Alice Gimbro Frisk
We all know that being anything but straight and cisgender was seen as a sin in 14th-century Europe when The Divine Comedy was released. Being gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary or anything else outside the norm would most definitely make you end up in hell. In a strictly Christian society, any belief or practice challenging the centralised power of the deeply patriarchal church and monotheistic faith was not only taboo, but forbidden. Many forms of witchcraft draw their power from the earth, opposite to Christianity, where power comes from above and God is depicted as floating around on a cloud. The underground is seen as a source of evil, the home of the devil, and by using medicinal plants and in other ways drawing power from the ground, this reinforced the idea that witches were in union with the devil.
Between 1560 and 1630, witches were prosecuted and murdered around Europe in the thousands, where an estimated 80,000 died. Around 80% of them were women, which portrays a strong fear of women with power or knowledge that could in any way challenge that of the church. The witch hunts were not only deeply misogynistic but also entrenched in racist and antisemitic beliefs. The image of the old witch, the “hag”, has many similarities to how jews were portrayed, with hook-like noses and exaggerated features. The witches’ gatherings where witchcraft and rituals were believed to be performed were called “sabbaths”, taken from the Hebrew word “shabbat”, or even in some cases “synagogues of satan”. In the Caribbean colonies and on slave plantations in North America, many black people were murdered or tortured for practising non-Christian religions and accused of sorcery and trying to use black magic on their slave owners.
If you practised traditional knowledge, herbal medicine, healing, or any signs of pagan faith, you would most certainly end up on the town’s most wanted list. Living as a queer person, non-Christian, or non-normconforming female in any way was thereby both an act of resistance as well as putting your own life in danger.