Currents

The gay writer and sex columnist Dan Savage once described Halloween as “straight pride parades”, even cheekily rebranding the holiday “Heteroween.” With its air of uninhibited naughtiness and infinite variety of “sexy” costumes (including sexy Sriracha and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos), Halloween, Savage argued, had become a night for straight people to break free from sexual repression and social taboos to get their freak on. But he readily acknowledged that in the days prior to LGBT rights, Halloween was the flagship queer holiday — “the one night of the year when you could leave the house in leather or feathers without attracting the attention of the police.”

While LGBT folks in Western countries are no longer persecuted simply for being different, there remains a strong connection between the spooky and the queer, from Pagan ritualism to costumes and hidden identities, and, of course, to vampires. Witchcraft, in particular, has been cemented in the popular imagination as an almost inherently queer domain — a conception that has been retroactively applied to history as well. Witches aren’t just associated with queerness today, it’s become almost axiomatic, especially within LGBT circles, that they have always been queer. As it happens, the history of queer witchcraft tells a spellbinding but altogether more subtle story.

Depending on the way it’s framed, the “witchcraft was always queer” narrative can be a tricky claim to substantiate. If by “queer” we really mean “LGBT people”, the case is speculative at best. Activist scholars like Arthur Evans in his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture made influential but thinly sourced and ultimately discredited contributions to the modern perception that historical witchcraft was intertwined with LGBT folks. The trouble is, that so much of this narrative relies on assumptions and deductive leaps. Every spinster accused of witchcraft becomes a lesbian. Every goddess-worshiping cult becomes a coven of sapphic feminists. And every orgy or sexual ritual becomes a queer orgy or gay/bisexual ritual. Except, these things are virtually never spelled out. True, until the modern era, writers and chroniclers often shied away from explicit descriptions of same-sex behavior, but that doesn’t render any conceivable instance of queer witchcraft evidence of queer witchcraft.

If, however, we mean “queer” in the broader sense of encompassing “anyone who does not conform to their society’s norms around sex, sexuality, gender, or romance”, then a tapestry of parallels begins to materialize.

The belief in and attempted practice of magic is as old as the human imagination, but the kind of witchcraft and sorcery that springs most readily to our minds today dates back to medieval Europe. The first organized witch-hunt began in Switzerland in 1428, and over the course of eight years, led to 367 people — mostly male peasants — tortured and subsequently burned alive (though a few were beheaded). From the 15th to 18th centuries, roughly 110,000 witch trials saw the brutal deaths of 40,000 to 50,000 people. Much of this carnage was concentrated in the frenzied period from 1550 to 1650. While men sometimes suffered more at the hands of witch-hunters than women in places such as Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, 75–80% of the supposed witches who were burned or otherwise murdered were women. But though men were the judges, jurors, and executioners who carried out these atrocities, more often than not it was the accusations of women that condemned alleged witches to torment and death.

Now, at the risk of offending the neo-pagans, astrologers, and religious fundamentalists out there, let’s be clear: witchcraft and magic aren’t real. So what were tens of thousands of “witches” being hunted and burned for? As with every form of moral panic and mass psychosis, many of the people targeted invariably deviated from mainstream sensibilities in some way. Some were midwives and healers, as anything resembling medicine seemed magical. Some were folks cynically accused by rivals or neighbors out of spite, resentment, or vengeance. Some were simply people unable to fight back, such as the elderly, the infirm, and the mentally ill. But many were women who strayed from the prevailing norms of what a woman was supposed to be or do. Women who were unmarried, or were too independent, or too masculine, or who lived in households with other women and no men, or whose sexual desires or behavior were deemed aberrant were massively overrepresented among the victims of witch-hunts. Among these deviant women were undoubtedly more than a few (suspected) lesbians or bisexuals, along with many who were, by definition, gender-nonconforming to the societies in which they lived. Female sexuality in general was a deranged preoccupation of witch-hunters.

The 1486 treatise Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), written by the German inquisitor Henrich Kramer, became the unofficial manual on demonology, satanism, and witch-hunting during the European witch craze. Kramer’s screed brims with an obsessive hatred of femininity and the female sex drive, which he characterized as corrupt, evil, and demonic:

“What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colors. […] Women are by nature instruments of Satan — they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation.”

The book goes on to rant, in tedious detail, about the ways in which women’s uncontrollable lusts lead them to engage in carnal unions with the Devil and other creatures of Hell. Leave it to the clergy to make horny women having steamy sex with demons sound excruciatingly dull — with God, all things are possible.

Throughout the centuries of witch-hunts, accusations of sorcery went hand in hand with what we’d now call queerness. Whether Joan of Arc was in fact trans, as many modern activists claim (or wish), she was certainly gender-nonconforming. When she was burned at the stake in 1431, the charges she’d been brought up on included witchcraft and cross-dressing. A few years later, Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman and companion-in-arms of Joan, confessed to witchcraft, homosexuality, and the serial killing of children under threat of torture.

In 1540, the English Baron Walter Hungerford became the first person executed under the Buggery Act of 1533, alongside the primary charge of treason — with a side of witchcraft thrown in, naturally. In Spain, the surgeon Eleno de Céspedes, who was born Elena, identified as a man, adopted the name Eleno, and even married a woman (after having previously been married to a man), ran afoul of the Spanish Inquisition in the 1580s. Arrested on charges of sodomy, transvestitism, and witchcraft, Eleno employed a creative defense: claiming that complications from giving birth had caused hermaphroditism. As a medical expert, Céspedes’s testimony helped them escape torture and death. In 17th-century Scotland, a bisexual woman named Maud Galt was accused of sexual misconduct by a maid in her husband’s employ with whom she had an affair. The charge turned into witchcraft because the authorities found sorcery easier to wrap their minds around than sapphic tryst.

As an unfalsifiable claim for which evidence could be invented, contorted, or conjured into existence with the torturer’s implements, witchcraft was a useful all-purpose tool to boost conviction rates, exact retribution, or simply persecute outsiders — including queer people. When the hysteria finally died away in the Western world, witches became a symbol for the outsider and the other — a niche that closely parallels the LGBT experience for large swaths of human history. Indeed, some of the slurs still used to demean gay and bisexual people derive from the witch craze, including “faggot”, which originally described the bundles of sticks on which witches were burned, and “fairy”, which was another early term for witches.

Over the past hundred years or so, however, queer witchcraft and the occult have enjoyed a renaissance. In the 20th century, figures including Aleister Crowley, once dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”, and bad boy rocket scientist Jack Parsons, both bisexual occultists, along with LGBT-friendly pagan religions such as Wicca, helped breathe new life into witchcraft as a gathering point of the queer community. Recent data is hard to come by, but according to a 2003 survey, 28.3% of American pagans self-identified as gay, lesbian, or bi. For context, in 2003, the US was still debating whether same-sex marriage would lead to “man-on-dog” relations. One hardly needs a crystal ball to divine that if a similar survey of Western pagan communities were repeated today, the percentage of LGBT respondents would be through the roof. As of 2021, pagans rank as the single most LGBT-affirming faith group in the US.

That’s all good news for the developed world, but when we travel outside its confines, the landscape sometimes resembles a troubling time warp. In many parts of Africa, for example, we see echoes of the European witch-hunts of yore. In countries such as modern-day Cameroon, homosexuality and bisexuality are both widely shunned and commonly linked to witchcraft. Some spells, it seems, are difficult to break.

In the final analysis, it’s very clear that most of today’s witchy subcultures are quite proudly queer. Statistics aside, one need only spend 15 minutes in queer circles to see just how pervasive practices like astrology, tarot, and various forms of magic are. As for the history of queer witchcraft — it may not be as explicit as some wish, but there are more than enough parallels for LGBT people to see in historical witches, if not themselves, at least kindred spirits.

Published Oct 21, 2024