What I'm Reading, Silvia Federici, "Caliban & the Witch"

<CW for all kinds of horror associated with Witch Hunts>

Holy crap this book is excellent. It’s about the Witch Hunts of the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries in Europe and the Americas. Federici’s thesis is that the mass persecution of women as witches was just as foundational to the development of capitalism as colonialism, slavery, and the theft of the common land through enclosure were. I say “mass persecution” without a specific number because we don’t know exactly how many women were tortured, burned, murdered, killed themselves, were cast out and died of preventable poverty... it wasn’t considered important to keep a record, unless it was a record of how much land and money was grabbed as a result. Historians estimate anywhere between 200,000 and six million, and that’s just in Europe. The Witch Hunts in the Americas were just as destructive, if not more so.

What Federici demonstrates is that “the transition from Feudalism to capitalism” is a phrase that makes that period of change seem much smoother and more inevitable than it actually was. In fact it was an extremely bloody time, and all kinds of contemporary resistance to feudalism and nascent capitalism existed. Many of those early rebels were women, or led by women. Once colonialism got into full swing, many women, especially in South America, used magic and traditional religions as the basis for leading colonial rebellions, for example the Taki Onqoy movement in Peru. The resistance to early capitalism seriously threatened to prevent it from ever taking hold. So to break the rebels, the new European elite first had to break the power of women.

As well as mass-murder, the Witch Hunts were accompanied by a massive curtailment of women’s rights, including reproductive rights: contraception, termination of pregnancy, any kind of non-procreative sex (including homosexual sex) was criminalised, as was sex work. The idea that a woman should be passive, remain in the home, and submit to her husband was an invention of this period: women in the Middle Ages had enjoyed more rights and a higher social status than they had in most places by the end of the 17th Century (though they still weren’t equal to men). During this time women were in many places forbidden from being paid wages and from inheriting property or running a business, which previously had been fine. But a family still required more than one income to exist (once the common lands had all been stolen) so women would work in the home making things that the husband would sell, and the money would go to him, keeping women under men’s control. Rather than unite to fight the people exploiting them, the newly minted European proletariat were divided along gender lines and encouraged to fight each other. Throughout all this, the figure of the Witch was used as a stick to cudgel women into the new social order. 

Federici also argues that magical thinking, with its charms, lucky days and unlucky days, rituals, spells, and veneration of nature, had to be eradicated if the new capitalist ideology was to triumph, which regards nature as a collection of exploitable resources and requires regimented, predictable, set times for lots of working. The keepers of magical thinking were often women, and so this period saw the criminalisation and persecution of wise-women, midwives, and female healers, and the violent eradication of generations of knowledge of herbal remedies and folk practices. In the New World charges of devil worship and witchcraft were used to justify the murder and enslavement of entire populations and the theft of the massive amounts of natural resources that built Europe into what it is today.  Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa had no concept of witches as we know them before Europeans arrived: they too were “encouraged” to change their societies in order to oppress women more, and so make them more efficient trade partners and riper for exploitation. Sadly this technique was so successful that it continues in some parts of the world to this day.

Some of the most interesting bits for me were when Federici connected the figure of the Witch back to philosophy being done at the time. Descartes was agnostic on the issue of witches; Hobbes supported the Witch Hunts saying, crucially and tellingly, that even if witches didn’t exist the mass persecution was good for maintaining social order! I assumed that the Witch Hunts stopped because materialism and rationality eventually prevailed and people stopped believing in witches, but in fact this isn’t true - they stopped because they had fulfilled their purpose. Witchcraft was specifically outlawed even if it had no negative consequences - in other words even if your supposed magic failed to have any kind of effect it was still enough to get you killed. From this we can tell that it wasn’t so much a fear of magic that prompted the Hunts as a need by the new European elite to stamp out a whole way of life. Towards the end, members of the higher classes began to be accused of supernatural skullduggery too, and that’s when things started to cool off. It’s also telling that courts and public figures towards the end of the Witch Hunt never denounced it all as a sham and a horrible error - rather the charges of witchcraft were gradually replaced with more specific crimes that the catchall term ‘witchcraft’ had been created to mask, like begging, petty theft, cursing, adultery, fornication, being poor in public, and basically anything that wasn’t shutting up and going to work. The final sentence of the book is a blistering summary: 

“As soon as we strip the persecution of witches from its metaphysical trappings, we recognise in it phenomena that are very close to home.”

This book is amazingly good. Very accessible, thoroughly recommended. It was sent to me by Teri from my Amazon wish list - thank you Teri! You can pick it up here if you’d like to read it.