Witch Way?

Lucianne Tonti’s “Good Witch” has dropped into a smouldering cultural schism between women and men and their warring perceptions of what’s Good and Right. The book tracks from the genesis of these discombobulating modern times and proposes a shockingly simple solution: Go Back. Lucianne theorises a return to nature and fundamental “feminine” values could save us all. (This story was published by Nine Media for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald arts/culture Spectrum section. Main photo of Lucianne Tonti by Wolter Peeters for Nine Media)

Words: Janice Breen Burns

Midway through the two intense years she researched Good Witch, Lucianne Tonti remembers checking into a London hotel feeling withered and sick; “completely physically and emotionally spent”.

Tonti was curious, but not overly surprised about her “weird” symptoms. The renowned journalist for Elle and The Guardian, fashion editor of The Saturday Paper and author of Sundressed, a seminal book on sustainable practices in the fashion industry, was on a punishing itinierary of scholarly research for her second book.

Tonti had criss-crossed continents (looped the planet by year’s end) visited academic archives, museums, libraries, crumbling prisons, 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 now on Zoom from Sydney, “But this (research)…it was hard on the body in a different way.” In London, she was 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…”

Most “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 what girl isn’t sometimes?), they could be slapped with allegations that were first described in 1486 Germany by a virgin Dominican monk, Heinrich Kramer.

“So many dark stories; a lot of unfairness, a lot of torture…” she pauses; “No relief…”
(Lucianne Tonti)

Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witches, (a version was recently purchased by the University of Melbourne) was Kramer’s breathtakingly misogynist guide to identifying, hunting and torturing witches. Another learned text on the subject, Daemonlogie, was written in 1603 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 a company of 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” almost anything: casting spells to shrivel crops, trigger miscarriages, 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 torturerers – invariably powerful men – most often found witches’ secret “mark of the devil”, (required by Heinrich Kramer’s and King James’ guides to authenticate the catch) in the region of her vagina. (Tonti says 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 trusted to “confess”.

Tonti’s accounts of torture in Good Witch are more sad than salacious. She doesn’t dwell on details but, we’re made accutely 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 common 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..”

In Good Witch, Tonti meticulously untangles how the 15th, 16th and 17th century witch hunts played into this “de-enchantment” of nature, elevating science and switching up the wealth-swelling production methods of the industrial revolution. Women’s knowledge and power was steadily trashed, cultural misogyny ramped up exponentially, and 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 frivilous and silly..”

“Nature was to be nurtured; everyone was connected, it was a sacred human duty to protect nature.”
(Lucianne Tonti)

Signs You May Be A Witch…..

For a solid year before setting off on her research odyssey, Tonti read deeply into academic records of the witch hunts: “The material was dense, emotionally really hard going,” she recalls. “But also very biased and devoid of those interpersonal dynamics, human emotion…”

She ploughed through piles of books: Malleus Maleficarum, Daemonlogie, a seminal study of the period, Caliban and the Witch by scholar Siliva Federici, plus knitty-gritty trial notes, fantastical records of “confessions”, legislation papers, even bills of service for instruments of torture.

When that gruelling year was up, Tonti set off to connect with the women and girls in their homelands: Europe, England, Scotland, Massachusetts in the USA, 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..”

“I had a strong sense that the land (where the women lived and died) was going to tell me something…”
(Lucianne Tonti)

After London, 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. Meanwhile, first draft copies of Good Witch were being dispatched to luminaries among her target readership: women.
“I do think there’ll be men who read it out of, um, maybe because they’re already annoyed by it,” she laughs. “I hope I’m brave enough to take them on. But there are also men – my brother and his friends for instance – exceptional, deeply thoughtful men who are excited by it. They will read it.”

Good Witch is written by Tonti in the immediate first person, 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, just so, 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..”

Millenial journalist and Eggshell Skull author Bri Lee was among the first to read Good Witch: “in turns fascinating and infuriating” she wrote. Gen X author of Rapture, Emily Maguire said it was; “…a potent brew…an invocation to rise and resist.”

Tonti’s exposition of the historic cultural mechanics and consequences of misogyny had twanged nerves. “Women today are certainly looking at how brutal patriarchy has become,” she observes. “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…”

Renowned Gen 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 independant, these vocal, these bold and brash women who were tortured and killed for being that way…”

Journalist, fashion editor, cultural commentator and co-host of CultureClub podcast, Maggie Zhou

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.”

“These independent, these vocal, these bold and brash women who were tortured and killed for being that way…” (Maggie Zhou)

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…”