Why the witch-hunt victims of early modern Britain have come back to haunt us

[icymist]

Lilias Addie’s body was piled into a wooden box and buried beneath a half-tonne sandstone slab on the foreshore where a dark North Sea laps the Fife coast. More than a hundred years later, she was exhumed by opportunistic Victorian gravediggers and her bones – unusually large for a woman living in the early 18th century – were later put on show at the Empire exhibition in Glasgow. Her simple coffin was carved into a wooden walking stick – engraved “Lilias Addie, 1704” – which ended up in the collection of Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world.

It was no sort of burial, but from the perspective of the thousands of women accused of, and executed for, witchcraft in early modern Britain, Lilias’s fate had a degree of dignity.

“Most women were burned, rather than buried, their identities erased by authorities and families out of fear and shame,” says Claire Mitchell QC, who is campaigning for a legal pardon for, and monument to, the estimated 2,558 Scots who were executed in the brutal centuries of femicide after Scotland’s 1563 Witchcraft Act (the same year England enacted its own bloody statute). She adds: “This lack of historical record makes it harder as a society to have the reckoning with history that we dearly need to have.”

If it’s a case of cultural amnesia, it’s hiding in plain sight. Halloween 2021 and online fast-fashion retailers are jolly with “witchy inspo”: cross-fusions of witch costumes and bunny girl outfits; miniature pointed hats worn at a jaunty angle, with a lipglossed pout. Meanwhile, designer Viktor & Rolf riffs on “wicked witches” in its haute couture shows (raven-winged leathers and laser eyes); “witchcore” trends on social media (an interior and lifestyle aesthetic centred on dark interiors, gemstones and, oddly, bread-baking); and influencers including the Modern Witch peddle a novel iteration of magical capitalism (spell-casting for business curse-removal, anyone?).
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/24/why-the-witch-hunt-victims-of-early-modern-britain-have-come-back-to-haunt-us?fbclid=IwAR0SvsumVHx3IDA5vkvMe-m-zpJCz-JVrpdajavy7PNPDGtj3XE-A0U_Xbw