Hunters and the Hunted

Our understanding of the history of witchcraft would be wholly incomplete without an examination of witch hunting. Witch hunts were at the heart of the hysteria that gripped England and the United States and many men rose to infamy as they passed from town to town accusing people of witchcraft. Trials, while understood now to be more or less kanagroo courts that sought convictions of innocent women caught up in arbitrary local rumors, were even worse than our modern understanding depicts them. Women were often locked in rooms for days without food or water until a confession was eventually coerced out of them. These confessions often roped even more women into what would then develop into scandalous and very public trials. While executions differed from hunter to hunter, each method used was equally horrific. Burnings were common as well as a practice called "dunking", which is often misunderstood as a trial in which a woman would be thrown into a river to see if she floats. Dunking was method of execution in which a woman was slowly lowered into a river, drowning to death in the most agonizing way possible. Once the executions were carried out, hunters would attempt to incite a mob in the town to join him to both continue the hunt and perpetuate the hysteria as they entered the next town. 

At the core of this fear lied depictions of women as murderous, deviant spellcasters who could curse entire towns with their bizzare and brutal rituals. Attached is an image of a woman blood letting an infant to be used in her rituals. These depictions of women as evil schemers is a stereotype that still hasn't left our collective conciousness. Kirilka Stavreva points to the very political way in which perceptions of witches and witchcraft developed as the Elizabethean monarchy attempted to maintain control over the status quo by scapegoating women and those accused of treason. Magistrates in England could gain political power and popularity if they sucessfully uncovered a 'witch conspiracy.'