A central aspect of witchcraft in its 21st-century incarnation is its insistence on its own virtue, a virtue which it projects back into the past. Modern witches have no doubt that witches in the time of the persecutions were good too, opponents of patriarchy like themselves. Patriarchy here means Christianity in the sense of organised religion, and especially the Catholic Church with its obvious discomfort with the body and human sexuality. Modern witches claim to be speaking for an entire class of oppressed people who have existed throughout history:
For decades, witches have been moving slowly out of the shadows and spreading good magic across the planet…the forces of capitalism, patriarchal greed and white supremacy united for one last gasp, producing our present circumstances—Nazis in the streets, our earth in peril, and an actual rapist in the White House. It’s not great out there these days. But in 2018, we will fight for the change we deserve to see. In 2018, we will support progressive candidates, advocate for justice, and, most importantly, vote witch.[2]
In a way, this is indeed nothing new; countercultural movements from the 1960s also sought ironically for magical powers, as when the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. Witchcraft “was always practiced by the people who were the outliers, who were on the fringes,” witch Dakota Bracciale says. “Those people oftentimes had to also be the arbiter of their own justice.” This almost meaningless statement seems to claim impunity for launching magical attacks. They have been attacked, so it’s fair to fight back.
This argument depends on history. These exotic outsiders are framed as historical constants. However, the source quoted (even by such an august scholarly journal as Marie Claire) is Barbara Ehrenreich’s long-discredited idea that the majority of those accused were midwives and herbalists. Careful study of the witch trials, including studies by women historians such as Lyndal Roper, has revealed that very few of the accused were midwives, and some historians have argued convincingly that the majority of midwives were more likely to be working with the persecutors than against them. The popular idea that witches in the past were lonely souls living at odds with their ignorant Christian communities is just not true.
There are in fact so many problems with some modern witches’ historical narrative that it’s hard to know where to begin, but a good starting point might be the assumption that witches are at variance with their culture rather than a product of that culture. Those accused of witchcraft—including those who genuinely believed themselves to be practicing magic, a minority of those accused—espoused beliefs that derived directly from medieval Christendom. In this essay, I will show that medieval and early modern witchcraft was for the most part not a pagan practice, but a dissident form of Christianity. I will also argue that modern pagans and modern witches are themselves products of the very globalized, commercial, urban and anywhere culture which they set out to resist, because rather than reacting against those trends, they are turning what might once have been a genuinely radical alternative into another form of self-care. Finally, I will show that the surviving remnants of pagan culture illuminate a much more violent and less liberal world than the one imagined by modern witches. A number of publications in the past ten years have focused on highly specific aspects of the medieval body, the classical understanding of sexuality, and a wide range of forms of magical thinking in the Middle Ages, including and in particular ideas about the beings usually called fairies. Here, I want to attempt a synthesis of all these strands of thought.