Witchcraft as Metaphor: Infanticide and its Translations in Aragón in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

We cannot hope to understand the peak which the phenomenon of witchcraft experienced in Europe during the early modern period unless we take into account the symbolic extent of the concept of witchcraft itself. Its enormous metaphorical power — an imaginary resort par excellence, accessible to those at the centres of decision-making, as well as to those in the remotest corners of the land — was made use of as a pretext, both by institutions and individuals to achieve very different, sometimes even opposite goals. If we analyse life in small rural communities, it will be seen that charges of malevolence brought by neighbours against one another were ways of disguising all manner of conflicts — everything from the purely economic to difficulties in personal relations and matters of inner conscience.

The witches of the barrels smother the children¹