By RICHARD SUGG
Guardian UK
Last week, police charged two people from Mount Hagen, in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea,
with the murder of Kepari Leniata,
a 20-year-old woman and mother. Accused of bewitching a six-year old
boy who had recently died in hospital, Leniata was stripped, tortured
with a hot iron rod, doused in petrol, and burned on a pile of rubbish
and car tyres.
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| Bystanders watch as
20-year-old Kepari Leniata, accused of witchcraft, is burned alive in
Papua New Guinea after being tortured. Photograph: AP |
Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history will quickly think of the legalised
witch killings of Europe and North America
as comparisons. These offer a sobering broader perspective. In Germany,
Switzerland, Britain and New England, perhaps 50,000 alleged witches
were tortured and killed by the most educated and powerful men in
society. By definition, most of their supposed crimes were sheer
impossibilities. But the forgotten history of witch attacks is perhaps
more surprising still.
In England, the
Witchcraft Act of 1736 outlawed any further prosecutions for witchcraft. Yet in the sleepy
Hertfordshire village of Long Marston in 1751,
the law did not protect 69-year-old Ruth Osborne. Accused of bewitching
cattle, she was watched by a large crowd at the village pond that
April, where a man named Thomas Colley ducked and drowned her. Though
Colley would hang, many stayed away from the execution in sympathy – but
the witch attacks were far from over.
With a present-day population of around 800 and a
late-Saxon church,
Great Paxton in Huntingdonshire now looks charmingly picturesque. Its
past is rather darker. One Sunday in April 1808 the church's minister,
Isaac Nicholson, could be heard attempting to talk his parishioners out
of their belief that
Ann Izzard
had bewitched several locals, including three girls who had fallen
sick. As Stephen A Mitchell notes, Nicholson was right to fear he had
scarcely dented the prevailing superstitions. One night that May a mob
dragged Ann, naked, from her bed into the yard outside her house. They
scratched her arms with pins and beat her face, stomach and chest with a
stick.
When Leniata was burned in Papua New Guinea, a
surprising number of onlookers, including police, failed to save her.
Though Izzard survived, her vicar had been powerless to help. That
night, when she managed to dress and drag herself to the local
constable, he too refused to protect her.
If this is a rather startling view of Jane Austen's England, matters were no better in Scotland. Near the
church of Kirkpatrick Fleming in Dumfriesshire,
a mill and a cottage faced one another beside Bettermont bridge, over
the River Kirtle. One night, around 1820, the local minister, Mr
Monilaws, was urgently called to Bettermont. In the cottage he found an
old woman – the skin of her forehead had been cut and was hanging down
over her eyes. The culprit was the miller, convinced that his uncanny
neighbour had bewitched his pigs, recently drowned in the river.
His
attack was not necessarily angry: he believed that he was
"disinfecting" the supposed witch. The same thing was performed in
Annan, Scotland, in 1826; and in Dorset around 1915 a woman had 22
wounds stitched by the local doctor for this reason. The old woman at
Bettermont had more rudimentary attention; she was sewed up the vicar
and his son. As far as we know, the miller was never prosecuted.
It
was by a very slight chance that this story survived at all – and many
others, if unprosecuted, must now have vanished. Yet similar accounts
are all too plentiful. Over in Texas in 1860, a gang rode up to Antonia
Alanis, and "lassooed her and dragged her on the ground" before taking
her across the border to Camargo in Mexico. Here she was beaten and
severely tortured for two weeks. Finally, convinced that her witchcraft
still prevailed, her attackers tied her up and had "corn shucks lighted
under her feet". She died soon afterwards of her burns. The culprit was a
wealthy man named Ramirez, and the cause, yet again, was his sick,
supposedly bewitched son Ambroso.
These are just a handful
of those who suffered for superstition long after the law had sought to
end attacks on "witches". Around 1880 an old Indian woman was stoned to
death in Pine Nut Valley, Nevada, as a witch, and in about 1885 two men
in southwest England were jailed for killing a woman thought to have
bewitched their cattle. Nor were such attacks purely rural affairs. On
Sunday 24 June, 1827, a crowd of over 300 people rushed down Marlborough
Street in Dublin, literally throwing around a woman amid cries of: "A
witch! A witch! Burn the witch!." The victim was narrowly rescued by one
brave young man and dragged into a nearby police station.
Come
the 20th century, there were witch murders or attacks in Arizona in
1952, Switzerland in 1959, and Bavaria in 1963. At times witch attacks
may have involved personal grudges, and at times victims may have been
singled out because they looked different (the Dublin woman was said to
be "dwarfish and deformed"). But time and again the chief factor, amid
the sick children, cattle, or failing crops was still more basic – a
problem which needed someone to blame it on. If there is one wider moral
of all these tragic events, it is this: those who seek scapegoats –
whether witches, outsiders or immigrants – usually hit the wrong target.
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| Richard Sugg |
