The Inuit famously have fifty words for snow.
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It usually is. Anthropologist Franz Boas lived with the people of Baffin Island for many years, learned their language and ate a lot of seal meat. His work influenced linguist Benjamin Whorf whose ‘linguistic-relativity hypothesis’ suggested that a person’s language affects how they perceive the world.
This so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ is now regarded as broadly true, but in a more diluted sense than was originally proposed – think about language ‘influencing’ rather than ‘dictating’ cognitive outcomes. This idea will be familiar with any psychologists out there who will, no doubt, be shouting ‘top-down processing’ at the screen. Top-down processing is where we draw from our expectations and beliefs while interpreting new information. We have a hypothesis of the world and our perceptions can end up jamming new information into old frameworks.
In the nineteenth century the new religious movement of Spiritualism put women front and centre. The Fox Sisters of Upstate New York became celebrities and modern priestesses. Other women’s movements like suffrage were fellow-travellers on the pathway to female emancipation – all elements of first-wave feminism. To this movement, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray contributed the ‘Witch Cult Hypothesis’.
Building on the work of many others in the nineteenth century (such as Jules Michelet), Murray proposed that the witch trials of early modern Europe were an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian pagan religion which coexisted with Christianity and worshipped a horned-god. You can still read her theories in The Witch Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches.
Murray’s contemporaries and virtually all those critics who followed cited the horrific methodological problems with her work. She used highly selective sources to create a coherent model, but it was a mirage.
Pivotally though, the witch cult hypothesis impressed the man regarded as ‘the father of Wicca’, Gerald Gardner. An amateur anthropologist, Gardner settled down in the 1930s in the New Forest following his extensive travels, and joined a local coven which he took to be one of the long-established residual pagan groups proposed by Murray.
So, uncritical modern Pagans could chase some of these threads back to make a link between the European witch hunts of the early modern era and their own religion. They would be mistaken. Many Wiccans and Pagans are far more educated than that, and they do not.
Perhaps the former group feels that they need their religion to be ancient in order to be credible? I don’t share that concern. Neo-Paganism/Wicca was invented fairly recently, but all religions are invented at some point. Humans have an inbuilt predisposition to spirituality and their strand is as respectable as any, more respectable than some.
The causes of the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are too numerous and complicated to reduce to an old religious cult.
The legal and conceptual groundwork was undoubtedly laid by the anti-heresy mania of the late Middle Ages. The witch hunts happened in a time of Post-Reformation upheaval, so there was religious paranoia. When states are organised on religious affiliations, there are political consequences. European wars in this era were very ugly indeed, especially as the technology had advanced to the point where killing became more efficient. The Thirty-Years War (1618-1648) was a horrific trauma.
In places like England, there was a gap between the charity which had been provided by the medieval church and more effective and large-scale poor-laws of the nineteenth century. This meant that the poorest in a village were not objects of sympathy – they were liabilities to whom others owed sustenance. Rather than take ownership of their antipathy, it was easier for accusers to cut off social relations with the poor by accusing them of witchcraft.
And people were not particularly mobile. Many witch trials reveal deep antipathy between the parties which had festered for years and culminated in an accusation.
The Inuit may have had many different words for snow but, regrettably, English-speakers have only one word for two very different types of person. One was labelled by exterior sources and was, by consequence, very likely to be victimised and possibly killed. The other is a self-labelled participant in a New Religious Movement.
It’s a strange paradox that the ‘w’ word probably appealed to some early Wiccans & Pagans because they were accessing an alternate history. In a top-down, Sapir-Whorfian way, perhaps they felt it alluded to an otherworldy power. However the original witches of previous eras were often the least powerful people in the community.
