A first insight into the meaning of the European witch-hunt can be found in the thesis proposed by Michael Taussig, in his classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), where the author maintains that devil-beliefs arise in those historical periods when one mode of production is being supplanted by another. In such periods not only are the material conditions of life radically transformed, but so are the metaphysical underpinnings of the social order – for instance, the conception of how value is created, what generates life and growth, what is ‘natural’ and what is antagonistic to the established customs and social relations (Taussig 1980: 17ff). Taussig developed his theory by studying the beliefs of Colombian agricultural labourers and Bolivian tin miners at a time when, in both countries, monetary relations were taking root that in peoples’ eyes seemed deadly and even diabolical, compared with the older and still-surviving forms of subsistence-oriented production. Thus, in the cases Taussig studied, it was the poor who suspected the better-off of devil worship. Still his association between the devil and the commodity form reminds us that also in the background of the witch-hunt there was the expansion of rural capitalism, which involved the abolition of customary rights, and the first inflationary wave in modern Europe. These phenomena not only led to the growth of poverty, hunger, and social dislocation (Le Roy Ladurie 1974: 208), they also transferred power into the hands of a new class of ‘modernizers’ who looked with fear and repulsion at the communal forms of life that had been typical of pre-capitalist Europe. It was by initiative of this proto-capitalist class that the witch-hunt took off, both as ‘a …

… platform on which a wide rage of popular beliefs and practices … could be pursued’ (Normand and Roberts 2000: 65), and a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated. It is significant that, in England, most of the witch trials occurred in Essex, where by the 16th century the bulk of the land has been enclosed, while in those regions of the British Isles where land privatization had neither occurred nor was on the agenda we have no record of witch-hunting. The most outstanding examples in this context are Ireland and the Scottish Western Highlands, where no trace can be found of the persecution, likely became a collective land-tenure system and kinship ties still prevailed in both areas that precluded the communal divisions and the type of complicity with the state that made a witch-hunt possible. Thus – while in the Anglicized and privatized Scottish Lowlands, where the subsistence economy was vanishing under the impact of the Presbyterian Reformation, the witch-hunt claimed at least 4,000 victims, the equivalent of one percent of the female population – in the Highlands and in Ireland, women were safe during the witch-burning times.