Dæmonologie

3 Dæmonologie

Transgressive women have often been called witches. They have allegedly always been with us, transgressing peaceful society at least since the time of the Old Testament: Exodus says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ the first of several references to witchcraft in the Old Testament.

There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son, or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Deuteronomy Ch. 18

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry: because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king. First Book of Samuel Ch. 15

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And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand, and thou shalt have no more Soothsayers Book of Micah Ch. 5

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Accusations of witchcraft were a common way of subjugating women, as even pre-feminist female writers noted.

The belief in witches persisted for centuries; the Witchcraft Act in England was passed in 1563, when Elizabeth I was newly on the throne and was not repealed until 1951, shortly before Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, about

Whatever the pretext made for witchcraft persecution we have abundant proof that the so-called ‘witch’ was among the most profoundly scientific persons of the age. The church having forbidden its offices and all external methods of knowledge to woman, was profoundly stirred with indignation at her having through her own wisdom, penetrated into some of the most deeply subtle secrets of nature: and it was a subject of debate during the middle ages if learning for woman was not an additional capacity for evil, as owing to her, knowledge had first been introduced in the world. In penetrating into these arcana, woman trenched upon that mysterious hidden knowledge of the church which it regarded as among its most potential methods of controlling mankind.

Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State, 1893

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the so-called Salem witches: young women who were supposed to have done harm to men by using sympathetic magic, creating ‘poppets,’ replicas of the person they wanted to hurt.

The witch was seen as transgressive, but she was thought not to do the harm of herself, just to be a conduit for a demon, with whom she may have had sex as an incubus. Witches could also be succubi, stealing men’s semen in their sleep like Lilith. People believed in this absolutely, and not just uneducated, superstitious people. King James I of England commissioned others to write what we now call the King James Bible, but he had previously written a book on witches, Dæmonologie, himself, discussing among other things their use of poppets.

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To some others at these times he teacheth how to make Pictures of wax or clay: That by the roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of, may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness.

The witches in the Salem trials and in many of the similar trials in Europe were young women or girls, but the popular image of a witch is of an old and ugly woman.

For hundreds of years any woman who did not look, dress and behave as men thought she should could be accused of being a witch: between 1482 and 1782, around a hundred thousand women across Europe were accused of witchcraft, and some forty to fifty thousand were executed for transgressions they didn’t commit.

One sort of such as are said to be witches, are women which be commonly old, lame, bleary-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles; poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as know no religion: in whose drowsy minds the devil hath gotten a fine seat; so as, what mischief, mischance, calamity, or slaughter is brought to pass, they are easily persuaded the same is done by themselves; imprinting in their minds an earnest and constant imagination thereof. They are lean and deformed, shewing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish. Reginald Scott, The Discovery of Witchcraft

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