In ‘Good Witch’, writer Lucianne Tonti argues the witch hunts never really ended
words by daisy henry
What witch trials tell us about female power and the natural world.
Last weekend, I sat around a table with three girlfriends pulling tarot cards. We each shuffled the deck, split it in half and selected three cards with our left hand – one for the past, one for the present and one for the future. If we spent an evening like this in North America, England, Scotland or Scandinavia a few hundred years ago, it would have been enough to have us accused of witchcraft.
These days, being called witchy is something most women wear as a badge of honour. But as Lucianne Tonti writes in her new book, Good Witch, it was a dangerous label between the 15th and 20th centuries.
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“Women who were gardeners, who had strong friendships, who did lots of textile work, who were healers and who had a strong connection to nature became targets in the witch hunts,” she explains.
Known by many as a fashion writer and author of Sundressed, Lucianne’s pivot to writing about witch trials might seem, at a glance, left of field. For her, the connection felt natural. Where her first book explored fashion and sustainability, Good Witch is her zooming out and tackling the question: “Why do we think we can exploit women and exploit the environment?”
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Through five different chapters (split into the archetypes of ‘Gardener’, ‘Gossip’, ‘Spinster’, ‘Healer’ and ‘Nymph’), she explores the individual stories of women who were accused of being witches, while examining how their connection with nature was perceived as a challenge to male power.
“Gossip is my favourite one because basically, they really felt threatened by female friendships,” she adds. Tracing the etymology of the word, ‘gossip’ used to mean ‘God sibling’, and your gossips would often be your most intimate friends and companions. “Over the centuries of the witch hunts, [it went] from being your best friend to being a petty enemy.”
Having friends wasn’t the only thing women were made to feel guilty for by witch hunters and men in power. In ‘Gardening’, Lucianne looks at how, with the privatisation of land, women lost access to the ‘commons’, a communal space they used to grow fruit and vegetables. In ‘Healer’, she looks at how women went from being relied on for tinctures and herbs, to being pushed out of formal studies, like gynaecology. “If you were a woman earning your own money, they wanted you to be seen as a disrespectful woman,” she adds.
Compared to today, where medical misogyny is still rife, women continue to earn less than men, and domestic violence is prevalent, Good Witch is a call to arms. “It’s culminating in the rise of these tradwives who [use] the same talking points: Submit to your husband, the male head of household is the natural order of things, and this idea that we should be going backwards rather than pushing forwards with feminism.”
For Lucianne, the persecution of women goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of nature. Citing the influence of figures like Scotland’s King James and English philosopher Francis Bacon, the book argues that our relationship with nature went from one of enchantment and magic to fear and control; that as women’s autonomy and bodies became under the control of the state, so did nature.
“We’re still living in a world where we don’t view our connection to the land as sacred, and we don’t view nature as something that, as human beings, we have an obligation to nurture and protect, with the exception of a lot of indigenous communities who obviously have not abandoned those core beliefs.”
And its legacy is still felt today. Rainforests continue to be cleared, sea floors are being destroyed and global temperatures are rising.
Three years in the making, Lucianne’s research took her around the world, to many of the key sites involved in the witch trials, including Salem, Edinburgh and Norway.
“It wasn’t until I really got to Norway, which was my final stop, and I was right up on the edge of the Arctic Circle, that I really understood how important the geography was to the trials, because each place was geographically incredible – awesome in the truest sense of the word.”
“I think that that is fundamental to what was going on in those places hundreds of years ago… That fear was driving a lot of the decision-making and a lot of the campaigns [against witches],” she tells me. “You’re trying to tame the natural world, and you’re trying to eradicate any kind of enchantment or magic and control women, and those things felt inseparable to me.”
Despite the harrowing history of the witch trials and ongoing threats to both women and the environment today, Lucianne remains cautiously optimistic.
“We’ve got to start somewhere, and we can all start in our immediate spaces,” she says. Whether it’s going for a walk outside and listening to the birds, growing your own herbs, knowing where our food comes from and who makes our clothes and valuing female friendships, Good Witch is about reclaiming feminine power.
“You can find ways to feel enchanted by the natural world. And I do believe that that is when we all wake up to that, we’re all going to get more motivated to push back against these bad forces.”
Get a copy of Good Witch: In Search of Our Lost Feminine Power here.
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