Today's selection -- from Haunted by Leo Braudy. In James I's England, the witch became a powerful symbol of those hated forces that opposed the king. During the English Civil War, this notion persisted, with the self- described "Witchfinder General," Matthew Hopkins. He was responsible for the hanging deaths of more than 300 women between 1644 and 1646, roughly 40 percent of all witches ever executed in England:
"Maleficium, the usual Latin word for witchcraft, was what witches were accused of, literally 'doing evil,' which often included copulating with the devil, kissing his ass, and other combinations of the diabolic and the sexual that are characteristic of the charge of trafficking with demons. ...
"James I of England ... linked religious subversion with political subversion, usurpation, and the attack on monarchical divine right authority in his book Daemonologie (1597). ... In News from Scotland, published by James in 1591 and reprinted as part of Daemonologie, he details the confessions of some Danish witches that they tried to assassinate him first by poison and then by summoning up a storm to sink the ship in which he was returning to the British Isles from Denmark with his Danish born queen, Anne. ...
"James was a patron of Shakespeare's acting company, and in Macbeth the playwright pays due deference to James's views with the tale of an erstwhile political usurper who dabbles in the black arts to gain his way. That the play was probably written in the wake of the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which broadened earlier laws to include the penalty of death, as well as around the time of the thwarted Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament (1605), suggests that on this occasion (and for the rest of the century) the diabolic forces are to be identified specifically with the Catholic threat to Protestant England.
"The pressures of war, along with the paranoia about one's enemies, created a fertile ground for witch-hunting to flourish. ... In England, for example, during the civil war conflicts in the 1640s between the king and Parliament, a young man in his twenties named Matthew Hopkins, calling himself the Witchfinder General, blazed through the east of England in strongly Puritan areas, accusing supposed witches of a pact with the devil even without evidence of maleficium. By the time he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven in 1647 he was responsible for hanging upward of three hundred women, according to some estimates more than the total of the previous century and a half -- around 40 percent of all the witches ever executed in England.
"In the year of his death, his Discovery of Witches was published, a book that became very influential in the New England witch trials that lasted from the late 1640s to the early 1690s [including the Salem witch trials]. ...
"The whole process [of witch hunts] resembles a kind of social pathology, a safety valve to compensate for fears of the unconventional sexuality of older, no longer fertile women who were without any defined social role and so occupied the bottom reaches of the gender hierarchy. Some of this sense of potential social upheaval lies behind the expanded usage of 'witch hunt' in the twentieth century to mean the search for any who criticize established authority."
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Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds
Author: Leo Braudy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Copyright 2016 by Leo Braudy
Pages: 44-47
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