike the stereotype many
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: historical defendants actually were. Because women formed the majority of
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: those accused in many regions but not everywhere, and witchcraft
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: prosecutions could involve men, married women, widows, younger people, Prosperous householders, laborers, healers, servants,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: socially marginal people, and individuals drawn into accusations through local
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: disputes that had nothing to do with looking remotely witch-like.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Iceland and parts of the Russian world are especially useful
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: reminders that the heavenly, feminized Western European image was not universal.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: While even within regions where older women were disproportionately vulnerable,
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: age itself never functioned as a reliable visual uniform. The
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: increasingly standardized witch, therefore, tells us at least as much
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: about what artists, demonologists, judges, printers, and audiences wanted an
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: enemy to look like as it tells us about the
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: people who actually stood in courtrooms accused of being one.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: By the time the pointed hat begins settling into the image,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: European culture has already spent centuries constructing witches who fly,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: summon storms, worship demons, gather at secret assemblies, keep animal familiars,
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: work around cauldrons, supposedly murder children, manipulate sexuality, and violate
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: the natural order. Which makes the hat particularly fascinating because
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: the object most people now use as the quickest possible
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: visual shorthand for witchcraft is not sitting there at the
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: beginning of the story waiting for us to discover it. Instead,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: the pointed witch hat appears to be the product of
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: repeated association, artistic convention, costume, caricature, and popular print rather
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: than the survival of one ancient piece of clothing worn
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: by an identifiable class of magical women. Modern witch history
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: becomes absolutely infested at this point with explanations that sound
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: so satisfying that people repeat them as settled fact. Because
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: depending on which article, meme, TikTok, or occult shop infographic
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: you encounter, the pointed hat supposedly came from medieval Hennans,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: Jewish Judenheit, Welsh women, Quakers, Puritans, convicted heretics, owl wives
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: advertising beer, or some combination of all of And the
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: frustrating answer is that no single one of those theories
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: has produced a clean historical birth certificate for the witch hat.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: There are meaningful visual parallels, and there are genuine histories
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: of pointed or unusually shaped headwear being used to mark status, gender, religion, ethnicity, fashion,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: or social difference. But resemblance alone does not establish a
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: direct line of descent, which means the responsible answer is
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: messier and therefore much more interesting. The hat seems to
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: become a witch hat because artists, illustrators, pamphleteers, performers, and
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: later costume makers keep putting similar hats on witch-like figures
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: until the audience no longer needs an explanation, and once
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: that repeated visual association becomes strong enough, the hat stops
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: being merely a piece of clothing and becomes a symbol
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: that communicates an entire category. That process appears especially clearly
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: by the 18th century. when popular illustrations and figures such
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: as Mother Shipton begin bringing together the aged female face,
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: exaggerated nose, dark clothing, prophetic or supernatural associations, and a
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: conspicuous peaked hat in ways that are much closer to
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: the figure we now recognize. Mother Shipton is useful here
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: precisely because she shows how folklore, prophecy, print culture, and
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: caricature can merge into witch imagery even when the historical
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: person behind the legend remains difficult to reconstruct. Later images
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: exaggerate her face, nose, age, and clothing until she becomes
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: almost a prototype of the visual hag. And by the
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: time those images are widely circulated, the old woman with
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: the prominent hat and supernatural reputation has become something audiences
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: can recognize instantly without needing a demonologist to explain what
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: she represents. By this point, the earlier inversion of domestic
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: life has also hardened into a visual vocabulary in which
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: the broom, cauldron, herbs, animals, hearth, and household space can
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: communicate witchcraft almost automatically. So that cleaning becomes magical transportation,
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: cooking becomes poison making, herbal knowledge becomes illicit occult practice,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: food preparation becomes cannibalistic fantasy, household animals become demons, and
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: the home itself becomes a place where hidden supernatural crimes
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: are supposedly manufactured, with the accusation working precisely because the
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: imagined laboratory is not exotic at all, but the kitchen.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: That symbolic reversal becomes even more powerful once the witch
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: begins moving away from the actual villages and neighborhoods in
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: which historical accusations normally occurred and into the forest. Because
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: the witch of fairytale and popular folklore increasingly inhabits a
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: landscape quite different from the social world of many early
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: modern defendants. Historical accusations usually emerge inside communities through relationships
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: between neighbors, families, creditors, beggars, employers, clients, and local authorities.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: But the later fairy tale witch becomes a creature of
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: the boundary, somebody encountered beyond the village, beyond the road,
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: beyond ordinary supervision, and often beyond the protection supposedly provided
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: by civilization. The deep forest becomes the perfect environment for
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: this transformed witch because it already represents uncertainty, hunger, isolation,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: wild animals, disorientation, and the possibility that familiar rules no
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: longer apply. and stories such as Hansel and Gretel strengthen
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: the association between the old woman in the woods, the
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: isolated cottage, food, children, deception, and cannibalistic danger. The witch
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: who supposedly lived among her neighbors has now been relocated
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: into the wilderness, where she becomes less like an accused
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: human being and more like a monster waiting at the
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: edge of childhood imagination. That distraction is one of the
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: most important answers to the question that started this entire episode.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: because the image of some feral old woman living by
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: herself in a crooked forest cottage is not a straightforward
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: portrait of the people prosecuted during the major European witch hunts.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: It is a hybrid built from legal accusation, older hag traditions,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: folk narrative, children's literature, and the symbolic opposition between civilization
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: and wilderness. And once fairy tales reinforce it strongly enough,
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: the forest becomes so natural of a home for the
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: witch that that later audiences assumed she must always have
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: lived there. By the 18th and 19th centuries, another important
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: shift has occurred because in many parts of Europe, the
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: legal machinery of major witch prosecution is weakening or disappearing
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: while the witch herself remains culturally alive. Courts become more skeptical,
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: intellectual elites increasingly ridicule old demonological claims, and the witch
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: who had once been presented as an immediate criminal and
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: religious threat begins changing occupations, moving out of the courtrooms
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: and into satire, folklore, theater, children's stories, illustration, and entertainment.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: That transition is crucial because the decline of belief does
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: not destroy the image. Instead, it frees the image from
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: the need to function as evidence, which means artists can
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: exaggerate it even further without having to pretend they are
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: documenting an actual criminal population. The witch can become funnier, uglier, stranger,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: more theatrical, more heavily costumed, and more instantly recognizable. And
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: once she is primarily a character rather than a defendant,
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: visual consistency becomes more useful than historical accuracy. One of
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the best bridges between the prosecuted witch and the later
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: cultural witch appears in the work of Francisco Goya at
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: the end of the 18th century, because Goya inherits a
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: visual vocabulary that audiences already recognize while using it in
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: an enlightenment environment where witchcraft can increasingly function as a
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: language for superstition, ignorance, social fear, irrationality, and human foolishness
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: rather than a straightforward documentary evidence that organized satanic conspiracies
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: actually exist. Around 1797 and 1798, he produced a cluster
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: of witch images connected with the Capriccius and a series
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: of paintings on witchcraft subjects for the Duke and Duchess
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: of Osuna, including Witch's Flight, where supernatural flight, strange headgear,
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: terrified spectators, and grotesque ritual imagery remain visually alive even
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: though the cultural work performed by the witch has changed.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: That shift is almost perfect for a larger argument because
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: the image survives while its meaning mutates, and Goya can
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: use witches from popular imagination to attack ignorance and superstition
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: at the same time that wealthy patrons can collect witch
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: scenes as art. By this point, the witch no longer
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: needs to be believed in exactly the way Kramer or
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Hopkins wanted her to be believed in, because centuries of
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: repetition have already made her useful as a symbol, and
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: once a figure can symbolize irrationality, fear, transgression, comedy, horror, folklore,
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: or fantasy, depending on context, she has become culturally harder
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: to kill than the legal belief system that once prosecuted
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: people in her name. The theater was undergoing the same transformation.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: Since Shakespeare's Weird Sisters have already spent generations being reinterpreted
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: for different audiences, and late 18th century artists such as
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: Henry Fuseli could return to Macbeth and visualize the sisters
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: again without simply reproducing a standardized Halloween hag. The theater
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: was undergoing the same transformation. Since Shakespeare's Weird Sisters already
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: spent generations being reinterpreted for different audiences, and late 18th
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: century artists such as Henry Fusilli could return to Macbeth
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: and visualize the sisters again without simply reproducing a standardized
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: Halloween hag. The result is a revealing reminder that, even
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: this late in the story, the image of the witch
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: was still far from fixed. Stage traditions, painting, print culture, folklore,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: prophetic figures such as Mother Shipton and evolving costume conventions
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: all offer different versions of what a dangerous supernatural woman
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: was supposed to look like. It was only during the
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: 19th century that these competing images began to collapse into
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: the more standardized and recognizable witch costume we know today.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: By the 19th century, that consistency has become strong enough
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: that we began finding something far more revealing than paintings
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: of supposed witches. Because in 1884 edition of the Victorian
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: Fancy Dress Manual, fancy dresses described or What to Wear
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: at Fancy Bowls gives us descriptions of witch costumes involving
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: pointed hats, brooms, black clothing, and decorations featuring creatures such
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: as cats, toads, serpents, frogs, bats, and lizards, sometimes even
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: placing a black cat on the shoulder. And this is
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: a massive milestone because the stereotype has now crossed from
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: representation into performance. The culture is no longer merely drawing
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: a witch for audiences to fear or laugh at. It
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: is teaching audiences how to put the image onto their
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: own bodies. That happens more than a half a century
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: before the Wizard of Oz, which means Hollywood did not
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: invent the Black Witch costume, and by the late 19th century,
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: the visual package is already familiar enough to function as
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: a fancy dress without a theological explanation attached to it.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: Somebody can put on that hat, grab the broom, surround
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: themselves with creepy animals, and become instantly legible as a witch,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: even though the person wearing the costume may know absolutely
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: nothing about NIDIRR, Kramer, Molitor, Bulldung, Sabbath demonology, familiar spirits,
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: the legal history of witch prosecution, and probably anything about
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: magical witchcraft in itself. At almost the same moment, the
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: witch also becomes merchandise, and Salem provides one of the
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: most beautifully ironic examples because in 1891, the Salem company
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: Daniel Lowe and Company marketed its famous Witch City Souvenir Spoon,
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: using witch imagery and the history of Salem trials as
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: a commercial identity. The transformation here is almost impossible to overstate,
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: because a word once capable of helping destroy a person's reputation, liberty,
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: and life has now become something capable of selling silverware,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: turning the accused witch into a tourist attraction, the terrifying
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: conspiracy into municipal branding, and the symbol of supposed satanic
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: danger into a souvenir. Once that happens, the witch no
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: longer belongs primarily to demonology or prosecution history because she
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: belongs to consumer culture. and consumer culture has an enormous
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: incentive to simplify her further. A complicated historical defendant is
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: useless on a postcard, but a pointed hat, a broom,
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: a black hat, and a crescent moon can communicate which
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: in a half a second, which means commercial imagery gradually
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: compresses centuries of contradictory history into a logo. Halloween accelerates
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: the process because sensational decoration depends on instant recognition, and
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: as postcards, paper decorations, Party guides, costumes, advertisements, and children's
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: products circulate through the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: the witch becomes increasingly standardized as a black-clad, broom-riding, pointed
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: hat figure associated with cats, moons, cauldrons, bats, and the night.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: By this point, the theological structure underneath the image can
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: disappear almost completely, while the silhouette remains intact, which is
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: probably the clearest demonstration of how successful the visual construction
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: has become. The propaganda no longer needs the belief system
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: that created it, because the audience does not need to
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: believe that witches attend satanic sabbaths in order to know
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: what a witch looks like. And that separation between image
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: and belief prepares the way for the event that will
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: probably do more than anything else to globalize the modern stereotype.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: Because in 1939, Hollywood takes a character that has already
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: been assembled over centuries, places her in Technicolor, and adds
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: one final feature that will eventually feel so natural that
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: millions of people assume witches have always possessed it. The
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: final major transformation arrives in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz,
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: and Hollywood does not need to invent the witch because
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: centuries of European art, demonology, folklore, commercial illustration, costume culture,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: and Halloween imagery have already done most of the work,
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: which means Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West can
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: walk onto the screen wearing black, carrying a broom, displaying
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: an exaggerated angular face beneath an enormous pointed hat, and
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: be immediately recognizable as a witch before the audience knows
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: anything meaningful about her character. What the film did add
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: was one of the most famous features in the entire
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: modern stereotype, because Hamilton's face was painted green for the
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: Technicolor production, even though L. Frank Baum's original novel had
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: never established green skin as some traditional characteristic of witches.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: and the enormous culture success of the film helped turn
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: a 20th century cinematic design decision into something that now
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: feels almost ancient. This is an incredible example of cultural
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: memory working backwards. Because once an image becomes dominant enough,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: people begin assuming that whatever they encountered first must somehow
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: represent what came before it. And the green-skinned witch now
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: appears on Halloween decorations, cartoons, advertisements, costumes, toys, children's books,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: television programs, and practically every imaginable form of popular culture
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: despite having almost nothing to do with the people historically
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: accused of witchcraft. The same thing happened earlier with the
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: pointed hat and the forest cottage, and the process reveals
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: how easily cultural repetition can manufacture false antiquity, because an
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: image does not need to be ancient to feel ancient
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: when generations of people have stopped remembering the moment when
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: it was invented. By the 20th century, almost every major
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: part of the familiar witch could be present in one character,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: even though those individual pieces had entered the tradition at
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: completely different moments, under completely different circumstances, and sometimes for
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: completely different reasons. The broom belonged to a late medieval
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: visual world of supernatural flight. The cauldron developed through early
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: printed witch imagery and the aversions of domestic labor. The
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: animal familiar emerged from demonological and trial traditions that included
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: far more than cats. The pointed hat solidified comparatively late
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: through the repeated popular association. The forest cottage owed enormous
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: depths to fairytale, The grotesque old face grew from older
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: traditions of age, bodily difference, and moralized physiognomy, and green
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: skin arrived through modern cinema. Yet popular culture eventually stitched
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: those pieces together so successfully that the finished product now
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: looks as though it had always existed. The same process
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: is why so many modern explanations for the witch costume
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: need to be treated with caution. Because once people realized
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: that the image was constructed, there was a powerful temptation
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: to replace one false ancient story with another equally satisfying one.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: The idea that the entire witch costume descends neatly from
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: female ale brewers, that essentially all accused witches were persecuted
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: herbalists or midwives, that broomsticks were routinely used as sexual
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: applicators for hallucinogenic flying ointments, or that millions upon millions
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: of witches were burned across Europe can all function as counter-mythology.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: Stories created partly to rescue the witch from the demonologists,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: but which sometimes reproduce the same problem, by treating messy
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: historical processes as though they must have one secret explanation
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: underneath them. The reality is less tidy and considerably stranger,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: because historical witchcraft persecution involved different laws, beliefs, social conflicts, genders, occupation,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: theological systems, local traditions, and political circumstances depending on where
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: and when we look. While the stereotypical witch became increasingly uniformed,
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: precisely because visual culture rewards simplification. The actual history becomes
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: complicated at the same moment the image becomes simple, and
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: eventually the simple image wins because a silhouette can travel
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: farther than an archive. That brings us to one final irony,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: and it may be the strangest part of the entire story,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: because if you walk through certain modern occult festivals, browse
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: witchcraft social media, enter a metaphysical shop, or simply look
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: at the contemporary witch aesthetic, you will sometimes see people
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: deliberately rebuilding the exact character we have spent this entire
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: episode dismantling. complete with black clothing, pointed hats, brooms, cauldrons,
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: black hats, crooked branches, moon imagery, herb bottles, forest symbolism,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: and the suggestion of a mysterious woman who exists somewhere
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: beyond respectable society. Some of that is obviously playful, cosplay,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: or maybe just simple lack of understanding of witchcraft and
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: the occult. And some of it is openly theatrical. And
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: some of it represents conscious reclamation, because taking a symbol
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: once used to portray somebody as dangerous, ugly, deviant or
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: socially unacceptable and turning it into an image of independence
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: could be a genuinely powerful cultural act. The problem begins
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: when reclamation gets confused with historical authenticity. Because somebody trying
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: to reconstruct a supposedly ancient witch identity may unknowingly be
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: dressing themselves in an image assembled partly by the very
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: people who feared, persecuted, caricatured, commercialized, and fictionalized witches in
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: the first place. And let's even think about this too
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: for a second. How much money do witches make off
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: of the death of other witches in Salem? If someone
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: today tries to look more witchy, it is worth asking
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: which historical witch they were supposedly trying to resemble. Because
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: it is probably not the ordinary married woman accused after
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: a neighborhood dispute. Not the Icelandic man persecuted for sorcery.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: Not the cunning practitioner selling charms. not the prosperous defendant
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: caught in local politics, and not any number of people
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: whose appearance would have given a modern observer absolutely no
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: clue that anybody would someday call them a witch. What
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: modern witch aesthetics often resemble, instead, is the imagery which
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: produced by demonologists, artists, pamphleteers, fairy tale writers, costume designers,
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: Halloween manufacturers, and filmmakers, which creates the almost absurd possibility
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: that a person can reject the witch hunter's religion while
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: still wearing the witch hunter's imaginary witch. That does not
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: make modern witchcraft meaningless, and it does not make reclamation illegitimate,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: because symbols constantly change meaning when new communities adopt them.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: But it does not mean that the pointed hat should
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: never be mistaken for evidence of some unchanged prehistoric witch
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: tradition simply because it feels old. The meaning can be
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: reserved while the silhouette survives, and propaganda does not always
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: survive because later generations continue believing the original accusation. Sometimes
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: it survives because the image was so successful that nobody
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: remembers it began as somebody else's idea of what the
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: enemy was supposed to look like. After everything we have followed,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: from Circe and Medea, to Roman hags, medieval night travelers,
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: 15th century heresy, nighters' hidden sect, broom-riding women, moliters' printed witches,
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: durers' inverted world, bulldogs' sexual and weather-working women, Sabbath conspiracies,
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: familiar spirits, witch marks, trial pamphlets, Fairytale Forest, Mother Shipton,
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: Victorian Costumes, Salem Souvenirs, Halloween Merchandise, and Hollywood Technicolor, there's
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: almost nothing left in the stereotypical witch that belongs to
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: one historical population. Because that population never existed in the
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: fucking first place. The people accused were real, the fear
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: was real, the trial was real, the prisons were real,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: and the execution was real, but the universally recognized old
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: woman in the pointed hat was something culture gradually built
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: out of centuries of anxiety, accusation, art, ignorance, and commerce.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: We did not discover what a witch looked like. We
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: taught ourselves what a witch was supposed to look like,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: and eventually the image became so powerful that real people
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: began trying to resemble it, which means the old woman
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: crossing the moon on a broomstick is not an ancient
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: photograph of pagan Europe preserved intact through the centuries, but
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: something far stranger. One of the largest collaborative art projects
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: in Western history. assembled partly by the people who feared witches,
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: partly by the people who hunted them, partly by the
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: people who sold them, and eventually by the people who
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: decided to become them. Maybe the final stage in the
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: history of witch propaganda then is not that witch disappeared
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: at all, but that after centuries of being constructed by
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: other people, the witch finally took possession of her own caricature.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: And that's the end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: all enjoyed, and until the next one.