Dornsife Dialogues introduce the societal implications behind witches

Halloween cannot be special without the stories of witches and other supernatural beings. In celebration of this holiday, the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences invited their audience to a webinar on Oct. 31 to hear about the origins and development of witches and witchcraft. Panelists included  Deborah Harkness, a history professor at Dornsife, and Lisa Bitel, the Dean’s Professor of Religion and professor of religion and history at Dornsife. Peter Mancall, a Dornsife historian and the Andrew W. Mellon professor of the humanities, was the event’s moderator.

Dornsife Dean Amber Miller gave a brief introduction to the event and talked about how her top costume choice for Halloween was the witch costume. 

“I had to admit that for at least half of elementary school, I wore different versions of the same [costume] — I was always a witch,” she said. “Turns out I wasn’t exactly choosing the most unique costume. I just learned that witches are by far the most popular Halloween costume out there.”

The question of current day society’s fascination with witches opened the discussion among panelists. Harkness said that across many cultures, witches are often regarded as liminal figures or a threshold garter between life and death, healing and sickness, the hearth and the outdoors and between birth and creation. 

“I just think that thresholds indicate a change of status, and we’re all fascinated by change, so having a figure who embodies change in your community or who can help manage change, I think, that’s still appealing to us frankly today,” Harkness said. “Who wouldn’t like somebody to help us get through the next bump in the road?”

Originally, witches were not portrayed in the manner they are today. Harkness said the precursors of witches are often oracles, healers and people who knew scrying and other special skills. However, when it came to the late Middle Ages, the publication of a Germanic guidebook on witchcraft codified and stigmatized witches, causing widespread influence which continues to affect how people view witches today.

Although men were also accused of witchcraft in history, people often tend to associate magic with women. According to Bitel, a number of threads from different origins feed into a powerful ideology that led to witch hunts and the execution of tens of thousands of women.

“If you think about gender theory in the medieval period, based on Aristotle, women were weaker, weaker of body and thus weaker of mind,” Bitel said. “And, in a Christian sense, weaker in that they were more prone to sin, especially lust, which made them more open to Satan.” 

The panelists also discussed how the concepts of witchcraft connect to contemporary society. Bitel said it is interesting to see the continuing cultural interest in magic — the rise of spiritualism, the revival of witchcraft and the creation of neo-pagan groups — and how all these ideas co-evolve with technology.

Harkness talked about how people’s belief in witches persist even to this day, long after the witch trials were halted. 

“Witchcraft and anxiety go hand in hand. I think we can look at our own time and modern versions of evil witches or others, and know that profound societal and cultural anxiety leads to wild accusations against people who used to be your very nice next-door neighbor and it’s now the other,” she said.

Witchcraft terms have also been used in modern-day languages. Harkness indicated that some conspiracy theories tend to use magical terms, such as cabal, to describe people who are responsible for the bad things that happen to others. Bitel added that there’s a long tradition for this phenomenon.

“People always look back to previous constructs for their accusations, so, you know, accusing women and others of incest or cannibalism or that kind of stuff,” Bitel said. “There’s a long, long tradition of those very accusations against people who are feared and distrusted.” 

Harkness said that this is unfortunately human nature and happens throughout history and today as well. 

“This is a pretty, pretty long tradition that led to a lot of death, so I would just encourage everybody to reflect on that,” Harkness said.