In honour of the Halloween season, MQUP presents an excerpt of Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay by Robert Rapley:
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broomsticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.
- William Butler Yeats
Yeats was wrong when he wrote these words – the witches have not gone! They are with us every year. For the month leading to 31 October, we are surrounded in every shopping centre by pictures of old women on fiery-orange backgrounds dressed in black, wearing pointy black hats, and riding broomsticks, often accompanied by their cats or dogs. Nobody needs to tell us that such a figure is a witch or that the cat or dog is her familiar, even though we may not be precisely sure what a familiar is.
We know that it is Hallowe’en. “Trick or treat” time. Fun time for the kids, going like small covens from house to house in homemade costumes to ask for candy. These are no evildoers; they chatter away and run from door to door, sussing out like magic those homes where nobody is there to deliver the goods and passing them by without a glance to hit on the next welcoming lights and decorations. Truth be told, there is no longer any “trick or treat” about it – the trick has pretty well disappeared; one gets a “treat” or goes on to the next house. But there used to be a “trick” element, not so long ago. As late as the mid-1900s, the witches and goblins overturned outhouses, soaped windows, performed minor evils on householders whom they did not like or who had failed to deliver – give us a treat or we will play a trick on you, causing you to regret it. No longer. “Trick or treat” is just a formula of words that we all recognize, part of an annual event based on dressing up in costumes and getting gifts of good things to eat.
This describes Hallowe’en for most of us. We have some underlying sense that long past there was more to it, something associated with witches – and with evil. Most of us, in fact, probably know more about witches than we think we do. If we were asked to do so, how would we describe a witch? Well, surely we would evoke the Hallowe’en witch that we are so used to, the old woman in black with the pointy hat and chin, the hooked nose, and warts.
Some 400 years ago, when everybody believed in witches, this was a fairly typical picture of the women who were accused. They were usually old women, village women – as most people lived in villages – often cantankerous old women without men left to protect them, poor widows, wrinkled with old age, with the hooked nose and pointed chin of a person without teeth. In tough times (and those were tough times in Europe, marked by disease, famine, and war), such women would beg a neighbour for bread, meat, milk, clothing, anything, sometimes to be refused, for the housewife was almost as poor as the old woman. Rejected, the cantankerous old besom would often cast behind her curses and vituperations as she hobbled off. No great harm done except to add to her reputation for unpleasantness. But perhaps within a few days an animal would sicken on the farm, a baby would fall sick, a husband or a son would fall and break an arm. Then the curses and threats would be remembered. This was literally trick or treat with a vengeance. The village whispers would begin and spread. The old woman had laid a spell, called upon the Devil to punish the ones who had rejected her. She was a witch, they would say. And others would add experiences that they had had, other examples of evil doing by the same old woman, local and family disasters that she had threatened or foretold. Sometimes the accusations would become formal, a trial would be held, and not infrequently a witch would be burned.
Click here for another excerpt from Witch Hunts or click here to order.
Happy Halloween from all of us at McGill-Queen's University Press!
