Original subtitles

Hi, team. Hello. Hello.

Are we ready to talk witches?

We are ready. How you feeling?

I'm good. I'm feeling it, yes, I'm feeling witchy.

I'm Suranne Jones.

And, for as long as I can remember,

I've been intrigued by the idea of witches.

I love that, yeah.

BLEEP the cleaning, I'm going to ride the broomstick. Exactly.

No, Jackson, don't follow me.

Shall I send you one, and you respond? Yeah.

SHE HOWLS

SURANNE HOWLS

But for much of history,

witches and witchcraft have been viewed with fear and suspicion.

You had 200 years where women were terrified of being called a witch.

I'm going on an epic journey to uncover what led to some of

the biggest trials in history.

There is a worry that witches are rampant,

and they are out to hurt the King and society.

I've already seen how witchcraft accusations played out in Pendle...

This is the dungeon where the witches were imprisoned.

Oh, my gosh.

..and why witch-hunts took hold in Germany.

If disaster strikes,

we become ready to see evil in other people.

Now, I'm heading to the site of the most infamous witch trials of all -

the American town of Salem...

The little girls gave this testimony,

that they have been going to the woods

and dancing naked in a circle.

..to discover why accusations of witchcraft caught fire here with

such devastating consequences...

And fingers point wildly.

Suddenly, you just have this snowballing

number of accusations.

We do need to make clear that these people were

wrongly accused of witchcraft.

"If it was the last moment I was to live,

"God knows I am innocent."

..and how their legacy can still be felt today.

CHANTING: We won't go back!

What do people think that they are going to achieve

by sending those threats? I think they want to shut you up.

They want you to be so scared that you'll stop talking.

Argh! Yes!

Ahhh!

Salem is known as the City of Witches.

In this quiet town of New England, in 1692,

14 women and five men were brutally hanged as witches,

after a number of young girls began convulsing

as if possessed by demons,

causing wild accusations of witchcraft to snowball.

It's an extraordinary story that has echoed down the centuries.

But I want to discover what really happened here.

Why did witch-hunting hysteria sweep through Salem

with such destructive force?

Who was accused of witchcraft,

and who were their supposed victims?

And what are the parallels with the witch-hunts

I've already explored in England and Europe?

Salem Village was a small agricultural community

of around 600 white settlers.

They were part of a wave of English Puritans who had travelled

to the New World in the 1620s.

To understand what they were seeking here,

I'm meeting Emerson Baker,

Professor of History at Salem State University.

This is the great Puritan experiment,

because they're convinced that they're going to come over here

and they're going to start from scratch,

and they're going to build this utopian, Christian community

where everybody walks in peace and harmony with each other,

with their friends and neighbours,

and it's going to be perfect.

When they get here, what are the rules?

Like, how... Yeah. ..pure is a Puritan?

How pure are the Puritans? Yes.

Puritan's are pretty pure.

When they come here for religious freedom,

it's only for the Puritan faith.

They didn't allow things like dancing or singing.

It was all the glory of God, so it was a fairly rigid,

strict kind of community.

This is a highly patriarchal society,

women are seen as basically,

for want of a better phrase, a necessary evil.

They have to be there because they have to reproduce.

But they are subservient, they don't have legal rights.

I mean, women were treated at this time

at the same level as children.

The settlers had come seeking a Puritan utopia -

but they were faced with an unexpectedly harsh environment.

So, they've basically had quite of antagonistic confrontations with

the Native Americans on the land.

But this is land that they don't know necessarily how to use.

So, there's dark forest, there's swampland,

a lot of the land is actually unusable.

So, this is unforgiving, inhospitable foreign land that

they have to find a way to make their home.

As God's chosen people,

the community here believed they were also in spiritual danger.

Puritans do see themselves as more susceptible

to witches or magical attacks,

because Puritans also see themselves

as the correct form of Christian.

You have these people who are terrified that something

could be happening to them.

And that's kind of a perfect storm for getting a whole lot of people

accused of something for really no reason at all.

This all made Salem a fertile ground for witch-hunts.

An account by the Reverend John Hale,

a minister from a nearby parish, detailed the strange incident

that first sparked accusations of witchcraft.

It all started on an icy afternoon in the middle of one of

the coldest winters that New England had ever seen,

in the parsonage of minister Samuel Parris -

the parsonage that stood right here on this spot.

On that cold day in 1692,

Parris' nine-year-old daughter, Betty,

and 11-year-old niece, Abigail, began behaving in

an alarming manner.

Both girls described being pinched

and bitten by an invisible agent.

Then they began to bark like dogs.

Sometimes, they would fall completely mute, and other times,

they would convulse as if they were having a seizure.

Adults are initially sceptical,

but they maybe tell the children to pray harder,

to be more Godly, to be better.

However, as time goes on, they start to be concerned.

They call in a doctor,

and they start to be really worried that witchcraft is a factor here.

The doctor who visited the Parris household diagnosed that

"the Evil Hand" was upon the girls,

meaning that witches were at work here.

Come on in. Oh, wow.

The following evening,

while the Reverend and Mrs Parris were out,

a well-meaning neighbour called Mary Sibley decided to try

and discover who the witch was by baking a witch cake.

What you do with the witch cake is you take a rye cake

and you add to it -

in this case, as odd as it sounds -

the urine of the afflicted girls,

and you bake it up.

And then, you feed it to the dog.

If I were to curse you, there would be an energy,

an evil energy that would flow from me into you.

So, in other words, a part of the witch would be living in them,

and they would urinate it out.

And in that case, if they could take that urine

and cause harm to it -

that is, bake it into a cake and have a dog eat it.

So, you'd have a witch screaming in pain as the dog ate

the witch cake, you see.

I shouldn't try and make sense of this? No. No?

I think we're not going to have a bake off for witch cakes.

No, no, no, no, no! HE CHUCKLES

So ironically, when the Puritans want to find out who is a witch,

they do some magic themselves.

The Puritan settlers officially did not use magic

or believe in magic.

But, of course, because they'd come from the old world where magic was

a very widely-used sort of skill,

some of them did continue to believe in magical remedies.

When Reverend Parris found out,

he was very upset, because clearly,

this is an act of magic.

Again, white magic, but still magic.

You're still invoking Satan.

In fact, he said a very famous line,

"The Devil hath been raised, and you have done it."

Whether it was the magic of the witch cake

or the Reverend Parris' ranting,

the two girls become lucid for the first time in a month.

They accused three local women of bewitching them.

The three accused women are immediately arrested

on suspicion of witchcraft.

A crime that's punishable by death.

The Salem Witch Trials had begun.

I'm in America to explore how witch-hunts unfolded here.

In the 16th and 17th centuries,

Britain and Europe saw thousands executed for witchcraft.

Most of them were women.

Stacy, hi. Hi.

So good to meet you. And you, too.

I'm meeting historian and author Stacy Schiff

to discover who was accused in Salem.

The girls are convinced that they are suffering

indeed from witchcraft.

They name names.

And at that point, essentially, you have a witch-hunt.

So, where do we go from there? Who did they name?

They name three people.

They name people who are the obvious suspects, in a way.

They name a woman named Sarah Good,

who was a kind of itinerant beggar woman,

something of a nuisance to the community.

The second woman they name is a woman named Sarah Osborne,

who had been bedridden for most of these months - and in fact,

is dragged out of her sick room to face witchcraft charges.

The third person the girls name is Tituba,

who was an Indian - probably an American Indian,

possibly a Caribbean Indian enslaved person who lives

in the Parris household,

and sleeps with and praise with, and eats alongside the girls.

Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were the obvious two suspects, in a way -

it's Tituba who's the wild card.

No Black American, no Indian has ever been accused of witchcraft -

although she doesn't look like everyone else in the community,

it's a little more inexplicable

because she is on such intimate terms with the family.

The way in which Tituba was presented in some accounts

and imagery hints at the suspicion with which she was viewed.

Tituba might have been accused

because she is a Native American, pure and simple.

Maybe she was seen as Pagan, a Devil worshipper,

somebody in the household that is racially different from those

who were accusing her.

So, she very well may have a religion that looks

to them like witchcraft.

So, she might still have indigenous practises that they would consider

to be malign or magical.

She might have told the girls about this at some point in time.

When they are accused, what happens to them?

So, the three women are brought before two Justices of the Peace,

and there are men of great fortune in there,

and some were commanding presences.

So, before them, a Salem villager,

particularly a female Salem villager -

and particularly, a marginal female Salem villager -

would have felt very much outpowered.

And in the Massachusetts criminal code,

witchcraft is the second-greatest offence after idolatry -

it's followed by blasphemy, and murder comes only later.

The little girls gave this testimony

that they have been going to the woods with them,

and dancing naked in a circle.

And this does a lot of things.

It kind of hits every single one of the bad things

you could possibly do.

First place, dancing - uh-uh, not for Puritans,

you know, dancing is in and of itself seen as inherently evil,

because it's slightly sexual.

Again, nakedness, nudity,

this idea of sexuality that is really on display.

And it really hits on every note from these classic images of

the Witches' Sabbath that have been around since the early 1500s.

This idea that witches go to some place out in nature,

that they bring younger, less-experienced girls in

and seduce them into doing these sexualised things that revolve

around demonic energies.

Tituba is seen as being incredibly sexual because she is native.

And this is a particular way that native peoples

are othered by Europeans.

Salem magistrate John Hawthorne led the questioning of the suspects.

Both Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne denied practising witchcraft.

But, after first also denying it,

Tituba then confessed.

What does she say?

She tells an extraordinary, lurid tale of having met with,

if not the Devil, then some representative of the Devil.

She essentially says that she has flown to Boston -

so she introduces flying into the tale.

She talks about meeting the Devil and being tempted by him

to attack Betty and Abigail.

She talks about witchcraft meetings,

including in the Minister's house itself.

She talks about ways in which they bewitched the children -

so she starts to identify the sort of spells that

they'd used against them.

A record of Tituba's supposed confession was taken down

by the magistrates' clerk,

and has survived in the Salem archives.

Tituba is said to have confirmed that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne

were in league with the devil.

But, even more shockingly,

that there were many more witches hiding in Salem.

And she says that there are actually nine witches at large,

not just the suspected three.

So immediately, she opens this story up to a much larger

infestation of witches.

So, Tituba's confessed, told this amazing story,

people are starting to freak out in the town.

What happens next, who was next?

There's a contagion - and there's a contagion both of ideas,

and a contagion of symptoms.

So immediately, two other girls begin to suffer from

the same afflictions that Betty and Abigail were manifesting,

and people begin to point fingers in various directions.

During the course of that process,

other accusers start to come forward.

They too are girls from the village,

and they too start to say they are being afflicted by witches,

that they're suffering unexplained pains.

They start to say they can see visions of other people

who are also witches.

And so, the whole witch-hunt sprouts.

Over the next few months,

many more people were accused of witchcraft.

At first, it was those on the fringes of the community

who were named.

But mounting paranoia meant that soon no-one was safe,

and even some of the most respected were accused.

So now, let's talk about how mass hysteria catches fire,

and what it does to a community.

So, at a certain point, what starts to happen is that

all of the fissures and fractures that had divided these villagers

begin to manifest in various kinds of accusation.

And fingers point wildly.

So suddenly, you just have this snowballing number of accusations.

The wild finger-pointing raged completely out of control in Salem

and the surrounding villages.

In the seven months from the first accusations

until the trials were halted,

156 people were charged with witchcraft.

An extraordinary number for such a small, isolated community.

The way in which mass hysteria overtook Salem

was brilliantly captured by one of the most celebrated playwrights

of the 20th century.

In 1953, Arthur Miller wrote his version of

the Salem story, The Crucible -

one of his best-known plays.

GIRLS SCREAM

It's on the beam, behind the rafters! Where?!

Why, why do you come, yellow bird?

Where is the bird? I see no bird!

When I saw it, I was like, "Wow, that can't be a true story."

It was so fantastical and horrific.

And then you find out that it is.

Her claws! She's stretching her claws!

I mean, it's like a madness - when you watch it,

you feel like it's a madness spreading through a community.

And still now, I feel like you watch it and go,

"How did this happen?"

Miller's depiction of this "madness" was intended to reflect

a similar hysteria he saw unfolding in 1950s America -

with the infamous hunt for communists,

led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The raw, harsh, unpleasant fact is that Communism is an issue.

There was this kind of panic, moral panic about how,

instead of witches,

every street in America was infiltrated by Reds and Communists

who were going to take it down from within.

It's the same idea, right?

And then, suddenly, all these people are blacklisted,

sent off to jail, or out of a job, etc, etc.

It's the same thing.

What Miller wanted to encourage people to do was to think

for themselves about persecution, and to try and stop it.

Let me break the suspense immediately and tell you

I am not a Communist.

This is a foul philosophy, this Communistic thing.

I am not, and never have been a Communist.

The Crucible also explored the power dynamic

that played a key part in how events unfolded in Salem.

GIRLS SINGING I saw Goodie Barton with the Devil!

I saw Goodie Cobb with the Devil!

I saw Goodie Franklin with the Devil!

There's an accusation of witchcraft levelled at

one of the younger women.

And, in order to defend themselves,

they start deflecting

and levelling those accusations at the older women in the community.

But what, in fact, you're seeing is that the two most disempowered

groups in this town are attacking each other

in a form of self-defence.

GIRLS SCREAMING

People might think that the Salem girls were just spiteful women

having a go at other women.

And in many ways, we still live in this society where people

find that compulsively fascinating.

Pointing at other women to accuse them of other things,

being frightened of other women.

We are connected to the witch trials,

whether we like it or not.

Those are the things that have been with us through all of time.

Salem's dark history means it is now a centre for the supernatural.

Millions flock to this small city north of Boston,

creating a witch-based tourist industry that brings in

$150 million a year.

BELL CLANGS Gather round, gather round!

This is a warrant for the arrest of Bridgette Bishop

on charges of witchcraft.

What?!

But beyond the tourist trail,

many who visit are part of an increasing number

attracted to modern witchcraft.

..For presenting yourself, this is a warrant for your arrest.

I'm meeting self-proclaimed witch Pam Grossman.

So, what drew you to witchcraft?

I am a Pagan,

I am someone who does witchcraft.

But I have declared myself a witch.

That's very different than a stranger calling me a witch.

When I use that word for myself,

it's both as a spiritual person,

but I also do it for political reasons,

because witches are figures who are independent,

who are unapologetically powerful,

and who make change in the world.

They transform themselves,

and they transform the world at large.

And that's who I want to be.

You know, learning and being with everybody here,

and on this journey is really making me feel like I'm not alone,

and I'm on the right track.

WHISPERING: That you're a witch.

THEY LAUGH

You're my people, for sure. Yeah.

Pam feels safe describing herself as a witch,

but the shocking history of the witch trials means the phrase

"witch-hunt" has become shorthand

for unjust accusations,

Something powerful men are now using to their advantage.

I want total transparency, this is a witch-hunt.

The witch-hunts against us by the Manhattan NDA.

Demented hoaxes, crazy witch-hunts.

You believe that?

This is what we're up... It's called the witch-hunt.

This is a man who had, arguably,

the most power in the world when he was president.

For him to misuse that word,

to say that he was the victim of a witch-hunt,

I think is a gross act of disrespect against all of the victims

who have lost their lives for being accused of something

that they weren't by people who had a lot of power,

the way Trump did.

Throughout history, there have been people who accused

other people of being witches.

And calling someone else a witch traditionally was a way

to silence someone, to shame someone,

to other somebody,

and to render them powerless.

So, here we are in Salem,

and it's important to remind people that those that were accused of

being witches would not have considered themselves

witches at all.

There's a T-shirt that's, you know, very popular.

"We are the granddaughters of the witches that you couldn't burn."

But this is, I think, also problematic,

because it makes it seems like

these witches were just these symbols of feminism and empowerment.

That isn't true.

So, I think we do need to make clear that these people were

wrongly accused of witchcraft.

They weren't symbols of witches that you couldn't burn.

They were accused of things they didn't do.

By the end of May 1692,

about 50 people were being held on witchcraft charges.

The Governor of Massachusetts set up a special court

to bring the accused to trial.

Because it's an English colony,

Massachusetts carries with it elements of English law,

and particularly English beliefs about witches.

English witch-hunting texts provided guidelines

for evidence someone was a witch,

such as examining them for physical signs.

Searching the accused for the "witch's mark"

features in reconstructions of some of the most famous trials.

Oyay, oyay.

There be a complaint made before us this day against Bridgette Bishop.

So, this is local woman Bridgette Bishop who's being accused.

She's been examined prior to this trial,

and they're saying that they found a witch's teat -

which is like a raised bit of skin, or a skin tag -

and they're saying that the Devil would suck on that teat.

So, they're setting up the scene for her

to be in league with the Devil.

Not usual in women.

Much like to a teat.

And that they were located in all three women near the same place,

namely...

..Alice Pickering midwife.

So, what he's stopped short in saying is that her witch mark

was found near her vagina,

and often skin tags appear under the armpits or in warm places.

So, prior to this trial, she's been violated,

she's been searched before she even gets to this part.

This kind of sexual humiliation would be traumatic for any woman -

but it was especially shaming in a Puritan society

which viewed nakedness as immoral.

While the pressure would lead some to confess,

many of the accused continued to protest their innocence.

The trials relied heavily on evidence provided by a core group

of eight girls and young women

who were allegedly afflicted by witchcraft.

What we see is a lot of these people are teenagers,

teenage girls, basically.

Suddenly, in a society which gives very little credence to women,

but particularly also girls' voices,

they are being listened to by the men of society.

And this gives them a fantasy of power.

And, you know, it's hard to know if they really believed that

they were afflicted of witchcraft.

I mean, I think, as normal people listen to them,

it must have strengthened their belief that actually,

something was happening to them.

Most damning of all,

some witnesses claimed the accused had appeared

in the form of a spectre, or a vision,

sometimes even in the courtroom.

These visions, invisible to everyone else,

were accepted as proof of witchcraft.

For a legal opinion on the use of this testimony,

I'm meeting Claire Mitchell KC.

What is going on in Salem? Are they making up evidence?

This is what is called spectral evidence,

and this is perhaps the most crazy the evidence got.

Now, spectral evidence is the evidence of a witness

who testifies in court that the person they're accusing,

the witch, comes to them in their dreams,

and they dream that the witch is doing them harm, and then,

they're weak, and they believe they've been visited by the witch,

and they have done harm.

So, spectral evidence...

Sorry, I'm trying not to laugh.

I'm looking and going, "Mm..." "Yeah, mm, spectral evidence."

So, think about it as this -

you could bring witnesses to court for the defence,

and say, "I am not a witch,

"I did not visit that person in their dream,

"and the proof of it was I have five people to say that

"I was sleeping in my bed."

"Oh, well of course that shows you're all the more

"devious a witch..."

Cos you can split yourself! Exactly!

"You have the power to be in two places at once.

"You can be at home with your friends,

pretending you're having a normal time

"whilst infiltrating your dreams."

Ghost evidence?

Ghost evidence.

OK, so how...

Hard to wrap your head round that one. Absolutely.

Because what makes people believe?

Everything is reinforcing your belief in witchcraft,

and then, in your life, you're thinking about witches,

your talking about witches. You're dreaming about witches...

You're dreaming about witches. ..which I understand.

You could not win.

That's the bottom line. Exactly, exactly.

You could not win in those circumstances.

It's madness.

You may think that, but it has legal precedent.

So, we know from Salem that what they did was they looked back

to England, to the colony that they came from, and say,

"Has this sort of evidence been used before?"

And was it? Yes.

In England? Yes.

They looked back and referenced a case in Berry, where Matthew Hale,

who became one of England's most senior judges -

he said spectral evidence is admissible.

So, when they find out that spectral evidence is admissible in England,

it's an absolute no-brainer that it should be admissible in Salem.

If you talk about a spectral vision,

you can put almost anything into it that you want to.

It may be that these are real visions, you know,

that people are genuinely afraid and genuinely hallucinating.

But it may be malicious accusation instead.

One of the reasons why Salem became so out of control

is because the court allowed spectral evidence.

People think, "Oh, that would never happen again here.

"We're too sophisticated for that, we're too intelligent from that."

The people who lived then where as intelligent as we are now.

We've got iPhones, we've got all those sorts of things -

but that doesn't mean we're any more intelligent.

Their belief system at the time was the Devil was real,

witches were real and they walked amongst us.

If our belief system were to change,

could we be in a situation where people are targeted again?

Yes, why not? Yeah.

In fact, recent events have shown that there are some groups

who are already prepared to believe extraordinary claims

based on imaginary evidence.

In 2017,

an online conspiracy theory known as QAnon began to spread.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory that America is

ruled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles,

and that Hillary Clinton is kind of the figurehead.

A shadowy, anonymous figure known as "Q"

appeared in online chatrooms.

He claimed to be a government official with inside information

that leading Democrats were part of a deep-state conspiracy

murdering children and drinking their blood.

That is literally almost the same as spectral evidence.

It is, this guy is a spectre, Q,

this person posting nonsense on 4Chan and 8Chan,

is obviously an impostor,

it's obviously made up.

It's nonsense - and yet, millions and millions of people

have fallen for it.

Spectral evidence.

Hillary Clinton is a powerful woman.

And that kind of is the definition of a witch.

So, it's interesting that Hillary Clinton became that focus

of this QAnon conspiracy theory,

and it's so obvious that that should happen.

I think that it's really easy,

particularly in politics where women have a voice,

where women have stepped into the fray

and are giving their opinions,

and they are alongside the men.

It's very easy to call those women a witch.

The witch has not gone away.

Maybe the witch trials,

like the Salem Witch Trials, have gone away

but they also haven't.

That's why you see the fact that, you know, Clinton was accused

of being a witch.

I mean, this is really so strong and so deeply ingrained,

it makes me wonder if the idea of the witch

will ever go away in society.

This conspiracy theory had real-world consequences

when it morphed into a belief that the 2020 election had been stolen,

contributing to the storming of the US Capitol.

In 1692 Salem,

society's willingness to believe in imaginary spectres

was equally devastating,

as the courts found those on trial guilty of witchcraft.

Between June and September,

19 people were executed -

14 of them women.

"If it was the last moment I was to live,

"God knows, I am innocent."

Seeing these names...

..really makes it real.

As many memorials do, that's the point of them.

Erm...

..and I'm really glad it's here,

amongst everything else we've seen.

Innumerable lives have been ruined.

People have been sent to jail, some of them died there,

they've had their property taken from them,

they've suffered greatly, they've been made sick,

they've been terrified.

They know that their neighbours were out to have them killed.

And that's a terrible legacy for the whole community of Massachusetts.

Astonishingly, the legacy of the Salem Witch Trials

continues to impact the rights of women even today.

I've travelled across continents to explore what led to some of

the most infamous witch trials in history,

and discovered their devastating impact on women.

Centuries ago, witch trials were born in

a climate of uncertainty and fear caused by economic hardship,

political upheaval, and extreme weather.

But these elements are very much part of our lives today.

So, are women in danger of being persecuted again?

Hey! How are you? Hello, how are you?

I'm meeting feminist writer and campaigner Laura Bates.

So, I think, for younger women, it's not that witch trials

have gone away, it's just that they've moved online.

And I think it has so many parallels

with what women went through then.

So, for example, there's a horrible form of torture

called "pricking the witch" -

and they basically kept women awake by pricking,

injuring their body with this small instrument

through the night for days,

until they became so delirious that they started hallucinating.

And then, what they said was written down and used

against them as a confession.

You know, you think, "Oh, my gosh, that's crazy,

"that's totally a thing of the past."

But then, you look at the young women I work with today,

and they are sometimes literally being tortured through the night

by the fact that the 24/7 kind of bombardment of social media.

Someone can share an image of them non-consensually,

or even create using, you know, DeepFakes.

And then, maybe it's being uploaded to different social media platforms,

and then, these comments are pinging through the night

and she's being called a slut or a slag.

It feels like that same bombardment.

In the 15th century,

the invention of the printing press helped spread the idea of

the witch as an evil woman,

using her sexual power over men.

Could the Internet be having the same effect today?

So, let's look at this on a larger scale now,

and touch on something that's horrifying to all of us,

which is the extreme misogyny.

With someone like Andrew Tate, who's been in the public eye

the past couple of years. Yeah.

He's talked about women being responsible for their own rapes.

He's talked about women being the property of men.

So, I think Andrew Tate very much isn't new, he hasn't created

the problem of extreme misogyny,

he's just one example of it.

But he is being facilitated in reaching particularly

vulnerable young people with those ideas on social media platforms.

And that's a real cause for concern.

So, you know, a good example of this is that, just on TikTok alone,

his videos have been viewed 11.6 billion times.

And that is just more than the number of people on the planet.

And that's one man. And that's one man.

And that's just on one platform. Yeah.

I think what's really significant at the moment

that people don't necessarily grasp

is the sheer scale of algorithmically-facilitated

mass radicalisation into extremist misogyny that's happening online

right under our noses.

And we've never seen anything like that in history.

So, does it feel like it's getting worse?

Does that... does it scare you?

I think it is really frightening.

I think a lot of people would be really shocked if you kind of

laid bare the reality of the situation we are in.

We know that, at the moment, just 1.4% of rapes

that are reported to the police result in a charge or summons

for a perpetrator.

Anywhere essentially where it is a woman's word against a man's,

a woman comes to harm.

Do you know, that makes me so - that's really, it's not...

I mean, it's hit before, but just putting those two things together,

"It's your word against mine..." Hmm.

I feel really upset.

Because, when you hear it in the context of the witch trials,

you feel like you're in the 17th century. Yeah.

But, when you have just put it together with rape trials today,

that's really made me feel very, very uneasy.

The fact that we still haven't escaped the shadow of

the witch trials is demonstrated by one of the most controversial

legal rulings of recent times.

CHANTING: We won't go back! We won't go back...

In 1973, the landmark case Roe vs Wade meant that

a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy became protected

by the US constitution.

Our bodies! ALL: Our choice!

In June 2022,

the Supreme Court overturned that ruling.

And as a result, abortion is now restricted

or effectively banned in many US states.

Our bodies! ALL: Our choice!

The decision by the court is atrocious.

It talks away my own bodily autonomy and the right of us

to make a decision about when and where, like,

when we can have a family.

Let's be very clear.

The health a life of the women of this nation are now at risk.

This is a sad day for the country, in my view.

Historic legal precedents were quoted to support

the court's decision -

including those by Matthew Hale,

the judge whose ruling made spectral evidence admissible 300 years ago

in the Salem Witch Trials.

He's the guy who allowed invisible evidence

to be admissible in court.

The fact that he has any say,

or like, we're referring to women's autonomy over their own body

in the 21st century is madness.

These issues are baked into our justice system,

and the fact that 400 years later,

this deeply misogynistic man who was, you know,

you could argue was responsible for the deaths of so many women,

has now been part of stripping so many more millions of women

of their rights to autonomy over their own bodies,

it's just horrifying, especially over and above the objections

of hundreds and thousands of women protesting,

using their voices today. I know! Who are alive today!

We've worked so hard at telling women to speak up,

but it does feel like we're in danger of being silenced still.

In the course of my work, on a bad day,

I can get 200 rape and death threats in a single day from men

who won't just say, you know, "Shut up, you're a witch,"

which they do say, but they'll say, you know,

it'll be a long, thousand-word email about the seven different knives

they're planning to disembowel me with,

and the order they're going to use them in.

How they'll find my family and what they'll do to me.

And that has an impact.

It makes you think twice.

You go on the news to talk about something, and you come home,

and the first message you get says,

"I'd like to use your hair as handlebars

"and rape you until you die."

It makes you think twice about going on the news again.

I mean, I went cold when I heard some of those things,

I've heard a lot of stuff whilst making this film -

but to hear from someone who receives those threats,

what do people think that they are going to achieve

by sending those threats? I think they want to shut you up.

They want you to be so scared that you'll stop talking,

stop doing stuff.

That's horrible, that's just awful.

We're conditioned to think of humanity as

progressing along a continuum,

and constantly getting better and more enlightened,

and clever and cleverer, and more prosperous.

But at the moment, it doesn't feel like that.

It feels like we're somehow retreating,

that this eclipse of reason is pulling us back into the world

out of which the Salem Witch Trials and all of that emerged.

So, how do we escape this terrifying legacy?

Perhaps the answer lies with the witch.

The image of the witch is, in some ways, starting to change,

especially with people who are very willing to say that

they themselves are witches.

I think that's really freeing for a lot of people.

This idea that, you know, you could be a witch and

you can regain some kind of power,

I think witchcraft offers that.

Along this journey, I've met some amazing women

who have embraced the identity of being a witch.

Hello? Hi!

Semra is known as "the Witch of Hackney Wick",

specialising in witchcraft rituals and healing.

Do you get any negative attitudes by proudly saying you're a witch?

If ever I get an eyeroll or somebody, you know,

is sort of a bit funny about it,

my go-to comment is, "Give me a strand of your hair.

"Give me a strand of your hair and let's see what happens."

THEY LAUGH And they don't.

They will never give me a strand of their hair -

not that I'd do anything to them,

but it's just always a great way to prove, because really,

you don't believe in it?

Semra has created a spell to break the cycle of persecution

for women past and present.

So, we're going to use walnuts.

So, walnuts in magic are very much

about discernment and judgment,

and they look a little bit like a brain. Right.

So, we're going to smash them up,

because we're going to be breaking down old beliefs.

Yes! OK? Yes.

And we're allowed to get a little bit angry and release

when we're smashing, as well.

I love that you say we're "allowed" to be angry. Yes!

Cos that's the one thing we're not allowed to be,

isn't it? Yes, exactly!

Or difficult. Or difficult!

"Difficult" is a huge one for women, isn't it? Yeah.

And I just feel like I've got a lot of anger around that.

As we're holding our hammers,

think about all thew women that were persecuted and lost their lives.

Yeah. Think about all the women that don't have the same freedom

that we have in the world.

Think about women who were persecuted for speaking up,

women who were persecuted for living their lives differently.

So... Change this narrative. ..let's change this narrative.

These people were not witches, you know?

No-one is consorting with the Devil, no pacts were made.

Seems like I shouldn't have to say that, but I do.

I will no longer feel guilt.

I am powerful. I am not afraid to use my voice.

People seem to think that witch trials are a relic of the past.

But what they don't realise is that witch trials can happen,

and are happening, over and over again.

Yes. I own my power, I step into my power. Yes.

I will... No longer be silenced.

I will no longer be silenced.

The more work I've done on this,

the more angry I've become about it.

I think we can see, in today's society,

the legacy of the witch trials,

and that makes me really angry.

Argh! Yes!

Ahhh!

BOTH: Whoo!

The history of witch trials is women being blamed

for things that they could not possibly have done,

and they were targeted because they were vulnerable in society,

because they didn't have any power,

and they were easy to blame for society's ills.

We can look at modern-day events,

and we can say, "Look, we are still targeting the vulnerable

"for things they can't have done -

"have we really moved on from those days?

"Or are we just targeting different people with more

"sophisticated ways of evidence?"

And social media, what evidence do you need?

Let the ash just fall, one, two, three...

..that's it.

That one really set on fire.

We need to make change, and the way that we need to do that

is by helping young people have a voice,

not let them do it on their own, by encouraging them to say

"Well, how can we change things?"

You keep this somewhere safe. Mm-hm.

And they're just this brilliant reminder to bring you

back to this moment.

Aww, thank you. Thank you so much.

Hopefully, people will think of something else

when they hear the word "witch,"

and they will feel like that maybe is a conversation towards

feminism and female power,

and they will understand that the witch trials

was a repression of that.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media