How To Kill a Witch & Its Not Her

So they are both Scottish women, and I believe they have a podcast that kind of follows this story.

So it does center around the kind of history of the witch trials and just witches in general in mostly kind of the British Isles area, because it's got such a rich history with witches.

But it also does touch on the American witches a little bit, as we all know, because Salem is so...

And they kind of break it up in kind of an interesting way.

First, it's very like your traditional nonfiction where like, what is a witch? And they kind of go over that.

And then how do you become a witch? And how do you get talked about as a witch? And it just kind of goes through step by step.

And they have a lot of, I guess, kind of cases of like talking about witches.

Because I think that's kind of what their podcast focuses on, is bringing to light these people's lives and seeing how they got to where they were.

The parts I found like kind of the most interesting or something that I just really liked about it is just how they explain the witch trials in a more deep way.

Because as an American, and I think you probably do know this too, Natalie, we both focus most on Salem.

We probably know a lot more about Salem and how that works, which is probably the most famous witch trial.

In fact, they do talk about Salem a little bit in this.

And one of the things they say is that as being Scottish people and, you know, learning about that as adults... scotland doesn't even really know that it has a much longer history with witches or at least not taught to their youth because like you know i mean witch trials in scotland were hundreds and hundreds of years where we just kind of had this bout of witch stuff with salem

yeah what was it called like the inquisition or something or

i don't i don't the inquisition i think is more spanish they didn't really give me

some name for that but yeah salem was terrible but it wasn't only like 30 or 50 people or something died which is a lot and bad but like hundreds and thousands of predominantly women were killed in europe

yes and that's kind of what they touch on is that like like you said it's just so much more prolific over here and kind of where it started with and one of the like kind of where the book starts is like how do you believe in magic and witches and you know obviously historically people did believe in fairy and magic and all of that much more And I love how they also touch on, at the beginning, the difference between good and bad magic, because there was a concept for that back in the day.

So what witches did was considered bad, technically, right? Because to be a witch, you signed with the devil or in some earlier, like, fae beings, you know, something.

And what they did note on is, if you look at the stories, it's almost always a man.

The women have to go to men to get power in a lot of these stories, which, you know, patriarchy right there.

But they also talk about the other kind of magic in this era was called charmers.

And charmers did magic technically within God's realm, right? So, which I guess you would probably think of these a little bit as they would cast like helpful spells, but mostly like apothecaries and things like that, like herbs and stuff.

So you'd go to the charmer if you had an issue, like you might go to a witch in other ways.

Didn't they

eventually turn on the charmers? I