“The idea of a witch goes back to the beginning of time. Every culture had its own version of the witch who was a strange person thought to have the power to heal and harm, cure, and curse. They were called shamans, wise folk, or cunning people. People feared and admired witches because they were thought to have a link to things that couldn’t be seen or known.”
“People generally got along with them even though they were religiously and socially different. But when the political and religious order of society was threatened, witches were seen as bad guys and were often blamed for wrongdoing. This was the case in Europe in the late Middle Ages and early modern era.”
“Witchcraft has been seen as wrong by the Catholic Church since the 9th century AD. But this changed as more people questioned the church’s power. All of a sudden, witchcraft seemed very real and scary. When the Inquisition was first set up, it started to get rid of anything that wasn’t in line with religion. This included witchcraft and non-Orthodox Christian views.”
“During the Reformation, both Catholics and Protestants went after and killed witches because they thought they were practicing witchcraft. It was asked how to tell the difference between a doctor who isn’t bad and one who is for the devil. Here are 10 tests and signs of witchcraft from the past. Appearance. People often first recognized witches not by the proof of their craft, but by how they looked and what happened to them.”
“There was a plan that most people thought witches followed. They were usually old women who were poor or sick or stood out in some other way as being different. A lot of them lived alone with their pets. In the 1640s, John Gaul, an English Puritan, cleric, and skeptic of witchcraft, wrote in his snide work, “Select cases of conscience, every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue, a dog or cat by her side, is not only suspected but pronounced for a witch.””
“The Malleus Maleficarum, also known as the Hammer of the Witches, was written in 1486 by Father James Springer and Henry Kramer, two Dominican inquisitors. It was the first book to identify some of these traits. At this point, witchcraft had been turned into a sin, and Pope Innocent VI gave the two Dominicans permission to find people who were practicing it.”
“The Malleus was a symbol of all the things they had learned about witches and the people who practiced it. It was the reason why both Catholics and Protestants went on witch hunts for the next 200 years. The Malleus said that most witches were women because women were weak and easy to control. When they are ruled by a good spirit, they are most excellent in virtue.”
“The book said of women, “But when they are ruled by an evil spirit, they indulge in the worst possible vices.” The Malleus thought that women who were loose or vagrant were most likely witches. They were on the edges of society because of their behavior or their situation. They included young women who were promiscuous or forward or old and poor women.”
“During the 1600s and 1700s, this idea of the witch was at its strongest. Because of the growth of printing, especially woodcut pictures, cheap broad sheets could be made in large numbers. People loved shocking crime stories more than anything else. The European witch craze peaked around the same time that these broad sheets were very famous and they made sure that people always had news about witch trials in Britain.”
“In 1579, one of the first witchcraft books came out. It was about four notorious witches named Elizabeth Style, Mother Dutton, Mother Duel, and Mother Margaret Fowler. Every one of the alleged witches was old, had lost a spouse, or lived alone. Also, all of them had pets. This simple piece of information was changed so that the woodcuts showed the women as ugly crone-like creatures giving blood to demonic familiars.”
“Other broad sheets copied the pictures of the witches in this book, and they became the standard picture of a witch in England. The picture solidified into the public’s mind a common idea of what a witch looks like. It was a common belief that was also used to find witches in society. Soon, it was possible to say that any old lady with a cat who spoke out was a witch.”
“It wasn’t just about looks, though. There was secret proof of witchcraft on the witch’s body. Witch mark. Once a person accused of being a witch was in jail, more proof was needed to show they were guilty. It was already known from the Maleficarum that witches got their powers by making a deal with the devil.”
“By the 1600s, the idea was made even more terrifying by the thought that a mark on the witch’s body would seal the deal. Faith in the so-called witch’s mark or devil’s mark peaked in 1645 and then died out by 1700. People thought that Satan brandished, scratched, or even licked his witches to make the deal official. The mark could look like moles, birthmarks, or scars.”
“The more odd the birthmark, the more people thought something was wrong. It was especially likely that the marks were animal-shaped, like those on a toad. People tried to cut off their moles so that the inquisitors wouldn’t think they were witches and punish them. But this last-ditch effort was useless because scars were seen as peck marks made by Satan’s claws.”
“In England and New England, skin flaps that were not attached to anything were very important. The so-called witch’s teats were not peck marks in the traditional sense. Instead, they were seen as a third nipple that the witch used to feed her demon master or her pet. After Anne Whittle, a witch from Pendle, agreed to give the devil her soul, she was told she had to give him one part of her body to suck upon.”
“The first thing that inquisitors often looked for were witch’s marks. Other times, they didn’t look for them until a witch refused to admit. In this way, Geillis Duncan, a maidservant in Scotland in 1590, was tried for witchcraft during the North Berwick witch trials. A full body search was done as part of the search for marks.”
“Depending on the gender of the suspected witch, the person was stripped of all their clothes and often their body hair, so that a doctor or midwife could check them. A judge and jury would often be present at this time. No part of the body was exempt, including the genitals. Martin Del Rio in his 1599 book Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex describes how witch’s marks were found in different places for each sex.”
“”In men it may often be seen under the eyelids, under the lips, under the armpits, on the shoulders, on the fundament bottom. In women, moreover on the breast or on the pudenda female genitals.””
“A person with no marks on their body, even if they didn’t have birthmarks, would have been very rare, especially in medieval Europe, where diseases were common. People were sometimes guilty just because they had a mark on them. Some inquisitors, though, like to test sores more to see if they really were the mark of the devil. Even when there were no suspicious marks at all, more tests were still done. A pen or pin was all that was needed to do these tests. Pricking. People used to prick a mole or other spot to see if it really was a devil’s mark.”
“The idea was that if the area in question didn’t bleed or hurt the person who was thought to be a witch when a small sharp object was stuck through it, then it was real and proof of a deal with the devil. In 1691, Robert Kirk, a minister at Aberfoyle, wrote, “A spot that I have seen as a small mole, horny and brown colored, through which mark when a large pin was thrust, till it bowed and became crooked. The witches, both men and women, neither felt a pain, nor did bleed, nor knew the precise time when this was doing to their eyes only being covered.””
“Reading about witch hunts is very disturbing. Louis Gaufridi, a priest from Marseilles, France, was charged with magic on March 10th, 1611. Two doctors and two surgeons were sent to find his witch mark to prove he was guilty.”
“It wasn’t too different in color from his skin that the three marks they found on him. It was necessary to prick because the marks were not clear. So the surgeons went ahead. The mark on Gaufridi’s right thigh was pierced to the depth of two fingers breadth. Gaufridi didn’t bleed or hurt from the mark. This was enough to prove his guilt.”
“Most of the time, doctors or surgeons did the pricking like they did with Gaufridi. In Scotland, on the other hand, the job was done by a group of trained prickers. There was even a guild for this group because they were so well-known and admired. It wasn’t a surprise that the pricker had a high social status. At least in Scotland, they could charge high fees.”
“It was common for witch hunters to get paid six shillings a day to live on while they did their job and six shillings for each witch they caught in the 1600s. For their job, prickers used needles, pins, and bodkins, which are usually used to punch holes in cloth. There were, however, big rewards for getting prickers convicted. So many, if not most, broke the law. Some of the tools prickers used were made to have points that could be pulled back, making it look like the end had pierced the suspected witch’s skin. Because of how it was made, there would be no blood when the bodkin was withdrawn, and the subject would not have felt anything.”
“Prickers were sometimes used when there was no witch’s mark to be found. Authorities thought the witch’s mark couldn’t be seen in these cases, so they stabbed, prodded, and pricked the suspect all over until they found a spot that didn’t hurt or bleed. But sometimes the witch’s mark wasn’t found by doctors or professional prickers. It was found by the witch’s claimed victim. People thought that if someone who was cursed by a witch drew blood from their tormentor, their symptoms would get better. Because of this, using the victim to prick the witch was helpful in two ways. It freed the victim from the curse and showed who cast the spell. A witch victim could be used to test a possible witch in more than one way, not just by drawing blood. The urine test.”
“If people in a community thought that one of their own was cursed by an unknown witch or witches, the person’s pee could be used to prove for sure if they were cursed. This urine test might even be able to tell you who the witch was. People thought that urine was powerful in this way because it was linked to the person. In the 1600s and 1700s, it was also often used to help doctors figure out what was wrong. In those days, people thought it made sense to use it to find evil soon after. Baking a witch cake with pee was one way to find out if a witch had cursed the person who was sick. By mixing rye with the victim’s pee and then baking it, this disgusting treat was made.”
“The cake was then given to a dog, or if there was already a suspect in line, to the so-called familiar. They then kept a close eye on the animal. If it started to show the same signs as the victim, that meant witchcraft was at work. The lovely thing about the witch cake was that it showed both witchcraft and the witch. Not only was the urine cake meant to make the dog or witch’s familiar sick, it was also meant to charm them into telling the witch’s name. Another thing that was meant to happen was that the witch in question would get very sick, accidentally revealing herself. One of the first groups of supposed witches was caught in January 1692 in the Massachusetts town of Salem with the help of a witch cake, though the outcome was not direct.”
“However, the cake did not work and the people who baked it were then turned into suspects. In other ways, urine was used to find witches. In 1717, the people of Leicestershire’s Wigston Magna became sure that witches were at work in the village. Several of the residents were stricken by an illness that caused twisting and distorting of their limbs backward and forwards. One unlucky woman, Mary Hatchings, did die from the mysterious illness. So, they asked their preacher to help them find the bad guys and heal the sick. The minister was sorry to say that he couldn’t do any. So, he called for a smart man in the area to help him solve the problem. The sneaky man sealed up samples of the victim’s pee and put them in a bottle.”
“He then put the urine over a fire to heat it up. This process was meant to have two outcomes, just like the witch’s cake. To begin, it was meant to heal those who were sick, but only if the pee stayed in the bottle. If any got out while it was boiling, the person who was cursed was still cursed. But when the urine was first heated up, the witch or witches were meant to be forced to come into the room, either as themselves or as a dog or cat. Thus, the people of Wigston Magna were able to figure out that the Clark family were the witches. The Clarks were some of the last witches in England to be put through the next test for witchcraft. Swimming.”
“It looks like the idea of swimming witches came from the idea of trial by ordeal. In the 10th century, King Athelstan said that indicium aquae could be used to prove blame or innocence for a number of crimes. This is when swimming first came into use in English law. In the end, trial by water was taken off the books in 1219. But until James I backed it again in 1597, it was still a popular, if not official, way to tell if someone was innocent of certain crimes like witchcraft. People thought of water as pure just by being itself. Large bodies of water were once used for baptism. The idea behind swimming was that the suspect’s innocence or crime would be tested by the baptismal waters of the pond or river.”
“According to James I in his Daemonologie, “God hath appointed that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism, and willfully refuse the benefit thereof.” In other words, if the water turned down a suspect, it meant they were dirty, working for the devil or a witch. By the end of the 1600s, witch panic was getting worse, and swimming became a more common way to test people for witchcraft.”
“The suspect could be tested while wearing all of their clothes, but Sir Robert Filmer said that they were generally stripped naked. After that, they were tied up. They tied the suspect’s right thumb to their left toe and the other way around, making a ball with their body. Finally, a rope was wrapped around their waist, and they were thrown into the deep river or pond.”
“The suspect would have lost by being swum no matter what happened. If they floated, it meant that God and the water didn’t want them, so everyone called them a witch. They would die though if they sank. Unless the people holding the rope were kind and pulled them out in time. The people in charge of the procedure could change the result by where they put the victim. According to a letter written by Thomas Ady in 1656, everyone knew that a victim would not sink if they were put flat on their back and holding up their feet with a string. People in Wigston Magna tried to get proof of the witch’s guilt before bringing them before the Leicester Assizes in 1717. Swimming was used in this case. Contemporary accounts describe how the accused had their thumbs and great toes tied fast together and were thrown so bound into the water “whether they strove and used all endeavors to sink. Yet they all swam like a cork or an empty barrel.” This was the last legal use of swimming in England. But until the 1800s, the test was still used to find witches. A possible witch was judged by both what she did and what she said. The prayer test, a belief that praying properly and without mistakes is very important. Goes back to Roman times. Priests leading religious ceremonies had to say and do everything exactly as it was written and without making any mistakes. If they messed up, they had to start over because their poor spells could anger the gods and bring bad luck. This idea seems to have lived on in Christianity. And by the 1600s, trial by prayer was another way witches were put to the test.”
“Some people thought that if the devil sent someone to pray to God or read the Bible, they would trip over the holy words. It became common to have people who were being tried for witchcraft say the Lord’s Prayer or read from the Bible to do this perfectly. They couldn’t stutter, shake, or say the words wrong in any way. The suspect was scared for their life and possibly already tired from being tortured and tried before. So, this wasn’t easy.”
“The court did not, however, look at any mitigating conditions. God would give the accused strength if they were not guilty. They were doomed if they messed up the performance. Even if you prayed perfectly, that didn’t mean you would be found innocent. George Burroughs, who used to be a minister in Salem, was one of the accused witches. Burroughs was sent back to Salem to be tried for witchcraft. She was found guilty and given the death penalty. As soon as he got to the scaffold, though, he spoke to the crowd and said he was innocent. He then said the Lord’s Prayer. Robert Calef was a witness to the execution. He noted that Burroughs’s prayer was “so well-worded and uttered with such composedness and fervency of spirit that it convinced some of the crowd that the reverend was innocent.””
“It seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution, Calef noted. However, the officials of Salem were having none of it for this. Calef described how Mr. Cotton Mather, “being mounted upon a horse addressed himself to the people partly to declare that he Burrows was no ordained minister and partly to possess the people of his guilt saying that the devil has often been transformed into an angel of the light and this somewhat appeased the people and the executions went on.””
“It was even less likely that other tests for witchcraft would work. The touch test. It was thought that someone had been possessed if they quickly got a scary illness that no one could explain. Fits, seizures, and paralysis were all common health problems thought to be caused by a witch’s curse. A lot of people thought that the witch who put the spell on the person could be the only one who could break it.”
“A Pendle witch named Alison Device bewitched a peddler named John Law in March 1612. John Law’s son, Abraham Law, looked for her and brought her to the inn in Colne, Lancashire, where his sick father was staying. It’s likely that John Law had a stroke. Nevertheless, the fact that he got sick right after meeting Alison made him think she had cursed him.”
“Abraham Law planned to make Alison heal his sick father. Alison seemed ready to do that, though, when she saw John Law. She was so sorry for what she did that she admitted her guilt and asked Law senior to forgive her. Then she tried to get rid of her curse. Law’s situation didn’t change, which wasn’t a surprise. This was used against Alison and set off the events that led to the Pendle Witch trial.”
“Even though it was clear that witches couldn’t always stop their magic, even if they wanted, the touch test was still a common way to find out if a witch. The most famous time the touch test was used was in the Salem witch trials in 1692. Three groups of young girls who were thought to be bewitched were locked up together. They did this because they were acting very weirdly. They were either frozen or having fits of hysteria as no doctor could help them. Witchcraft was thought to be the cause. So on September 7th, 1692, the Reverend Bernard put together a group of suspects and had them brought to the meeting house. Behind closed doors, he made the suspects walk up to the girls and touch them one by one.”
“As each of the accused got closer, the girls’ shaking got worse and so did their worry. They started to complain that they were cursed. Finally, the accused had to touch them. The girls’ fits stopped in all of these cases. They were able to accuse the person who had touched them of being their tormentor once they were completely calm and able to think straight.”
“18 men and women were arrested and put on trial for witches based only on this touch test. The next test for witchcraft literally weighed up the likelihood of a suspect’s guilt. Weighing the witch. The idea of witch weighing was one of the more unusual ways to test for witches. The idea behind this was that a witch had to be light to be able to fly on a broom.”
“From the 1600s on, people in Germany and Holland who were thought to be witches were taken to the local weight house which was mainly used to weigh goods and produce. A normal weight was set and anyone who didn’t meet it was called a witch. Emperor Charles V even supported the method. He made the weight house at Oudewater in the Netherlands the official witches’ weight house because it had a good reputation for being honest.”
“Iron weights were not the only way to test witches, though. It was also common to try people who might be witches by putting them up against a single Bible or a stack of them. The witch’s soul weight, not their body weight, was being tested in this case. They thought that the Bible, which was God’s word, should be used to judge the suspects instead of God himself. But it’s not clear how the Bible decided whether someone was innocent or guilty because the standards seem to change from place to place. Some sources said that in order for the suspect to be found not guilty, they had to bear the same amount of weight as the book or books that were stacked against them. In other places, though, the suspect had to be heavier than the Bible in order to be found not guilty, which was easy to do unless they were very thin or a child.”
“But in other places, the witch’s guilt was proven by more than the Bible, which made it unlikely that she would be found not guilty. Near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1759, one of these witch weighing events took place. According to Gentleman’s magazine, a neighbor told Susanna Hanniker, an old woman from the town of Wingrave, that she was a witch. People said that Susanna cursed the woman’s spinning wheel so that it would not turn. Susanna strongly denied that she was guilty and insisted that she must swear under oath in front of a judge to prove it. What her husband did, though, was even worse. He said his wife should be tried by the church Bible. So Susanna, her accuser, and the rest of the village assembled in the parish church. And there Susanna was stripped of all her clothes to her shift and undercoat, and weighed against the Bible, when to the no small mortification of her accuser, she outweighed it, and was honorably acquitted of the charge. Other proofs of witchcraft came from the world of dreams and spirits. Spectral evidence. People who were Protestant used spectral proof as a type of witch test all the time.”
“It meant the idea that a witch’s spirit or spectral shape could show up in people’s dreams while the witch’s body was somewhere else. People thought that the devil couldn’t change into someone who didn’t have any ties to him. Hence, if someone saw or said they had seen a possible witch in spirit form, that person was almost certainly a witch.”
“In many witches’ cases, people believe in ghosts or other supernatural beings. One of the proofs used against the Clark family from Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, was that their victims saw them at night in their own and other shapes. At Alison Device’s trial in August 1612, the peddler John Law said that the witch came to him in the form of a ghost while he was unconscious in the inn at Colne.”
“The ghost stayed not long there and looked on him before leaving. He was sore afraid though, and the ghost plagued him both day and night. The main issue with spectral proof was that it couldn’t be tested, which meant it could just be made up or be a lie. But during the Salem witch trials, it was used over and over again as proof of witchcraft.”
“In order to decide if spectral evidence could be used to get someone convicted, the judges looked at the witch trials in England, where spectral evidence was used to get people found guilty. A trial of witches by Gilbert Ge and Ivan Bun helped them make their choice. The judges were most interested in the cases of Amy Denny and Rose Cullander who were found guilty and hanged in Lowestoft, Suffolk in 1662.”
“Both of the women were old widows. Cullander came from a family that owned land and Deny was the widow of a worker. Both were charged with witchcraft against 13 kids, one of which killed. At the trial, testimony was given by some of the bewitched children that Amy Dunny and Rose Cullander would appear before them, holding their fists at them, threatening that if they related either what they saw or heard, that they would torment them 10 times more than ever they did before.”
“Like the girls in Suffolk, many of the girls in Salem said they had seen the supposed witches in their dreams. One of them was Goody Proctor, who was said to have bit, pinched, and almost choked them despite having a hollow body. Because of the similarities, the judges let spectral evidence be used in the trial. However, they did not sentence based on spectral evidence alone because Cotton Mather told them that the specters could sometimes be devilish illusions.”
“However, ultimately, prejudice was the only evidence required to identify a witch. Mental illness and eccentricity. In the end, charges of witchcraft were made out of fear and bias. It was dangerous to be seen as a witch if you were different from the crowd or didn’t follow the rules. Sad to say, this put at risk a lot of people who had mental diseases or who behaved strangely because they were old or sick.”
“This group of people included those with epilepsy, schizophrenia, or dementia caused by getting older. According to the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, a large number of the alleged witches and possessed persons who were burned probably had visible mental disturbances.”
“Women were thought to be acting in a strange way. Based on the works of ancient philosophers, the Malleus Maleficarum created the idea that women are naturally weak and bad, making them more open to being influenced by demons. People said that the womb was a source of evil, which is why women were so angry they had their period.”
“Women were more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit. If they did that, they would turn into a witch, which would make them naturally crazy or weird. But even worse, people were more likely to think someone was mumbling spells under their breath if they were talking to themselves, and the words could not be understood.”
“These were some of the witchy traits that Pendle Witch Anne Whittle aka Chatox showed that proved she was a witch. During her hearing in 1612, Chatox was an old woman of about 80 years who most likely had dementia. However, her eccentric behavior was used against her when the judges were told how Chatox was “always more ready to do mischief to men’s goods than themselves. Her lips ever chattering and walking, but no man knew what.””
