I did not mean to imply that misogyny was the only cause of witchcraft accusations, only that some historians see it in the cases of mass persecution of female witches, such as those towns which were only left with one surviving woman once the craze had ended.
The percentage of men to women varied from country to country, according to this site:
The * Malleus Maleficarum * states that most witches are women, so communities that relied heavily on this work for identification of witchcraft focused more on female witches.
Of course, in New England, confessing to witchcraft was the only way to avoid execution after an accusation. The same was not true in Europe, where generally a witch was executed whether she confessed or not.
The “spontanaity” of some of the confessions is questionable. Often times when a witch confessed under torture, it was recorded as a “spontaneous” confession. Some witches confessed immediately after an accusation in order to avoid the inevitable torture.
And then, there was the occasional “odd duck” who confessed without having even been accused. Some historians have speculated that these women were either trying to commit “state sponsored” suicide, or were so caught up in the craze that they feared for their souls having seen “signs” of being a witch in themselves, and wanted to confess in order to be “cleansed.” One cannot discount the possibility that some of these women were insane, either, given the colorful nature of some of the confessions. (Insane people can appear perfectly rational.)
There has been some research done, lately, that seems to point in the direction of contaminated rye. Apparantly, there is a blight, or a fungus that contaminates rye (which was a staple diet for many rural communities in the UK, then, and they also brought it over to America. Settlers, I mean), and when consumed it produces violent hallucinations and body contortions, as described in the Salem Witch Trials.
Scientists have dug through weather reports, and found that witch hunting would spark off after a very mild spring, followed by a very wet summer. Ideal conditions for the fungus to develop.
hallucinations, mixed with severe contortions, plus widespread ignorance and fear of natural powers, spread to witch trials…
The work of Rene Girard on The Scapegoat addresses the OP question.
Girard says that in early societies, collective killing was common. Hominids copied the actions of others while killing (seen today in youth gang-related killings). After the killing, people had a sense of unity and relief, because something was accomplished together. This sense of relief leads to the repetition of group killing.
In Girard’s words * "The momentary halt to violence produced by the collective murder of what we can now call a scapegoat attributes to the victim a kind of magical power that the newly formed community acknowledges by seeking to reproduce this moment again and again, this time through the reenactment of the originary murder in sacred rituals and by the substitution of new victims for the original victim, in order to assure the maintenance of that miraculous peace…Girard’s research has found the story of the scapegoat repeated again and again throughout numerous human cultures and societies which he takes as a symptom of the universality of such persecution. " * Source
Non-Girard quotes follow – statements do not necessarily reflect my opinion:
"Over 200 people who were accused of being witches were burnt to death in South Africa between the beginning of 1994 and mid-1995. " Academic paper
“…witch hunting became big business. It made money, since an accused person rarely went free, and her/his possessions became property of the Church.” dani’s page
There are a lot of bad things that can happen to people that haven’t been explained until recently (and some that still aren’t fully understood) – disease, crop failure, accidental poisoning, etc. If you’re in a primitive society, how do you explain heart attacks or strokes or hallucinatory ergotism or autism or mental illness? The evil influences of malign individuals would seem as likely as anything.
This supposition would be helped out by the fact that people actually were practicing such casting of spells. As Chadwick Hansen documents in his book Witchcraft at Salem, people really were casting spells, practicing divination, and making what we would call “voodoo” figures in Salem Massachusetts at the time of the witchcraft trials. There have been several books since his confirming this. It doesn’t matter if we believe such things work or not – the people at the time would know about them, and see them as evidence. This is true not only in Salem, but everywhere in the world. Heck, if Vanity Fair is to believed, Michael Jackson was casting malefic spells just recently.
Read the accounts of the Salem trials – people were reporting (or having) visions – and not only those accused of witchcraft. People felt a very real and palpable fear. A belief in the reality and efficacy of witchcraft isn’t hard to understand.
Ergot poisoning, or, as it was known in Medival times, St. Anthony’s Fire, was well known (they knew the symptoms, not the cause) and differentiated from “witchcraft victims”.
Asking why people beleive in witchcraft is asking two separate questions:
Why do people believe in magic?
-Various reasons, including a more metaphysical world view and theology, primitive scientific and logical understanding, and the acceptance of poorly understood ritual and phenomena in everyday life as magical.
Why do people beleieve their neighbors are out to harm them? I mean, what’s the real difference between a terrorist, a communist spy, a serial killer, and a witch anyway?
-Greed, personal and societal prejudice, paranoia, political expedience, and outright delusion come to mind for a start.
Not to justify the falsely and the crimes committed in witch hunts, but people believed in witchcraft because there were actually people who practised witchcraft, and still do today. As I said, this is by no means an excuse, but we are speaking of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance here.
I put forth that the answer to the OP would be: People (ppl) believed others were witches because others (although very few others) WERE witches. Technology and education notwithstanding, there are still many people today who believe in witchcraft and practice it, and there are also many people alive today who think they can be affected by witchcraft.
What I find more baffling than people believing in witchcraft and the related events that occurred, like witch hunts hundreads of years ago is that some believe in things like people of different races being inferior and segregation NOWADAYS, and that many of the practises related to the latter were legal, at least in the US up until the 1960s and South Africa till very recently. That is something that I find baffling and hard to understand.
Plesae do not take this as a hijack, attack or otherwise. It is just an observation about the different perception of beliefs from different times, when many of the things we are appaled by happened extremely recently, or are still going on, while other things are perceived as inconceivable, even though there are extremely long time spans separating them and the culture and beliefs of that time were very different from the culture and beliefs we hold today.
I invite the OP to take a look at the rest of the threads in GQ. On the front page currently, we’ve got someone claiming to automatically stop any watches she wears, and another fellow asking about chi. And this is here on the SDMB, where we pride ourselves on having a bunch of very bright, educated people. If people still believe in witchcraft, why shouldn’t they have believed it then?
It does not seem improbable that some people would confess to witchcraft of their own accord. It is said that more than fifty men–and a numer of women–have confessed to the Black Dahlia murder over the years. One man had his letter published in a national magazine (was it Life?), complaining that the police wouldn’t believe him.
And here is another thought on why people accepted the existence of witches:
When people are confronted with the new or anomalous, they try to identify it based on experience. John Sladek wrote an interesting chapter on this in his book The New Apocrypha, and used as an illustration a collection of drawings made by an astronomer who observed the planet Saturn before it was known that it had rings. He repeatedly drew the planet without rings, but with various kinds of markings on its surface which show that he was seeing the rings, if only in a limited, blurry fashion. In one picture he drew the planet as a light colored sphere, with two black spheres along its outer edge–in fact he was apparently drowaing the space between the rings and the planet’s surface.
The astronomer at least knew what a planet was “supposed” to look like. When a person cannot categorize a new experience in terms of things already known, he or she is liable to refer to fiction as a source of reference. Do you see something odd in the sky you can’t identify? The thought it occurs that it might be a rocketship, like in pulp magazine stories. Do people dress oddly and appear to be practicing an unidentifiable religion? They must be witches.
Among the people who have been denounced as Satanic in recent years are Roman Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and members of Eastern Orthodox churches. I once read a story on the Web about a panic in a small town down south over people in white robes “skulking” about in the forest. They were, in fact, Episcopalians attending an outdoor wedding.
Similarly, there was a hair-raising story in the papers back in the mid-1980s about a bus of kidnapped children who had been discovered by local police somewhere in, if IIRC, New England. The wire story I read at the time matter-of-factly claimed that it was “known” that parents who are Satanists sometimes deliver their children over to the leaders of their cult for human sacrifice and other nefarious purposes.
Only years later did I read that it turned out they were actually just a busload of kids from a Taoist religious group on an outing.
You guys do know that witchcraft isn’t the same thing as Satanism at all, right?
Witchcraft is a pagan belief system. Satan is a Christian figure. Most witches don’t beleive in Satan, cause they’re not Christians. (although there is to my knowledge, at least one Tradition that does practice a form of Christian magic.
(I do understand you’re talking about witches in the historical sense, it just really bothers me when people call witches Satanists and call witchcraft evil)
The thing that’s always baffled me is, why are “miracles” widely accepted as occuring, but people can’t believe in magic?
I think most of the people posting in this thread are aware of that, actually. However, historically, witchcraft was defined (in Christianity) as the use of evil magic through the service of Satan. So, while you or I might not say witch when we mean satanic magician, in 17th century Salem, for example, they would have.
No, Santa Claus is a horrible communist, with his Big-Brother means of watching us when we are sleeping and awake, those elves who he has working for “free” at his gulag at the North Pole, and of course the red suit is a dead give-away.
He Who Must Not Be Named really doesn’t stand, so much as lurch.
Keep in mind folks, that in that day and age, Wiccans didn’t exist. Wicca is a modern faith. What you had were hold overs of the “wise old woman” archetype, who were skilled in herbal lore and the ways of childbirth. The odds are strong that most of them weren’t even religous.
However, at the time, the vast majority of the European world was Christian, or at least faked it really well.
There are plenty of beliefs floating around today that (1) are widely held enough to significantly affect public policy; and (2) don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Why does such nonsense continue to float around? As suggested by other posters, it’s a combination of wishful thinking, the need for an explanation/scapegoat for bad events or things, and greed.