Kids today won’t even know how to prove someone is or isn’t a witch.
Thank goodness we’re past all of that nonsense! /s
A lot of people tend to imagine that witch accusations were a constant thing, but my understanding is they follow the pattern of moral panics.
Many here may remember the satanic panic that came and went in the 80s. There was a similar panic about mods vs rockers in the uk. The red scare of mccarthyism was another. A friend of mine analyzed a 2002 flare up of anti-romany sentiment and violence in italy (maybe just rome?) which also fit. Probably pogroms against jews fit the pattern too.
Moral panics are volatile - they bloom for a time and then wither. So probably there were short term bouts where women (and rarely men) who were percieved as deviant or unwelcome were at risk of being swept up in this panic and labelled a witch. Subjects of a moral panic are believed to pose some kind of threat to society, often legitimizing them as targets of violence.
You’re exactly right. This particular moral panic, however, was a big one, because the morality being panicked about was the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation). Most witchcraft executions happened in the late 16th early 17th centuries in areas contested between Catholicism and Protestantism.
I agree. In the history of the French town i was born in, rumours that someone poisoned the drinking well starting going around. Enough people started saying it was jews and that led to the town burning thousands of jews in and around the town. Turned out the water was fine, but the rumours were enough to freak everyone out and send them into panic
Oh yeah, that sounds like a classic moral panic. Instigating incidents are often fictional.
Sorry champ, that only works on poor people. You gotta be way smarter to take down the rich.
“Build a bridge out of her!”
A lot of the “witchy” things women would do back then was actually just a cover for gossip. There ain’t shit in the tea leaves, she’s just having a coded conversation with her fellow women.
Later we just started saying they were hysterical and send them to an asylum for insane women. How do you prove you’re not crazy when you’re just a weak-minded woman and psychology barely exists as a field of medicine?
Now we just straight up ignore them. Or we make fun of their body. Usually both.
Same as ‘paedophile’, I guess.
