the idea has been flying about for a while now, at least since the summer<u+2019>s cries to lock up or hang the democratic presidential candidate. earlier on, ben carson helpfully linked her to lucifer. after the first debate, rush limbaugh made the designation official: in a double-barreled attack, he declared that hillary clinton came off <u+201c>exactly as many people see her <u+2014> a witch with a capital <u+2018>b.<u+2019><u+201d> a conservative editor recently begged his readers not to elect mrs. clinton; were she to land in the white house, his health would deteriorate. she would upset his stomach. she would shorten his life. he sounded steeped in witchcraft texts. those are classic symptoms of enchantment <u+2014> in the pre-enlightenment world. as we dust off the broomsticks and pointy hats, it seems fair to ask what exactly we mean by a witch these days. in some respects the 21st-century witch <u+2014> someone who is one because others insist she is, not because she identifies as a wiccan priestess <u+2014> closely resembles her early american forebears. a maine police officer in a <u+201c>hillary for prison<u+201d> t-shirt succinctly defined the term at a september rally: <u+201c>an angry, crotchety old hag who is just out for power, who just wants to be able to line her pockets.<u+201d> when sorcery arrived on these shores, when new englanders hanged witches, they worked in part from that stereotype. witches could enchant rope, cause fences to disappear, make stomachs lurch with a glance, transform themselves into balls of fire, disturb their neighbors<u+2019> dreams. they might also appear shrill, vindictive or calculating, three adjectives that the conservative editor rallied last week when he implored readers to spare him <u+201c>four years of this witch as president.<u+201d> the early modern american understood a witch to be a confederate of the devil; he took literally the biblical command: <u+201c>though shalt not suffer the witch to live.<u+201d> he was also more egalitarian than we are. for him, <u+201c>witch<u+201d> was a gender-neutral term. he condemned enterprising ship captains along with muttering, menopausal malcontents. and he was more creative: in the course of the salem witch trials, men and women stood accused for a whole catalog of reasons. (running for political office may actually have figured among them: a rich merchant was accused weeks after he had been elected a salem selectman.) the uncommonly strong or unaccountably smart raised suspicions. indeed, a witch often committed the capital crime of displaying more wit than her neighbors, as was said of the third woman to hang in massachusetts, in 1656. halloween provides the modern witch with her bread and butter; what sustains her are our fears. we have many more tools than did the 17th-century villager to make sense of our world, chemistry, physics, biology and guilty consciences among them. but misfortune continues to perplex and provoke us. our stomachs still lurch. any number of things disturb us in the night. witches remain in business so long as we feel powerless: they offer the blessed relief of assigning blame; they allow us to distill spite, that heady brew of vindication and humiliation. we may consider ourselves more enlightened than the peruvian villagers who last month burned a woman alive, or than the rural ghanaians who banish spell-casting women to primitive witch colonies. but we still have few other names for the way a woman<u+2019>s voice unsettles, for the queasy sense that the world must be upside-down if she happens to be running it. nancy pelosi<u+2019>s republican challenger portrayed her as the wicked witch of the west in a 2010 ad. (he melted her in the tv spot, though not in the election.) an older woman moreover knows things a younger woman does not; she can say things a younger woman says with difficulty. like no. at the heart of the matter is a paradox: for centuries women were assumed to be more susceptible to satan<u+2019>s advances because of their inherent frailty. at the same time they exercise unnatural power on two fronts. the witch has retired her religious affiliation. but as your dictionary will tell you, she survives as a hybrid of two disturbing creatures: the vocal old hag, and the alluring young vixen. the idea may have evolved; the animus remains. and while the religious piece has fallen away, the demonic talk has returned. the alt-right commentator alex jones has deemed mrs. clinton <u+201c>an abject, psychopathic demon from hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to destroy the planet.<u+201d> in doing so he revealed something else about witchcraft: witches tend to be people we didn<u+2019>t like in the first place. they appear suspect in advance of their crimes. at least some of us can take comfort in the fact that we have tamed many of our fears. otherwise we might hear the kind of reckless accusation the 1692 witchcraft court did when a blunt, boastful, perversely contentious man came before it. thrice married, he guarded his secrets closely. he made outsize promises; he threatened and insulted. he broke rank with his establishment peers. he emerged unscathed from a series of savage attacks. under interrogation, he made an art of <u+201c>tergiversations, contradictions, and falsehoods.<u+201d> among his wizardly feats: he manipulated a very heavy gun despite surprisingly small hands. he was clearly a superhuman mastermind, the most formidable of witches, <u+201c>the ringleader of them all.<u+201d> his trial was the one everyone awaited. he was hanged in salem that august. prepare yourself for a storm of witchcraft when a woman alights on pennsylvania avenue. stacy schiff is the author of <u+201c>cleopatra<u+201d> and <u+201c>the witches: suspicion, betrayal and hysteria in 1692 salem.<u+201d> a version of this op-ed appears in print on october 31, 2016, on page a21 of the new york edition with the headline: witchcraft on the campaign trail. today's paper | subscribe
witchcraft on the campaign trail
stacy schiff