29. Burn the Witch!!

Flipping Tables

Monte Mader

Society & Culture

5 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil?” — Heinrich Kramer (Malleus Maleficarum, 1487)Part I, Question VI

Today we travel to Europe's witch trials, the church and government leaders claimed it was to rid the world of women who had made pacts with Satan.

It was really just to remove women from positions of medical and religious power. and to it was to take their wealth and force their obedience. Priestesses, healers, midwives were targeted and the traditional role of women in medicine stripped and given to male doctors. Women who inherited land were targeted so their wealth could be given to powerful men. Women who refused marriage norms, appearance norms... also died in the flame.

The language and history that demonized the sexuality and prowess of women is the same language we hear today in purity and incel culture, with the same motive. The motive of stripping women of power, autonomy, wealth, equality and position,

The woman who refused to give up her power and knowledge, or chose to keep her own wealth, the woman that chose solitude... chose death

Sources

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Augustine. City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics, 2003.
Canon Episcopi (c. 906), in Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, 13th century.
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Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Feminist Press, 1973.
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Kramer, Heinrich and Sprenger, Jacob. Malleus Maleficarum. 1487. Trans. Montague Summers, 1928.
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Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford, 1997.
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Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright, 2020.
Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. Liveright, 2017.
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Donovan, Joan. “How QAnon Uses Digital Witch Hunts.” Harvard Kennedy School, 2021.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What else is woman, but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, unnecessary evil?
0:07.0	Heinrich Kramer, Malius Malifakarum, 1487.
0:10.7	They called them witches.
0:12.2	They were really healers, midwives, and wise women, or simply the women who spoke too loud, lived alone, or didn't know their place.
0:20.0	Across Europe and colonial America,
0:21.7	they were hunted, tortured, drowned, burned, and hanged by the thousands. But behind the hysteria,
0:27.8	behind the bonfires, and the confessions pulled from broken bodies and broken mouths,
0:32.3	lies a deeper story, one of power, fear, and control. This wasn't just mass panic. It was weaponized theology. It was the
0:40.6	church declaring war on what they claimed were witches, but it was really just women. From the
0:46.5	cold stone chambers of medieval inquisitors to the thunderous pulpits of Puritan ministers,
0:51.6	the Christian church helped turn folklore into felony and suspicion into
0:55.8	execution. Witchcraft, once dismissed as pagan superstition, was rebranded as heresy, a pact with
1:02.8	the devil himself. And it was no coincidence that the accused were overwhelmingly women.
1:08.5	Misogyny was baked into the doctrine, inked into the law, and shouted from the
1:12.5	pulpits. And then in 1692, a group of small schoolgirls in a Puritan village began to scream,
1:19.3	undergoing a psychological fit that was deemed witchcraft. The Salem witch trials would become the
1:24.6	most infamous witch hunt in American history, a frenzy of paranoia,
1:28.9	religious extremism, and scapegoating that would leave 25 people dead and countless lives shattered.
1:34.3	So how did we get here? What did the church stand to gain? And why centuries later do the echoes
1:40.2	of these trials still haunt our culture and our politics.
1:48.2	Today we walk through the smoke and ash of history to uncover the truth behind the witch trials, how they started, who fan the flames, and what it means that so many of the accused
1:52.8	were women, punished not for spells, but for surviving in a world that feared their power.
	...

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