The Renaissance Times

We wrap up the witches series by pulling together everything we’ve covered – the folklore, the hallucinogens, the conspiracy theories, the Inquisition, and yes, the broomstick thing. Turns out the witch trials weren’t really about witches. They were about famines, heresy, herbal healers, ergot fungus, ancient blood-drinking myths that got recycled from Jews to vampires to women with cats…. and a church that was absolutely terrified of losing control. Plus: the first documented vampire in history, a polymath who married a 13-year-old and died from too much sex, and a toad someone was keeping under her bed and feeding bread and cheese.

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We’re deep in the witchy end of the Renaissance now…. women falling into trances, communing with the dead, healing the sick, and charging for it, which honestly sounds like a pretty solid business model. Meanwhile men called the Căluşari are dressing as women, leaping around with swords, and apparently killing people with no legal consequences whatsoever. The church is not thrilled about any of this, but it’s been going on for thousands of years and a strongly worded sermon isn’t going to cut it.

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We’ve finally made it to witch trials…. sort of. First: an 80-year-old man in 1692 Livonia confessing to being a werewolf, werewolves who apparently lose battles against sorcerers armed with broomsticks, and a fertility cult called the Benandanti who leave their bodies in the shape of butterflies to fight for good crops using fennel stalks. Then the Waldensians, who just wanted to preach poverty and got 700 years of massacre for it. And then the witch trials of 1430s Switzerland, where the accused were confessing to flying on chair legs with the help of a hallucinogenic salve applied in a manner Cameron declines to leave ambiguous.

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We’ve been building up to witches for a while now, and this episode we take a detour back to the second century CE…. because of course we do. Before Christians started accusing Jews of ritual murder, cannibalism, and orgies, Romans were accusing Christians of exactly the same thing. The stories just get recycled. Then we get into women flying at night with the goddess Diana, Herodias engineering the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and how 1,500 years later she somehow ends up co-leading the witches. Next episode: werewolves.

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We finally get to the witches. Only took us a couple of hundred episodes. The trail leads through the Black Death, tortured confessions about poisoned powders and boiled infants, a German theologian named Nider who wrote the first book on witchcraft in 1435, and a judge who apparently knew an extraordinary amount of detail about secret devil-worshipping covens…. under torture, of course, which is famously reliable. By 1438 the template is basically set: broomsticks, covens, babies in pots, and 700 followers on the verge of becoming lords of the country. Between 1400 and 1775 roughly 100,000 people would be prosecuted. About 80% of them women.

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