Do toxic men want a modern witch hunt? Gen Z is ready for them

In the two years Lucianne Tonti spent researching her book about the witch hunts of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, the mood in the world around her was shifting. As she read about ancient sites of torture, persecution and execution, a new kind of patriarchal offensive was under way. The manosphere was gaining ground.“Women today are certainly looking at how brutal patriarchy has become,” she tells me, as she looks back on a gruelling period of research into these historic assaults on women. “We’ve only had feminism for 100 years, but those previous generations fought so hard for things they’re already trying to take away from us again.”In Good Witch: In Search of Our Lost Feminine Power, the renowned journalist and author of Sundressed, a seminal book on sustainable practices in the fashion industry, charts a history that left her feeling withered and sick, “completely physically and emotionally spent”.She had crisscrossed continents, visited academic archives, museums, libraries, crumbling prisons and ancient sites of torture and execution to bring the tragic three-centuries-long chapter of history colloquially known as “the witch hunts” to life.“Travel is what I love to do,” Tonti says via Zoom from Sydney. “But this [research] ...it was hard on the body in a different way.” In a hotel in London, she found herself buckling under the hundreds of heartbreaking horror stories, fleshed out from her notes as she travelled. “So many dark stories; a lot of unfairness, a lot of torture.” She pauses. “No relief.”A rare 1494 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum was purchased by the University of Melbourne this year.Simon SchluterMost “witches” were ordinary women and girls (15-20 per cent were men and boys) ripped from simple lives, subjected to near-unimaginable terror. For a neighbour’s grievance or rival’s envy or for just being mouthy and annoying (and which girl isn’t sometimes?), they could be slapped with allegations that were first described in 1486, in Germany, by a virgin Dominican monk, Heinrich Kramer.Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches (a version was recently purchased by the University of Melbourne) was Kramer’s breathtakingly misogynistic guide to identifying, hunting and torturing witches. Another learned text on the subject, Daemonologie, first published in 1597, was written by King James of Scotland and England (yes, he of the King James Bible), who, it turns out, was a complicated young chap with a disturbing penchant for torturing women, especially in the company of a few jolly mates.“Witches” were publicly humiliated, “confessions” and names of “collaborators” thrashed out of them with repulsively vicious instruments such as thumbscrews and racks. Given enough time (torture could go on for months) they “confessed” to almost anything: casting spells to shrivel crops, trigger miscarriages or strike a neighbour down with illness. They “confessed” to sex with the devil, shape-shifting into their animal familiars, flying through nights, eating newborns.According to Tonti, although records don’t describe sexual assaults, the torturers – invariably powerful men – most often found witches’ secret “mark of the devil”, required to authenticate the catch, in the region of her vagina. (Tonti says to draw your own distressing conclusions.)Whatever the grievance or accusation, a lone, frightened, illiterate girl, stripped naked, head shaved, tormented and tortured by a ring of older, educated men could be relied on to “confess”.Maggie Zhou: “I think we’re looking for respite, or hope, or even just a different way of being.″⁣Wayne TaylorGen Z journalist, commentator and co-host of the popular Culture Club podcast Maggie Zhou says she found herself empathising with the women and girls whose stories had sickened Tonti. “I feel, like, a kinship with these women,” she muses on Zoom from Melbourne. “These independent, these vocal, these bold and brash women who were tortured and killed for being that way.”Zhou sees Good Witch dropping into the very now cultural schism of Gen Z women reimagining their life plans outside of patriarchal frameworks.“We’re a generation that’s lived through a lot of catastrophic world events, from COVID to all that’s happening politically around the world now,” she says. “I think we’re looking for respite, or hope, or even just a different way of being ... and maybe we’re looking to women of the past [because] it makes sense: we’re looking back to understand our present.”Zhou’s theory fits with an explosion of social media interest in traditionally feminine vocations. TikTok’s mushrooming category of neo-witchcraft, WitchTok, for example, had clocked more than 64 billion views by January this year. Searches for the hashtag #Witch also hit more than 20 billion, and the popularity of spinning, weaving, quilting, embroidery, knitting, crochet and gardening accounts, anecdotally, surged across all social media.“That beautiful idea of ‘re-enchanting’ our world is the most important message I took away from Lucianne’s book,” Zhou says. “It’s a really feminine concept, I think, connecting our external world to our inner worlds.”Tonti’s accounts of torture in Good Witch are more sad than salacious. She doesn’t dwell on details, but we’re made acutely aware of the women’s mostly soft, peaceful lives before they were terrorised. “It was a world where everybody believed nature was enchanted,” Tonti says. “Nature was to be nurtured; everyone was connected, it was a sacred human duty to protect nature.”In this seemingly magical natural world, women tended gardens, gossiped and gathered plants for tinctures and elixirs in forests and fields. They shared knowledge, raised families, ran businesses, spun yarn, wove cloth, worked as healers and midwives.“Then everything changed,” Tonti says. “From a world where everybody believed nature was enchanted, to the industrial revolution and now nature’s a machine we’re going to exploit and explode in the name of profit.”Good Witch meticulously untangles how the witch hunts played into the “de-enchantment” of nature, elevating science while devaluing women’s knowledge. By the 18th and 19th centuries, fields such as healing and midwifery were so legislated and professionalised they almost completely excluded women.The unfairness of it all still resonates today, says Tonti: “At some point women’s powers and the things that make us; our softness and beauty, our caring, and our interests – fashion’s a great example – became maligned as frivolous and silly.”“It was a world where everybody believed nature was enchanted,” says Lucianne Tonti.Wolter PeetersFollowing a gruelling year spent reading “dense, emotionally hard-going” academic research about the witch hunts, Tonti set off to connect with the women and girls in their homelands: Europe, England, Scotland, Massachusetts, Norway.“It was important to me to find those women’s voices,” she says. “I had a strong sense that the land [where the women lived and died] was going to tell me something. I wanted to understand as much as I could about them because history, you know, is written by the ‘victors’, and in this case, the witch hunters.”It took Tonti a solid six months and some unmistakeably “witchy” therapies to shake off the strange malaise that had settled on her during the trip. The book is at times excruciatingly personal (“I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror ... I look weathered and otherworldly ... like a witch”) and gruntingly funny (“My sad hotel ... not bed bugs sad but smells like cleaning product sad ...” )Tonti tethers her reader – it feels like a few steps behind – as she dissolves history, turning the pages of centuries-old tomes, taking tea with scholars, trudging villages and windy hills, forests and beaches, and positioning her body as near as she can to the precise spot where innocent girls and women were tortured and burnt or hanged: “I hope it was a sunny day,” she writes of one haunting story. “I hope it was quick.”Good Witch: In Search of Our Lost Feminine Power is published by Summit Books, Simon & Shuster, on July 28. Lucianne Tonti appears at Readings, Emporium, Melbourne, with Ruby Jones, on August 4; Berkelouw, Paddington, with Lauren Sams, on August 13; Byron Writers Festival, Byron Bay, August 14-16; and The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney, on August 22.