11. Because, let’s be honest, while I am totally into Stevie Nicks and candles and The Craft and whatever now of days, it is enormously safe for me to do so, and I prioritize my physical safety and comfort over absolutely everything, and if there was even a chance that someday I could face social or legal repercussions for my vague, shallow interest in “witch shit,” I would throw Stevie Nicks into a god damn river this time yesterday.
10. Because as much as I would like to think of myself as a persecuted outsider I am fact a Joiner through and through who craves nothing so much as the approval of a group. Any group. If there’s a group, I will defer to its moral code. Oh, there’s multiple people of you? I bet you have a way better plan for living than I do. Let’s do your thing. I have the seamless soul of a conformist.
9. There is not a single principle I would not betray in order to preserve my miserable, wretched, cowardly skin, if shit ever really came down to it. Not one.
8. Yes, even that principle. The one you’re thinking of. I’d chuck it in a river with cheer and a right good will.
7. Because I would have thrown a rock at that lady in The Lottery. You kidding me? Tessie Hutchinson? Threw a rock right at her face, then gone home for supper.
6. I love blaming other people for my problems.
5. Because I’m no better or smarter than a seventeenth-century peasant just because someone explained to me how electricity and outer space work. If I’d had the same information as your average Bavarian circa 1605, you can bet your absolute britches that I’d be in the tavern jabbering about spirits of evil portent come the first bad harvest or weird-looking moon, looking for someone to blame.
4. I love the cleansing purity of self-righteous anger and feeling like I’m a part of something bigger than me.
3. I still kind of believe in magic, and I’m not convinced one of these days I won’t be able to move something using the power of my mind, so it would not take a lot to talk me into believing devil-consorters walk among us and must be killed.
2. I honestly quit smoking because my dental hygienist told me, “You have great teeth, and it would be a shame if you ruined such perfect teeth from smoking,” which tells me that I am A) incredibly suggestible and B) driven entirely by empty praise and the promise of Official Male Approval.
1. I would have named names, too. And I’d have been especially good at intuiting what names my interrogators wanted to hear (they would not have to torture or even threaten to torture me) – sharp-tongued gossips and independent-minded widows and all kinds of people who get described as “unruly” in modern academic essays. Throw them under the god damn Witch Bus. Does it disappoint you to hear this? I never asked you to have faith in me, Goody Watson.
Never had to, knock on wood, and I’m glad I haven’t yet, because I wonder if I could, yes I wonder if I…
dangit I have the drug references post open in another tab and for a moment I was like “oh no, I missed something in THAT line? what is that line about?!”
I always thought it was about abortion for some reason
For a long time everyone thought it was about the AIDS crisis but I think Dicky Barrett once said it wasn’t? I don’t know, I’m not great at analysing ska punk lyrics.
Unhelpfully, from genius.com: “He states again that he has never knocked on wood and that he’s glad he hasn’t had to. He knows that knocking on wood isn’t good, or at least that’s the impression he gets from his friends who have had to.”
Mallory.
Are you naming Mallory as the witch???
GOODY ORTBERG CONSORTS WITH FELL SPIRITS
I SAW THEM LAIN IN CLOSET TOGETHER MAKING BABIES
AND I SAW ONE OF THE BABIES
AND THE FELL-SPIRIT-BABY LOOKED AT ME
Oh yeah? Well I saw something nasty in the woodshed!
But did it see you, baby?
All I wanted when I made that comment was for someone to reply with that.
Thank you. I think I’ll go get back in bed now, having achieved all I set out to achieve for the day.
I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS THREAD.
“What’s he *building* in there?”
She turned me into a frog!
God, I love the cleansing purity of self-righteous anger. I really, really do.
Basically the only times I’m able to get myself to go for a run are when I’m feeling extremely self righteous and angry. I wish that were a more consistent reaction; I’m likelier to go for bourbon and yelling. But either one feels awesome honestly.
For me, that’s the best time to get some serious house-cleaning done. Normally house-cleaning requires a solid few weeks of procrastination and dread leading up to the event, followed by grudging acceptance, and finally a half-hearted and listless performance. But when I’m in a white-hot rage I can clean like a machine while I stomp around ranting silently to myself and it feels like no effort at all!
RAGE CLEANING. Here for it.
it’s why I keep following politics.
I would have been burned as a witch, but almost exclusively because of the demonic pact my parents made in my name before i was born, and I don’t frankly think I can help that.
furthermore a lot of guys have got a cloven hoof for a foot and you can get that from consorting with all sorts of different powers, not just demonic ones
mallory… even AFTER we went to the witch store?!?
(jk, i would be right there with you declaiming the witches and doing witch shit privately)
i’d definitely get burned for being a dyke though
like, i could try REALLY hard to not be gay, but i would still get caught in the barn with the pastor’s daughter every time
“#please consider my application #please do not consider my application”
I love tag-based humor, I really do.
Also I, too, have never gotten over Matilda and believe that I can move small objects with my mind if I look at them hard enough.
Whenever I’m tempted to noble acts of bravery or non-conformity, I find it helpful to imagine a Concerned Handwringer Prince Man who is all Don’t Go, You Are Too Important and Beautiful To Do The Noble Thing, What Shall I Do Without You, I Shall Surely Die of Worry
and then I don’t do the thing
See, I’m the opposite, I start thinking about how long I will obsess and beat myself up over failing to do the right thing. I tend to hold on to that kind of thing. Because of that, when I come across a situation like that, I tend to be the person speaking up/stepping forward. But because I’m a huge coward, I try to avoid those situations as much as I can. Like, if I can sense that something is brewing, I am so outta there.
I’ve actually been meaning to watch the kdrama Awl, which seemed to be about a reluctant hero, but I thought it might make me feel guilty so I haven’t (even though I love Ji Hyeon-woo).
My dog I could watch 2 hours of this man looking all earnest with those eyes and saying, well, anything really. Le sigh.
Only a witch would have so many reasons why they would not be burnt as a witch.
Perfect comment. Everyone else can go home.
I SAW GOODY ORTBERG SPEAKIN WITH THE DEVIL.
“the cleansing purity of self-righteous anger”
Mal as a less-seedy Dennis Reynolds is now head canon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkJd5oQXt4g
I totally would’ve been burnt as a witch, but not for cool witchy reasons. More because I was a weird, socially awkward kid who probably would’ve been forever known as the village weirdo if I was born in 1602. Also because in 1602 I would not have had access to a back brace, and my kyphosis would’ve made me an awesome hump-backed crone around age 22.
Sorry this is so late I feel weird commenting so late. I mean I imagine I would be in a similar situation but I imagine I would also sell out any co-conspirators in a desperate attempt to save my own skin based on both the fact that I was bullied and how I reacted to it (yes I would sell out the other bullied kids if I think deflecting would help me in any way).
I’D BE DEAD IN 1602.
because if it weren’t for antibiotics, I’d have died when I was 5. 😀
That’s a fun* game! Why Would You Be Dead in 1602?
I’d be dead because I was a breech twin and had a somewhat complicated delivery followed by a brief stint in the NICU — maybe a particularly witchy 1602 midwife coulda saved me, but I doubt it.
*Not sure if fun or morbid.
Oooo, I’m a twin but my sister was the breech* one. And now I’m wondering if my sister is posting Toastie, and I didn’t know it. By any chance did you just call your sister and tell her you’re on the way to the store to buy ice cream?
How many twins comment here and of that group, how many had at least one that was breech?
*this is embarrassing, but I don’t think I knew how to spell breech before now
This is a super-downer and for that I apologize, but my twin died of a heart defect a couple days after we were born, so I do not think you are her! Though that would have been an awesome sibling meet-cute. (And I forbid you from feeling weird about asking and having this be my answer; this is not a traumatic thing for me to talk about.)
I’m glad you added that last part because I was feeling reeeeeallly bad there for a second. And now I’m still kinda sad because that definitely would have been awesome. But we still have the NICU/would have died in 1602 thing in common, even if you’re not my sister and don’t have a twin to call you about ice cream.
NICU twins unite!
It me.
This makes me really happy for some reason!
I think you need to call each other about ice cream.
I don’t know if I’d be dead, but without medication I think I definitely would have been shuttered away somewhere for having melancholia.
Depends on your social standing, religion, family. With just the right combination of older family-name-bearing siblings and personal property to donate to the Church you could have been an anchoress. Although that still counts as being shuttered away, even if by choice.
Assuming I didn’t die at birth of being too huge a baby for too tiny a mother, I’m pretty sure I would not have made it through the hardcore scarlet fever I had as a child without the joys of modern medicine. Or the two times I had infant chicken pox before that.
THERE ARE SO MANY SCARLET FEVER KIDS ON HERE WHY IS IT MAKING ME SO HAPPY TO NOT BE ALONE IN THIS OMG
HOORAY! I am the only person I know who had it as a kid, so if I ever mention it, people usually tell me they thought it was one of those diseases nobody had gotten since the nineteenth century.
Or they ask me if this was before or after I tried to ford the river with my oxen.
SAME.
My brother had it, specifically on the day my 10th birthday party was scheduled. After my initial “omg scarlet fever that’s how Beth died give him extract of belladonna” freakout, and my parents assuring me that people don’t die of that anymore, I was just annoyed with him for ruining my party.
Me too! Although it’s probably about fifty-fifty on the 1602 survival thing, since my case wasn’t too bad and I had actually mostly recovered by the time I went in to the hospital. I probably would have survived, but been sickly for years afterward.
Which, come to think of it, is kinda how it went. Lifestyles of 1602 vs. late 20th century when growing up poor in America without health insurance? Hmm… not as much difference as one might like to think.
Slow death of anemia-induced exhaustion or quick death of stake-burning caused by my atheism and queerness.
Hell, I was a preemie, I might have just been an infant mortality statistic.
Two months premature and iron deficient! I’m a 1602 statistic too.
I love this game!
By general consensus of my high school friends*, my untimely cause of death hinged on my social status. If I had to do any sort of manual labor or be anywhere near a farm, my allergies/asthma would totally do me in. Otherwise, my lack of childbearing hips would be my undoing.
Either way, I’d be tragic and sickly. (Yay antihistamines and albuterol!)
*Apparently we were very morbid teenagers.
See, it’s occurred to me that my allergies and asthma might not be as severe/existent in 1602, as the environmental factors would be so different. My asthma became full-blown after I spent a summer doing custodial work, with hazardous chemical sprays and no face masks, so I think it’s a reasonable assumption.
It’s hard to say whether my asthma would’ve existed in the past.
In my case, my asthma was childhood onset. It started in elementary school and got worse from there. It’s mostly exercise induced (so I usually got out of running the mile, score!), but can also be triggered by certain environmental factors, like smoke. So technically my triggers would have existed in 1602.
But then there’s the hygiene hypothesis, where our modern, cleaner lifestyles might be causing an increase in immune problems. It’s definitely possible I never would’ve developed problems at all.
My childhood allergies always had the potential to turn into asthma, yeah. It’s fun to think about, though.
I had scarlet fever when I was 8! I got strep soooo often as a kid, and if I somehow managed to contract scarlet fever in 1998, I definitely would’ve died from it in pre-penicillin days.
I had scarlet fever when I was a college freshman, so I’d have possibly survived childbirth to get taken out by measly mutated bacteria.
I thought I was the only person I knew who came down with scarlet fever since the Oregon Trail – good to know I’m not alone!
I HAD THIS TOO but I was like 4 and I’ve never met anyone else who had such a weird, Victorianish disease and I’m way too pleased right now that I’m not the only one
I got strep once a year until it settled into my tonsils enough to just turn into tonsillitis. I missed so, so much school.
I did this too until they finally took my tonsils out. I also once had a really fun allergic reaction to strep that gave me a horrible painful rash all over my body that left these scaly scar patches that are super fun. Good stuff!
Christ, that sounds terrible. I had the beginnings of an allergic reaction to the penicillin they gave me for my first strep infection, so that was cool.
(my grandmother was deathly allergic, so at the first sign of hives, my parents shut that shit down and the doctor switched me to a non -cillin.)
My mom nearly died from TSS prior to my birth, so I would have NEVER BEEN BORN! (and surely, as a result, Bedford Falls would now be Pottersville)
I had TSS too! In college, and spent a couple days in the ICU getting gallons of IV fluids and super strong antibiotics. Plus I had strep throat a bunch as a kid, like a lot of us, so I’d also have died in 1602.
Although, I’d have possibly died from a bacterial infection in 1902, as well, since we didn’t have antibiotics until the 1940s. It’s sometimes amazing to me that what we now think of as basic medical care is so recent.
Yiiiikees. TSS is no joke, I’m glad you came through OK! Apparently, at one point my mom’s blood pressure was so low they couldn’t get a reading for the first number! Scary stuff.
There were totally many awesome midwives that knew all about delivering breech twins. A few of them even figured out how to safely help women with placental abruption and their babies survive birth! But…yeah, not every midwife everywhere, and not every time, especially if there were other complications. So, luck of the draw.
Hmmm. My childhood was free from major illnesses or significant injuries, but in 1602 there were no vaccines, so who knows how well my otherwise robust immune system would have fared against measles, mumps or rubella (or smallpox, TB, etc).
Ooh ooh, I had scarlet fever as a kid, pretty sure that shit was fatal for an extremely long time, right? (My sister was mad at me, she thought her toys were going to get burned a la The Velveteen Rabbit, which is actually somewhat on theme)
I’d be dead because I was the third-born of triplets and have a cleft lip! And if I somehow survived infancy, I am extremely short-sighted and would have fallen down a well sooner or later.
Whaaaat I am also the third-born of a set of triplets.
Even if I miraculously survived, my multicolored eyes would probably get me burned for a witch. #cantwin
I would have probably survived childhood (assuming one of my bouts of strep hadn’t killed me and, y’know, without vaccines who knows.) That said, I could’ve knocked out 15 kids by now (of whom maybe 5 survived) and so there’s a good chance of me having died in childbirth.
And if somehow I survived all that, currently I’d be getting increasingly and mysteriously ill from undiagnosed B12 deficiency. The symptoms of which are actually something I might blame on a witch!
Assuming I survived my many bouts of childhood strep throat, I’d most likely have killed myself in a fit of melancholia. Or been a victim of botched trepanning to cure same.
I’d probably have died in a tragic farming accident. I’m not totally blind without my glasses, I just don’t have any depth perception. So I can see well enough to get myself into danger, but not well enough to get out of it.
I was an emergency C-section baby so I MIGHT still be alive in 1602? My mom would definitely be dead, and I’d be blind as a bat and probably crazy from the untreated endocrine problems. And with a hella big goiter.
I was a c-section baby – my mother refuses to admit that it was an emergency, though it was after a billion hours of labor and the doctor straight-up informing her that if she didn’t have a c-section that she and I would both die, so. …totally dead in 1602.
Pneumonia! 😀
I’d definitely be dead because I would have walked off a cliff or tripped into a river or something. Peasant parents could not have afforded eyeglasses for little practically-blind MariahnotMaria.
Same. I’m clumsy even with corrected vision. Without glasses, I would definitely fall off stuff and hit my head and die.
Yup, I would either died of something my eyes couldn’t see, or sent to be a nun because I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. (Thank goodness for contacts!)
Did they really send the short-sighted to be nuns? I am also incredibly nearsighted and have wondered.
Woww I love nuns and I somehow have never incorporated this option into my daydreams of living in past centuries. I probably definitely would have been sent to the nunnery if living in Renaissance Europe. Preteen, angsty me would have loved have loved the escape from the social circuit.
I don’t know about the shortsighted, but for years I inherited the nameless terror that all the females of my family have been prey to for at least three generations. Namely: that if you never get boobs you are legally compelled to be a nun. It usually hits somewhere around late elementary/early middle school. My mother knew the fear. My grandmother knew the fear. I and my sister knew the fear. Yet somehow I am the only one who rose above it. Pulled myself up by my own training bra straps. Be the boobs you want to see in the world. (Especially if it keeps you out of a nunnery.)
I’d be dead in 1602 because I can’t see how an English woman would have met a dude from a small village in Iran, let alone married him, and then she is unlikely to have still been alive and healthy enough to childbear to have had me at age 36.
I was born with six inches of hair on my wee skull and two fully emerged front teeth in my mouth. They would’ve drowned me immediately and probably cast my mother out of the village (or burned her, just to be sure). #witchchild4lyfe #butnot4verylong
Okay, too cool. We have a thread winner.
I was born two weeks early. Imagine if they’d left me in longer! I might have wings! Horns!
Vestigial tail?
I hate to have to be the one to break this to you, but you’re in very serious danger of becoming a werewolf. Like, you should talk to a priest yesterday about how to avoid selling your soul to the devil.
Oh I love this game. Haven’t played it since Christmas Eve. My mother and I went through each sibling that time. (I think we decided that only the youngest brother would’ve lived past infancy, if one of us preceding siblings hadn’t taken mom out with us, of course. I would’ve. Just out of spite. And because I was first.)
I was pretty much given up for dead by American doctors when I was five-ish so without Germans and their crazy wunderdrugs I’d probably be dead in any era. That is if I even survived birth which was (I have been reliably informed since I don’t remember it myself) an event that involved me very stubbornly in the breech position, a mother who was very young and very slight and very much a first timer. And a doctor who had gone to medical school in the 1920s or there abouts. So as long as its post WWI I probably would’ve made it to early childhood at least?
I would be so super-bad-at-seeing that I’d surely have pitched headfirst into a well by age 11.
I plan on getting laser eye surgery, and one of the (tiny! But present) reasons is that in the zombie apocalypse I’d immediately die when my contacts ran out.
I like your reasoning for getting laser eye surgery, and will have to take it under advisement. You see, I refuse to get LASIK on the grounds that it would make me ineligible to go into space – which for me was never about joining NASA, but more for the future wherein I expect that we will be colonizing distant planets because we have ruined this one.
Dystopian futures guiding life choices UNITE.
! I’ve said these exact things so many times…hazardous lack of vision, LASIK and NASA (there’s this character in Krakauer’s INTO THIN AIR whose LASIK fails on Everest). Why are all of you me???
Ooh, yeah, Everest conditions would not be good for a LASIK patient. It causes eye dryness in a lot of people who have had it. Combine that with some of the worst winds on earth, and you could have a very unfortunate situation on your cornea. Probably safe to assume this would be a potential issue on extrasolar planets as well!
Assuming I made it past birth, I’d have been killed by the hip infection when I was 18 months old or gotten my self eaten by a bear or something due to being partially deaf as a toddler. Also, the partial deafness never would have been fixed, so once the nearsightedness kicked in around age 12 I’d probably have been declared not worth the effort of keeping alive.
Epilepsy. But not until I was 17 so maybe I’d have been burnt as a witch for being possessed or whatever? Also asthmatic and prone to lung infections so there’s a good chance of having wasted away, or possibly died of heatstroke.
I can’t say for sure what would have killed me as a child, but just in the past year I had a very minor leg injury that got massively infected and would have, undoubtedly, killed me in 1602. Kind of terrifying to consider, actually. It was really a tiny wound to be causing so much trouble.
This is why whenever someone asks me, in my capacity as a historian, what period I would have liked to live in, I answer “now is fine. Or at least, not any time before antibiotics”.
Appendicitis when I was five. And if that hadn’t killed me, my asthma surely would have.
I never would have been born. My mother would have been burned as a witch for sure.
I wouldn’t have existed, what with grandparents from three countries on two continents. But if I had, I’d likely have fallen in a river or something (nearsighted like a motherfucker and no depth perception), killed myself (depression since puberty), or died in childbirth by now.
Well I weigh the same as a duck, so I’m pretty much screwed.
It’s a fair cop.
But society is to blame.
This makes me feel a lot better about my constant nagging awareness of how strongly I identify with Aaron Burr.
Hamilton has a lot of layers, but one of them is “don’t call your co-counsel your assistant counsel, or that’s gonna fester into violence in like, 20 years, tops” and I think everyone can relate to that.
I over identify with Hamilton, or at least with his more self-aware moments; “I know I talk too much, I’m abrasive” is basically my anxiety incarnate. Oh also assuming I’m smarter than everyone else but I’ve gotten better with that one in adulthood, since I’m now past the age where I can ever be a prodigy at anything.
Also the part where by a certain age he’d worked out even if he assumed he was the smartest in the room, *leading* with “I know I talk too much, I’m abrasive” was a good idea so people couldn’t hit him with that first.
Especially a good idea if followed by “YOU’RE incredible in court, succinct, persuasive.” It didn’t work but the theory was sound, dammit.
Hamilton has made me so conflicted because I know damn well I would not have been on his side in most of those disputes and he was also a contemptible wife-cheater-onner but *dammit* he makes for a compelling character.
Lin-Manuel Miranda probably would’ve been burnt for a witch first thing back in the day.
This seems like a remarkably self-aware and self-flagellating post. Only a witch would write such things.
Did anyone ever read that YA book called GALLOWS HILL? (I think that was the name.) The main character and her friends were the victims of modern-day bullying/a witch hunt and they ultimately figured out that they were being punished because they were the accusers of in Salem in their past lives. LOVED it and read it several times as a kid. No idea if it would hold up to adult scrutiny, but if anyone wants to buy it and mail it to France, I’d like to see if it does. (I don’t imagine I can find an English-language, old YA book in bookstores, and the digital version doesn’t seem to exist.)
The ebook is on the website Scribd. You could read it there, it has a free test period of a month.
Thank you!
O no, just 14 days… you probably saw that already
That’s alright. It’s YA. I’ll sign up on a weekend and knock that book out in less than a day. 🙂
I appreciate your honesty, and yeah, samesies.
Well, one time I wrote a paper defending Abigail Williams in The Crucible. I’ll give you the summary: Abigail was exercising the only power she had as a 17-year-old girl in 1692!! All of this could have been avoided with!! Feminism!!
I dig it.
I had a long running argument with my English Lit teacher on this (inherited from my older sister, in fact). He said she was evil. I said that if your parents were murdered in front of you you’d probably have boundary issues and a warped world view too. This went on for years longer than we actually studied the play…
Yes. Or take Jane Austen – everyone, ladies and gentlemen included, should get jobs. Dependence is the enemy…trains for everyone?
I got really into the Salem witch trials in 5th grade and was briefly convinced she was haunting me
Eh, I used to worry that had I been around during the run-up to World War II, I would have been one of the people saying Europe is Europe’s problem. Then I realized that no, I would have been a Communist.
The real question, then, is how closely you match the profile. It varies from time to time and place to place, but Wikipedia quotes Scarre and Callow thusly: “. . . typical witch was the wife or widow of an agricultural labourer or small tenant farmer, and she was well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature.”
I am rather quarrelsome and fairly aggressive.
No question. I would have been suspected of being a witch, and possibly of having killed my farmer husband with my bare hands. Or my mind.
Oh, uh-oh. I am definitely a witch. Or I was. Or maybe amwas.
I never give in to peer pressure. If I feel like someone is trying to pressure me into doing something, I won’t do it even if it’s a good idea. I’m way too stubborn. Not in a good way.
But I’m extremely *suggestible.* Like, yesterday I was going to stay at the office late. But my work friend was cutting out 15 minutes early and asked if I was also leaving. No pressure, just asking because sometimes I leave around that time. I immediately said, “Yes me too I also am leaving now as well.”
So I could go either way.
(as an aside, I quite smoking because I was walking past a building with some professors standing outside smoking, and one was a woman with the lip wrinkles and the look of someone who has been smoking a long time, and it felt like looking into my future. Vanity has helped with a couple of bad habits.)
Vanity: not entirely bad
Reason #1 for me too.
I still see the beginnings of lip wrinkles and wonder if it’s because I drink out of straws a lot. So you’re welcome, another horrifying thing for you to ponder.
Thank you, Mallory; reading this made me feel absolved of my secret cowardice. I’ve known for years that I don’t have the guts to stand up and do the right thing, that I wouldn’t have helped Gary Cooper in High Noon, even though the noonday train would bring Frank Miller.
Well, he is *not* My Man so I wouldn’t have helped him either. If he were My Man obviously I would have to.
This article lands so squarely in the center of my Venn diagram of interests that I am a little unsettled… Mallory…
I would have been 100% with the witches, right up to the exact moment that someone told me that magic does not, in fact, confer superpowers.
“So, this is the part where we loose our bonds and fly away from the stake? Or does…do we have to wait for the fire to actually reach us?”
“Halloween Jack…I have some bad news about witches.”
0) Because witch’s flesh, when properly cooked, is delicious.
Not to bring up Toastie sorting again, but yeah, there’s no way Slytherin/Durmstrangs like Mallory got burned at the stake, that’s a v Hufflepuff thing to have happen to you.
This is very true. I would sell you all out to the Witchfinder General to save my wretched hide.
AH, but REAL witches don’t suffer when they get burned at the stake, they use magic to keep the flames from hurting and apparently it just sort of tickles (which, given the way I react to being tickled, might make people THINK I was burning). However, Hufflepuffs are unlikely to have the above-mentioned quarrelsome manner that makes one a suspect in the first place (and would never name names)
Wait, isn’t that exactly how the Fat Friar becomes a ghost?
Did not remember that, but I looked it up, and yes.
I would have been abandoned to die of exposure, on account of being a changeling. (aka, I cried too much.)
The changeling stuff was often used against neurodivergent children, I think 🙁
I would 100% have been burnt as witch, without question. My mental illnesses, bisexuality, general weirdness and precociousness, and tendency to be almost too quiet most of the time but sarcastically point out society’s general ridiculousness under my breath…I doubt any of that would have endeared me to the village. Oh well.
Third nipple. Who’s with me (getting burnt at the stake)?
Cats are magnetically attracted to me, dogs instinctively obey me, but I can never make bread rise or grow plants from seed. I’m for the stake, definitely.
Yep. Mole that looks almost exactly like a nipple right below my left boob.
I’m almost 50 and extremely pale complected. I’ve been getting yearly (or more often) mole checks at the dermatologist for 20 years. This year was the first time a doctor pointed at the pinkish mole on my chest and said, “Oh, you have a third nipple.”. WHAT?!? “Yes, that is the start of a third nipple. It just didn’t get very big.” How did no one ever point this out to me before? So I might have been able to play it off as a mole but I’m not much of a people person so it probably wouldn’t have worked and I’d have been hung or burned.
Meeeeee!
When I was 4 or 5 I used to show it to all my friends, until my mom told me I shouldn’t. Clearly she was mindful of my witchy powers.
I’ve had supernumerary nipple envy ever since I was a kid. I skimmed through the OB/GYN textbook of an aunt who was a former obstetric nurse, and although it didn’t have what I really wanted to know (how babies were made), it did have nifty drawings and pictures of birth defects and double cervixes (cervices?) and an illustration of the “milk line” [minorly NSFW for boobs], which fascinated me to no end, as it suggested that variation in normal human anatomy might approach something I’d see in Star Trek, if Trek featured nudity.
I haven’t quit smoking yet because my dental hygienist consistently comments on my great teeth and also because I think it Looks Cool. Also my dream career involves me working for the IRS which means I am 100% Team Establishment.
I don’t even pretend I’m cool or principled enough to have been burned as a witch. I’d have been one of the townspeople who was like “My husband says this is a thing that’s happening. I have no opinions on this thing that’s happening, but those girls are probably dirt bags,” which is arguably worse than arguing passionately in favor of witch-burning because powerful women are frightening.
Once a Texan told me I was “irreverent” so I’m pretty sure I would be burned as a witch
A texan once called me domineering.
There was no second date.
I was a goody-two-shoes in high school, so I’d probably just keep my head down and mind my own business while all this witch hunting was going on. Smile pleasantly at the elders, nod in agreement at their pronouncements, but don’t actively participate in all the accusing and executing – and hope no one notices I’m totally lusting after other village maidens.
Hello, high-school-age me!
Does anyone remember the introduction to The Crucible where Miller says something like, Well sure there were some Communists in the United States in the fifties, and I’m sure there were people communing with the Devil in Salem too, but this was handled all wrong.
The part about the devil just always struck me as a weird thing to be sure about.
I’m not especially witchy myself, but if the witch hunters had decided they didn’t like the cut of my jib I have zero confidence that I could have survived.
I would get burned at the stake for using a REALLY good burn on the lord’s son, who is obviously a huge tool.
I once posed this question to an actual historian who specializes in witch hunting and stuff like that, and she was like, “no girl, you’re dead. You are not gonna make it. Maybe try to run if you can, I guess.”
Good to know!
I’m quiet and not out about being bi at work and so on, but I’m also super nearsighted and sickly and as a child I was just…really weird. Really, really weird. So I like to think I could take control of the situation like a proper Slytherin and turn it to my advantage, but realistically, I’m pretty sure I would be called out as a witch pretty much ASAP.
Anyone else read Ann Rinaldi’s A Break With Charity?
It’s on my list. Was it good?
YES. I read it in eighth grade, I think it might be one of the best YA-geared books about it. Actually, all of Ann Rinaldi’s writing is really good. At least I thought so back in the day. There were a few books I read and reread several times.
Cool. I’ll look into it. On a witches kick lately, (well, kind of always, but more so than usual of late) and a lot of what’s out there isn’t great. I just read DAUGHTERS OF THE WITCHING HILL and enjoyed that one mostly, though.
I’m giving you money for this one.
One time when I was in college there was a campus protest going on, as there often was (I attended a particularly protest-prone college), and my English professor told us she would be out protesting and invited us to join her rather than attend class that day. I was all for it, and gathered with her and some classmates on the campus quad, but then all the protestors started crossing the street and I was like, “…wait, what’s going on? We can’t cross yet, the light hasn’t turned! OH MY GOD we can’t WALK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET, there might be CARS DRIVING THERE. We have to WAIT our TURN.”
Apparently it never quite registered in my brain that the phrase “take to the streets” meant that you did, in fact, walk on the actual street and not just, like, on the sidewalk. Or that political protests sometimes involve, you know…*whispers* breaking rules.
All of which is to say I would 100% also not have been burned as a witch.
Rarely have I read anything as true as this post and I feel it’s a lesson more people should learn.
That retreat must’ve taught you humility, Mallory…I bet Prudence can write that off.
This is when I smugly remind people that witch burning was a post-medieval thing, and therefore another reason why the Middle Ages were surprisingly sometimes better than the Early Modern Era.
Thank you! For centuries The Church insisted that witches weren’t real and everyone needed to calm the eff down. I’ve always wondered just what on earth got that to change. I’m thinking the Plague, maybe?
I read one account where the townsfolk insisted this one woman was a witch and could escape through the keyhole of a door. So to prove that it was bs, this priest locked himself in a room with her, and beat her. His reasoning was that if she could go through a keyhole, she’d certainly use that to get away from him. It’s sucky that he beat her up, but it was a very clever solution.
In a similar case of “later does not mean better”, women had much better legal rights in Anglo-Saxon England than in England after the Norman Conquest (they could inherit stuff!).
If I were to live in medieval times, I’d choose pre-Norman England for that reason (and also to get a chance to shag Alfred the Great–don’t judge me).
He promoted literacy and the vernacular! There is nothing to judge you about.
My s/o was shocked and appalled that as someone raised Christian (neither of us are religious currently) I don’t remember most of the Lord’s prayer.
His reasoning? “What if you get sent back in time and people try to test you on it and decide you’re a witch??”
This is literally the only reason I have made it a point to know the Lord’s prayer.
Ah, but in Latin?
…oh, shit, I gotta get working on that.
Same, but in Old English, just in case.
Funnily enough, I was told not too long ago by a tour guide in Edinburgh that I would have definitely been burned at the sake, because I have red hair. Fun times.
How would that even work, though? Would the rest of the community just… not have noticed your red hair up until then? Does this presume that you have recently immigrated from a more redhead-friendly land, or that your parents have somehow concealed your red hair from everyone else since birth? Like, maybe, they dyed your hair, or made you wear an outrageously huge bonnet, until that fateful day when the wind picked up unexpectedly, sweeping the bonnet from your head, and your red hair unfurled like a coppery pennon in front of everyone, and they just stared, all thunderstruck and slack-jawed?
I just assumed that they made anyone with red hair the scapegoat when something bad happened, but I like the bonnet version better. Or maybe red hair gives you special powers, but you don’t realize it until someone sets you on fire.
if they’d burned everyone in scotland with red hair they’d’ve run out of kindling.
That sounds … not right. Currently, isn’t about 13% of the Scottish population red-haired? That seems like a lot of people to burn as witches. (I am red-haired (and English, but with a Scottish grandparent) and would quite like not to have been burned as a witch.)
I also don’t think we went in for witch-burning (as opposed to other methods) in the UK much. Sorry, I am a fun-sucker.
I teach English language and I use both the Lottery and material on witchcraft in my lessons and this really just hit the right spot.
I grew up on a working farm, eating what we grew and playing in the muck, so that would’ve been much the same. I developed childhood asthma probably from my mother’s nervous chain smoking, so maybe that wouldn’t have happened. But I was a sullen, withdrawn kid who asked too many questions. I’d be on the wrong side of the establishment in any era. If I didn’t die of respiratory infections or severe nearsightedness in childhood, I’m pretty sure I’d have been labeled a witch in adulthood for keeping to myself, having no patience for stupid people, and owning lots of cats.
On the other hand, I have nice teeth and regular features, so maybe I’d have been comparatively pretty enough to attract and marry a wealthy merchant, so I could hide in my rooms under cover of propriety and hopefully prove to be tragically barren. Then my husband would scandalize the village with his affairs with other women and I would refuse to appear in public from the shame. Thus I would not be burned as a witch because everyone would have something else to talk about and also forget what I looked like.
Oooh! That’s (roughly) my plan too! Although I, personally, suffer from the fear that back in the day a violent and possessive man would have decided I was The One for him and the rest of the village would have decided it was easier to let him have me than to deal with his violent outbursts and threats against my other suitors. Then they would watch as I slowly withered away and then eventually died from his abuse because he always thought I’d been cheating. It’s an incredibly depressing fear.
I suggest you incorporate into this distressing fantasy the traditional element of poisoning the abusive husband. Then he’s gone and you’re a respectable widow, living quietly on your inheritance of one-third of his estate, gaining the respect of the community for remaining chaste and never seeking another husband. After all, the first place to take your power back is in your dreams.
At least, that’s my fantasy of how to deal with the violent spouse interrupting my pleasant medieval daydreams. Plant some oleander just in case. To repel the deer from the rapunzel, you know.
Rhubarb will do it, too. Although slowly. Patience patience.
A++ medieval daydreaming
I’m no expert, but I believe you just made an excellent point. You certainly fully understand what you’re speaking about, and I can truly get behind that.
Every time i am tricked into seeing magic i am reminded instantly that despite my red hair i would have been the witch burning ringleader of my village. like if you could still drown people who asked you to pick a card i would be standing by a river right now sending people back to hell.
Yeah, I didn't see that one because I don't do horror, but I was willing to take the risk to see a movie based on one of my favorite childhood books. Thanks for the link to the article. I bookmarked it, but seriously have to go to bed right now. 🙂
I guess the LCH I had as a toddler might have killed me in 1602? If I survived that somehow, then I am sure I would have accidentally knocked over something heavy and been crushed by it – because I was that curious and that clumsy and that unsupervised as a kid.
Unfortunately, I would have probably been among the condemned … I would have been one of those contrary widows, living in an isolated hut, interested in local botany, and not afraid to pick up snakes, toads, lizards, etc. and cuss out the local constabulary. I would have been gone early!!
I’m a left-handed green-eyed Jew with a beauty mark on my neck, many exciting freckles, and a habit of making tiny dolls. I could never come up with enough names to name to save myself.
Yes. Yes. This. So much this. This is me. I feel this on a very deep level of my soul.
intense, INTENSE self-identification
(aaron burr and this article are both literally me what do I do with this information)
help