Surprising similarities between 17th‑century witch hunts and today

ABC Arts

Topic:Books

Lucianne Tonti is a journalist, author and consultant who specialises in regenerative fashion systems. (Supplied: Kitty Callaghan)

Lucianne Tonti was researching her first book, Sundressed, about sustainable fashion when she visited Fibershed, a regenerative farming outfit in California.

[It] is basically ground zero for regenerative fibre farming," Tonti tells ABC Arts.

When you're farming regeneratively, you're bringing back biodiversity [with] no synthetic inputs, improving water cycles, ecosystem functionality, soil health … Theoretically, [you can create fashion] with a negative carbon footprint, so that's actually pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

When she arrived, a worker gave her a tour of the farm.

Behind the house, Tonti spied a meadow of dye plants like indigo and marigold. In the dye shed, she found copper cauldrons, benches laden with glass vials of powder and bunches of dried herbs and flowers strung along the roof.

Outside, by a stream, a collection of stools was arranged under the branches of a large tree; a weaving circle, according to the guide.

[It] looked to me like somewhere you would cast a spell," Tonti says.

Lucianne Tonti is the fashion editor of The Saturday Paper, the sustainability editor at large for Elle Australia and a contributor to The Guardian. (Supplied: Anne Peeters)

After the trip, Tonti discovered a large body of academic work examining the overlap of "the iconography of women's work — so the cauldron, the broom, the spindle — and the iconography of the witch", she says.

Once I started to pull at that thread, it took me all the way back to the witch hunts between the 15th and the 18th centuries, the 300 years leading up to industrialisation.

Crucially, this period immediately preceded the introduction of capitalism, a system which, to the frustration of sustainable fashion advocates today, has come to rely on the exploitation of women's labour and the environment.

What I realised was that both of those things have roots in the witch hunts," says Tonti, who explores these connections in her new book, Good Witch: In Search of Our Lost Feminine Power.

A changing world

Good Witch is divided into five parts: Gardener, Gossip, Spinster, Healer and Nymph; "all feminine archetypes but also all tied to women's work", Tonti explains.

Each section tells the story of one or more witch trials, often disturbing accounts of accusation, torture, interrogation and death through the lens of different aspects of women's everyday lives.

Tonti's research took her to far-flung locations: the remote Norwegian coast, woods in the English countryside and the exurbs of New England in the US, exposing deep-seated misogyny through the centuries.

In Good Witch, Lucianne Tonti calls for "re‑enchantment as resistance". (Supplied: Simon & Schuster)

The witch hunts of the early modern period coincided with significant social change triggered in part by the scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Led by the likes of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England under one of history's most enthusiastic witch hunters, James I (both of whom appear in Good Witch), the Scientific Revolution forever altered the way we view the world.

[It's] basically saying we no longer believe in anything mystical," Tonti says. "If you cannot measure something, it does not exist.

The [effect was] to transition us in the West away from this belief in an animate, sacred, natural world that we had an obligation to nurture and protect to looking at the world as a machine that should be exploited in the name of profit.

At the same time, economic systems were changing. England had historically been an agrarian society in which people lived off the land, using common spaces to graze livestock and forage for food.

During the witch hunts, property owners began limiting public access to common land, which pushed people to rely on a wage to survive.

[We] lose this way that we have been living in the village, growing most of the food and fibre that our family needs, to this different system of existence," Tonti says.

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Those accused of witchcraft in this period, women (mostly) who were outspoken, independent, entrepreneurial, gifted or otherwise unconventional, often challenged institutions of power.

Witches also served as scapegoats for others' misfortune, blamed for everything from ill health to bad weather.

Of particular concern was the witch's Sabbat, an all-night gathering of women who, it was believed, converged to practise devil worship and witchcraft. These infamous meetings were often mentioned in the witch trials.

This fear of women's collaboration and connectivity is a big theme all the way through demonological theory," Tonti says.

Using the same playbook

The witch hunts might feel like ancient history, but Tonti sees strong parallels with the current moment.

We're still living in a world where we believe nature is disenchanted," she says.

We're still living in a world where we extract and exploit natural resources in the name of profit, no matter how badly it's hurting us as a civilisation, no matter what the threat is.

Lucianne Tonti says reading Call of the Reed Warbler by regenerative farmer Charles Massy was an "aha moment" that informed her first book. (Supplied: Anne Peeters)

Tonti sees a direct line between the violence perpetrated during the witch trials and the endemic problem of gendered violence today. According to Destroy the Joint's Counting Dead Women Australia researchers, 30 women have died in Australia due to violence so far in 2026.

She says the same playbook wielded by James I against women accused of witchcraft in the 1600s is still in use today.

In Good Witch, Tonti writes:

The champions of traditional family values who want to restrict women's access to reproductive care are subscribers to the belief systems that were entrenched during the witch hunts. Belief systems that carried us all the way here: man has dominion over nature and women, and both are resources to exploit in the name of the economy.

What we are seeing now with the surge of far‑right politicians all around the world, particularly in America, is the same playbook, but now the imagined enemy is an immigrant and not a witch," she tells ABC Arts.

We're seeing them revert to the same language around fear and difference and propaganda.

In the US, the trad wife has emerged as a counterpoint to the changing role of women in the 21st century brought about by feminism and the #MeToo movement.

A similar reaction is underway in Australia, where One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has criticised paid maternity leave (she later wound back these comments) and subsidised childcare.

The parallels are blatant," Tonti says.

Cause for optimism

Good Witch closes with an appeal to honour the memory of every witch who was burnt at the stake by resisting the ideologies, still active today, that killed them.

For all the injustice Tonti recounts in her book, she still feels cause to be optimistic.

For centuries, the trappings of femininity have been dismissed as "trivial or girly or valueless", she says.

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But, increasingly, the historic sources of women's strength — friendship, collaboration, cultivation and care work — are being reappraised and recognised for their value.

When I'm talking to people about the book … there is this sense of pride and energy around this idea that women are really powerful," she says.

Now, with the internet and all the other tools we have at our disposal, we can break down those [oppressive] structures and belief systems and unite.

Lucianne Tonti is at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at Carriageworks in Sydney on August 23.

Good Witch is published by Summit Books.

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