Recently, while reading fairy tales and learning of Baba Yaga, it seems that throughout history, there has been this concept of witches. People are afraid of elderly, eccentric women, especially women without children. Older independent women who live outside of societal norms. Women with no support structure or safety net, forced to strongly advocated and protect themselves. Let’s talk a little about this.
In most pre-modern societies (and to a large extent today), a woman’s expected role was tightly defined: daughter → wife → mother → grandmother within a family network.
Elder G sums of the traditional “woman” archetypes:
The “Old Woman Archetype”
Folklore often splits female characters into three symbolic types:
The Maiden (youth, beauty, fertility)
The Mother (nurture, stability)
The Crone (age, wisdom, danger)
The “crone” archetype appears everywhere: Slavic tales, Celtic myths, Norse sagas, even Greek mythology.
But the crone is not always evil.
For example:
Baba Yaga sometimes eats people
Baba Yaga sometimes gives the hero magical advice
She is unpredictable rather than purely wicked.
In folklore terms she represents wild wisdom outside society.
Think of her as the forest version of the university professor who has tenure and zero interest in social approval.
The Traditional Woman’s Archetype
Carl Sagan’s Take
In 1995, Carl Sagan published A Demon-Haunted World. The book is part of the WLBOTT Library, but sadly it is lost in the dark abyss/vortex of our filing/hoarding system. And if more sad – the Austin Public Library only offers the book as an e-pub, a practically useless e-reader format.
Luckily, we have an Elder who has read every book on the planet, with a perfect memory. So, with the help of Elder G, let’s get Sagan’s take on witches.
Carl Sagan discussed witches in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark mainly as an example of how fear, superstition, and social pressures can overwhelm reason. His treatment is less about folklore characters like Baba Yaga and more about the historical tragedy of witch persecutions in Europe and colonial America.
Here are the main ideas he emphasizes.
Witch Hunts as a Warning About Abandoning Skepticism
Sagan uses the witch hunts to illustrate what happens when claims are accepted without evidence.
During the late medieval and early modern periods, authorities believed that witches were real agents of the devil who could:
cause illness
destroy crops
fly through the night
transform into animals
harm neighbors with curses
Sagan points out that these beliefs were widely accepted by educated people, not just peasants. Judges, clergy, and scholars all participated in the prosecutions.
His lesson is simple but powerful:
When societies abandon critical thinking, even intelligent people can become convinced of impossible things.
The Scale of the Tragedy
Sagan emphasizes that witch hunts were not a few isolated cases but a mass social phenomenon.
Across Europe and parts of North America (roughly 1400–1700):
tens of thousands of people were executed
many more were imprisoned or tortured
about three quarters of the victims were women
Most were poor, elderly, or socially vulnerable.
He presents this as one of history’s examples of institutionalized paranoia.
Confessions Produced by Torture
A disturbing point Sagan highlights is that many accused witches confessed to impossible crimes:
flying to secret gatherings
mating with demons
casting supernatural spells
But these confessions were often extracted through torture.
Sagan stresses that torture can make people say anything their interrogators want to hear. Once a few confessions existed, they were used as “evidence” to justify more accusations.
It became a self-reinforcing system.
How Fear Becomes a Feedback Loop
Sagan describes the witch craze as a social feedback loop:
Misfortune happens (crop failure, illness).
Communities search for someone to blame.
Suspicion falls on outsiders or vulnerable individuals.
Forced confessions confirm existing beliefs.
Fear spreads and more accusations follow.
Because the belief system assumed witches were everywhere, any denial could itself be seen as proof of guilt.
Why the Victims Were Often Women
Sagan notes that women were disproportionately accused for several reasons:
many accused were widows or socially isolated
women often worked as healers or midwives
misogynistic religious ideas associated women with temptation and sin
So the witch stereotype combined fear of the supernatural with existing social prejudices.
The Book’s Central Lesson
Sagan’s purpose is not merely historical. He uses the witch hunts as a warning for modern society.
His argument is that:
superstition can flourish when critical thinking disappears
authority can reinforce false beliefs
fear can override compassion and evidence
Science, skepticism, and open inquiry act as what he calls “a candle in the dark.”
Without them, societies risk repeating similar patterns of mass belief and persecution.
A Small Irony Sagan Appreciated
Sagan points out something striking: many people who sincerely believed they were defending morality and religion were in fact persecuting innocent neighbors.
In other words, the witch hunts were carried out not by villains in cloaks, but by ordinary people convinced they were doing the right thing.
That insight gives the story its chilling edge.
I also recall reading about a medieval bounty system for identifying witches. You can imagine the corruption that occurred. There were bounty hunters who would randomly pick women (and sometimes men), condemning them to their deaths, just to get the bounty. A direct analogy can be drawn to today’s Department of Justice, ICE, the FBI, or anything tRump touches.
Historical Gender Roles
Let’s keep in mind that for most of recorded history, the vast majority of people were really poor, and lived in hunger and the fear of starvation. Men are bigger and stronger, and would do the backbreaking work of farming. It would be impossible for men to combine the demands of child rearing with farming. To support the family, women would assume the more domestic roles of child rearing, cooking and cleaning. Cooking and laundry were all-day, exhausting affairs, but could be accomplished while looking after the little ones.
I am in no way minimizing the role of women. There is a centuries’ old English proverb: “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.”
Elder G:
Why It Shows Up in Farming Cultures
In pre-industrial societies the day often looked like this: A farmer might finish field work at sunset. Meanwhile the women of the household might still be:
preparing the evening meal
cleaning cooking vessels
feeding children
spinning wool or flax by firelight
mending clothes
preparing food for the next day
So the proverb became a kind of grudging cultural acknowledgment of invisible labor.
The Demon-Haunted World
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. (Four of the 25 chapters were written with Ann Druyan. In it, Sagan aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning.
Themes Sagan explains that science is not just a body of knowledge, but is a way of thinking. Sagan shows how scientific thinking is both imaginative and disciplined, bringing humans to an understanding of how the universe is, rather than how they wish to perceive it. He says that science works much better than any other system because it has a “built-in error-correcting machine”. Superstition and pseudoscience get in the way of the ability of many laypersons to appreciate the beauty and benefits of science. Skeptical thinking allows people to construct, understand, reason, and recognize valid and invalid arguments. Wherever possible, there must be independent validation of the concepts whose truth should be proved. He states that reason and logic would succeed once the truth was known. Conclusions emerge from premises, and the acceptability of the premises should not be discounted or accepted because of bias.
