The Witches Are Still on Trial

Amelia Casey-Rerhaye, Co-Deputy Editor, BA Arabic 09/12/2024

I listened to a podcast recently, a BBC Radio 4 production called ‘Witch.’ In it, the presenter, India Rakusen of ‘28-ish Days Later,’ spends 13 episodes exploring witches and all the matters surrounding them. I was hooked from the beginning, and spent the next week with half my mind lost in the woods of rural England and crags of the Highlands. It reignited a part of me that had been buried under piles of washing up, university work and other mundane aspects of student life. I used to be obsessed with fairies and folklore as a kid, and when I got a bit older, it turned into a fascination with the occult, listening to the sounds around me and being plagued by the idea that there was something just out of reach, just there, and if I could just get the right timing or the right angle, then maybe…? This, of course, could very much all be in my head, but that’s no fun. 

The podcast covered a scope of topics, from the Witch Trials in the UK and Europe, to myth and mistold stories, to the present day Witchtok and capitalist interests. It began under the pretext of trying to decipher what it meant to be a ‘witch,’ but I think more explored what it means to be a woman. I find this to be a question recurring in the lives of myself and the female friends around me, as cliché as that sounds. 22 has carried a shift in our perception of society which we have all felt to varying degrees. Something to do with the frontal lobe development, we’re told, though to me it feels like lifting up rose-tinted glasses, slowly revealing the horrors of reality. The women who were hunted and turned on by their own communities during the trials are the same women who walk home after a night out, followed by a shadowy drunk figure, or groped by their boss. We’re constantly confronted with the fact that we are women; we are living the female experience, a collective, transgenerational experience. How very ‘Me Too’ of me, I know.

A lot of researchers say that those penalised during the witch trials were mostly women who lived alone, women who preferred the outskirts of their villages and maybe had more knowledge or understanding of the environment and nature than was deemed normal. The trials were a way of pointing blame for things that went wrong, such as bad harvests or failed skirmishes. Women were used as scapegoats, as a way of explaining the difficulties and despair brought about by natural events… like the weather. The Scottish Witch Trials were hugely encouraged by an account written by King James VI of Scotland. This account describes a storm in which his ships were caught, almost killing him and his new queen. He blamed it entirely on witches and condemned it as an attempt on his life. Approximately 60,000 women were killed during the Witch Trials in Europe, 2,500 in Scotland alone. Horribly, brutally, and for no reason. There aren’t any monuments in the UK which specify that these women were unjustly killed - only that they were killed, be that burned, hanged, drowned, or tortured to death. 

However, in 2022, a petition reached the Scottish parliament. The Witches of Scotland campaign demanded a few things, one of which was a formal apology from Parliament to those women who were part of the Trials. On International Women's Day 2022, Nicola Sturgeon, as First Minister of Scotland, gave a formal apology to all who were the subject of the Witchcraft Act of 1563, and described it as the brutal miscarriage of justice that it was. 

Misogyny in the purest sense of the word is how Nicola Sturgeon put it. She was ridiculed by some after her apology, people claimed she was grappling for things to say and do. I’m just sad it took four centuries to be said. 

I sobbed at the table in my living room when I heard this. I have never previously been very interested in the Trials, no more than your average person at least. I remember learning about them in school, seeing drawings of the stake burnings and thinking: ‘Wow that looks rough, I’m glad we’re not in the Middle Ages anymore, anyway when’s break time?’ I was shocked at the tears on my face. But it makes sense; people were abused. They were innocent yet they were strangled and burned, and it was lawfully done. They were not witches, they were women. 

Women of our age grew up with this knowledge of history, as well as the stories of witches in fairy tales - Brothers Grimm and Baba Yaga; we’re told of the Evil Woman and the Single Woman and the woman who talks to animals. All the old crones and evil step-mothers in folklore build up to a clear mistrust of women. Women are something to be feared and contained, controlled and monitored. This sentiment is a constant, it can be found everywhere we look in society: Roe v Wade or the mass graves of unmarried women and their children found in the Magdalene Laundries and other convents in Ireland. Women face violence as a fact of life; it’s a generational trauma that no amount of therapy is going to make go away.

The hatred and fear behind the Witch Trials still exist today, and penetrate deeply into our health care systems. Every girl and woman I know has had to fight to be heard in a doctor's appointment - I know stories of endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) being dismissed as exaggerations and normal period pains, and diabetes symptoms being disregarded as just ‘exam stress’ (a real experience of someone I know). I once called my GP to discuss why I was feeling so depressed before my period. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) was the diagnosis and I was offered antidepressants, or the classic, ‘have you tried the pill?’ As it turns out, a bit more magnesium and iodine in my diet did the trick. Shocker. The lack of knowledge surrounding women's health is terrifying, but unsurprising. During the Trials, a big proportion of the women attacked were midwives, and women who specialised in women’s ‘affairs.’ No real effort has been made in our society to truly understand women as beings. As a result, we don’t know ourselves, the unknown is feared and shunned, and we are left severed from our bodies.

Witches or not, women are inherently connected to nature. Our bodies sync to cycles of the moon and we are built with space to create life within us. The male hormone cycle is 24-hours, a much faster turnover and higher rate of metabolism. It comes as no surprise then that our societies are dictated by the fast paced efficiency of our 24-hour cities - which simply does not align with our physical needs. In the constant need for growth and expansion and more of the past few centuries we have completely detached ourselves from the earth and environment, considering it something to manage rather than our home. 

I try to walk in Highgate Woods as much as possible. When I’m there, the sounds of the city disappear, the fumes are blocked by lines of trees and I just walk, noticing the leaves on the ground or the mushrooms on the trunk of an oak tree. Sometimes I’ll say hello to a magpie or pause to have a little stare off with a squirrel. I’ll come home and drink some chamomile tea or smell lavender from my diffuser and feel calm. These simple things, mildly witchy, centre me in my surroundings and my body. I’ll snuggle in bed with my flatmates, or call my mum. I think about Practical Magic and Midnight Margaritas or the women who were hurt for healing others.  

Covens and midwives, ‘fertility cults’ and ‘orgies with the devil,’ that’s what was condemned during the Witch Trials. Groups of women helping each other, essentially. Sometimes, I want my rose-tinted glasses back on, growing up is all a bit too much and I’d just prefer it to stop. But the bond that I have with my best friends, with my mum, my aunts and women on the street who ask if this strange man is bothering me, just gets stronger with age. The relationships still exist, women still bond together and make herbal remedies and sniff flowers.