Bruges: from infamy, torture and the gallows to naming streets

“It is true that the devil took me to Aiguafreda”.

This was finally confessed —and everything they asked of her— on July 28, 1620 in the prison of Vic (Barcelona), the 70-year-old widow Elisabet Martí, a neighbor of Seva accused of witchcraft.

Her testimony was extracted from her under torture.

They sat her naked on a bench and ordered her to say how many years she had been a witch and to reveal the names of her companions.

Martí initially bravely refused.

Then they tied her arms behind her back and by means of a pulley they suspended her from the ceiling until she was almost out of joint (the sensation was that your rib cage was bursting) during the time, the documentary sources say with sinister piousness, in which it takes “in praying a Hail Mary or an Our Father”.

She needed to be hanged several more times,

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Being a witch in Catalonia was much worse

The case of Martí, who seems to have died during torture - the interrogation ends abruptly, and worth the word -, is one of many accused and convicted of witchcraft in Catalonia in the 15th to 17th centuries, especially during the extraordinarily intense witch hunt unleashed between 1616 and 1622. There was then a true witch psychosis worthy of Salem, Zugarramurdi or North Berwick.

They were seen everywhere and it was considered that in some towns, such as Ventalló, all women without exception were witches.

In Les Guilleries, a popular saying went: “From Sant Hilari to Arbúcies, twelve houses, thirteen witches”.

It is estimated that more than 400 people, the vast majority of them women, were executed on charges of witchcraft in the territory. In Catalonia, where, according to scholars, the persecution was much more violent than in other parts of Spain, they were not burned, but rather hanged, because it was the courts and secular justice that prosecuted them and punished them as common criminals. The executions took place in the public square of the towns or on the gallows installed in different places for this purpose, clearly visible, such as on the royal road from Vic to Barcelona. It was common to see witches hanging in the landscape of the time and the terrible, atrocious spectacle (nothing about the Witch Pirula, the Train of the Witch or Maleficent) left its mark on the toponymy, such as the Pla de les forques del bisbe, in Centelles.

Illustrative vintage print of a witch hanging.

Catalonia, where different popular and academic initiatives have been taking place to review that terrible persecution, now wants to recover, dignify and institutionally vindicate the historical memory of the victims, and the Parliament expects that it will be approved (there is a majority) in this week's plenary session a resolution in that sense, presented by ERC, Junts, CUP and the commons and that asks, among other things, that the Catalan City Councils give some of their streets names of those convicted of witches.

So one can live, for example, on Carrer Maria Joaneta, Carrer Antònia Rosquellas or

Margarida Puig alias

(three of the 14 women, including a 12-year-old girl, hanged by witches in the small town of Viladrau, in Girona), or in that of Francina Redorta, a native of Menàrguens (Lleida), or Eufrasina Puig, from the submerged Susqueda .

A way to remember them all.

The initiative is part of a campaign launched by the historical magazine

, and this week there will also be the premiere (Tuesday, 10 pm) of a documentary on the subject co-produced by the publication and TV3, entitled

“The parliamentary initiative and the documentary, as well as series of conferences that are being carried out and an interactive map are part of the campaign that under the slogan

, wants to make known what the witch hunt was in Catalonia and at the same time present the results of the investigations that we have carried out for the last ten years”, explains the historian of the University of Barcelona Pau Castell, who praises that it is done “an act of the country”, of reparation, in favor of the alleged murdered sorceresses. It seems to him that it is "fair". Specialist in witch hunting, Castell dedicated his thesis to the subject, considered the starting point of the new scientific approach to the phenomenon, after pioneering works such as those of Mosén Antoni Pladevall in the seventies of the last century and the exhibition

, at the Museum of the History of Catalonia in 2007. “The memory policy and the act of reparation are initiatives that have already been taken in other European countries where the persecution was very intense, especially in the north.

The idea is that the trials that were made for crimes of witchcraft were devoid of legal guarantees and the minimum respect for the law.

At the same time of the witch hunt we see that Catalan jurists raised their hands to their heads at the nonsense that the trials and convictions were, not only from a human point of view but also from a procedural one”.

A radio-controlled device, shaped like a witch, flies next to the moon in California (USA), on October 8, 2014. MIKE BLAKE (Reuters)

Castell points out that in Catalonia, until very recently, there was not a powerful tradition of scientific research into the phenomenon and that knowledge was based on local studies, often with a folklorist nature. "Most people are unaware that the persecution here was very harsh and started very early," he stresses. "Catalonia is one of the great centers of European repression of witchcraft." He assures that the geographical reality of the hunt is very clear, territories in which it was very intense and others in which it was not. In Spain, he points out, in the most centralized areas of the State, witches fared better: the courts were far from the communities in which the witch was detected and tended to be more

less vehement. On the other hand, in Catalonia, Aragon and Navarra, territories far from Castilian centralism, he says, justice was local

and worse: the closer, the more dangerous for the accused of witchcraft

The cases were resolved in the local framework, which was where there was more hostility. And the inmates were executed right there. "The local dynamic is fundamental in the intensity of the witch hunt."

For the scholar, the vindication of those held as witches will generate interest in them and "must encourage new research." The historian warns that the persecuted women were not, of course, witches, "but neither were they what other folklorist visions have wanted to make them, they were not those wise women, possessors of arcane knowledge, expert healers and specialists in plants and medicinal remedies that they confronted the Church and the scientific orthodoxy of the time, that is an invention of the romantic nationalism of the 19th century, of the Grimms, of Michelet”. So what were they? “A heterogeneous group in which there is no pattern beyond the fact that they were all accused of being witches. There are young women, old women, from all social conditions, although it is true that marginalized women predominate among the defendants,foreigners, emigrants, without strong ties in the community or who endanger some interest of a neighbor or an enmity; many are widows and live alone, which makes them more defenseless, vulnerable”.

Did having a physical defect make you suspicious?

“In some cases, but it was not the reason.

It is the communities that create their witches, those that stigmatize, in the general consideration that there are people infiltrated in society who secretly do evil,

We usually find that popular hysteria against witches is unleashed in times of crisis: epidemics, bad harvests... it was necessary to find those responsible.

But crime was of course non-existent, there were no such organized groups of witches doing evil.

It was all a fantasy."

An image of the Ball de Bruixes de Viladrau in the TV3 documentary about witchcraft in Catalonia.

Castell concedes that some of the accused could carry out magical-medicinal practices. “It is one more reason for suspicion that they carried out spells and some practices condemned by the Church, but we did not find it in the majority of cases, and these practices were not exclusive to those accused of witchcraft. All the women of the time, as our grandmothers have done later, had their ointments, remedies and prayers”.

The vindication of those persecuted for witchcraft has a couple of uncomfortable elements. The first is that a case such as that of the famous witch María Pujol,

, the neighbor of Prats del Lluçanes who was caught with the liver of a girl she had murdered,

does not sneak into the dignification ;

Let's hope they don't name a street after her, that's what Millán-Astray is for. “It is true, the names have to be selected well. Some really shady character could fall into the sieve of the pursuers. It is likely that some defendant was a true criminal. There were husband poisoners, for example, there always have been. As for the Napa case… it is there, although it is very ambiguous. It's a late case, she was executed in 1767, so she's out of the big witch hunt."

The second danger is to believe that the phenomenon was only female and limit the witch hunt to femicide. There was a lot of warlock executed as well. There are the

Malet or the shepherd Pere Torrent, hanged for

not to mention the old Menocchio del Friuli, the miller and

of Carlo Ginzburg, burned in 1599 (see the seminal

1976)

“It is not a strictly feminine phenomenon, it is true.

The crime of witchcraft was not limited to one sex, the whole world could be part of the diabolical plot.

The proportion of accused men and women varies a lot from one area to another, it could be 50% of each sex, but in general figures, 80% were women, and that speaks of misogyny.

Nothing strange when you consider that in our culture women have always been considered closer to evil and more prone to sin, since Eve.

But it is not so simple as to say that the witch hunt was a gender crime, an expression of sexist violence: many accusations come from other women”.

heterodox

For Joan Manuel Tresserras, former Minister of Culture of the Generalitat, member of ERC and who was one of the first to analyze culturally from the university, as a specialist in theory and history of communication, the phenomenon of witchcraft, the initiative "is of great interest in recognizing the importance of popular culture and heterodoxy as important currents of history”. Tresserras considers that vindicating the people who moved "on the fringes of official culture and who were beyond established dogmatic knowledge" is as transcendent "as vindicating the avant-garde." The scholar does believe in the existence of a deposit of ancient knowledge, alternative to the dominant discourse and based on experience, which was transmitted from mothers to daughters and which could be dangerously seen as transgressive.For Tresserras, witches "did not exist and did exist", a curiously similar formulation, from academic reflection, to the famous "

”.

The witch, she says, is partly caused by the persecution, but there is real knowledge of the substratum and relationships that suggest that there could be networks of mutual protection between women, perhaps with elements of lesbianism.

Tresserras points out that some things that are part of our lives today, such as the search for natural remedies, concern for healthy living and for nature —but also the frauds of television seers—, are a bit of a legacy of witches , "those heterodox".

There are probably few people who are as enthusiastic about the initiative to vindicate witches as Noemí Bastias.

She is the mayor of Viladrau (Girona), a town that has spent years, since 1997, recovering the memory of its witches —one of the most tragic stories of the hunt— through the annual Ball de les bruixes, in which the entire town participates. town and that has been growing in depth and spectacularity, as well as in popularity.

A part of the TV3 documentary (which will have a presentation in the same town on March 8) is dedicated to the party and show.

The mayor and the witches

"The initiative seems very powerful to us and we are glad that it strengthens our

", says the mayor; "We have always remembered them, trying to highlight what women suffered then and projecting it in the current feminist struggle and in the need to end gender violence." When asked if they have thought about the idea of ​​giving a street in Viladrau the name of one of the victims of the witch hunt, he replies: “No, but of course it is feasible, there are many spaces in Viladrau that still have no name and we could be pioneers; In addition, this year will be the 25th anniversary of the Ball and we want to take advantage of it to carry out more actions and make it an even more symbolic act; progress has been made and progress will be made”.

The mayor doesn't have a favorite witch.

"They were all equally mistreated, but perhaps Maria Joaneta has a special role, we have named the

town's giant after her.

Viladrau, which has a permanent point of explanation about witches and wants to complement it with an exhibition of the dresses worn by the actresses in the Ball, is in contact with other places of witchcraft tradition and in fact a meeting of witches of different locations to strengthen ties that had to be suspended due to covid.

Regarding the relationship between the parish of Viladrau and its rector, Mosén Balbino Mújica, with the whole phenomenon of witches and their claim, the mayor says that she is not aware that there is any problem.