Terror as economic strategy. The persecutions peaked precisely where and when the enclosures ran, and the charges track dispossession rather than heresy.
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The European witch hunts of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries are usually explained as religious superstition. Silvia Federici's research establishes a different account, and the account is forensic rather than interpretive.
The persecutions killed an estimated thirty-five to sixty thousand people, between eighty and ninety percent of them women, and they peaked between 1560 and 1630, which is the period of capitalism's emergence. This is not a coincidence of dates. It is the same operation read from two registers.
[See THE WITCH · HETEROPATHY · THE ENCLOSURE]
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WHAT THE HUNTS PERFORMED
In Caliban and the Witch, Federici sets out the functions the hunts served for the emerging order: breaking female solidarity networks, establishing state control over reproduction, and creating the terror necessary to impose new forms of labor discipline.
Her statement of who the witch was is the sharpest sentence in the literature. The witch embodied everything that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeah woman who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to revolt.
Women who had been central to anti-feudal resistance, and who held knowledge of contraception, healing and communal practice, were a direct threat to capital's need for a disciplined and reproducing workforce.
[See PARTUS SEQUITUR VENTREM · COVERTURE · THE MEDIEVAL TEMPLATE FOR CAPTURE]
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THE GEOGRAPHY
The geographic pattern is the part that will not resolve into superstition.
In England most witch trials occurred in Essex, where land had been recently enclosed. Regions that maintained collective land tenure saw no witch hunting.
And the charges themselves record what was happening to the land rather than what was happening in the church. Destroying crops. Raising storms. Harming neighbors' property. These are the social tensions of dispossession, entered as accusations against the dispossessed.
[See CLEARANCE LOGIC · THE PRIOR OCCUPANT · TERRA NULLIUS]
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THE SPECTACLE
The violence was public and it was designed to be watched. Women were stripped naked and completely shaved, then pricked with long needles all over their bodies, in spectacles that entire communities, including children, were required to attend.
The terror destroyed women's autonomy and their knowledge, and it taught men to fear women's power, which is the gendered hierarchy the new order required.
[See THE PERSECUTION RITE · THE RITUALS OF SUBORDINATION · THE MOBBING OPERATION]
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The hunts are not a lapse the emerging order later corrected. They are the instrument by which the order was installed, at the register of the body, in the same decades and the same counties as the enclosure.
What was burned was the knowledge that made the commons survivable without a wage.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
