The wise healer becomes the evil witch in Toledo’s Brujeria Museum

The first whispers of satanic witchcraft started in Spain – in the Aneu Valley of the Pyrenees in the early 15th century. In his brilliant, exhaustive book, The Witch, Ronald Hutton relays the rumour:

They would … steal sleeping children from their homes and murder them, and use poisonous substances to harm adults. Some had already been apprehended and confessed to this crime, and it was decided that they and any convicted of it in the future would be burned to death.

People called them bruxas, later brujas, after the female demons believed to kill children by night. Today, the Brujeria Museum in Toledo collects their history.

Of course, the true origin of the witch is in nature, in the cults of fertility and the acts of motherhood. “She is … herbalist, healer and midwife,” write Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin of the witch in The Book of Symbols. It is in the natural world, too, that the collection begins.

Belladonna, hemlock and nightshade are just some of the plants preserved behind glass. This is only partly for your protection, dear reader. Though known for their hallucinatory effects, the recipes alongside each ingredient – how to transform men into animals, how to turn invisible – make them an attractive prize for thieves or desperate writers.

Of course, we all know that this witch was to be corrupted. Though not by the forces of darkness.

Christianity presents the Virgin Mary as a prototype of woman, converted into a mother thanks to a spiritual and non-carnal act … a frontal attack on the image of the Great Mother.

So it was, the exhibition tells, that the wise healer became the evil witch. Their gifts, curses. Their cures, poisons. In the 1600s, the northern provinces of Spain executed hundreds of women for brujeria. There, the Christian fear of the demonic witch was stronger than it was further south. Here, in cities like Toledo, the large population of converted Muslims believed that magic users were in control of, not controlled by, demons.

It therefore seems apt that such a grand tribute of witchcraft should be in Toledo, Spain. Here, the old image of the witch can live among the Moorish architecture.

If you’re in the area, Toledo’s Museum of Torture collects instruments employed in the persecution of alleged witches and other heretics. And if you’re in the mood, the city of Paris esteemed and, eventually, executed La Voisin for her herbal knowledge.