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Some of the most notorious historical occurrences in Europe and North America include witch hunts. Which took place over many centuries. We have been enthralled by the notion that women are capable of magic for hundreds of years. Unexpectedly, girls take center stage. They started off as victims before becoming suspected witches.
Why? What transpired to cause young females, often very young girls, to turn into witches?
This subject is investigated in Little Witches. Which focuses on historical witch hunts to determine instances in which girls played a prominent role in the pursuit of witches. And the reason they persist now.
What Constitutes a Witch?
Witchcraft: What is it? When did the witch trials start? Knowing is challenging. While the Code of Hammurabi contains records of witch-hunting dating back almost 4,000 years. We know less about beliefs prevalent before Ancient Babylon. Our sources play a role in this since, as far as we are aware, pre-Mesopotamian tribes did not maintain written records. Instead, knowledge and history were transmitted orally. This makes it challenging to determine the precise beginning of witch hunts and, by extension, the belief in witches.
Written in 1750 BCE, the Code of Hammurabi codifies witchcraft beliefs through its rules. More specifically, it says that if a man casts a magic on another man and it is not justified. The target of the spell must go to the holy river and plunge into it. The person who cast the charm on him will inherit his home if the holy river overtakes him and drowns him. The person who cast the spell will be executed if the holy river finds him to be innocent and he is unhurt. The person who dove into the river will occupy the person’s home who cast the charm on him.
Make a few observations. There is no evidence that women were witches, as the Code stipulates that a witch is a male. Second, because the Code differentiates between whether a spell is justified. Witchcraft was probably viewed as both good and bad. like punishment, in a way. Did the target deserve to be the target of a spell? Why did someone curse someone else? As a final penalty, it codifies a practice that would be adopted by Europeans in the future:. Accusing witches were thrown into rivers, and whether they drowned or not proved their innocence.
This rendered all decisions utterly random and absolved everyone still alive of all responsibility. He perished if the witch was to blame. If he was innocent, he would still be alive (although his accuser would be put to death for giving a false account). In reality, the only function of the legal system was to determine guilt and innocence.
Witch hunts have historically been particularly Western (read: European and European-American) events, which is another issue. Witches have existed for a very long time and in many different forms. But only in Europe and America have they been consistently persecuted historically. It’s crucial to keep in mind that not all societies demonize witches, despite the fact that the practice eventually spread through colonization.
Little Witches concentrates on European and European-American witch hunts since at the time of writing, our team had easy access to these sources. We also examine how European witch hunts permeated colonialism and the modern era. Fundamentally altering folk beliefs and turning them into tools of oppression.
Locating Female Witches
Beyond cultural differences, witch hunts are a challenging subject to research, particularly when trying to locate girls in the myths. Notably, many witch hunts neglected to document even the most basic biographical details of the accusers or victims. This was a reflection of the idea that women were inferior and that the only things that mattered in court were their name and marital status. A lot of times. It is necessary to extrapolate from the data or conduct lengthy genealogical and historical research in order to determine people’s ages, locations of residence, employment, families, and personal religious views.
Verifying the ages of the women we investigate is one of the largest challenges in the field of girlhood research. A precise age is occasionally noted. Other times, it is stated that a lady was “young,””married,” or “old.” In order to understand what the contemporaries meant by these expressions, we must look at average marriage and death ages. Finally, there simply isn’t enough information on the women in question most of the time. Male authors didn’t consider it important to record the lives of women or even just the most basic facts. They weren’t writing for those of us studying them hundreds of years after. They were writing for themselves and for their time.
Take everything with a grain of salt if you’re looking for girl-aged witches. Which we define as those who are under the age of 21. There are reports of early witch hunts where young girls participated, or most likely did.
A Rise in Modern Witchcraft
Witchcraft didn’t seem to be a widespread religious and social problem until the late 1400s. Rather, it was a localized folk belief and community issue. What altered?
First, the Renaissance rekindled interest in magic, particularly the school of thought found in Arabic, Jewish, Romani, and Egyptian works that Europeans had “rediscovered” in the 1400s. There are descriptions of divination, palm reading, and what is known as demonology or black magic in modern times.
As they were considered unusual, many people were curious to learn more about or observe these skills being done. Especially as solutions to problems that science was unable to explain. However, the Catholic Church specifically condemned such magical arts.
These new arts were unique in two ways. It was learnt magic in the first place, and unusual magic in the second. In the Middle Ages, people believed that magic originated from “fae”—naturally occurring. Regional beings that were either magical or semi-magical and lived in their surroundings. Magic was more of a talent or gift that someone possessed. It might be developed via training and study, but it ultimately depended on a person’s intrinsic skills. Magic became a skill that anybody could learn throughout the Renaissance.