Kristen J. Sollee - Witch Hunt

Kristen Solle, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists, explores the archetype of the witch in this entertaining mix of travel guide, journal, and ghost story collection. Highlights include an examination of the divination culture of Italy, including the tarot-dedicated Museo dei Tarocchi in Bologna, and of England's occultism, including the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, where the occult is inseparable from the landscape. Historical figures such as Joan of Arc in France and Dame Alice in Ireland are recast both as early examples of gender-fluidity and powerful women who were killed by fearful men. These and other historic women are featured in fictionalized visions that overcome Solle, and work as a narrative device in which the dead impart knowledge of their craft and details of their often violent fates. While the author admits these scenes are fantastical, they nicely round out and give context to the catalogue of sites visited.

Publishers Weekly

Sorceresses of ancient Rome casting love spells with their menstrual blood. Joan of Arc speaking to angels. The cunning women of Ireland and their flying ointments. The witches of Kristen Solle's new book teach us how to live magically. Impeccably researched and keenly feltto read this book is to enter into a romance with the witch. A traveler's tryst. Solle's love of place, the moss and the cobble stones, the ocean spray and the crumbling cemeteries puts her in a polyamorous love affair with the witch and the world in which she lives. This book makes clear that the witch is a creature of her environment. Magic is embodied. The lands through which Solle travels contain the spirits of the people who collected herbs on their hillsides and spoke their enchantments into the wind. But as with so many love affairs born on holiday, behind all the beauty, the heart grips in grief. We know how the story ends. The witches in this book were hunted after all. But even though we know the story of many of these witches ends in sorrow, we carry on our love affair with them anyway, because to love is to be fully alive. And none are more fully alive than the witch. It's clear that Solle fell in love with the witches in this book. Solle's magic is that, if you read it, you will too.

Amanda Yates Garcia, author of Initiated: Memoir of a Witch and host of the Between the Worlds podcast

There is now a very clear need for a travel guide that deals with places associated with historic and contemporary views of witchscraft; and therefore, it is a real pleasure to find one so extensive, well-written, well-informed, and good humored.

Ronald Hutton, author of The Witch:
A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present

This edition first published in 2020 by Weiser Books, an imprint of
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
With offices at:
65 Parker Street, Suite 7
Newburyport, MA 01950
www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2020 by Kristen J. Solle
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-699-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design by Micol Hiatt
Interior by Kathryn Sky-Peck
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro

Printed in the United States of America
LB

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Witch Hunt arose from a lifelong immersion in the magic of travel, but only came to fruition because of the support, guidance, and kindness of friends, family, and colleagues. My gratitude goes to Pam Grossman, Micol Hiatt, Sandra Roldan, Kathleen Martens, Bill Sollee, Charlie Schmid, and everyone else who read drafts, contributed ideas, and endeavored to keep me in good spirits along the way. I am grateful to Peter Turner and Weiser Books for giving this book a home and to Christina Oakley Harrington at Treadwell's Books for her invaluable guidance in my research process. I am also indebted to everyone I met on my Witch Hunt travels with whom I conversed and communed and gained knowledge about their country's histories. Above all, I offer thanks to my ancestors and those accused of witchcraft in years past. I hope to honor their lives and their deaths with this book.

THE WITCH IS A TRAVELER. She has traversed continents, cultures, and epochs, carrying with her millennia of conflicting ideas about sex and gender, magic and power. The witch has made us travelers, too. She leads us on a journey through the horrors and wonders of myth and history. Seeking the timeless archetypal witch, those who were branded witches centuries ago, and those who identify as witches today requires travel both literal and figurative. Witch Hunt is a guide through this mercurial terrain.

Witch Hunt traces the legacy of the witch through significant sites across Europe and North America. Witches no doubt appear in cultures around the world, but the witch who looms largest within the nebulous conceptual region we call the Westthe monstrous maiden out to seduce and destroy men, the Satanic sorceress hell-bent on killing crops and livestock, the horrible hag out to consume childrenwas born in ancient myths, raised in medieval times, and came to full furious fruition in the early modern era.

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, thousands of people accused of witchcraft suffered and died. Families were ripped apart. Villages were decimated. Terror, torture, and paranoia ravaged communities. It is a delicate matter to craft a travel guide through such horrifying episodes in human history. Whenever we immerse ourselves in periods of historical oppression, we run the risk of glamorizing or aestheticizing them, which can make light of real people's pain and trauma. First and foremost, this book aims to honor the victims of the witch hunts.

And yet, the morbid appeal of the witch hunts is the reason they continue to survive as a subject of intrigue. Cunning women, stunning sirens, and vengeful crones strike fear into the hearts of young and old. Sexually gratuitous confessions and untrammeled cruelty against a backdrop of apocalyptic weather, religious corruption, and personal power struggles; magic, destruction, and seduction all wrapped up with a poisonously pretty bowthe whole thing is so Shakespearean the witch hunts literally inspired the writing of Macbeth.

The most curious piece of this puzzle, however, is how we got from witch being a word you didn't whisper without fear of recourse in early modern times to an identity voiced proudly by thousands of people in the twenty-first century. The transformation of the witch from a figure who had occasioned fear and loathing for the best part of 2,000 years into one perceived as sympatheticeven aspirationalis one of the most radical and unexpected developments of modern Western culture, proclaims John Callow in