The feature image is a medieval miniature depicting the torture and execution of women convicted of witchcraft.

As we recover from Halloween festivities, I’m thinking of witches. This week I visited an exhibit currently on display at the Pointe a Calliere Museum of Archaeology and History in Montreal called Witches–Out of the Shadows. 

I was looking for Halloween fun, but most of the exhibit was a very serious history from the Middle Ages.

It was an eye-opening glimpse into a long historical arc of religiously-justified violence against women. The exhibit was dimly lit and quiet; it felt sacred like a tomb or memorial. I learned that between 1560 and 1630, 50,000 individuals, mostly women, were executed by church and civic courts for witchcraft throughout Europe. They were usually burned or hung. Many of them were tortured first to force confessions. A major purpose of this exhibit was to reveal witch trials for what they really were: misogyny, hysteria, and murder. The vocabulary and concepts used immediately spoke to familiar Mormon feminist experiences, and I knew I’d be drawing comparisons throughout my visit. This post compiles some of what I learned. Quoted text is from the exhibit.

“Witch trials helped to tighten political control over the populace and encouraged idealized social and religious behaviors.” Witchcraft was defined and legislated by male church authorities and magistrates. Their perceptions, codified and disseminated in numerous texts, were much more myth than reality. The underlying motivation for trials was to control and scapegoat women. The whole movement was empowered and perpetuated by what the exhibit identified as “patriarchal rhetoric.” I viewed several books clergy and other leaders used to identify and convict witches. The one pictured here, Malleus Maleficarum, was especially misogynistic and influential. It was used to convict women for two hundred years.

“At the time, women were believed to be more susceptible to temptation by the devil.” This is one of the central themes of the text above. Misogynistic readings of the Adam and Eve narrative were the central justification for assertions of women’s spiritual inferiority. Witch hunters’ intent was to protect Christendom from women who adhered to Satan’s will. The idea of magic had been around for a long time. For hundreds of years, “cunning folk” and wise women, largely folk healers, were tolerated and respected. Things changed when church authorities started to conflate the power of magic with that of Satan. Witch trials waged war against the devil’s efforts to wreck havoc on earth through (mostly) female servants.

While our church upholds fairly Eve-positive readings of the Garden of Eden narrative, it also propagates archaic thinking about women’s agency and their supposed dependence and weakness. Like medieval predecessors, Latter-day Saint leaders frequently associate women’s autonomous thoughts and feelings with the deceptions of Satan. Last spring, during the Relief Society anniversary worldwide gathering, leaders counseled women that if they feel discontent with what they are offered in their religious lives, this is likely due to Satan’s influence. This idea isn’t scripturally based, nor is it given to males. This messaging teaches women to distrust their spiritual intuitions and desires, and it assumes they need paternal monitoring. To provide another example, a woman I’m acquainted with recently told her bishop she wouldn’t be coming back to Church. The bishop bemoaned how she was being seduced by Satan’s lies. She experienced things very differently. Her bishop regularly exhibited behaviors she considered misogynistic, one of the reasons she lost interest in attending.

Witch hunts were a way to eliminate women who were gifted, leader-like, and prophetic. Joan of Arc experienced visions and other revelatory experiences. Angels and saints sent her messages from God about a special role she needed to play to help France. She was brought to trial before a church court. Her captors treated the messages she had been following as demonic, and partly because of these assumptions, she was burned at the stake. This painting from the exhibit depicts her execution.

Joan of Arc’s story reminds me of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ history of excommunicating women for bringing feminist concerns to the forefront. Such excommunications have followed a comparable impulse to get rid of women whose ideas threaten male agendas. In some cases, Latter-day Saint feminists and scholars have been disciplined for following personal revelation. For example, Maxine Hanks, excommunicated in 1993, has shared her story about how she compiled and edited Women and Authority thanks to divine revelation. Through such excommunications, the Church communicates that women’s revelations are not welcome additions because such content challenges male preferences and power. Leaders treat women’s revelations as something like hysteria or the influence of Satan. This is a symptom of misogyny and it shows a lack of intellectual humility.

Sometimes women have been disempowered by the Church in other ways. The First Presidency disfellowshipped Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery after they published Mormon Enigma in 1984. Leaders disapproved of its unconventional portrayal of Joseph Smith’s life. The writers had fulfilled a cherished goal to research and publish an accurate historical account of Emma Smith’s life. International outcry over punishing scholars checked Latter-day Saint authorities and the discipline was withdrawn. 

In the Middle Ages, women were regularly considered witches if they were invested in female bodies and relieving their suffering. Sometimes women were punished because they were so skilled in nature-based medicinal arts and remedies, including for childbirth. Many of them were midwives. Religious authorities devalued and were suspicious of their efforts to relieve female suffering. Much of their superstition about witchcraft in general centered on worries that cunning women would intentionally harm fertility, births, and babies. Ironically, in their paranoia, churches and villages rid themselves of the women who helped these causes the most. Older women and widows were targeted most frequently because they had more life experience and independence and were more likely to fill healing and caregiving roles. 

The LDS Church has ignored and invalidated women’s work to relieve female suffering. Our wise women and feminist thinkers have been treated as if their work is by default suspicious or not worthy of consideration. I remember hearing Carol Lynn Pearson share on a podcast or post about how she sent a copy of her feminist treatise The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy as personal gifts to each member of the Quorum of the 15 (I apologize that I can’t find this source now). Her book shares hundreds of witnesses to the spiritual abuse and pain that continue today due to polygamy doctrines. Yet Pearson received no response from leaders, and the Church does not appear to have considered any of her recommendations for remedying women’s suffering.

Witch trials benefited churches financially at the cost of making women vulnerable and disposable. Witch hunts were a way for churches to reap profits. Church agents claimed the personal properties of women whom they executed. Starting after the reformation, churches also used trials and executions as “perverse advertisements” to gain patrons. In some cases, villages took advantage of the option to target women they disliked. “The slightest hint of collusion with Satan, either from accusation or from mere rumors, could lead to an investigation.” Offending authorities or neighbors could put a woman’s life at stake, a reality that must have been devastating to their mental health and self-actualization. 

The idea that women are sexually debauched was integrated into witch rhetoric and trials. Old sketches and paintings of witches from the Middle Ages don’t depict them wearing pointy hats and capes. Instead they show groups of naked women having orgies, partying with Satan, and harming others’ bodies. A medical textbook from the Middle Ages on display in the exhibit showed a woman’s pregnant torso, with a portrait of Satan’s face covering the female genitals. Male genitals are covered by an innocent leaf. Males projected their religiously-based sexual shame onto women’s bodies. 

As Latter-day Saints today, we’re impacted by long-standing Christian attitudes of misogyny and suspicion toward women’s sexuality and bodies. We might not vilify women’s sexuality, but we are anxious about it, and we don’t give it any space. I sense we’re ill-at-ease with the idea that women are just as sexual as men, even though the fact that this is true is vital for healthy marriages. The repression of sexuality and male leaders’ scrupulosity about sexual sin seem to be underlying reasons Church leaders bear down hard on practices like garment use. It is male leaders’ biases against women’s bodies that make them intolerant of women dressing according to personal desires. The LDS Church treats the female body as something unsafe that is to be monitored by male clergy much like churches did in the Middle Ages.

Today it is obvious to see that all the thinking and periods of hysteria around witches were really just a way to gain a tighter grip over women in times of conflict and anxiety. European countries have exonerated all those murdered for witchcraft. It’s painful to witness what women suffered because of men’s irrational, anxious thinking, and men’s impulses to harm vulnerable people in order to gain a financial or religious upper hand. Below are objects created to stave off black magic and witches from the exhibit.

It is bizarre to realize that people were sincerely convinced by the goodness of their misogynistic and violent thinking. At the time, they believed they were doing the right thing for society, the church, and God. Now just about anyone can see that they oppressed and murdered the poor and the helpless, and that their anxious oppression of women only held the Western world back from progress and a more enlightened and compassionate kind of Christian faith. 

Managers of the LDS Church are consciously well-intentioned and convinced of their moral uprightness. Yet they suffer from distorted thinking about women’s spiritual autonomy that is comparable to that of the Middle Ages. Hundreds of years from now, will Latter-day Saints look back at patriarchal rhetoric as irrational, anxiety-driven and oppressive? Will feminists be exonerated like Joan of Arc, who was canonized in 1920? Or, will the Saints still be convinced of the divinity of misogynistic thinking for centuries to come and dwindle in numbers? All I know is that there is a lot of cautionary content for our Church in the European history of witch trials. If our administrators humbly considered this history, it might even lead them to wonder if they are in fact the ones who have been deceived about women’s roles and needs. 

Today, witches are often symbols of female emancipation and resilience. In recent decades, some feminist groups have taken up the witch as a symbol of their subversive work.

When Mormon women join feminist forces like Exponent II, we enter a space that is comparable to “Mormon Witchcraft.” There are experiences of empowerment, healing and sisterhood, but this also comes with a cost of social acceptance and ecclesiastic safety. We may be snubbed, criticized, or invited to unwanted one-on-one meetings with priesthood leaders. We may not feel safe to talk about our work with our own families.

We feminists don’t always deliberately choose this path. When a woman receives revelation that contradicts what she was always taught to believe, she may be surprised. When God inspires her to write a certain book or advocate for marginalized people, her spirituality may suddenly become autonomous and untamed in a way she did not foresee. It doesn’t always feel comfortable, but someone needs to steward these strange and beautiful woods of autonomous Mormon female thinking.