In all the human societies ever studied there is to be found the figure of the witch. What is most interesting about this is not that the human race should have disliked and feared bad-tempered old women since the beginning of time, but that the old women themselves should have adopted the role of witches, and even confessed to being witches when the penalty was certain death. Death by bludgeon, by stoning, by drowning or by being burnt alive. The people who thought witches had occult powers were deluded; the witches who thought they had occult powers were equally deluded. Witches do not exist; so why have we found it necessary to invent them?
Why would the Aboriginal people of Numinbah Valley have told their children to stay away from the scarps of the Lamington Plateau because up there lived an old witch called Koonimbagowgunn who liked to roll huge rocks down on people below? The clue is in her name, which means widow. When seeking a supernatural agency to blame for unpredictable catastrophe, people hit upon the most troubling figure in their community, the woman who outlived her husband. In hunter-gatherer society there were probably never many such women. One version of the Hindu goddess Kali shows her as an old woman with black wrinkled skin and withered dugs, dancing on the beautiful body of her immortal husband, Shiva. The Indonesian Rangda has “tangled black hair, long fingernails, pendulous breasts”, and a “flowing tongue between terrible fangs”. The old woman gradually turns into a ravening animal preying on the young and vulnerable. In many societies she is suspected of digging up the bodies of her victims and eating them.
In most pre-industrial societies, the woman who outlived her husband was in trouble, especially if she had no surviving children. Even when she did, she often had no claim upon those children, who may have inherited everything her husband had to leave. Until relatively recently, a British widow could be turned out of her home by her husband’s heirs, and left to find a living the best way she could. One way she could survive was by setting herself up as a wise woman, working on the credulity of her neighbours who would pay her for spells and potions. She might charm away your warts, or tell you how to see in a mirror the face of the man you were to marry or show you how to make a man impotent by blowing on a knotted string. Some of her remedies were effective; she might be able to tell you how to ease the pains of teething or what herbs to decoct to drive worms out of young animals. She might even give you potions of her own making. If they worked, good; if they didn’t, and the patients died, the “witch” was in immediate danger.
The wise woman lived on a knife-edge. If the cry went up that she was responsible for miscarriages and infertility, whether in women or cattle, her neighbours were likely to lay violent hands upon her. The limits on her power were obvious, but she did have power. People did seek her out, did beg her for help and did cross her palm with silver. From being a mere wife and mother she had become a self-governing visionary, straddling the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit, interpreting fate, determining luck, making things happen. Her chief instrument was imagination, her own and other people’s. It would be imagination too that was her undoing.
Witches, being for the most part solitary, lived with companion animals, most often cats. As late as the 19th century the sight of an old woman collecting food from the hedgerows with her cat wreathing itself around her tattered skirts was enough to send children home howling. And yet there was a whole race of saints who understood the language of birds and beasts. St Bee was fed by seabirds. St Gertrude let mice dance upon her spindle. The lions sent to kill St Thecla in the amphitheatre sat down and licked her feet. St Martha tamed a dragon and led him about on a leash made of her girdle. When a hare fleeing from the hounds of the seventh-century Prince of Powys hid under the cloak of Melangell, the prince gave her the valley for a nunnery.
The muddling together of female saints with witches comes to its apogee in the ongoing tradition of St Wealdburg, the ninth-century English missionary, the eve of whose canonisation day, May 1, is still celebrated as Walpurgisnacht, the witches’ sabbath, all over northern Europe. How an elderly veiled abbess morphed into a naked woman on a broomstick is a story worth telling; an intrinsic part of it is Wealdburg’s unnatural ability to read and write Latin. Female literacy was as frightening for the church in preliterate Europe as it is for the Taliban today. One strand in the iconography of witchcraft depicts them as bare-breasted women with pens in their left hands, surrounded by every species of nocturnal animal.
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