26. Witches

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A practitioner, perhaps. I've got a lot of Dark Arts stuff in my house because my son is massively into JK Rowling. I know JK Rowling is a son and on grater in some quarters, but this is definitely a rolling friendly household. So my house is stuffed with witchcraft and wizardry and all that sort of carry on. Brilliant. Well, that should give us something to talk about. Be good, perhaps to get onto to Harry Potter at some point in this podcast. But we're very honoured to be joined today by our special guest, Susanna Lipscomb, star of TV, who also happens to be Professor of History at Roehampton University, the author of a series of award-winning books on early modern history, including most recently The Voices of Niem about women's sex and marriage in Reformation Long dock. But she's also the author more mainly for our purposes of the recently published Ladybird Book of Witchcraft. Susie, so good to have you. Great title. Yes, we've moved on side with Jack and Jill with Witchcraft. Well, it's a great series. I've also written one, so I know that it's the very highest quality scholarship. And Witchcraft, was this a subject that you kind of got into on the back of your interest in early modern history? Or was it the other way around? It's sort of the other way around, because my supervisor, my doctor, it was Robin Briggs, who's a great scholar of Witchcraft, looked at the trials of Witches in Lorraine, particularly, which is one of the independent duchies that was particularly keen on executing Witches. And my college advisor was Linda Roper, who's worked on Witchcraft and the Witch Craze in Germany. So, I mean, I was, I barely evaded Witchcraft, frankly, as my personal studies. So it's sort of not surprising at all that I've come round to it in the end. So there's so much to get into. I guess the big question, Susie, is Witchcraft a kind of constant in human history? Have we always believed in Witches? I mean, I'm guessing you'll say kind of yes and no, will you? Yes, we have always believed in Witches, it seems. So the earliest case that I've come across is, and this is far more Tom's territory, the mine is Ancient Greece, so it's about 330 BC. There was an alleged witch called Theoros of Lemnos, and so she was prosecuted for casting incantations and using harmful drugs, and then we see it appear again and again throughout time. Basically, time is punctuated by there being Witchcraft cases, whether you're talking 30 BC or just after the AD BC, or do you call it any more, but you know what I mean, we're just into the modern era. And we see this throughout the Anglo-Saxons, we see it in medieval period. And so the period I've particularly worked on is where those beliefs become prosecutions, where there's a particularly serious craze, I suppose, and people are concerned with trying to persecute Witches under law and then have them executed, but they've been with us throughout time. So is the big shift from thinking Witchcraft was fine, and it was just something that people did, it might be a bit weird, but it was kind of carrying on to thinking that it was sinful and must be extirpated at all costs. I don't think it was ever thought to be fine, I think it was always thought to be transgressive, but I think the shift is towards seeing it, I suppose, as not just doing something harmful, but that being infused with a dibolic intent, that a pact has been made with the devil, so that it is a form of heresy. I think that's the shift. Yeah, because I was wondering about heresy, because famously the Middle Ages, described by R.A. Moore as a persecuting society, and the definite sense you get with heresy, and we talked about this in relation to the supposed Cathars, is that you get kind of Fryer's learned scholars who go back to classical antiquity and kind of plunder it for source material, and then they kind of create a package, and then they project it onto people, and it kind of catches fire. And I guess the, is what happens with Witchcraft, that essentially, what is it, it's by the kind of the 14th century, and then really into the 15th century, that the church starts to conflate sorcery with heresy, and so the assumption becomes that if you were having dealings with the devil, then in a sense you are no longer Christian, and therefore you must be targeted for that reason. Yeah, so it's the end of the 15th century, and it particularly happens through the famous book Malias Malafakarum, the hammer of the Witches, which was written by a German Dominican monk called Heinrich Krammer, and he reproduced a papal ball that had recently been published, that said that Witches were heretics. So it's exactly that that's happening in terms of elevating the threat of Witchcraft from being a local sorcerer, to being something that is on a kind of this transcendental level where you know there's this absolute threat to souls as well as life, and so I think that's crucial, and then the other shift that happens is that once that has the weight of the church, or the supposed weight of the church behind it, then we see it starting to be accepted at an elite level, and indeed we even get demonologies written by members of the elites, including a raiding monarch, and we end up with seeing it becoming a crime under law. So there's kind of two shifts, so it's become seen as heresy, and then become seen as a crime, and that's what a crucial thing that has to happen in the 16th century. And why does that happen where it does? So obviously Germany, as you mentioned in the Roman she wrote that great book about Witchcraft in Germany, and in England we think of it as you know the Witchcraft of General Matthew Hopkins, and we obviously which one? Scotland and then the American. Colin is the crucible and all that kind of carry on. But I'm not aware that it's such a big deal in, you know, Spain or Italy or something. Is it places where, I mean, to a sort of layman, it would look like it's places with a lot of Protestants? Is that right? It certainly does happen in places with a lot of Protestants, and I think it helps, as it were, I think in areas where there's a particularly kind of hot form of Protestantism, so in England it becomes to be called Puritanism. It means that people have a kind of pieboard mentality. They see the world in black and white, they see the devil at work everywhere, and it's certainly true that in areas like Scotland, in East Anglia and Essex, there, and in parts of Germany, we do have a particularly sort of inflamed, no pun intended, culture around Protestantism, and so that is true, but there are trials, although they're fewer, there are trials in Catholic areas. So for example, I mentioned Lorraine, the Duchy of Lorraine, which is, which is broadly Catholic, and there are, there are many trials there. There aren't that many in France, about 3000 over the period, which is, it's not that many, but there are some in Spain, so there are trials in Catholic areas. It's not quite so clear cut as just being Protestant, and I think it's because in this period, whether you're Protestant or Catholic, you're concerned about what is wrong in terms of faith, that the reformation has produced this kind of atmosphere of angst about the end days, about whether the devil is at work, perhaps it's slightly more the case amongst Protestants, but Catholics are certainly concerned about it as well. Which is, there's a brilliant comment by Coliseir, who says that hunting witches was actually the most intensely ecumenical event of the Reformation era, which is the kind of sober way of putting it, and he kind of talks about, you know, it's almost one of the few aspects of theology where Catholics are reading Protestants and vice versa, and I was wondering, I mean, essentially the kind of the real peak of the witchcraft crazes, the latter half of the 16th century, moving into the 17th century, and that's also when confessional identities among Protestants and among Catholics in the wake of the counter-reformation are really intensifying, and again, as kind of a counter-effect, that is that you start to get warfare between them, religious war. Is there a link between the prevalence of witchcraft, the growth, the anxiety about witchcraft, and the sense that presumably both Catholics and Protestants have, when they're going to war, that they're engaged in some kind of cosmic battle between good and evil? There certainly is, there certainly is this connection that actually they're living in a time of anarchy, spiritual anarchy, and, you know, pretty much no one in the 16th century, early 17th century, thinks that toleration is a good idea, you know, they think there's a right way and there's a wrong way, and you need to root out that, which is wrong. So it certainly, that's the background to it. I think we have to be careful if it's quite just to prevent against thinking this is Protestants attacking Catholics, very few instances where that's the case or vice versa, but generally speaking, it's that, as that lovely quote may have cleared, it's something that everybody's doing at the time that witches are thought to be a threat overall, because people are much more concerned about evil at work in the world. They differ on their definition of which particular version of faith is correct, but they do think it's the right and the wrong way, and which is a clearly on the wrong side. So yeah, let's talk a bit about witches themselves. So the sort of standard view of the witches, I guess, is that they are women, older women, childless widows who are marginal in their village, and it tends to be villages, right, rather than big towns. And is that right or is it more complicated than that? I mean, do you ever get a male witch, for example? So there's a lot to unpack there. So yes, it tends to be villages rather than towns because most people live in villages, right? So you don't have that many, like 95% of the population or more lives in villages and some more places under 400 people. And it's true that most witches that are convicted are women and they're older women, crucially, they're menopausal, postmenopausal, they are often widowed, they have ceased to have children, they're no longer fertile, and those are really important things. And there are lots of reasons for why it's older women being attacked, but it's not just women. So, for example, particularly during the severe panics, 1611, for example, in Lwangen in Germany, there are 430 people who are executed as witches, and they are men and women, they include priests, they include a judge who's protested about his wife's arrest, sometimes witches, and this is pretty terrible deviation as it were from the stereotype are children. So again, in Germany in the 1620s in Würzburg, there are, I think it's more than 40 children who are executed as children, that happens in the Basque Country. Well, happens in Sweden. Have you seen the, it was a friend of mine made a film for dispatches on Channel 4 about 10 years ago, I think it's called Saving Africa's Witch Children. I mean, we're massively moving forwards now, but this is in Southern Nigeria, where of course it's become very radical form of Protestantism, but it's fused with local beliefs in spirits and demons, and there there's a whole kind of strain of evangelical Protestantism that says that that witches are everywhere, and that children are particularly prone to being witches, and children who get accused of it get kind of at best expelled from the family at worst, tortured to death. And I wondered, you know, is that showing that we're talking about something that is universal and constant, or is it the fact that it's the Protestantism, it's the Christianity that is inspiring this, or what's going on there? Can we kind of trace the patterns all the way through history, do you think? Is a difficult thing to answer. I mean, it's certainly true that we have, there have been many witch hunts in recent times, so in the late 80s, early 90s, there were 200 lynching, because of suspected witches in South Africa. There have been, in 2001, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there were unofficially, officially it sort of figures around 800, unofficially were told it's more and running into the thousands, which is killed, you know, murdered by lynching mobs as it were. Saudi Arabia created an anti-witchcraft unit in 2009. And we've seen it more recently, even, you know, wherever you look around the world, Nepal, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, so it's a constant for sure. And I suppose even in Britain, I mean, I don't know if you've researched the ritual satanic abuse scandals, the haters, fears, yeah. So it was, in a sense, that's a kind of witchcraft scare, isn't it? Yeah, I suppose you could probably argue that. I mean, there's clearly, I, well, I don't know, maybe Susie would disagree with this, but I think there's a, there is a human constant, isn't it? A lot of escape goats and a, and the particular figures in society that end up being these folk devils, so older women, children, classically and teenagers, tend to be seen as folk devils, generation after generation. So maybe, disturbingly, there is this, I don't know. Susie, let me ask you a question, a slightly weird question. If you were accused of being a witch, what's your best way of getting out of it? So how would you escape? Let me just first come to that point about teenagers and older women. I think perhaps the constant with children and teenagers and older women is that they're people that it's harder to control. I wonder if that's something to do with it. How do you best escape? Actually, sometimes you can escape by confessing to it, but it depends where you are. So it depends on the jurisdiction you're operating in. In some places, people got away with it if they confess and repented. That happened in Salem, in New England, the trials in the 1692 outbreak. And it's those who refuse to confess that died quite often. But often, actually, by naming other people, that might be a way out of it. That's kind of depressing, isn't it? Who else turned up at a saboteur? Yeah, exactly. So if you can name people who were in large numbers who were there, at your saboteur or whatever they've come up with as an idea, because quite often it's the interrogators' ideas that are being reproduced by those who are being interrogated, then maybe you've got a chance of being let off. And what's the ducking stool? Was that a real thing? Or is that a kind of children's history book invention? It's a real thing, but not for witches. It's a real thing that's used for scolds. So in exactly the same period that we have a rise in the number of people being executed as witches, we see Basically, there's a great, there's a sort of, how do we put it? Intensification of patriarchy in this period of time. And so women who speak out, who are, you know, cantankeras or who gossip, sort of these sort of things, can be doctors, scolds. But it's, basically it's just a confusion. What we do have is what's called swimming, which is in England, our swam. Which is something that James, the first writes about in his demonology, which is the following, you've got your witch, male or female, you strip them naked, you tie their thumbs to their toes, and you put them in a river to see if they're going to, sorry that's the dog, you put them in a river to see if they're going to sink. Or float, yeah, yeah, my, my, my family is a nearby. So you, if they are innocent, they will sink, and you know, you hope they're going to be pulled out in time to knock down, and if they float, they are a witch, and the, the logic is that their baptism, their baptism, in waters, no longer holds because they have turned to the devil, and so the waters will reject them. Right, yeah, so on that, that thing of, of, of rejecting your baptism, and you become a worshiper of the devil, this idea that you are leaving the Christian faith, and that you were, in a sense, are taking up another faith. There was a very popular theory that this was an expression of a kind of ancient paganism that had survived Christianity. And I always remember, my parents, when I was a child, had a book of kind of gazetteer to folklore, and they had a wonderful thing about the, the death of William II in the new forest, and this, you've been shocked by an arrow, and this supposedly was part of a, a, a satanic ritual. Kind of a Wiccoman style. Yes, which I'd always, which I'd always wanted to, I'd always wanted to believe, but Susie, it's not true, is it? There was no such pagan cult lasting into the early modern period that, which is, we're belonging to. Well, I can say, with great certainty, there's no evidence to prove it. I can't say it's not true, but I can say, I can say there's, there's perilous little to make their case for it. But Susie, that then raises the question. Were there, so were any of the witches actually guilty? Were any of the cases kind of banged to rights? They actually had been consorting, I mean, obviously they hadn't been consorting with the devil. But did they think they were witches? Did they been doing spells, and did they have a familiar and all this sort of business? Well, this is the amazing thing about the witchcraft trials is exactly this question. So many of us looking at this, see this as, as one historian described it as a, you know, a, a crime with the whole at the centre of it. There is, you know, there is nothing there. And they're not doing anything. But clearly, some of these people did think that they were acting as witches. At least that's what, that's what the confessions seem to suggest. Now, obviously there are lots of confessions that are extracted under torture, but then there are also confessions that are freely given, and some of those do seem to suggest that, and we can psychologist about what's going on there, but some of them do seem to suggest that people are saying they've met with the devil. And some of the interesting work, again, actually from Linda Roper has looked at the idea that what we're seeing is their fantasies that quite a lot of the time, these are people who are poor and dispossessed and who have very little, and they fantasize about meeting with the devil and him, you know, freeing them from hunger and from want and from poverty and, you know, lots of feasting goes on with the devil. Because they're hungry or lots of sex because these people are untouched, and so that actually what we're seeing there is an idea about what they lack. And this is a period when the little ice age is kicking in, particularly in the 17th century, it's a period of cold and therefore of famine and therefore of hunger. And do you think there is a connection between which could be escalation of which craft trials and the fact that basically Europe is under massive stress at the time? Yes. I'm actively. Absolutely. There's certainly the case that we've got. I think the thing about witchcraft is that it is the sort of perfect storm, you know, it's an overused phrase, but it comes from all sorts of things happening at once, that you do have this extraordinary socio-economic conditions where people are hungry. Wait, in the 1590s, you have four years where it basically rains nonstop and there are the harvests are destroyed and there's famine and, you know, bread prices shoot up. And whilst we can't do any sort of a board causality between, you know, their hungry and then the people are accused of witchcraft, clearly this is the climate, both literally and sort of more metaphorically, in which witchcraft is hacked. Which craft is happening? Which craft accusations are happening? And Robin Briggs, who I mentioned earlier, did really good work on examining the details of neighborhood accusations. So much of this is happening between neighbors, between people who are hungry and envious, between people who are being selfish and not operating as community norms say they should. And one of the classic scenarios that Keith Thomas and Alan McParle and came up with was being called the refusal guilt syndrome. So, basically, you have a probably older woman, somebody who is in need going to the door of a richer, not particularly rich, but richer householder and asking for arms and maybe in England, because they've started giving, you know, arms through the parish, they think they've already done enough. So they turn this person away, she mutters under her breath as she leaves and then, you know, a cow gets sick or a child dies and they accuse her of witchcraft. So there's a lot of projection onto these poorer people that they must be angry. There's a sense that they must be acting against the richer people because it's about guilt. So I think the fact that people are hungry and angry makes a big difference. And I suppose also it kind of provides a reassurance that there is an explanation for these awful things happening rather than just, you know, shit happens. Anyway, on that note, shit happens, which could really be the. - That should be our title. We risk that out. Let's take a break and when we come back, we will return to the Dark Arts with Susie. This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways. Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it, nothing more, except. Except when you hop on TikTok. You don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s people would pour their coffee into sources to let it cool before drinking it. 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Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So, your Anthropic knows the importance of questions, and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people? So they asked over 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai/RestresHistory and keep thinking. Hi, welcome back to The Restres History. We are talking witches and witchcraft and we've got all the questions we get back to go through them. But very selfishly, I've got one question that I would like to put to Susie before we get on to yours. And that is really to go back to the gender of witches, because one thing, you talked about the maleus Maleficarum. And there, witches are described as female, it's a female noun. But in the vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible that people would read in the Middle Ages, the famous line that's translated in the King James V. Bouchard not suffer a witch to live in Exodus. That word, it's Maleficore, so it's a masculine. And again, just why is it that over the course of the Middle Ages, into the early modern period, there seems to be this evolution of thinking of witches as masculine and then becoming female? What's going on there? So the maleus Maleficarum was a particularly misogynistic text. So the writer conceived of witches as female, and that's the sort of dominant theme. And it would have been us, even for its time, surprisingly misogynistic. But what we see is a belief that both men and women can be witches. And in some places, there are more men accused of witchcraft than women. In Iceland, for example, 92% of those accused of witchcraft in the 17th century are male. In Russia, it's something, 68%, Estonia, it's very high. Normandy, the male's outnumber, female's three to one. But elsewhere, it's the shifts, and it's more like four out of five, which are female. Because, whilst both men and women are thought capable of being seduced by the devil, women are weaker, it's thought more credulous, more likely to fall into sin, particularly sexual sin. It's thought in this period of time, and therefore more likely to be persuaded away from the truth. And the men that are accused, are they sort of marginal men, so they kind of loners and oddballs or people on the fringe? Or could they be people at the centre of the community? In some places, they are more marginal. So the Russian cases appear to be looking at people who are shepherds or vagrants, so people who are moving around wanderers. So we do have some of that marginality, but we also do see instances of very mainstream men accused as well. So how does Dr. D, Elizabeth I, who's busy looking at angels or doing all kinds of stuff? How does he get away with it? I suppose he's a sort of wizard, as opposed to a witch. So the definition of witch by this point is that you're practicing maleficarum, that you're doing evil through magic, and he's not doing evil. So white magic is okay? Yes, I mean, there's a sort of problematic, isn't it? It's still problematic, and the line between the two is very easy to cross. I suppose the fact that he's got the patronage of Elizabeth I helps. I mean, he's operating to just much like Elizabeth I did. I'm very interested in alchemy. He's very interested in trying to find the philosopher's stone, as Glenn Perry has written about D, and shown that Elizabeth I had alchemical laboratories and her palaces. So I think that he's pursuing a sort of magic, as it were, that is state-approved. Because it's open. I suppose he's not hiding anything. It's not like he's doing it in the back of a cupboard. I mean, he's sort of, isn't it one of those things that if he tries to cover it up or whatever, it looks more dodgy than if you're, say, well, I'm an alchemist, I'm casting spells. I'm sure that's right. And I think it's about his level of power and society. So much of this comes down to it's those who don't have power who are accused of trying to do something with this illegally gotten power. Okay, so that brings up a good question, actually, from Venzel Rosner. And he, or he, I assume it's he, I don't really know what Venzel is. I don't know anything about this person. Anyway, Venzel says, "Would the average woman have been worried about being accused of witchcraft?" In other words, are you living in fear of witch hunters? Or could you just go about your daily life without assuming it would never happen to you? I suppose it depends who and when, where, because there would have been certain periods where the culture around witchcraft, the concerns around witchcraft would have been heightened. And so I think even an ordinary woman could be accused. But I do think that witchcraft reputations took time to build up. And sometimes they came from a sort of family tradition, you know, family members, grandmother, mother thought to be witches. And it took many accusations. It wasn't on the first time. So because if you think someone's a witch, you need to be sure before you accuse them, right? They've got evil magic at their disposal. So we tend to find that in the trials, we get references to this happen 20 years ago, this happened 10 years ago. So that means people are talking about witchcraft a lot. They're talking about it much more than we have trial cases to show for it, because then there's going to be lots of people who don't make it to trial. But I think you have to have quite a substantial body of evidence against someone to accuse them. So that means that you're going to know where the people are going to think you're a witch or not. There's a follow-up on that from a question from Andre. Are there examples of people who are accused of being a witch and presumably convicted only then to get off? So basically once you've been convicted of witchcraft, was that it? Or did you have a chance of.? There are people who aren't convicted and there are people who aren't executed. So there's an instance, for example, one of the famous outbreaks in England is the Pendle, which is 1612. And in the same year in Lancashire, also in Lancashire, there are three women accused by a 14-year-old girl. And it's discovered that the girl has been coached and the women are set free and acquitted. So there are acquittals. And it's certainly true that not everyone is executed. So we think there are about 90,000 people who are prosecuted as witches in this period and about half of those are executed as witches. So it is possible to get away with it as it were. Get away with innocence. You mentioned the Pendle witch trials and Cain Carlisle asked a question about that. So Cain says, "Can you talk about the witch trials and the links with the English Reformation on a side note, Pendle Hill, is a stunning place to go for a lockdown walk?" Cain also says. That's suspicious to me. Very suspicious. But so the links with the English Reformation, what's all this about? I mean, I think there's a lot more going on than links to the English Reformation there. I suppose as usual, we've got the, we've got a background of religious change. So this is, so this is 1612. So crucially, I suppose what's happened is that James the Sixth of Scotland has become James the First of England. And James the Sixth of Scotland had written a book called Demonology in 1597 in which he had given people instructions on how to find witches. And so we're in a period in which this Protestant has come to the throne of England and those who are thought to be practicing witchcraft are being supported at this, you know, seriously elite level at the level of the monarch, there is a sense that people can rightfully pursue witches. And so that's part of the background from a Beth, isn't it? It is absolutely indicted. That's right. Yes, exactly. Written in the 1590s, it precisely at the sort of time that there are trials in the 1590s in North Barric, which James the Sixth of Scotland oversees. So in 1612, we've got witches who are being accused in that climate, but one of them, his known as Old Demdike, has been accused of being in which 50 years. So it's not just about those circumstances, people have been thinking of her as a witch for a long time. And there are lots of associations with some of the ideas about witchcraft that we might pursue, like we might think of it even voodoo. For example, Old Demdike makes these clay figures that she sticks pins into that will injure the people that she's cursing. So it's a really interesting case for England, because it's quite large scale for England. It's sort of 12 people accused of witchcraft, and 10 of them are executed. And the one I've mentioned, Old Demdike, Elizabeth Suthans dies in jail. It's nothing by comparisons. the scale of things in Germany, but it's quite big for England. Right, we've got another question from Stephen Clarke, going forward now, when, if ever and why, did the British Isles see a significant decline in popular belief in magic and the supernatural? That's a huge question. I mean, let's narrow that down. What's the process by which belief in witchcraft in, not just the Britain across Europe, starts to fade? So I suppose we could say that in the later 17th century, and early 18th century, we see a changing idea about who can be convicted of witchcraft. It's not quite the same thing as people stopping believing in witchcraft, and I'm not sure that people necessarily did. I suppose we see some evidence of change in terms of what scientific revolution is called the enlightenment. Perhaps we see changes there, but chiefly what we see evidence of is changes and beliefs about evidence. What are the grounds on which someone can be convicted of witchcraft? And at the same time as we have in America, in the Salem witch trials, we have people who are being convicted on the strength of what are known as spectral evidence, so those who are accusing them are possessed by the spectra of this witch, and also on their own confessions. We have the evidence from the home sizes, the court circuit of trials, saying actually there's evidence against them apart from their own confession, and this isn't good enough. And that's a radical change, whereas 60 years earlier, it had been the strength of the confession that had convicted witches. So it's more about that than about a change in beliefs. And some people still do believe in witchcraft, and we see some people who are pursuing witches, when the members of the elites won't do it at law, they're going to pursue them with a mob in the 18th century. But the last person to be executed for witchcraft is in England as 1685 and in Scotland as 1722. Because in the 20th century, that idea that there was a kind of pagan, often a female-centered religion in the background of the Christian Middle Ages. Yes, yes, which I think is pronounced witcher originally. Okay. Really giving you a hint of what's going on there. And that becomes kind of, that becomes the basis for 20th century paganism. And I suppose that more recently, most obviously in children's books, say the worst witch first, and then most famously Harry Potter, which is basically, I mean, Hermione Granger is a witch, isn't she? I mean, she's kind of the hero. Yeah. Well, the Beletics are strange is a very kind of stereotypical witch, and she's a baddie. So, you know, she's kind of dark, mad hair, and Helena Bonham Carter, and you can imagine her on a broomstick and stuff. So there's still some of the-- Helena Bonham Carter's always playing with you, isn't it? No, it's basically a half. Anyway, Susie, go on. Sorry, I'm interrupting. No, you're not talking. I mean, the interesting thing there is that we do have both the idea of a witch being evil, black magic, as it were, and the idea of white magic that we mentioned earlier. That's what comes out in the 20th century, and it's what comes out in children's stories, so that very much you can have Hermione Granger, who's a witch, but using magic for good. And I think that many of the people who identify with being a witch today or a practising wicker feel that they have a lineage to the witches who are accused in the 16th century, whether that's true or not. And they--particularly one of the things that comes out, I'm often asked, whether it's to do with being healers, whether they were people who were what was called cunning men and women in the 16th century, and who were conjuring up potions using herbs to heal people. And certainly many of them may have been that, the evidence is quite hard to follow on that through the trials. But there is a sense today and in the 20th century that surely magic could be used for good. And throwing it even further forward to the present day, the 21st century, I mean, the question that we got a lot when we advertised the subject, we get it from Neil Page, for example, he says, "What's the modern version of the witch trials?" And you see this all the time, particularly on social media, people talking about witch hunts and how particular women, we mentioned JK Rowling without getting into the kind of internet of that debate, but particular women become stigmatised and scapegoated. And is there any--well, obviously we use the terminology of the witch and the witch hunt. But do you think there is any kind of continuity, any parallel or is it purely a sort of metaphor? I think there are parallels with punishments in the 16th century, though not so much that that was dealt out to witches. I think what we see today reflects the sort of religious punishments that happened, for example, the Protestant church in Scotland or in France, dealt out shaming punishments. And what we see on social media is this large-scale shaming that happens, of course, John Ronson wrote about it. And so I suppose that's what we would say when we're talking about a witch hunt today that somebody's life is made so uncomfortable that they are considered a person in a non-grata. They don't end up dead, but they might end up socially dead. Dominic, do we have any other questions? Good questions from Phelma Dinkley, I see. Thanks dad. Phelma Dinkley, I can read. Phelma Dinkley says, how are witches regarded? Oh, come on, Thomas. Oh, geez. Have fun over that one. Okay. How are witches regarded in Roman, Pagan, pre-Christian times? Please answer Susie in such a way that Tom cannot add anything of worth to your answer. There's no way I'm doing that. In Tom's presence, can I just very quickly answer that one? Please, are you Galma Dinkley? I'm well. Not at liberty to reveal whether I am Valma Dinkley, but it's an excellent question. Well, thank you Valma for asking that question. So witches were an absolute theme of Roman poets. They were obsessed by them. Very hard thing for Roman poet who doesn't portray a figure of a sinister old woman who kind of grunts around in graveyards digging up bones and making potions with ashes. And I'm sure, I don't know, but I'm sure that this must then feed into what the the friars and the Dominicans and the Protestant devines are reading and kind of creating from it. But I think also the other thing that must feed into the witch scare in the 16th century is the sense that Romans, and people across the Mediterranean have, that there are kind of malign figures. So the Romans have street gaze who are kind of female figures who fly through the air and who feed on the hapless. I'd like there's an amazing story. I'm told of Apolognes of Tionna who's a kind of Jesus figure. He's often parallel to Jesus who turns up at Ephesus, I think. And Ephesus is plagued by all kinds of hideous witchcraft. And they ask Apolognes what's going on. And he points to a poor beggar who is sat at the gate with his asking for arms. And Apolognes says that's the guy stoning him. That's not surprising. But Ephesus, I'm not, I'm nothing to do with it. And everyone says no, he's not, he's just a harmless beggar. And Apolognes says stoning. So they all stoned him and he gets buried beneath a great pile of stones. And then he turns into an evil dog and howls and dies. So I think that's all kinds of elements there. The idea of flying through the air, the idea that human beings can become animals, the idea of familiars. I guess it's all kind of the brew of stuff that scholars in the 16th century can read and then can kind of form this cocktail of what a witch should properly be. I mean, do you think that's what's happening? I think that's right. I mean, I think what we've got going on by the time we get to 16th centuries, you've got two discourses about witchcraft. One level you've got what the elites are saying, which is absolutely going to be informed by their new humanistic Renaissance study of classical texts and is going to have those elements. And so they're thinking about them flying through the air, maybe backwards on a goat or maybe on a broomstick. And at the same time, you've got what is believed at a village level and all those neighbourhood accusations. And the sort of, I was going to say the magic. The terrible thing that happens is that those two connect, those two beliefs, which are really probably quite different, connect up. And I thought to be the same thing. I wrote a forward for a book which is called a history of magic witchcraft in the occult. And that looks at witchcraft beliefs across the world throughout time. And there are many strands that come out as being similar in different, really radically different societies. But it is interesting to consider the ways in which there is a lineage that these ideas are being passed on. And do you think it will always be with us then? Do you think witches and witchcraft will always be with us? So in this sort of visions of the 27th century that you have, there are no witches, but actually is that unrealistic and will always be, you know, looking. Dominic, something beyond. Are you asking Susie to look into the future? I am. Are you attempting her into the practice of witchcraft? Yeah, I have been saying it. 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