Ditch witch-hunts
MY Halloween costume of choice was always a witch. Pointy hat, long black cloak and a broomstick with a cuddly black cat glued to it.
Easy. Because everyone knows what a real witch looks like, don’t they?
They glared at us from the pages of childhood fairy stories, screeched their spells around bubbling cauldrons on dramatic blasted heaths and cackled their way through hundreds of films and TV series. Those are the images that spring to mind when someone says “witch”.
Not the tens of thousands of innocent women murdered during three centuries of global hysteria from the 1500s to 1800s.
Wives and mothers drowned or burned at the stake simply because a neighbour with a grudge said he’d seen them flying a broomstick.
Healers, herbalists and midwives, condemned for their “dark arts” or the ale brewers who wore pointed hats to signify their trade and kept cats to chase mice away.
Victims like Lilias Addie from Fife, Scotland, a woman in her 60s who was over 6ft tall with unusual physical features…and thus blamed for a spate of illness in her village in 1704.
She was imprisoned, tortured, deprived of sleep and interrogated, and then after a month she confessed to fornicating with the devil.
Mercifully, perhaps, Lilias died in prison before she could be burned alive.
Her body was buried under a half-ton stone slab on the sea shore to prevent the devil bringing her back to life.
Grave robbers dug her up in 1852 and her bones were exhibited before disappearing. But in 2017 her face was digitally reconstructed (pictured below left) from photographs taken of the remains – revealing a sad, gentle, intelligent woman robbed of her dignity by superstition, prejudice and fear.
Lilias is now the focus of a campaign in Scotland to win pardons for the estimated 2,558 Scots executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1563.
It is part of a wider worldwide effort to get justice for ALL women condemned and murdered for impossible witchcraft “crimes”.
Because facing up to past injustice helps us recognise injustice today.
And witch-hunting is an alltoo modern phenomenon…we just call it “cancel culture” now. Ask wizard creator, JK Rowling, branded “a vile, rotten, raggedy old hag” for her views on sex and gender.
Or philosophy Professor Kathleen Stock, bullied and harassed out of her university job for daring to have her own opinions on trans issues.
Witch-hunts today may not end at the stake or on the ducking stool, but they still stifle voices with breathtaking ease. Call someone a witch and they are a witch…because how can they prove that they’re not?
So, perhaps it’s time to ditch the pointy hats and besoms and find a new look for Halloween.
To give the real “witches” back their dignity and humanity.