10/09/2026
The Modern Witch Hunt
From ancestral spirituality to religious persecution, bodily autonomy, and the battle over who gets to define evil
I want to begin thousands of years before the European witch trials, before the Malleus Maleficarum, before Christianity became an imperial religion, and long before anyone in Zimmerman, Minnesota, could open Facebook and tell a woman who teaches about crystals, energy, and ancestral connection that she was communicating with demons. The word witch has a history, and so does the word demon. So does the idea that one person's relationship with the sacred gives them the authority to condemn somebody else's.
That history is more complicated than the familiar story of innocent pagan healers being systematically wiped out by the Church. What the documented record shows is troubling in its own way. Religious institutions, political authorities, and ordinary communities kept developing ways to mark people as spiritual threats, sometimes with devastating results. The question I'm following through all of it is when somebody else's spiritual belief becomes an excuse to control another human being, and I'm following it all the way to 2026.
1. Before Christianity, human beings already had relationships with the sacred
[Image: Ancient Near Eastern sacred-tree imagery]
[Image: Northern European pre-Christian symbolism]
Long before Christianity, people were building religious explanations for life, death, illness, fertility, the seasons, and the unseen world. In ancient Mesopotamia we find divination, ritual healing, protective amulets, sacred trees, gods, spirits, and elaborate ways of communicating with divine powers. In Egypt, medicine, magic, and religion overlapped constantly. In ancient Greece and Rome, people consulted oracles, honored household gods, and took part in ceremonies tied to the agricultural year. Northern European traditions had sacred groves, offerings, divination, and relationships with many deities, and in the Norse world the great tree Yggdrasil connects the realms of existence.
None of these civilizations shared one universal spiritual practice, and ancient magic wasn't always benevolent. Some ancient cultures drew a line between legitimate religious ritual and harmful sorcery and punished people accused of the second. That matters, because the fear of witchcraft is older than Christianity. Christianity didn't invent the idea of accusing someone of harmful magic. What changed over the centuries was how societies defined that harm, how they tied it to demons or heresy, and how much power their institutions had to prosecute it.
2. When conversion became a question of political power
Christianity didn't erase the religious practices of the people it encountered overnight. Conversion happened differently in different regions and centuries. Sometimes it was gradual and voluntary. Sometimes a ruler converted and expected his subjects to follow. Sometimes older customs survived with Christian meanings layered over them, and sometimes conversion came at the point of a sword.
Charlemagne's campaigns against the Saxons in the eighth century are one of the starkest examples. His laws set severe penalties for certain non-Christian practices and for refusing baptism, and religious conversion moved hand in hand with the expansion of royal power. This is where the political problem at the heart of this history comes into view. A person might experience a tree, a spring, or an ancestral site as sacred, while a ruler trying to impose religious uniformity saw the same practice as disobedience. The fight wasn't really over whether nature had meaning. It was over whose interpretation would be allowed and who had the power to enforce the rules, and that's the pattern to watch for whenever religious belief turns into an instrument of political authority.
3. The creation of the diabolical witch
For centuries, European Christians held a range of beliefs about magic, supernatural harm, and the devil, and medieval religious authorities didn't always agree on whether accusations of witchcraft were even believable. During the late Middle Ages, though, a particularly dangerous set of ideas took shape. Certain theologians and legal authorities began combining accusations of harmful magic with claims that witches had made pacts with the devil, gathered in secret assemblies, and threatened Christian society itself. By the fifteenth century those ideas had become a working framework for prosecuting witches.
In 1487, Heinrich Kramer's notorious Malleus Maleficarum spread a demonological view of witchcraft that was deeply hostile toward women. Its authority was disputed even in its own time, but the printing press carried its influence far and wide.
Then came the trials. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, European witch prosecutions led to roughly 40,000 to 50,000 ex*****ons, according to historian Ronald Hutton. Women made up about three-quarters of those convicted, though the proportion varied a great deal from region to region. The accused weren't mostly practicing pagans, and historians have largely rejected the theory that the trials were an effort to stamp out a secret pagan religion that had survived underground. Many of the victims were Christians. That's what makes this history so disturbing. Sharing the dominant religion didn't protect you from being accused of secretly serving the devil, because the danger came less from what you believed than from what someone else claimed you believed.
4. The women, the healers, and the question of bodily control
It isn't accurate to say most accused witches were their communities' doctors, but healers were certainly among the persecuted. A published study of Scottish witchcraft records identified 142 people accused in connection with folk healing or midwifery between 1563 and 1736, and 85 percent of them were women. The researchers found that unorthodox religious practice and parts of folk healing could put practitioners at risk.
Beyond the healers were the women who were poor, isolated, caught up in disputes, or seen as disruptive. A woman's reputation could be made or broken by her neighbors. Her behavior was judged by male judges and religious authorities, and her body could be subjected to invasive examinations and coercive interrogation. The witch trials are a documented example of how an accusation of supernatural danger could strip a person of her credibility and her legal protection.
Not every accusation came from male control over women. Women accused other women, men were prosecuted too, and local rivalries played their part. But gender inequality ran through the whole system, and the deeper question it raises is how a society decides whose testimony counts and whose body may be subjected to force. That question carries straight into the modern world.
5. Salem: when neighbors became accusers
In Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693, nineteen people were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death, and others died in jail during the Salem witch trials. Somewhere between 150 and 200 people were imprisoned.
Salem belongs at the center of this history because it shows what happens when a frightened community starts treating accusations as evidence. Tituba, enslaved in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris, was central to the earliest accusations, and her confession, given under enormous pressure, helped spread more and more elaborate stories of witchcraft. Rebecca Nurse was a respected older woman whose neighbors spoke up for her character, and she was executed anyway. Salem is a direct lesson in what suspicion, religious certainty, social power, and failed legal safeguards do when they reinforce each other. And the persecution wasn't driven only by distant church authorities. Neighbors accused neighbors.
6. American religious freedom: the promise and the contradiction
The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, protects the free exercise of religion and bars the government from establishing one. That promise wasn't kept equally for everyone. Indigenous spiritual traditions faced government interference long after the Constitution was adopted, and it took until 1978 for the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to recognize and protect traditional ceremonies, sacred objects, and access to sacred places. That belongs in this history too. The European witch trials aren't the only time an institution treated another people's spiritual practice as illegitimate.
The constitutional principle is freedom of religion, not freedom only for the dominant one. It doesn't stop private individuals from criticizing each other's beliefs. The line matters most when hostility turns into threats, unlawful discrimination, or government coercion.
7. Are there literal witch hunts happening today?
In some parts of the world, yes, and I don't mean that as a metaphor. Pew Research Center has documented violence against women accused of witchcraft in Tanzania and stigma against Vodou practitioners in Haiti. Its June 2026 report, covering conditions in 2023, found religion-related harassment by governments or private actors in 192 of the 198 countries and territories studied. That figure covers many religions and many levels of harassment, so it isn't a count of witchcraft persecution in particular. What it does establish is that spiritual accusation and religious hostility are present-day human rights issues. The mechanisms behind them are worth studying closely: fear of unfamiliar beliefs, scapegoating after misfortune, accusations dressed up as moral protection, and powerful people deciding who belongs.
8. From Salem to Zimmerman: the modern social witch hunt
This is where my own story comes in. I've been told I'm teaching about demons because I sell crystals, teach about energy, and encourage people to explore consciousness and their connection to their ancestors. I don't call myself a witch, but I'm not willing to condemn the people who do. Nobody should have to disown another spiritual tradition to prove that her own business and beliefs deserve respect.
The comparison has limits. Hostile Facebook comments aren't ex*****ons, and not everyone who criticizes witchcraft is part of an organized persecution. But there's a real question here about what spiritual labels still do in a community. When someone calls a woman a witch or suggests she's communicating with demons, they're inviting other people to believe something about her, and that reaches her reputation, her customers, and whether she feels safe taking part in community life at all. Those consequences deserve to be looked at honestly, not assumed away.
Social media adds another layer. Platforms can amplify an accusation while limiting the accused person's ability to answer it, and they can affect whether a small business reaches its customers at all. My accounts have faced restrictions on Facebook. My business is called Magic Mushrooms in the Crystal Garden, and I believe automated systems may have read that name as drug-related, but I'd need Meta's actual moderation records to show what drove those decisions. The gap between what I experienced and the reasons Meta gives is part of this story.
9. From control of spiritual identity to control of bodily autonomy
This is the most important connection in the whole history. During the witch hunts, an accusation could lead to prison, invasive examination, torture, and ex*****on. Today's debates over sexual violence, reproductive rights, gender identity, and bodily autonomy raise different legal and political questions, and these histories aren't interchangeable. What they share is a recurring concern: whose account of their own life and body is taken seriously, whose authority is recognized, and what institutions do when someone says they've been violated.
The survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse, and their demands for accountability and privacy, deserve attention on their own terms. Their experiences aren't a metaphor for witchcraft, and the documented failures, the alleged crimes, and the survivors' own words have to stay at the center. The historical comparison only means something when we look at how shame, threats to reputation, and unequal access to power keep people from speaking.
10. The propaganda connection
This part belongs inside Misinformed and Misunderstood. Propaganda doesn't always start with an outright lie. Sometimes it starts with a familiar symbol, an accusation, an inherited fear, or a description repeated so often that people stop asking where it came from. Throughout this history, words like witch, heretic, heathen, and demon carried different meanings and consequences depending on the culture and the century, and what matters is how those words were used, by whom, and what they did.
A label can turn a complicated human being into an imagined threat. A label on its own doesn't prove a coordinated propaganda effort, though. To make that case I'm looking for identifiable campaigns, repeated messaging, institutional involvement, funding, and evidence of intent, so that this argument stands on the record and not on historical analogy alone.
The modern version of this doesn't need anyone to accuse a woman of magic. Look at what has happened to diversity, equity, and inclusion. At its most basic, DEI asks institutions to examine whether people from different backgrounds and experiences have a fair chance to participate. It doesn't require a Christian to become a pagan, a conservative to become a liberal, or anyone to give up their personal beliefs. Over the past few years, though, the idea of inclusion itself has been turned into something people are taught to fear, and the people who already felt pushed to the edges are now wondering whether they can participate openly at all.
There's a documented political development behind this. On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration ordered the termination of federal DEI programs, and its January 21 order directed agencies to go after private-sector DEI practices it considered unlawful. The administration says these measures protect merit and equal treatment. Critics say they are dismantling opportunities and protections that were built to address long-standing discrimination. Both orders have been challenged in court.
For this book, the most revealing part is what happened to the language. Diversity has been recast as division, equity as an unfair advantage, and inclusion as a threat to the people who used to hold most of the institutional power. Not every criticism of a DEI program is dishonest, and not every program works. Policy disagreement is legitimate. What I'm investigating is the point where disagreement becomes a broader campaign of fear and exclusion.
During the European witch hunts, an accusation could turn someone who had always been part of a community into a danger to it. I'm asking whether modern political messaging can do something comparable by casting inclusion as a threat to the social order. Anti-DEI policy isn't ex*****on, and I won't pretend it is. The comparison is about how institutions and communities build an image of a threatening outsider, and what happens to that person's opportunities, reputation, and freedom once the label sticks.
That's where the argument of this chapter comes together. The modern witch hunt may not require anyone to believe in witches. It only requires people to believe that someone else's difference is a danger society has to be protected from. My experience in Zimmerman gives that argument a human starting point, the historical records give it depth, and the executive orders, court cases, and documented consequences of these policy changes give it present-day evidence. The question was never only what people believe. It's how they came to believe it, who reinforced it, and what happened to the people it was aimed at.
11. What this means under the Libra New Moon
All of this brings me back to October 2026 and the intentions I'm setting under this New Moon. I believe ancestral remembrance is part of spiritual growth. Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, and our relationship with the natural world are how I study the way those who came before us understood existence. I also believe humanity is moving through a period of enormous collective change, and the current outer-planet cycles reflect that.
A Libra New Moon carries balance, justice, and relationship, and this history hands us questions that fit it. It asks what we've inherited about people whose spiritual practices differ from ours, what we've accepted without ever looking into it, what religious freedom asks of us with our actual neighbors, and what kind of community we want to build.
I've been sitting with a personal question too: whether I can love the Minnesota land I've lived on for decades without being obligated to stay in a community where I expect hostility. Here's where I've landed. You can love your land and also leave it. My ancestry and my spiritual identity don't get decided by somebody else's religious interpretation.
Nana Has Questions
Nana wants you to examine your assumptions, not just nod along with me. Start with who taught you what a witch was, and whether you've ever looked into the history of that definition. Look at why some practices were accepted as communication with the divine while others were condemned as contact with demons, and how many customs in your own religious practice existed before your religion did. Learn what happened to the women and men who were falsely accused, and who benefited from the systems that prosecuted them. Think about how a community can tell a real concern about harm apart from fear of an unfamiliar belief. Then ask yourself honestly whether you'd defend another person's religious freedom when you disagree with everything they believe, and what you'd need to unlearn to make room for someone else's spiritual experience.
There's a book-length investigation in this history, and the human stories have to stay at the center of it: Tituba, Rebecca Nurse, the Scottish folk healers, the Indigenous practitioners whose religious freedom was restricted, the people accused of witchcraft today, and the women now speaking about religious stigma and violations of their bodily autonomy. Each of them has a distinct story that deserves to be told accurately.
The thread running through all of it is how we got from our ancestors' many ways of understanding the sacred to a world where some people still believe they have the authority to call another person's spiritual experience evil. That's the history worth following all the way back, and all the way home.
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Sources and further reading
Hutton, Ronald. The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present. Yale University Press, 2017.
Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Routledge.
Kramer, Heinrich. Malleus Maleficarum, 1487.
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft and the published study of accused folk healers and midwives in Scotland, 1563–1736.
Salem witch trial court records, 1692–1693.
American Indian Religious Freedom Act, 1978.
Pew Research Center. Report on global restrictions on religion, June 2026 (covering 2023).
Executive Order 14151, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, January 20, 2025.
Executive Order 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, January 21, 2025.
