“Burn Her!”

I just couldn’t get over this quote from Monty Python’s movie, and I figured it was a good enough heading to grab some attention. Regardless, I enjoyed our discussion this past week about witches and superstitions in colonial Latin America. I have to admit that I came into the lecture thinking that the Spanish treated the “witches” as colonial Americans did, the infamous Salem trials in particular, but was surprised to see some major differences.

Ruth Behar’s article does perhaps the best in articulating that women who were thought to be witches were not really taken seriously. I find this interesting that the Church and Inquisition found witchcraft just a sign of “ignorance” but yet had such an overwhelming power over sexual practices of people during this time. Why did I bring in sexuality, though? Because as Behar expresses, women used witchcraft as a source of power, mostly through sexual relationships. So, the church was really concerned with how people were engaging and talking about sex, but yet seemed to overlook “witches” who were using “ligatures”, as Behar mentions, in which women tried to make husbands impotent. I found this a disconnect.

Also, Behar points out that women who were using sorcery in colonial Spain were mostly unmarried, young women or widows.  This was different that in colonial America and Europe. What struck me most though was that the idea of witchcraft among these women was in reality a means to some sort of power. As we have really elaborated on, women were much more subordinate than men in colonial Spain. The gender roles and norms were typical as women were considered more passive and domestic workers, while men were much more aggressive, to display masculinity of course, and in the public sphere in many more cases. Thus, as Ruth Behar’s article articulates, witchcraft for women was not only a means of power over their husbands, but served as a community for them combining women of all classes.

Behar argues that the Inquisition, by ignoring withcraft as ignorance over heresy, devalued the “power” that women were gaining by using sorcery and magic. I had not given this connection a though before, but I find this point of view convincing in that, even though women were probably causing a scare on small, local levels of superstition, because it was not given much emphasis or attention, it was as if women were so emersed in a patriarchical society that even succumbing to magic and the devil, on some extreme cases, didn’t cause for much attention.

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