Why do we still use the image of witches created by the inquisitors?

Although it is widely known that the women victims of the witch hunts were not Satan-worshipping sorceresses, although the term "witch hunt" itself now refers to the persecution of innocents, the image that has come to light and continues to be spread is of the old woman, ugly, with a big nose and a wart, smelly breath and a devilish smile, accompanied by a black cat and riding a broom.

Some even sport an incomprehensible green skin.

That is to say, an aspect similar to the one that the inquisitors and witch hunters spread in the towns, the way in which those who feared them imagined them, the story of the victors.

“The witch hunt is the biggest femicide in history, but it is not studied in schools or universities.

It has not only been forgotten, but has become a legend.

The witch is a character from a fable, almost a joke”, explained the Italian-American thinker Silvia Federici, author of works such as

(Dream Traffickers), at the presentation of the II International Feminist Meeting on Witch Hunting, held in the Reina Sofía museum and the Traficantes de Sueños bookstore, both in Madrid, last October.

It is enough to do a search in an image bank on the internet, such as Getty Images, to see how the stereotype has permeated.

Thousands of files appear where the witch is represented in the usual way.

Sometimes in old engravings, sometimes at Halloween parties, sometimes lost in misty forests, sometimes in games in nursery schools.

Sometimes the one who is disguised as a witch is a playful girl, other times she is a woman in an erotic pose.

Sometimes the image is trying to instill fear, other times it is a harmless caricature.

But it's always the witches with the broom and the pointy hat.

This is how those who were victims of a massacre are remembered.

Margaret Hamilton, in 1938, in the role of Miss Gulch, the Witch of the West, in the musical 'The Wizard of Oz', directed by Victor Fleming.Virgil Apger (Getty Images)

remember witches well

"It is necessary to reliably recover the memory of those women who were murdered, imprisoned, exiled or tortured," explains Beatriz García, one of the promoters of the

who has reading and research groups in various cities in Spain, but also in Quito or New York.

In Spain they have visited various places where the persecution of women took place;

The mapping carried out includes the case of the Laspaúles witches, which occurred in this municipality of Huesca in 1593, where 24 women accused of witchcraft were tortured and hanged, and where a theme park today recalls their history (in which the habitual iconography of the witch with a black silhouette and a peaked hat).

Or that of Miraflores de la Sierra, in the Community of Madrid, where, in the mid-17th century, two poor and widowed women were blamed for a series of inexplicable deaths of children and sent to the Inquisition prison in Toledo.

Theme park in Laspaúles, Huesca, dedicated to witches, where the usual iconography is reproduced. Campaign for the recovery of the memory of women persecuted for witchcraft

“We found that in many places where there was a witch hunt, there is no memory,” says García, “what is surprising is that in those where it does exist, and even where historical events are explained exactly as they happened, it is still used the classic image of the witch in iconography,

or popular festivals”.

The figure of the sorceress is long before the witch hunt of the modern era, it has existed since mythologies and literatures exist.

Some are evil, like the witch Circe, whom Odysseus meets in the

and that transforms men into beasts.

Others are benevolent, like the magicians, for example, the lady of the lake who in the Arthurian cycle guards the prodigious sword Excalibur.

But the stereotypical image of the evil sorceress, as the old woman who eats children and makes ointments and poisons in the depths of the forest, is typical of the witch hunt of the Modern Age, and the most widespread today.

"Some women accused of witchcraft were prominent, but the vast majority were older and poor, many of whom had knowledge of medicine or herbs and did not have a man to protect them," explains chemist Adela Muñoz, who came to the world of witchcraft. witches investigating their ointments and poisons and has published the book

(Debate).

"They were powerful in the minds of the witch hunters, but not in reality," adds the author.

The persistence of the perverse image of witches, when in reality they were mostly peasants with no connection to midnight covens or dealing with billy goats, is due to different factors.

The weight of tradition, its replication in numerous cultural products, from gothic horror stories to movies and musicals, or the profitability of the witch stereotype when it comes to selling products, devising fairground attractions or generating tourist interest in certain places.

Representation of the image of the witch in Soportújar, Granada, known as "the town of witches". Campaign for the recovery of the memory of women persecuted for witchcraft

In some municipalities in Spain, festivities related to the witch hunt are held: the Ball de las Bruixes in Viladrau, Girona;

the Witches' Fair in Sant Feliu Saserra, Barcelona;

the Festival of the Witch in Alcantarilla, Murcia;

the Night of Witches in Soportújar, Granada... Although in the official discourse of these events emphasis is usually placed on the fictitious nature of the accusations of witchcraft, these women continue to be represented in a stereotyped manner and in some places they even recreate the hanging or the burning witches in festive mood.

In Catalonia, the processes of women accused of witchcraft abounded (and today the festivities abound), so much so that at the beginning of 2022 the Parliament approved a resolution that urges to "repair the memory" of these women victims of "misogynistic persecution",

In Terrasa, Barcelona, ​​a forgotten case in which six alleged witches were hanged resurfaced when the Historical Archive published a monograph documenting the process, which took place at the beginning of the 17th century.

The city's feminist network picked up the gauntlet and collaborated in its dissemination, for example, through walks where they visited the places where those women lived or where they were tortured.

"Now a more conscious review of the iconography of witches is beginning to be made, but very slowly," says Clara Massana, from the Grup per a la Recuperació de la Memòria Històrica de les Bruixes de Terrasa, "we want people to feel ashamed of these images: we must give the true dimension of the largest femicide in the history of humanity.

Curiously, a positive view of witches has also been inherited, although less widespread.

"It happens when the witch's perverse connotations are removed from her and she is left as a powerful woman, as a symbol of empowerment," says Muñoz.

An American collective between 1968 and 1970, for example, carried out guerrilla feminism, very typical of the radicalism of the time, under the name WITCH, which means witch and which was the acronym in English for the International Terrorist Conspiracy of the Women of Hell.

Not without a dose of humor, the members of WITCH carried out acts of protest and

decked out in all the witchy imagery, casting spells in front of the Wall Street stock exchange or celebrating public covens.

A book published by the editorial La Felguera tells their story: through this attitude they reappropriated the stigma of the witch for their purposes.

Some see them as precursors of other movements such as the Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot or Femen.

The witch hunt and the birth of capitalism

The explanations for the phenomenon of the witch hunt that occurred at that particular moment in history are varied: collective psychosis, the publication of the

, a widely distributed witch-hunting manual published by the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in 1487. , the crystallization of exacerbated misogyny, the dynamics of religious beliefs or of the Church itself.

Silvia Federici's approach focuses on the political and the economic.

The transition from the feudal system to capitalism, according to her research, required the disciplining of women to withdraw them to the reproductive role in the domestic sphere.

This discipline was achieved with the witch hunt, in the same way that, as Marx observed, capitalism required the plundering of communal lands or slavery, in the processes called original capital accumulation.

“There was a change and a new typology of women: passive, obedient, without rights”, explains Federici, “until recently, women were not legal entities and they had to be represented by a man for any management”.

The witch hunt did not stay in Europe or the United States, but was transmitted to all the colonies, by the hand of missionaries and conquerors.

Malawi healer Voster Ngona claims he can "see" who is a witch.Wester Torbjörn

In this sense, the witch hunt, which we associate with the past, continues in parts of Latin America, Asia or Africa, as stated at the meeting held in Madrid and quoted at the beginning, and according to reports from the United Nations, an organization that maintains a Witchcraft and Human Rights Network.

In a July 2021 resolution, the UN urges states to take all necessary steps to eliminate violence related to witchcraft accusations.

According to Federici, States and large companies use these accusations to take advantage of persistent magical thinking, create discord in communities and break them from within, for extractivist purposes.

“This is how they intend to destroy the community relationship, in order to expel the population and privatize the land.

We must not let this story be forgotten."

concluded the thinker, “it is not a history of the past, but of the present”.

For this reason, in the opinion of the activists for the recovery of memory, the frivolization of the representations of witches is even more serious today.

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