Look up the definition of the word “witch,” and this is what comes up: “a person thought to have magic powers, especially evil ones, popularly depicted as a woman wearing a black cloak and pointed hat and flying on a broomstick.” Just a tad simplistic, don’t you think?

Marion Gibson takes her book, WITCHCRAFT: A History in Thirteen Trials, and turns it into a fascinating and revelatory look at real witch hunts and the persecuted people who are prey to the angry, power-hungry, frightened governments that couldn’t allow women to share their deep concerns about the world with them.

Gibson reveals, “Most witches were thought to be female. Although healers and shamans could be of either sex, as magic became associated with evil, so it also moved toward association with women…. [The church was] obsessed with the regulation of women: their sexuality, conduct, and thought.” The history of witchcraft around the world is a broader and less fairy-tale version of oppression, power plays and political corruption as seen in WITCHCRAFT, a compendium of historical events that changed and challenged gender roles, colonial rule, indigenous spirituality and much more throughout civilization.

"WITCHCRAFT is a new and important look at an old problem and, by understanding how it has evolved, a possible solution to setting the record straight as we enter the Age of Aquarius."

Gibson is a professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures at the University of Exeter, UK. The author of seven academic books on witches in history and literature, she also serves as the General Editor of the series Elements in Magic. She has a very deep commitment to telling the stories of these women and the unfair treatment they received. The perspective offered in this book is unique, practical and fair-handed. Gibson turns the tables of history to a comprehensive realism that can change the perception of witches forever.

Even though the term “witch hunt” has prattled around as a power trope since the days of the Salem witch trials, the US is not the only country to use such persecutions for political gain. Often for colonization purposes, Protestant demonological beliefs were foisted onto folk practices and cultural rituals. From the Scots to the Sami to the Native Americans, Gibson offers a comprehensive look at the various ways in which non-Anglo Saxon religious practices were shut down as a means of cultural homogeny. The Sami in Norway suffered witch hunts 70 years before the Salem trials. The true victims are the focus of Gibson’s research, the women who were unjustly persecuted and often killed by angry mobs who organized misogynistic laws and decisions around those who they found different and therefore threatening.

Even more interesting and pertinent to the present day is how the Enlightenment actually eliminated the need to believe in witches. Yet it gave birth to the conspiracy theory, a belief in secret societies and cabals, and the idea that anyone who did anything outside of the established order was out to undermine all of civilization as it evolved.

The three sections in which the examples of the 13 trials are embedded move astutely throughout history, looking at how any resistance to established norms and systems can get the practitioners marked as “witches,” “demonic” or “evil,” even as these terms start to lose some of their efficacy. Gibson uses academic research to fashion a book that is at once readable and informative, an energetic and declarative statement on a particular brand of cruelty that is at its most historically hysterical and rotten. Many thanks to Gibson for her commitment to the truth about history.

Today’s identity politics and power plays among those seated in high-influence positions make this the best possible historical reading. Let’s learn something, Gibson asserts, in the hopes that it will stop being a means by which the world shuts down anything that can bring a deeper and richer understanding between cultures. WITCHCRAFT is a new and important look at an old problem and, by understanding how it has evolved, a possible solution to setting the record straight as we enter the Age of Aquarius.