Witch Trial Cultural Analysis

Witch Pricker

The Witch Pricker is a fine, retractable needle used to prick the alleged witches during the Salem Witch Trials and other European witch trials. If they bleed they were not witches but if the prick from the needle didn’t cause the women to bleed, which it often did not, then the women were prosecuted and were often tortured and burned alive. 

The tests and trials the town folk, primarily men, back in the 17th century would do on the alleged witches show how corrupt the Witch Trials were. For example, witch prickers were often used to “prick” the “witches” and if there was no blood, the woman in question was a witch. The trials during the Salem Witchcraft era and many other witch trials in Europe changed the world’s outlook on witches, seen as the workings of the Devil compared to their true intention, to heal others. 

I find it very interesting how women and on rare occasions, men, would be led to be accused of being a witch. Most often the weaker link of the town would be the accused. Whether their crops didn’t go or they just weren’t contributing to the community. But sometimes it was the opposite, just in the wrong place at the wrong time on multiple occasions. As stated in Jess Blumberg’s article called “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials”, “More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft—the devil’s magic—and 20 were executed.” 20 too many, and the other 180 were shunned from their families, friends, and the town. These trails ruin people’s lives and most of the time end them.

The National Geographic article “A royal obsession with black magic started Europe’s most brutal witch hunts” states that the origin of these faithful trials goes back to the late to mid-1500s with King James of England. The king had an obsessive fear of witchcraft, he blamed witches for the dangerous storms that attacked his voyage with his wife across the north sea. He then made it law to kill all witches with a series of tests to torture them first. He even wrote a book called Daemonologie. A set of rules and methods to test to see if people were witches, they were often very torturous. By the end of the royal cruise of witches, there were 40,000-50,000 killed for being witches, and many more were tortured and then shunned from their community.

This unfortunate series of events was the cause of Christians not understanding the true nature of witches. In the article, Witches: Real Origins, Hunts & Trials, they go into the depth of the true origins of witchcraft which was to be natural healers, or as they called it “wise women ”. Most people who practice witchcraft practice Wicca, an official religion in North America where the motto is to “harm none”. The main point of Wicca is to heal others, both mentally and physically with herbal remedies called “potions”. Most ironically potions are used to stop people from harming others or themselves.

The worst of the witch trials is it wasn’t just located in Salem Massachusetts, most of the trials were held in Europe. 50,000 were burned at the stack during the European witch trials. The article “The 17th Century World of Witchcraft ” by Jonah Hoffmann, goes into depth of each region that conducted the trials. The main reason for the burning of innocent witches is that usually a natural disaster or event happened that the people of the surrounding area couldn’t explain and blamed on the devil. Christian’s thought of witches as people who worshiped the devil so they blamed them. In total there were five different witch trials in Europe and one in the United States, killing about 60,000 innocent people in all.

How the execution of witches came about was the work of Malleus Maleficarum aka “Hammer of Witches”. In the article “Witch Trials in Early Modern Europe and New England”, they give a brief synopsis of the book. It was a basic handbook for witch hunters and a guide on how to get prosecution of them, it also was a way to prove to people that witches were real. The three parts of the book are to expunge skeptics, separate the categories of witches, and how to legally execute/prosecute the witches. Overall it is a very dark and disturbing book that shows just how tortured these poor witches were.

Witch prickers were just one of the many corrupt torture devices used to hurt and execute witches. Most often these witches were just trying to heal others and live their lives. Today witches are still viewed as evil, devilish souls, but in reality, they just want to save/heal others. All around the world, so many witches were killed, just because the world had no one else to blame. The stigma of witches has to change, they are good, caring, and compassionate healers, even after the world attacked and killed their ancestors.

Works Cited

Witches: Real Origins, Hunts & Trials, 12 September 2017, https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/history-of-witches. Accessed 10 April 2023.

Blumberg, Jess. “A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials.” Smithsonian Magazine, 23 October 2007, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/. Accessed 10 April 2023.

Goodare, Julian, and Charles Walker. “A royal obsession with black magic started Europe’s most brutal witch hunts.” National Geographic, 17 October 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2019/10/royal-obsession-black-magic-started-europes-most-brutal-witch. Accessed 10 April 2023.

Hoffmann, Jonah. “The 17th Century World of Witchcraft.” Salem Witch Museum, 17 December 2021, https://salemwitchmuseum.com/2021/12/17/the-17th-century-world-of-witchcraft/. Accessed 10 April 2023.

“Witch Trials in Early Modern Europe and New England.” Berkeley Law, https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/the-robbins-collection/exhibitions/witch-trials-in-early-modern-europe-and-new-england/. Accessed 10 April 2023.