Striges, non tantum victimae

I am reading Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. A brilliant and provocative book that interprets the witch hunts within the transition to capitalism, assigning a central role to control over women’s bodies and their reproductive capacity.

Yet I am wary of explanations that, however intellectually stimulating, seem to reduce phenomena unfolding over centuries, across different places and societies, to a single dominant interpretation.

But that is not what I want to discuss.

My interest in magical thinking—my fascination with it, perhaps—began with Giorgio Galli’s writings and deepened as I followed its many tangled threads.

When these explorations led me to the history of witchcraft, professional instinct immediately sent me looking for trial records. A difficult undertaking, since time has destroyed many sources. Sometimes the destruction was deliberate. In Milan, in 1788, the authorities ordered the destruction of the Inquisition’s archival records held at Santa Maria delle Grazie. With those papers disappeared some of the traces of a past in which women were burned in Piazza Vetra.

What remains is therefore an incomplete body of evidence, of which I have read only a small fraction. And these are documents produced by those conducting the trials, not neutral accounts.

With these qualifications, and through the double lens of an amateur historian and a professional lawyer, I believe certain points deserve attention. Men appear among the accused with some frequency. As for torture, in some cases it was threatened but never inflicted, and some confessions were obtained without its use.

This does little to alter the psychological pressure. Even the possibility of torture radically undermines the reliability of a confession. Yet on more than a few occasions, and always bearing in mind the serious limitations I have mentioned, I have read accounts in which the accused appeared to describe events and people coherently, identifying themselves as witches and recounting magical and satanic encounters and experiences as part of their lives.

The effects of patriarchal repression, visionary experiences, remnants of agrarian cults such as those explored by Ginzburg in his pioneering I benandanti, or judicial fabrications?

To my mind, no single explanation can encompass all of this. But one possible interpretation deserves to remain open: that some of these people really were witches.

Not, of course, in the sense that they possessed supernatural powers, but that they had freely chosen this tortuous, perhaps openly malevolent, certainly magical path as a form of personal affirmation. That they had found in magical thinking, and perhaps also in ritual practices—even orgiastic ones, if any such accounts reflected actual practices—a scandalous way of recognising themselves, in historical settings where we might imagine individuality struggling to find expression.

This line of thought is not without precedents, although the parallels are not exact. One comes to mind in Ernesto de Martino’s work. In The Land of Remorse, he studies a phenomenon distinct from witchcraft, but which I connect to it through the thread of magical thinking: tarantism. In his interpretation, ritual offers a means of expressing and symbolically resolving emotional and sexual conflicts, including the frustrated or forbidden desire that he calls eros precluso, which marked the lives of many women. Traces of this phenomenon were still alive in Salento during his fieldwork in 1959. This does not establish my hypothesis, but it suggests how ritual could give expression to aspects of the self that ordinary life left little room to acknowledge.

Here, then, is my conclusion: that some of those unfortunate people caught in the machinery of the courts may have consciously chosen to be what they felt themselves to be—witches. A choice of identity, not of the persecution that awaited them.

Acknowledging this possibility, I believe, restores a human depth that we risk denying them when we see them only as victims.

References

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004.

Giorgio Galli, La magia e il potere. L’esoterismo nella politica occidentale, Torino, Lindau, 2004. ISBN 88-7180-520-8.

Carlo Ginzburg, I benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Einaudi, 1966. Published in English as The Night Battles.

Ernesto de Martino, La terra del rimorso. Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud, Il Saggiatore, 1961. Published in English as The Land of Remorse.

Anna Marcaccioli Castiglioni, Streghe e roghi nel Ducato di Milano. Processi per stregoneria a Venegono Superiore nel 1520, with contributions by Rolando Bellini and Pierluigi Piano, foreword by Fabio Minazzi, Thelema, 1999. Includes the complete trial texts with facing Italian translations.