might actually be a portrait of a medieval businesswoman?
I don't know what the green gas is.
and I need a timeline and algorithm cleanse immediately.
professor and historian of witchcraft and demonology.
might actually be a portrait of a medieval businesswoman?
No, it's not. Here's why that matters.
women called alewives ran the beer industry across Europe.
Women have always been involved in the brewing industry
and were really important to the production of ale,
which is what a lot of people drank in the period,
given that water was often contaminated, not safe to drink.
and women were deeply involved in that.
[Narrator] They wore tall pointed hats.
[Narrator] So customers could spot them
They stirred giant cauldrons of brewing ale.
Beer could be brewed in lots of things,
It could be brewed in a sort of regular giant sauce pan
It could be brewed in water buckets.
It was not always being brewed in cauldrons.
cauldrons are actually rarely mentioned explicitly,
even though various domestic instruments
of cooking and other things do show up.
A lot of people kept cats, and dogs, and other animals.
But cats were associated with heresy and the demonic
long before you have the sort of heyday of the alewife,
and long before the witch trials themselves too.
So cats have this demonic association
that they were owned by these brewers.
But I do enjoy the fact that this is very clearly
playing on the black cat stereotype.
[Narrator] When a fresh batch was ready,
they hung a broom outside the door as a signal.
They have become one of these stock items
you see them on front porches and so on.
But witches were believed to fly to demonic Sabbaths
on lots of different objects, right?
as much as you would expect in the British records
It's much more of a continental European idea.
But people imagined that witches flew on pitchforks,
or sticks, or rode animals, goats, other creatures.
Or just flew lifted by the devil's wind itself.
and I think they've stuck around because they are an object
the sphere of the home during this period.
So that connection between women and witchcraft
is why broom is so dominant in our imagination,
but it has nothing to do with alewives.
that people could get to these demonic parties.
So I just arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692,
and honestly, it's not as bad as I -
Gold would've been something surprising to see
an ordinary person walking around the streets with
but it's not because people though gold
and because they thought it was a sign of vanity,
a sign that you were devoting your attention in the world
is that immediately this guy sees the necklace and says,
That is not how devil's marks worked.
People certainly believed in this period
that when a witch made a pact with the devil,
she was marked in some way as his servant.
It's kind of an inversion of the baptism ritual.
But the devil's mark was something people searched for.
It's certainly the case that in the Salem witch hunts,
accused people were stripped and searched
for an insensible mark, a strange mark, a discolored mark
that they had engaged in a deal with the devil.
So this building right here, this is where it all started.
It started in the home of Samuel Paris,
because it was his daughter, Betty,
who were the first girls to display signs of bewitchment.
And the minister Samuel Paris didn't immediately say,
they are clearly taken with the devil or witchcraft.
What he did first was call a doctor to say,
Hey, can we explain this by some other means?
And when the doctor couldn't figure out
what was going on with these bewitched girls
who were having fits, strange contortions,
that's when people started to strongly suspect witchcraft.
And once the accusations started, they didn't stop.
Most of them were just women who didn't fit in.
It is true that most of those accused in Salem
A lot of the women who do get accused in Salem
as the trials progress, they actually do fit in.
They actually are upstanding citizens.
It's only early on in the Salem witch trials
where Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne,
the first three accused of witchcraft,
they are the typical outcasts or misfits,
you do really have some upstanding citizens
And that leads to a broader suspicion
among some quarters of the Salem community
about whether or not any of this is accurate at all.
that genuinely messes with my head a little.
Like, look at this, it's just a normal market.
People buying vegetables, kids running around,
that there are people going about their business,
buying and selling wares and food, talking to one another,
it's a good reminder that even though
there were these moments of witch panics,
where people were tremendously anxious
about the harm that witches could cause to their lives,
People weren't thinking about witches 24/7.
or even hearing of one from a relative or a neighbor.
Can I ask, what did they say you did?
My neighbor's cow died the morning after we argued.
after we argued and that was enough,
the problem with that is it suggests
that all it took for someone to be accused of witchcraft
And it's certainly true that in moments of witch panics
where lots of people have been accused,
people could be swept up quite easily for small means.
But typically a witchcraft allegation
came after someone had built a reputation over the years
and it's immediately a threat of witchcraft
why bad things were befalling them.
Also, no one would've been in jail by themselves.
People were sleeping on straw that was often damp,
crawling with mice and other things.
even though it doesn't look very nice,
would've been much better conditions
than the average accused witch would've been subjected to.
he cannot afford to be associated with me now.
She's been abandoned by everyone she knows
At least this video gets the hanging part right.
were just people accused by other people.
But I think we have to be careful in any sort of suggestion
that people in the 16th, 17th Century
They were more gullible, more irrational.
In the context of their perceived reality,
They were genuinely afraid about what might happen
to their futures, to their families, to themselves.
Witchcraft at its core was about fear.
the people who died for this imagined crime of witchcraft
But the accusations that brought them to the gallows,
they were rooted in people being afraid.
and we should be careful in not assuming that we,
as a society, are any more insulated
from the power of fear or not knowing or otherness,
making us do really horrific things
to our loved ones and to our neighbors.
So one of the things that's really interesting to me
But the thing about witches in the early modern period
is they didn't live apart from the community.
They were believed to be your neighbor, your friend,
And that's what made them so terrifying.
That is very much coming from fairy tales,
Even though of course witches in this period
were believed to congregate in the woods,
[Spectator] Witch. She cursed the Bord Boy.
the Puritans, which I think this is depicting,
would've found that appalling, right?
The sign of the cross making it over your body
was seen as a very Catholic, even Popeish symbol.
And for the Puritans, that was a no-go.
This little girl is wearing a very cute,
the type that gets developed in Shetland,
primarily first for fishermen's hats.
No one in the context of 17th century New England
was wearing this pattern with this saturated of colors.
The style is great. The history is bad.
was genuinely believed to be a witch,
there is no way this mother would just stand there
and let her child be touched by her.
They believed witches could do harm.
And a lot of that fear was rooted in this idea
could cause babies to wither and die.
So unless this is the world's worst 17th century mother,
I highly doubt she would be putting her child
And one of the things that is really important to know
about the witch hunts is that even white magic,
even good and healing magic was considered by authorities
to be something that involved a deal with the devil.
that ordinary Jack and Jill peasant
would be able to perform magic at all.
They though they had made a pact with Satan,
so therefore magic in all of its forms,
according to most authorities during this time period,
[Witch] If you take this, you'll feel better.
One of the things that this video is already insinuating
is that the accused witch was actually a witch.
The thing is, while there were of course some wise women
and cunning folk who were accused of witchcraft
during the 16th and 17th centuries,
the vast majority of those accused were not.
Most people were just ordinary men and women, mostly women,
who got caught up in fear and reputation,
and in this sort of chain of events,
this perfect storm that led to the deaths of so many.
So I think it's really misleading to suggest
that an accused witch is waking up,
opening a book, doing a potion, doing spells.
that these truly were innocent people
in a very deadly demonic conspiracy.
No, there's no way this street would be so clean.
It would be covered in horse and other animal shit,
this is a very pristine washed street that would not,
you would not have found it anywhere
in the 17th century, much less up until the 20th.
[crow squawking] [crowd chattering]
I will note that in that video they have American accents
as they're saying, She poisoned my daughter.
That would not have been the case in the 17th century.
The colonist of New England still very much held on
A lot of things going on here in this particular scene.
The way that hangings worked in this period
is that the accused climbed up a ladder
and then was turned off the ladder.
The hanging was slow. It was painful.
It was in some ways sort of horrific to watch,
but it wasn't a sort of lights out moment
like you have as later scaffolds get developed,
are sort of built into these sort of structures
So this scaffold too is inaccurate for a range of reasons.
[Witch] You brought this on yourselves.
And here again, this video is suggesting
and the subtext is that they were right to execute her.
These were ordinary people. These were not witches.
I don't know what the green gas is.
That again is clearly pulling from pop culture.
And of course, this is how AI slop videos work, right?
They scrape what is ever is available in the public domain
and sometimes things that are not available
in the public domain, things that are stolen.
And this is clearly sort of a Disney-fication
of this particular video and I hate it.
because here we have kind of quintessential images
these nocturnal gatherings witches were believed to have
under cover of darkness, on a mountain, in the woods,
And people believed at these witches Sabbaths
that all sorts of dastardly deeds were being done.
People were committing cannibalistic infanticide,
But here we have women sort of dancing happily
that people were really terrified of.
So I think this is a really good example
the idea that when women gather together,
it can be powerful and not necessarily frightening.
One of the things that is the most sort of archetypal,
the most stereotypical when we think of witches
about what Jews were purportedly meant to wear
Other scholars say the pointy witches hat
is kind of a bastardization of typical headwear
that sometimes Puritans and others wore
that had that kind of triangular shape.
But regardless, the pointed hat doesn't actually become
a mainstay of the witchcraft stereotype
until after the witch trials have reached their heyday
know that it's a feature of popular culture
that has maybe some roots in history,
but is more the product of later depictions of the witch.
but apparently my herbal tea cured a headache,
So this video suggests that this woman
gives herbal tea to someone, it works,
if you gave a friend or a loved one a tea
because their head hurt, that's normal herbal medicine.
Most witchcraft allegations start with a misfortune.
Your baby dies of a mysterious illness
and you don't know what happened to them.
and you worry about the future of your line of your family.
Your cow is unable to produce milk like normal.
There's a freak frost that causes your crops to die
much earlier in the season than they should have done.
that made ordinary people think to themselves,
They wondered about natural causes.
and if there was someone in their lives
who they didn't trust who had a negative reputation,
that could then spiral into accusing a neighbor,
of causing that harm to themselves,
with the actual history of the witch hunts,
or even historical ideas about witches,
so much as our modern pop culture idea of what a witch is.
Everything here is stereotypical, right?
The green potion, the scary face, the hat.
You know, people did believe that some witches
brewed potions and poisonous ointments
but the way this video is presenting it
is very much fantastical, very much Disneyfied,
Disney married with the brothers Grimm.
It's not actually about the history.
[Judge] Mistress Hale, you are accused
there are a couple things wrong with this video.
Number one, why are they holding a hearing outside?
they're not meeting outside in the summer or the winter.
Typically, the trials were held in the Salem Townhouse,
No one is standing barefoot out in the dirt
because, of course, the judges themselves
would not wanted to have conducted trials in the elements.
So the location from the outset, wrong.
A lot of the people who were accused of witchcraft
in Salem and elsewhere really attested to their innocence,
and they didn't want to confess to something
These people were concerned about their salvation.
So when asked, Have you met the devil?
Have you done his deeds in the woods?
They often said no until, of course,
other sorts of pressure was applied
that led to some people confessing.
and in Salem, something interesting happens.
People who are accused of witchcraft and confess,
because they are used as witnesses for the prosecution.
She confesses, and then that's more fodder for those
who want to go after the scourge of witchcraft
In other places in Europe, if you confess,
most surefire evidence to send you to the gallows
[Judge] The testimonies claim otherwise.
we have records of people in Salem saying that very thing.
I'm not a witch. I've never met the devil.
I would never do this. I'm a godly woman.
Now, of course, no Salem that would've been recognizable
to people in the 17th century, but regardless.
and in all of the sort of material out there
that AI is vacuuming up and slopping out
into these truly questionable and terrible videos?
And that's because of the prominence of America
It's because of Arthur Miller's The Crucible,
It's because of the popularity of the 2015 film,
It's because when people think of a phenomena,
of the broader story of the early modern witch hunts.
Now, any loss of life is tragic, right?
19 people are hanged, one is pressed to death,
lots of other people languish in jail,
a lot of other people's lives damaged
But that's a small number if you look at Europe as a whole,
and you realize that 100,000 people
between the late 15th and early 18th century.
The first thing I'll say about this video
is it suggests that there's a cohesive idea of a witch
So you don't really have the idea of the witch
at least not in the way that leads to the witch hunts.
So here we're in the heyday of the witch hunts, right,
by the time we get to the second half of the 16th century.
And this video is depicting all of these witches
purportedly over time as being young,
as being beautiful, at the height of their beauty,
which I think is sort of the creator's way of,
well, the AI's way of making this a tragic heroin figure.
But in reality, most of those accused of witchcraft
but many of them were middle-aged, right.
because often someone was first suspected of witchcraft
the purported age of some of these AI figures,
but they weren't actually accused until decades later
once that suspicion among their neighbors
had built up and crystallized into something that could lead
Here, actually, you have an image of a supposed witch
that's, I think, meant to be kind of a Puritanesque witch
But 1715, the witch trials had ended
And ordinary people weren't typically wearing black garb.
They might wear it when they went to church,
but it wasn't the normal common dress.
The only good thing about this video,
is the fact that we have very cute cats on display.
And cats are associated with witchcraft
because cats are mysterious creatures, right?
They behave in sort of unpredictable ways.
If anybody has ever heard a cat get in a fight,
And actually, the '90s are representing
in some of the later depictions in this video
a much more modern understanding of witchcraft
as something potentially empowering,
That's enough AI slop for today and forever.
