Witch-Hunting, Past and Present, and the Fear of the Power of Women

<p>She stands alone in the twilight, in an empty space, holding in her hands a skein of blue yarn that weaves around her to embrace a cluster of homes, which, because of this, appear almost as a continuation of her body. Trazando el camino (1990) is among the many paintings that Rodolfo Morales, one of Mexico’s best twentieth-century artists, has dedicated to the theme of the female body as the material and social fabric holding the community together. Morales’ painting is a counterpoint to the image of the witch: with her quiet look and embroidered apron, the woman it represents is almost angelic. Yet something magical and secretive about her recalls the female “conspiracy” that was the historical justification for the witch hunts that bloodied Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, perhaps providing a clue to some of the mysteries at the heart of this persecution, which historians have yet to solve.</p> <p>Why were the witch hunts primarily directed against women? How does one explain the fact that for three centuries, thousands of women in Europe became the personification of “the enemy within” and of absolute evil? And how does one reconcile the all-powerful, almost mythical portrait that inquisitors and demonologists painted of their victims—as creatures of hell, terrorists, man-eaters, servants of the devil, wildly riding the skies on their broomsticks— with the defenseless figures of the actual women who were charged with these crimes and then horribly tortured and burned at the stake?…</p>