Woman, Witch, Other
Reclaiming the Lost Worlds of European Witches
For this year’s Samhain season, The Tilt is diving into the lost worlds of witches and explores the ways in which relational worlds have come under similar scrutiny in Europe, as in other places, under the rise of Western Modernity. This long-form article merges decolonial and ecofeminist insights and is based on an unpublished academic paper, written by the author as part of their MSc in Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden.
As modern beings, many of us have lost touch with relational ways of understanding the world. Decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez writes in Vistas of Modernity that decoloniality calls for “the recovery of relationality”. He asks,
“How can we remember ourselves Earth-bodies? How can we remember ourselves always already communal? How can we remember ourselves in time, in relation to those that procede us?”
With the base of our existence as always rooted in our relations, Vazquez notes that we “could not be alive if we were not in this net of relations that is sustaining us, the Earth that is sustaining us, the community that is sustaining us, and those that preceded us without whom we wouldn’t be here”.
Such a call for “the recovery of relationality” can be understood as a call to actively listen to and learn from the many peoples and lifeworlds that were colonized, to explore what it means to decolonize ourselves and retrace our own rootedness in networks of relations, and to reconnect to an ancestry that was once Earth-based but that so many of us have come to neglect and reject through the hegemony of Western Modernity.
Despite growing up in Western European countries that experienced some of the highest concentrations of witch trials in the early modern period, I was taught little about these terrors and happenings. A silence that is less surprising when one considers that witch-hunts are one of the most understudied phenomena in world history. It was only through the feminist movement, as notes Marxist-feminist theorist Silvia Federici, that such studies were revived. In Caliban and the Witch she writes that feminists “were quick to recognize that hundreds of thousands of women could not have been massacred and subjected to the cruellest tortures unless they posed a challenge to the power structure”.
But how could such subjugation and erasure be legitimized?
Colonial Politics of Being
Colonial violence, and other current systemic issues like racism and ableism, are characterized by othering, a practice through which Western Modernity has come to justify and legitimize the expropriation, dehumanization and domination of diverse peoples, knowledges and lifeworlds.
In the words of decolonial scholar Julia Suárez-Krabbe, such a practice forms part of a “colonial politics of being” and refers to a mode of existential and material violence that uses the “negation of the other” to establish a norm: the norm of humanness, of what it means to be human.
In the case of the European witch-hunts, such othering was actively used to portray women (mainly poor and working-class women) as Other. The aim was to “produce” women as another species — as “savage” beings, who were “mentally weak, unsatiably lusty, rebellious, insubordinate”, and “incapable of self-control”, writes Federici.
The witch-hunts were used to frame the “darker side” of women as both unruly and perverted, and symbolically linked to the chaotic and disorderly side of nature.
Misogynistic narratives were also born from the practice of witch-hunting. In The Death of Nature, ecofeminist philosopher and historian Carolyn Merchant, analyses how the witch-hunts were used to frame the “darker side” of women as both unruly and perverted, and symbolically linked to the chaotic and disorderly side of nature. As the witch became a “symbol of the violence of nature”, she soon had to be dominated and subdued. For Merchant, a nature-culture divide lies undeniably at the core of portraying women as Other and legitimizing their persecution as witches:
“In early modern Europe, the assumption of a nature-culture dichotomy was used to justify keeping women in their place in the established hierarchical order of nature, where they were placed below the men of their status group.”
Since the modern-colonial expansion, indigenous peoples of the Americas suffered a similar fate. They were actively reduced to the category of natural objects, writes Portuguese sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos, where notions of “savage” and “nature” became “two sides of the same purpose”: that of domestication, of turning “savage nature” into a natural resource. Ecofeminist Ariel Salleh similarly affirms that during this time “sexual and racialised metaphors were used interchangeably by ruling elites: just as women were described as closer to nature and unclean, so were natives”.
Racial and sexual differences were then used to distinguish between those categorized as humans and nonhumans. In the sexual sphere, “a distinction was traced between necessary and dispensable women”, writes Argentinian decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo: Those perceived as “dispensable” were framed as witches, whereas those perceived as “necessary” had to fit into the role of wives, whose main role was to “secure the regeneration of the species”.
The reason why some and not all women were cast aside as witches during the witch hunts was, indeed, that women, in their role as wives and mothers, were indispensable for the establishment of capitalist relations. By providing unpaid reproductive labor, women ensured the delivery and care for workers that in turn sustained and became part of the capitalist workforce. The assault on women’s bodies and the persecution of witches served the goal of European elites to regain power and control over the sphere of reproduction, writes Federici. The attempt to keep control of the woman’s body in a capitalist society is still obvious today, and the Roe vs. Wade overturn is a blatant example.
By providing unpaid reproductive labor, women ensured the delivery and care for workers that in turn sustained and became part of the capitalist workforce.
But it wasn’t just that some women were viewed as “dispensable” and therefore framed as unruly witches; rather, their mode of existence posed a serious threat to the establishment and legitimacy of a new social order and therefore had to be devalued and erased.
The witch embodied “a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt”, writes Federici. But why did the world of witches pose such a serious threat?
Disenchant and Rule
Many decolonial scholars point towards the colonial expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries as the beginning of the modern colonial world system. Feminist theorists note that it wasn’t a coincidence that the witch-hunts happened around the same time. Similar strategies were employed by social elites to demonize and erase the lifeworlds of both European women and colonial subjects of the New World. “In both cases, we have the forcible removal of entire communities from their land, large-scale impoverishment, the launching of “Christianizing” campaigns destroying people’s autonomy and communal relations,” says Federici. Both, the subjugation of witches in early-modern Europe and indigenous peoples in the Americas were crucial in the establishment and transition to a colonial and capitalist Modernity.
But why specifically became women the target of erasure in early modern Europe?
At the time, women were knowledge holders of rites, rituals and customs that were seen as embedded in their local and communal relations.
At the time, women were knowledge holders of rites, rituals and customs that were seen as embedded in their local and communal relations. Women were, for instance, responsible for marking animals during times of sickness and knew how to use local herbs to heal and assist their neighbours. It was thus through their roles as folk healers, midwives, herbalists, sorcerers, ecological knowledge-holders and performers of divination that women were most commonly persecuted as witches.
The world “had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated”.
Around the 15th century, witchcraft was declared one of the highest crimes “against God, Nature, and the State”. As the world of witchcraft was seen as animistic, anti-hierarchical and “everywhere infused with spirits”, Merchant argues that it posed a serious threat to the Church and the social elites attempting to mechanize the world. Female practices and belief-systems, rooted in animistic and relational modes of existence, were incompatible with the emerging power structure of capitalist Modernity and its mechanical conceptions of work, reproduction and rationality. The world, as writes Federici, “had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated”.
Through terror and criminalization, the witch-hunts destroyed “a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe”. The witch-hunts were therefore a direct assault on the animistic and relational lifeworlds of pre-modern and early modern women.
Removing animist conceptions about the world and cosmos ultimately led to, what Merchant calls, “the death of nature”. The world, once perceived and worshipped as a beautiful organism, became a “mere system of dead, inert particles” legitimizing its exploitation and manipulation ever since.
Enabling pathways for collective liberation
Seeking to decolonize my own relationship with the more-than-human world, it was through my exposure to decolonial scholarship and the teachings of indigenous leaders, such as Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe), Anne Wilson Schaef, and Lyla June, that I was reminded of the necessity to explore my own Earth-based ancestrality. As Rowen White, a Seedkeeper and activist from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, recalled on For The Wild: “Each one of us descends from people who have been in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with plants and seeds since the dawning of time”.
When we zoom out into history, we can spot commonalities between processes of othering that have led to a colonial and capitalist world order at the expense of relational worlds. Worlds that once also constituted parts of “Europe”, beyond its Colonizer identity. This, of course, is not to deny Europe’s continuous role and responsibility for ongoing processes of coloniality. Rather, it serves to show that the European witch-hunts are one of many examples through which relational worlds came to be erased during the rise of Western Modernity.
We must engage in decolonizing and restoring our relationship with the Earth, as — in Arturo Escobar’s words — “we cannot be intimate with the Earth within a mechanistic paradigm”. We must shift onto narratives that enable us to reunite the scientific and the emotional, the sacred and the universe, and the human and the non-human.
I wonder whether the writing of a new story starts both by listening to and fighting for the rights of those still immersed in relational worlds and by retracing our own Earth-based rootedness — no matter where our roots may lie. I remember being deeply moved by Lyla June’s personal essay on reclaiming her Indigenous European roots, coming from both Diné and European lineage. She writes:
“Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves. Our task is to remember that we are those beautiful Earth People […] When we remember this, the healing of our lineages comes full circle […] When we remember this, we will remember that the fates of all beings are intertwined with our own.”
“Our task is to honor our ancestors, even those who caved beneath the weight of systematic destruction and became conquerors themselves.”
Maybe this is how we can engage in enabling pathways for collective liberation; By looking at our pasts, our histories, at how a colonial and mechanical world managed to arise. By actively listening to colonized lifeworlds and reconnecting to roots that were once relational. Maybe this is how we can engage in closing the divide of “us” versus “them”. By practicing how to see ourselves in “the Other”.
