Epilogue

Witch Crafting in Modern Spain

Four centuries after the Inquisition burned eleven people for witchcraft in its days-long auto de fé, some two hundred people gathered in Zugarramurdi, a tiny village in Navarra. Over the course of three days, hundreds of Spanish and Basque-identified people alike gathered to recognize this infamous event, and to socialize, eat, drink, dance, and ponder their past. The main event, unfolding under the somber new moon, saw a dozen women paraded in front of men dressed in clerical cloaks to reenact the dramatic auto de fé. They were then ceremoniously led to a burning stake. But paired with this melancholy performance, thirty other activities offered attendees food, entertainment, and artisanal wares. While these reenactments occur every year, in celebration of the witch panic’s 411th anniversary in 2021, multiple local agencies came together to provide “representative performances that will remind us of a part of our history,” as noted by the head of the local Citizen Participation Organization.¹

While witches continue to bewitch us, three and a half centuries have elapsed since the royal tribunals last adjudicated a trial of witchcraft and sorcery. Following the final trial of María Esparza in 1675, the royal tribunals handled only four cases related to witchcraft: three slander trials due to witchcraft accusations (1681, 1691, 1714) and one trial of a witchcraft accusation coupled with attempted murder (1748).² Yet despite the lack of witch trials in Navarra, sorcery and witchcraft narratives continued to resonate with Basque speakers, as scholars such as José Miguel de Barandaian, Julio Caro Baroja, and Florencio Idoate demonstrated in their robust compilations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century local folklore, myths, and fairy tales. Today, in twenty-first-century Navarra and the Basque country, representations of witches, devil-goats, herbalists, and other aspects of local lore and the collective imagination consistently materialize at public holiday celebrations, carnivals, and local festivals (see fig. E.1). Their presence at these events confirms that these characters hold meaning for local populations and the power of attraction for tourists. Recently, a travel site advertising yet another witch-themed attraction in the region opened with the seductive “Reality and legend have gone hand in hand since time immemorial in Navarra, where the histories of spells and sorcery have given rise to the Route of Witchcraft.”³ Drawing from its witchy past as the site of the witch panic, Zugarramurdi has emerged as a quirky tourist destination boasting a witchcraft museum, tours of caves where the akelarres were rumored to be held, historical architecture and mills, and a new “Route of Witchcraft.” Like academic scholarship, popular artistic creations have focused on the witch panic of Zugarramurdi, even crafting two new movies inspired by the event.⁴ Both of these films reflect the horrors a witchcraft accusation often brought to vulnerable women and girls.

Modern feminist movements in Spain have found connection with those, mostly women, executed as witches. Crafting themselves as witches or the descendants of witches, these contemporary women seek to subvert patriarchal and Christian systems of power that have oppressed women for millennia throughout the Spanish world and beyond. While some scholars may find this adoption inaccurate, anachronistic, or even offensive to those conforming, Catholic women crafted as witches, the trial records used throughout this book do not uphold a singular, definitive identity that would preclude such modern applications. The lack of any clear, concise, and stable definition of what a witch could be in the secular trial records makes it tricky to declare what a witch cannot be. I do not suggest that the witches in these records held developed notions of gender equity. But, despite the discursive trials and my close readings, the precise reasons why certain women were accused and persecuted by their neighbors and the courts simply remain unknown. This allows for a legitimate possibility that some of these women did indeed threaten (in reality or the imagination), wrinkle, or even rip asunder social and gender norms. Further, most modern feminists and self-identifying witches do not claim that their maternal ancestors practiced pagan rituals or stole away male genitals. As Laurel Zwissler reported on her focus group of practitioners, one self-identifying Witch shared: “If you look at the ways that the victims were presented—Pagans and Jews and Witches and anybody else—it was a stamp. They were created as Other and destroyed as Other and when that Other was gone, a new Other was more or less found.”⁵ This woman, a practitioner of Witchcraft as a religion, crafted her identity from the modern cauldron of witch belief—the idea of witches as scapegoats—and did not rely solely on an imagined identity of powerful or pagan women. As was the case with early modern witches, identity is crafted from narratives and stories, not just some documentations of the “truth” of the past and present. As such, the identity of modern feminist witches or Witches who practice witchcraft as a religion should be free to draw from the mythos of the past, just as every other cultural, national, ethnic, and collective identity has done.

Modern feminist groups do not necessarily invoke a nondocumentary past in their connections to witches. One modern feminist collective in Spain, the Memoria de las Brujas, does not draw from the vision of the witch as inspiration for their own identity but instead explains, “as feminists, we must deconstruct the myth of the witch and eliminate the role women have been subjected to in the long history of patriarchy.” The invocation of the past is crucial in their efforts toward present gender equality, and their members center witches in their objectives, meetings, and conferences. They argue that there is presently “a struggle for memory, this struggle is based on historical work. The rewriting of the witch-hunt has to do with providing dignity and making another story about the mass murder of those women.” No timidness or equivocation emerges from this goal, nor should it. They provide an interpretation, a framing of the past, just as I have done. They center the moralizing tales of bygone days for social justice today, hoping it will avoid further repetition in the future. They also remind us that people “continue to persecute and kill women accused of witchcraft in some regions of Africa and India and Latin America,” bringing the very real witch-hunts occurring today to our contemporary consciousness.⁶

In addition to practitioners and feminists, some modern nations of the West have also addressed their witchcraft pasts, even issuing legal or ceremonial mea culpas to long-departed people who suffered from a witchcraft accusation centuries years ago. The United States was the first to do so in 1957 when Salem, Massachusetts, formally apologized for the two hundred accusations and nineteen executions in the 1690s. And in Germany, more than fifty towns have apologized for the witch burnings, with some extending official pardons to those executed. One of the activists behind this, a retired pastor who for over a decade has urged German cities to pardon the witches, feels his campaign is relevant today because “witch persecution is still rife in parts of the world and xenophobia is rising in the west.” He noted that in addition to deserving exoneration, they serve as moralizing tales against the “search for scapegoats, such as ‘immigrants’ that are ultimately based on fear.”⁷ Similarly, the first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon announced in 2022 that “she was choosing to acknowledge an egregious historic injustice” and offered a formal apology to the 2,500 witches executed in early modern Scotland, mostly women.⁸ As do others, the first minister understood witchcraft persecutions as an issue of justice and gender, lamenting “they were accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases, just because they were women.”⁹ While the witch-trial records of Navarra do not always specifically support such a claim, they certainly do not contradict the glaring gender bias among most early modern victims.

Spain has recently joined the witch-pardoning project of the modern West. The Catalan Parliament has passed a resolution to exonerate up to one thousand accused witches, following the creation of the No Eren Bruixes (They Were Not Witches) project. Compiled by the local history journal Sapiens, a database of more than seven hundred accused witches (mostly women) tried throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Catalunya and Andorra provides the most exhaustive documentation of accused Catalan witches so far.¹⁰ In addition to listing names, dates, tribunals, and sentences, the project has created an interactive map. The mission of No Eren Bruixes is to “recover the memory of all these innocent women, without prejudice or falsehoods. To repair their reputations and dignify them through acts of reparation throughout the territory, in the name of all women who have been oppressed throughout history.”¹¹ The project’s manifesto has gathered nearly thirteen thousand signatures including those of public and private institutions, town halls, women’s associations, community cultural centers, and countless professors, historians, journalists and individuals. Even the Catalan president Pere Aragonès has opined on the project, describing the witch-hunts as “institutionalized femicide.”¹² In Navarra, some politicians are urging their local government to consider an investigation into the witchcraft persecutions, and to create memorials, markers, guided tours, learning stations, and statements in honor of the women executed for witchcraft in Navarra.¹³ Parliamentarians, especially those on the left, see “the witch-hunt as antecedent of repression women suffer, in historical periods and the present.”¹⁴ Ranging from government officials to Gen Z feminists, the witch not only symbolizes the injustices of the past, but is a tangible reminder for the present and a warning for the future.

As this book has argued throughout, the very nature of witchcraft is ephemeral, variable, and plastic. And as the beliefs about witchcraft varied wildly among early modern Europeans, so too does witchcraft register quite differently for contemporary audiences. While I have conducted a documentary-based analysis according to historical methods, I am well aware, as was Foucault, that all we can write are fictions, though that is not to say the truth is entirely absent.¹⁵ The trial records themselves do not hold the “truth,” as many of the beliefs and injustices and fears surrounding witchcraft were not documented, and all of the records were mediated by elite men. I therefore choose to give voice and understanding to other interpretations, even if not grounded in archival documentations.¹⁶ Because the witch has always been malleable, I believe that modern intersections of the witch and feminism, spirituality, and other identities are valid. I propose that the witch can be usefully used to explore how belief systems create and support othering, xenophobia, and cruelty against others, usually minority populations. The role of the witch label absolutely offered a means of scapegoating, enacting revenge, and punishing social transgressions. These forms of othering—in conjunction with the suspension of ordinary legal processes—helped create witches in the early modern world.¹⁷ It is my hope that these insights invite scholars to engage more thoughtfully with modern witchcraft understandings and practitioners, and that these connections and this intersectionality continue to illuminate the extraordinary world of witchcraft.

1. Diego Sacristán, “Las brujas de Zugarramurdi vuelven a Logroño en ‘Todos los Santos,’” Radio Rioja, October 28, 2019, https://cadenaser.com/emisora/2019/10/28/radio_rioja/1572270873_756708.html.

2. AGN, TR_290606 (1748). The inquisitorial tribunal at Logroño, however, continued to process hundreds of people for Supersticiones, though few were tried for witchcraft specifically, and none were executed for it. Henningsen, unpublished database, 2016.

3. Just as the singular witch panic of Navarra has commanded academic attention, so has its main locus, Zugarramurdi, “a locality famous for its relationship to witchcraft and aquelarres,” become identified with witchcraft. “Navarra, tierra de brujas: Conoce su historia y leyenda,” Binter (blog), https://elblog.bintercanarias.com/blog/navarra-tierra-de-brujas-conoce-su-historia-y-leyenda.

4.Las brujas de Zugarramurdi by Álex de la Iglesia, 2013; Akelarre by Pablo Agüero, 2020.

5. Laurel Zwissler, “In Memorium Maleficarum: Feminist and Pagan Mobilizations of the Burning Times,” in Emotions in the History of Witchcraft, ed. Laura Kounine and Michael Ostling (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 255. I draw here from Zwissler’s use of the capitalized “Witches” for those women who identify as such.

6. Members of Memoria de las Brujas (http://memoriadelasbrujas.net/) are found throughout Spain, in Ecuador, and in New York City. Wolfgang Behringer similarly connected early modern witchcraft to those who have suffered from prosecutions in modernity in Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 196–228.

7. David Crossland, “German Church Finally Says Sorry for ‘Bleeding Wound of Witch Burning,’” The Times, December 23, 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/after-400-years-the-church-in-germany-apologises-for-burning-witches-fw6blbzf2.

8. She also signaled that parliament could choose to legislate to pardon those convicted under the law. “Nicola Sturgeon Apologises to People Accused of Witchcraft,” BBC, March 8, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-60667533. Yet, as Jan Machielsen has rightfully pointed out, modern nations’ apologies do not adequately address the fact that witches were created, not just by early modern judiciaries, but by fellow neighbors who, sometimes, truly felt they intended harm to their families and livelihoods. See Machielsen, “As a Historian, I Worry that Scotland’s Witchcraft Apology Was a Mistake,” The Scotsman, April 5, 2022, https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/as-a-his torian-i-worry-that-scotlands-witchcraft-apology-was-a-mistake-dr-jan-machielsen-3640568.

9. “Nicola Sturgeon Apologises to People Accused of Witchcraft.”

10. This project has been conducted in consultation with historian Pau Castell and specialist Agustí Alcoberro. Link to the project: “Atles de la cacera de bruixes,” Sapiens, https://www.sapiens.cat/que-es-cacera-bruixes.html.

11. “Manifest,” Sapiens, accessed June 8, 2024, https://www.sapiens.cat/que-es-cacera-bruixes.html.

12. “El Parlament ‘repara’ la memoria de las mujeres condenadas por brujas en Catalunya,” El Periódico, January 26, 2022, https://www.elperiodico.com/es/politica/20220126/brujas-cataluna-parlament-repara-mujeres-condenadas-brujeria-13152419.

13. Beatriz Arnedo, “El Gobierno de Navarra no investigará la caza de brujas,” Diario de Navarra, April 20, 2022, https://www.diariodenavarra.es/noticias/navarra/2022/04/20/el-gobierno-navarra-no-investigara-caza-brujas-524591-300.html.

14. Gonzalo Núñez, “Podemos y Bildu quieren que se pida perdón por la caza de brujas del siglo XVI,” La Razón, March 29, 2019, https://www.larazon.es/cultura/podemos-y-bildu-quieren-que-se-pida-perdon-por-las-brujas-del-siglo-xvi-LF22639233/.

15. “I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to go so far as to say fictions are beyond truth. It seems possible to make fiction work inside of truth, to induce truthful effects with a fictional discourse, and to operate in such a manner that the discourse of truth gives rise to, ‘manufactures,’ something that does not yet exist, that is, ‘fictions.’” Foucault, “The History of Sexuality,” Finas Interview, P/K, 193, as quoted by Michel Kokora, “The Mirrored Project of Foucault and Smithton,” Object Territories, accessed June 8, 2024, https://object-territories.com/the-mirrored-projects-of-foucault-and-smithson.

16. That said, we all should take care to frame our understandings and to define our terms.

17. Historical writings, such as this one, reflect the world in which they were written.