When politicians started calling the coronavirus an
“invisible enemy”, it was obvious that the rhetoric accompanying the pandemic
was moving from science to magic. Both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have used
the phrase: coined by the former on 16 March 2020, it had spread to the UK two
days later. The misdirection of public fear and anger onto an indefinable
insurgent – which, of course, could not be predicted by political leaders or
dealt with by rational action – has happened before. In early modern Europe and
America, the invisible enemy used to be witchcraft. So as I sit at my living-room
desk, making insufficient progress on my new book on Elizabethan witches, I
find I am in familiar territory. Witches were blamed for all manner of early
modern disasters: illness and death in humans and animals, failures of transportation
and supply, agriculture and food manufacture, infestations, weather events and
political turbulence. They were not usually the first explanation chosen,
however. Often, attempts would initially be made to diagnose and treat a
problem in accordance with other-than-magical theories. People who fell
unexpectedly ill would consult a physician, if they could afford one, or a
village practitioner if not. Explanations offered would include humoral
imbalance, parasites such as worms, and self-delusion. But if symptoms
persisted, minds turned to invisible enemies. Witches were thought to afflict
their victims by looking at them – often referred to as “the evil eye” – muttering
spells against them, or by sending a demon in animal form to attack them. These
“familiar spirits” went by homely names: Jack, Suckin, Bid. But they were
deadly, creeping into early modern homes to bite, scratch, touch or just to
ill-wish their target. The method whereby the evil was transmitted was unclear.
Like the current myth that 5G masts have spread the virus, early modern people
wondered if harm could be zapped into them remotely. But whilst they feared the
demonic familiar, their only method of addressing perceived attack was by
seeking out and punishing the witch. Hundreds of thousands of people were
accused, imprisoned and interrogated. Many were tortured, many were executed.
These scapegoats were the visible manifestation of the invisible enemy, and the
ostracism and violence inflicted upon them were the “war”, the cure, the victory
over evil that bolstered magistrates and ministers’ authority across the world.
Hundreds of thousands died. There are resonances here that we must not ignore.
In recent times we have seen the language of magic return to our minds:
“magical thinking” was attributed to extreme supporters of Brexit by an unnamed
EU official in August 2017, and Donald Trump has tweeted the words “witch hunt”
over 300 times since his inauguration in an attempt to portray his opponents as
witch-hunters. The reiteration of the slogan “invisible enemy” is simply the
latest example of the ways that studying witchcraft accusations can teach us to
respond to the present crisis, holding our leaders to account.
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