Adapting a Witch to Modern Beliefs and Values: Persecuting the Outsider through Trial, Stage, and Film

• Published in: Evolutionary studies in imaginative culture 2019-12, Vol.3 (2), p.39-52
• Main Author: Larsen, Mads
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: adaptation; cognitive science of religion; Day of Wrath; evolutionary psychology; folklore; humanism; spiritualism; witchcraft
• ISSN: 2472-9884; 2472-9876; 2472-9876
• DOI: 10.26613/esic.3.2.142

In 1590, after Norway's most famous witch trial, Anne Pedersdotter was burned alive. Resource scarcity and religious competition transformed an old superstition into a witch craze to which Anne fell victim. Her story became a play in 1908 and a film in 1943. The two adaptations attempt to give Anne's persecution more modern explanations. In the play Anne Pedersdotter, Anne has psychic powers that make her neighbors think she is a Satanic collaborator. In the film Day of Wrath, Anne embodies humanistic aspirations that would have been delusional in her own era and that are perhaps also poorly adapted to human nature in general. The trial and the two fictional versions of the trial all illustrate how thought patterns that evolved for small groups of foragers can be overstimulated in post-agricultural environments. This article identifies cognitive dispositions that, in periods of crisis, can trigger persecution of outsiders, discusses how those universal mechanisms manifest themselves in different cultural contexts, and examines the historically specific beliefs and values that animate the two fictional versions of Anne's story. The article concludes with reflections on how the evolved cognitive mechanisms that led to beliefs in witchcraft often manifest themselves, in the present, as conspiracy beliefs directed at minorities.