When I was browsing the shelves at my local library, I came across a book on the witch hunts of the Middle Ages that promised a “modern treatment”. I flipped through it and was not surprised to learn that witches had done nothing wrong. They were simply judged not by the content of their character but their appearance, and sometimes, men and other women were simply jealous of them. Armed with this new knowledge, I did a bit of supplementary research, which I will briefly summarize below.

The mainstream narrative seems to be that medieval witch hunts had a number of reasons, but they all boil down to the accused women being completely innocent. Some “historians” claim that witches were some kind of proto-feminists, of which all the dumb, white men of their time, as well as their narrow-minded white wives, were simply afraid of. There is also the angle of women being prosecuted because they were the most intelligent of their society, due to all the deep knowledge of nature they possessed. Presumably some witches were physically very attractive and because some pudgy white woman was afraid that her husband would stray, she accused her of being a witch. As you can see, there is absolutely no chance that today’s idiotic academics apply their political leanings to history.

There are other accounts, however. It seems that there were indeed witches, i.e. women who lived in forests. They were unable to live in society, so they were either banished or disappeared on their own. There surely is absolutely no connection to today’s danger-haired feminists who nobody would banish from society even if he could because everybody just loves having them around. It is quite uncontested that there were women who did not find a place in society and they did not have many options. As women cannot survive well on their own, they formed covens. This may even have negatively impacted their chances of survival in the forests but at least this helped them calm their nerves.

Fairy tales often have a connection to reality. There is the hypothesis that witches riding through the sky on broom sticks can be explained with them brewing psychoactive substances and rubbing a stick against their cooch. Of course, when they made it back to the nearest village, they may not want to say that they get high in their coven, followed by some mutual masturbation sessions. The broom had to be long so that one witch could fiddle her privates with one hand while touching another’s with that stick. Presumably, those women were very smelly, so this seems to have been the best option.

Then there is the angle of witches kidnapping children. Arguably the most well-known fairy tale on this topic is Hansel and Gretel. As I was musing about this, I recalled reading a small number of stories about adult women stealing babies from strollers. In Sweden, there is the habit of putting babies in a stroller, and leaving it outside, even in winter. This has absolutely nothing to do with houses and apartments being tiny in this socialist utopia, and everything with those hardened Swedes wanting to ensure that their children become rugged and able to withstand the elements. As it so happens, every once in a while, there are supposedly completely normal, strong, and empowered women in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries that suddenly get hit with the thought that they are strong and empowered, yet childless, er, “childfree”. Realizing that they have completely failed to fulfill their biological purpose, they just take a baby out of a stroller and run. This does not happen a lot, and probably most cases consist of a deranged woman just trying to hug the baby of a stranger, only to put it down when approached by the mother. Sometimes, though, there is a connection of unfortunate events, and women literally run off with a stranger’s baby. I even found one story that made the international news. There is normally some bizarre cover story such as the (childless) woman wanting to steal the stroller, not realizing that there was a baby in it, like in the case above. Supposed drug consumption is also used as an explanation, which connects nicely with the witches of the past, unbeknownst to the journalists trying to run cover for those deranged women of today.

My hypothesis is that witches were women who, for whatever reason, did not find a husband and had no children. You recall that witches are normally described as ugly. This also makes perfect sense because they least attractive women are simply the least desired on the dating market, regardless of what today’s feminists may want to tell you. If witches really had been hot, they would have been married off. We also know that beauty and physical as well as mental health are positively correlated, so the ugliest women tend to be the least healthy ones, and the most likely to have mental problems. If those ugly, deranged women had nobody to financially support them, then fleeing the village and trying to survive in the nearby forest may have been the best option they had. There probably were also women who were so unpleasant that they were simply run out of the village. I don’t think this is particularly cruel either because any man endangering collective survival probably just got killed on the spot.

While there surely were witch trials in which innocent women ended up losing their lives, a fair number of witches probably had it coming to them. Given the literary evidence, I consider this the most plausible explanation.