Aidyn Osgood, a visiting assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, teaches a popular class on the history of witchcraft. With Halloween upon us, he shares fascinating insights into ways witches have been viewed throughout history and the evolution of Halloween as a major cultural phenomenon. This interview is edited for length and clarity.
What sparked your interest in the history of witchcraft?
Like many of my students, I grew up reading fairy tales and watching Disney movies about witches. My generation also grew up alongside the chief characters in Harry Potter. As I entered high school, witchcraft seemed a frivolous topic. But as I began to study early modern Europe, 1400 to 1800—the largest and most sustained period of witch hunting in human history—I began to see how the study of witchcraft is in fact enmeshed with vital political, economic, environmental, religious, social, cultural and gender developments.
Between 1300 and 1800, more than 30,000 people—about the population of Claremont—were executed as witches in Europe. Witchcraft engages issues central to modern history: political centralization, climate change, gender, sexual and racial power, medicine, conceptions of the body, shifting religious dynamics, and evolving juridical norms. Because most of the documents describing witches’ activities come from witch hunters, studying witchcraft requires us to become sensitive and nuanced critical thinkers.
To what do you attribute the public’s durable interest in witchcraft?
Magic furnishes explanations for things that seem beyond our intellectual grasp. As humans, we seem to desire to understand our world. Magic provides us some reasons for why things happen. At the same time, magic suggests that we might somehow influence forces that initially seem out of our control. I think these characteristics are especially prominent in childhood, when we lack control and begin to understand our world: hence the number of children’s media featuring witches. The presence of children in almost every society makes magic appear in a wide variety of contexts. But the connection between imagination and witchcraft poses dangers, too. In Salem’s famous witch trials, the first two bewitched people were girls aged nine and eleven whose testimony the local court understood as unimpeachable proof of the diabolical activities of the people they accused.
Why have people labeled as witches been feared and scapegoated throughout history?
Witches have not been scapegoated throughout history. Many societies have a conception of magical practice but not witchcraft. Some believe in witchcraft (harmful magic) but have rituals to contain rather than punish witches. There are commonalities in witchcraft accusations that surface over and over. First, people need to believe that there is some mystical or occult power that effects the material world. Second, witchcraft accusations tend to happen in places with attenuated central authority and limited oversight. Third, they happen when communities are under threat.
Still, responses to magical practice varied widely. The earliest European missionaries to North America, for example, looked upon belief in witchcraft as humorous and frivolous superstition and sought to curtail indigenous spiritual practices (which they understood as witchcraft) in favor of Christianity. Only later, after missionary efforts had been well established, did ideas shift towards fear and persecution of witches.
What causes witch hunts?
I think there are some structural elements. For the witch hunts in Europe between 1500 and 1700, those include religious upheaval in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the Little Ice Age in the Northern Hemisphere, crop failures, a view of women’s bodies as particularly susceptible to demonic influence, recurring plagues, and the development of the printing press that gave access to knowledge about witchcraft. But many witchcraft trials came down to local and historical conditions and the actions of particular people. Prosecuting witchcraft was a choice that people made, and they might have decided differently.
Why does popular literature continue to be fascinated with witches and witchcraft?
I think nostalgia plays an important role. Descriptions of magic proliferated in the nineteenth century in the Euro-American context at the same time that society industrialized rapidly, scientific experimentation advanced, and humans developed ever more sophisticated and invasive ways to understand and control their environments. The world felt like it could be comprehended by a series of equations. But that version of the world struck many people as drab, and they longed for an enchanted world again.
I think the enduring fascination with witchcraft, magic and the occult reflects the extent to which we feel we have answers for so many of our questions. Even if the answers are right, they may not be emotionally satisfying. Or maybe we wanted uncertainty and mystery rather than answers in the first place. Witchcraft symbolizes a world once more subject to mystical rules and its dangers and promises.
Magic makes everything possible. Witchcraft lets us articulate our fantasies. In a world seemingly ruled by logic, a possibility to realize one’s fantasies takes on added meaning and social significance.
How did witches come to be associated with Halloween?
It’s a long, contested and convoluted story! “Halloween” is short for “All Hallows’ Eve,” known in many Christian denominations as All Saints’ Day. Some historians argue that this holiday goes back to pre-Christian Europe. In this telling, Druids believed the days around November 1 were a time when the spiritual world and the material world were in closer alignment than normal. Dressing up as an evil spirit could help ward off those evil spirits. Placing All Hallows’ Day on November 1 was an elegant solution for Christian missionaries. It appropriated a pagan holiday, so people who had celebrated it wouldn’t have to change their routines and could still practice Christianity.
Other scholars argue that Halloween as we know it was a popular gloss of Christian theology, which held that on October 31, saints were especially inclined to intercede in the lives of ordinary people. But if saints could intercede, demons and other preternatural forces could as well.
By the nineteenth century, as people wanted to inject a sense of magic and mystery back into their world, Halloween again became associated with the occult. Insofar as witches held sway over literary imagination, they became entangled in Halloween. If witches were frightening, and if the last night of October was a time in which magical powers were strongest, one could dress as a witch for protection. Another idea was to “bribe” evil spirits to keep them from causing mischief. If one provided a treat, they could avoid a trick. Over time, this became the ritual we now associate with Halloween: “Trick or treat!”