Halloween Set Witch
Released: 2020
RRP: £4.99
Rating: ★★★★★
All Hallows’ Eve is nearly upon us, and I am going to give A. a Playmobil (trick or) treat. Always happy to have a villain in town, and no doubt inspired by occasional references on CBeebies, she did ask for a witch earlier in the year. In spite of the ambivalence of the occasion – a celebration of the dark arts or an opportunity to participate in gift-giving to our neighbours – there’s no escaping the prominent place of Halloween, or the witch, in modern culture.
That’s actually quite surprising when you think about it. Not many of us believe in witchcraft or magic anymore. Those who do, Wiccans for example, have appropriated it and manipulated it in an attempt to contextualise their own cultural identity into something esoteric, even gnostic. Wicca is a modern phenomenon and has nothing to do with historical witchcraft.
Wicca drew its foundational inspiration from Romanticism, as did other movements such as modern Druidry. The Romantics, as the term suggests, created a nostalgic and decidedly positive spin on pre-industrial Europe. The epitome of this in England may be Walter Scott’s novels, with their fictional reimagining of chivalry. Romanticism placed the heyday of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, a conception rehearsed in Monty Python’s Holy Grail and the first series of Blackadder. In fact the anxieties which created the witch are decidedly early modern.
To get to grips with the difference between historical witches and our modern conceptions of them, it’s essential to unpack what a witch does. For example, in the biblical story of the so-called witch of Endor (in 1 Samuel 28), the anonymous woman does not fly on a broom, cast spells, or boil up a potion in a cauldron. She summons the spirit of a dead man for consultation, a practice known as necromancy. In fact the passage does not use the term ‘witch’, that’s a later interpretation imposed upon it. The Hebrew א֔וֹב may best be translated ‘oracle’ or ‘medium’. By contrast the King James Bible, published in 1610 at the height of the ‘witch craze’, calls her ‘a woman that hath a familiar spirit’ – familiars, such as cats, being one of the stereotypical hallmarks of the early modern witch.
The association of witches with those late medieval ‘cunning folk’ who created potions to help woman conceive is also largely misplaced. Nobody went to the stake for dabbling in ‘natural magic’. There was a considerable interchange between popular forms of magic, charms for example, and the institutional religion of the Church prior to the Reformation (Eamon Duffy has a whole chapter on this in his magisterial The Stripping of the Altars).
Divination, augury, astrology? ‘Witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ have fluid definitions. For early modern people it was the action of maleficium, doing something wicked, that made you a witch: causing sickness; killing children or cattle; damaging the harvest. Such power had to involve collusion with the Devil. That meant the defining element was diabolism, typically conducted in a gathering sometimes referred to as a sabbat. Hence the flying brooms to get you there. There is no objective evidence that any such gatherings ever took place.
Nevertheless, between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth century, something like one hundred thousand people were tried for the crime of witchcraft in what is commonly referred to as the ‘witch craze’. They were mostly tried by secular courts rather than the Church, they were mostly (about 80%) women, and about half were executed.
There were broad regional variations: there was a far greater intensity of witch hunting in Switzerland, Germany, Scotland and around the Baltic states. It will be noted (especially by fans of Dan Brown) that these are the heartlands of Protestantism. Far more men than women were prosecuted in Normandy. Prosecutions got going in Poland just as they were ending in France. There was also regional diversity in the character of witchcraft: English witches did not use brooms, for example.
Spikes in prosecution appear to coincide with breakdowns in the social order, such as during times of war. Due process tempered the rate of convictions because it required hard evidence. That’s one of the reasons why the Inquisition, contrary to the popular view, hardly ever executed anyone for witchcraft. As European states centralised the judicial appeals process the number of cases declined.
There was significant intellectual opposition from the start. Martín de Castañega’s Tratado de las Supersticiones y Hechicerías (1529) established the suspicions that kept witchcraft convictions low in early modern Spain. Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) and Michel de Montaigne’s essay, ‘Of Cripples’ (1588) are other examples of an early sceptical tradition. Eventually the sceptics would triumph: in England, witchcraft was reclassified as a fraud in 1735.
This set bundles together a number of stereotypical characteristics that, again, have little to do with historical witchcraft: the pointy hat, the broom (p/n 30251940), the spell book (p/n 30061960). Even that malevolent face owes itself to physiognomy. The carved grotesque on a pumpkin has nothing to do with witchcraft either: it derives from the practice of using squashes as Samhain lanterns to ward off evil spirits.
The pumpkin case opens by twisting rather than pulling. It is well made and can be used either as part of play – the witch who lives in the pumpkin house – or repurposed as a Halloween decoration or container. Curiously it has eight small holes at the base, as though for drainage. Perhaps a poltergeist put them there.
The witch herself has brown hair, missing teeth and a mole on her right cheek. Her scowl is exaggerated by having pupils added in; I’ve not seen that on a klicky before and it gives her a really effective glare.
Her hat is dark grey and is, I think, the same mould as used for the Midnight Witch (#4550) back in the nineties. She sports a yellow feather, which complements the yellow on the front of her dress. That is predominantly black, decorated with a large spider and web motif in yellow, black and white, and with a splash of dark grey across her skirt. Her sleeves are also dark grey. Her scarf is a separate piece, black, and a nice snug fit. No doubt it keeps her neck warm while flying.
From my discussion it should be obvious why Playmobil couldn’t possibly produce a historical witch klicky. Early modern witches came in all shapes and sizes, from vulnerable old ladies to the mayor of Bamberg. This figure resides in the ranks of fictional monsters, ghosts and vampires; an antagonist for Scooby Doo. As such she’s a great addition to our world and I think A. is really going to enjoy integrating her alongside her fairies and mermaids.
EMPM
EarlyModernPlaymobil 