On a sweltering August morning in 1692, George Burroughs stood on the gallows in Salem, Massachusetts, a noose around his neck and a congregation of neighbours watching below. He was a former minister, a Harvard graduate, a man of the cloth—and yet he was about to be executed as a witch. As the cart was pulled away, Burroughs did something that unsettled the crowd: he recited the Lord’s Prayer, flawlessly, his voice carrying over the murmurs. According to popular superstition, a witch could not utter those words without stumbling. The spectators wavered. Cotton Mather, looking on, reportedly reminded them that Burroughs had not been a properly ordained minister, and so the hanging proceeded. Burroughs was cut down, buried in a shallow grave, and largely written out of the story we tell about Salem.
We remember the witch as a woman: the crone, the midwife, the heretic, the woman with too much knowledge and too little protection. But Burroughs was not an anomaly. Across centuries and continents, men have stood in the dock, on the pyre, and in the gulag, accused of sorcery, shamanism, rune magic, and witchcraft. They are the forgotten sorcerers—the male half of a persecution that history has largely painted in shades of bonnet and broomstick.
To remember them is not to diminish the thousands of women who were tortured and executed. It is to complicate the narrative, to recognise that the charge of magic has always been a weapon of power, aimed at anyone who held knowledge the state, the church, or the village could not control.
The North Atlantic and the Rune
Nowhere is the erasure of the male witch more striking than in Iceland. Between 1625 and 1685, Iceland conducted a series of witch trials unlike those in most of Europe: the majority of the accused were men. These were not satanic conspirators in the continental mold, but farmers, labourers, and coastal dwellers charged with galdr—runic magic, the carving of staves to cause illness, to steal milk from a neighbour’s cow, or to summon the wind. The Icelandic authorities burned roughly twenty people for these crimes, most of them male. Their magic was practical, rooted in an older oral tradition, and it made them dangerous to a Lutheran church determined to monopolise the unseen.
The Old Norse practice of seiðr – a potent form of shamanic magic involving trance, prophecy, and weaving fate – was deeply stigmatised for men. While goddesses like Freyja and gods like Odin (who famously learned it at great cost) practiced it, male practitioners were routinely labelled ergi – a term conveying profound unmanliness, sexual deviance, and cowardice. The sagas whisper of men like the völva (traditionally female seer) who dared to seize the staff; they faced social exile, ridicule, and sometimes violence, long before the Christian witch hunts. When Christianity arrived, this existing prejudice fused with new theology: a man practicing seiðr wasn’t just a heretic; he was a threat to the rigid warrior-masculinity the new order sought to impose, his magic seen as inherently corrupting and emasculating. Records from Norway and Sweden show men prosecuted for runic magic or healing arts deemed “devilish” precisely because they challenged patriarchal norms of strength and rationality.
In the north, the Sámi noaidi—shamans who used drums to journey between worlds—were hunted by church and crown alike. Their drums were confiscated and burned; their bodies were subjected to the strappado or the rack until they confessed to dealing with demons. Many of those who died under torture were men, the keepers of an Arctic cosmology that did not recognise the authority of Rome or Copenhagen.
Across the Baltic, in Finland and Estonia, the noita occupied a similar shadowlands. The noita was a healer, a curse-worker, a reader of signs. Both men and women held the title, but male practitioners were especially vulnerable once the Lutheran church consolidated power. A man who could staunch bleeding with a whisper or locate a lost reindeer by drumming on a reindeer-skin membrane was a rival to the priest. In Lithuania and Latvia, indigenous Baltic paganism persisted fiercely. Here, male practitioners – often called žynys (Lithuanian) or noaid (Estonian, related to Sami noaide) – were central figures as healers, diviners, and keepers of ancestral knowledge. As Teutonic Knights and later Catholic and Lutheran authorities sought to eradicate paganism, these men became prime targets. Trial records from the 16th-17th centuries reveal significant numbers of men accused alongside women: men charged with causing crop failure through evil eye, summoning storms via forbidden rituals, or healing with herbs deemed demonic. Their persecution wasn’t merely religious; it was an assault on the very fabric of community leadership and traditional medicine, replacing male elders with foreign clergy and barber-surgeons.
In Russia and Ukraine, the volkhvy and veduny—the old pagan priests and sorcerers—faced systematic persecution following Christianisation. Tsarist laws criminalised “sorcery” as a form of religious rebellion, and male ritual specialists were tortured, exiled, or sent eastward to Siberia, the empire’s great dumping ground for the spiritually inconvenient. Among indigenous groups like the Sami, Nenets, Yakuts, Evenki, and Buryati, the male or female shaman (noaide, tadibey, böge) was the indispensable intermediary with the spirit world – healer, guide, psychopomp. Tsarist colonisation and, later, Soviet militant atheism launched systematic campaigns against them. Similarly, in Ukraine and Western Russia, male folk healers (znahar) and practitioners of pre-Christian rites faced persistent suspicion and occasional violent repression from both Orthodox authorities and later Soviet organs, their knowledge dismissed as dangerous superstition.
The Cunning Man and the Witchfinder
In England, the figure of the “cunning man” straddled the line between respected healer and suspected felon. He cast horoscopes, brewed remedies, and found stolen goods. For generations, communities tolerated him—until they didn’t. During the witch-finding mania of the 1640s, Matthew Hopkins and his associates swept through East Anglia, and while most of their victims were women, men were not spared. John Lowes, the vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, was “swum” in the village pond and, after floating, was hanged as a witch in 1645. A clergyman accused of sorcery by his own parish: the charge was absurd, and the result was irreversible.
In Normandy and across France, male sorciers appeared in the records of regional parlements, accused of maleficium—harmful magic—often in the wake of a child’s death or a crop’s failure. Approximately 70 per cent of those charged with witchcraft in Normandy were men. In these regions, due to the strong Celtic and Germanic traditions persisting beneath Catholicism, male devins-seurs (diviner-healers) and practitioners of lingering rune or charm magic featured prominently in early modern witch trial percentages, sometimes exceeding women in certain localities during initial waves of panic. Think of the men accused of using wolf-pelts for transformation or binding spirits with intricate knots – acts deemed inherently masculine yet perilously supernatural.
In Germany, where the witch craze burned with particular intensity, male witches formed a significant minority of the executed in some territories, particularly in areas where folk healing and Catholic ritual practice overlapped. The Malleus Maleficarum fixated on women, but the inquisitor’s torch did not discriminate when a man’s reputation, his property, or his politics made him a target.
The Colonial Crucible
When European empires crossed the Atlantic, they brought their fear of magic with them—and turned it against the men they encountered. In Colonial America, beyond Burroughs and Giles Corey (who was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to plead), male figures were swept into the witch hysteria. But the colonial project was most lethal to the indigenous men who served as healers and spiritual leaders.
In New Spain and Peru, the Spanish Inquisition pursued hechiceros—male sorcerers among the Nahua, the Maya, and the Quechua. These men were accused of idolatry, of communicating with huacas, of using herbal knowledge that the Church deemed diabolical. They were tortured in the secret cells of the Inquisition, forced to confess to pacts with the devil, and often executed in public autos de fe. The Portuguese in Brazil pursued similar campaigns against male curandeiros and indigenous shamans. The target was not merely magic; it was authority. A male healer who commanded the loyalty of his community was a rival to the colonial priest and the colonial governor. While the Inquisition did target women, its records (like those from Mexico City or Lima) show a significant proportion of men accused of hechicería (sorcery) or baharism (Andean folk healing). Male curanderos, often Indigenous or mestizo, who combined Catholic prayers with ancient Andean or African techniques, were seen as particularly dangerous syncretists threatening pure doctrine. Their crime was often bridging worlds – a threat to colonial control.
The Siberian Silence
If the Atlantic world has begun to reckon with its witch hunts, Siberia remains a quieter grave. Under the Tsars and later under the Soviets, Siberian shamans—most often men, though women also practiced—were branded as charlatans, counter-revolutionaries, or the mentally ill. The Soviet regime, in particular, viewed shamanism as an obstacle to the New Soviet Man. Shamans were imprisoned in the Gulag, their drums confiscated, their rituals banned. Some were subjected to “re-education” in psychiatric hospitals, where drugs and isolation replaced the rack and the thumbscrew. The vastness of the taiga swallowed their names, and the cold preserved their silence. Siberian shamans (predominantly male in many groups due to specific cultural roles) were arrested under anti-religion laws, had their drums (the soul of their practice) confiscated or destroyed, were forced into labour camps, or simply vanished. KGB files from the mid-20th century detail the interrogation and torture of male Evenki shamans accused of “counter-revolutionary sabotage” through their rituals – a stark, modern echo of the old witch hunt, where spirituality was equated with treason against the state.
The Modern Pyre
The persecution of men for magic did not end with the Enlightenment. In Saudi Arabia, the state still executes individuals—men and women—on charges of “sorcery” and “witchcraft.” The accusations are often vague, the evidence spectral, and the defendants frequently foreign workers or marginalised locals with no access to meaningful legal defence. The sword still falls. While Saudi Arabia’s modern Wahhabi-influenced legal system notoriously punishes sihr (sorcery) today – historical records from the Abbasid Caliphate era and Ottoman provinces show men (astronomers, alchemists, folk healers) periodically caught in crackdowns deemed heretical or socially disruptive, alongside women. The accusation often served political ends.
In Papua New Guinea, accusations of sanguma—sorcery—have sparked waves of vigilante violence in recent decades. Men accused of causing death through occult means have been tortured, burned alive, or beheaded. The victims are often successful men, men with land, or men whose wealth excites envy. The charge of sorcery provides a moral language for violence that might otherwise have no name. In many highland societies, male sorcerers (masalai practitioners or sanguma agents) are feared more intensely than women for their alleged use of lethal, violent magic. Accusations against men frequently lead to brutal payback killings (“witch hunts” in the modern sense), driven by land disputes, illness, or death, where the male sorcerer is seen as an active, hidden aggressor wielding supernatural force – a perception that makes him doubly dangerous and thus doubly forgettable in Western narratives focussed on passive female victims.
In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, elderly men are accused of witchcraft when a child falls ill or a business fails. They are driven from their villages, beaten, or killed. The label of “witch” is not gendered there; it is simply a convenient explanation for misfortune, and a convenient pretext for eliminating an inconvenient man. In areas influenced by both Islam and Christianity (and later colonial rule), male diviners, herbalists, and practitioners of indigenous systems (like the Zulu isangoma, though complex in gender, often had prominent male lineages in certain contexts, or the Yoruba babalawo) faced accusations of witchcraft (uju), sorcery, or dealings with evil spirits. Colonial administrations frequently empowered local chiefs or missionaries to persecute them, viewing their influence as obstructive to “progress” and conversion. Post-colonial states sometimes inherited these laws.
Ancient Roots
Look back. In the Greco-Roman World, while figures like Horace mocked elderly female witches (sagae), men practicing goēteia (magic, often involving chthonic spirits) or claiming prophetic inspiration (like certain Pythagoreans or Apollonius of Tyana types) faced suspicion, exile, or execution under laws like Lucius Cornelius Sulla’s Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis (81 BCE), which addresses poisoners and magicians. Think of the Roman Senator executed for consulting astrologers about the Emperor’s death. In the Ancient Near East, Babylonian and Assyrian texts describe male āšipu (exorcists) and bārû (diviners) holding high office, yet also reveal periods where such practices came under royal scrutiny or theological condemnation, especially if deemed manipulative or against state religion. Even the revered Egyptian priest-magicians (hekau) could fall foul of shifting political tides.
Why They Are Forgotten
Why have these men vanished from our collective memory? Partly because the cultural archetype of the witch is so stubbornly female. The feminist recovery of witch-hunt history was necessary and just, but it has sometimes left the impression that only women were burned. The truth is messier. Men were accused when they healed without a license, when they prophesied without a bishop’s blessing, when they loved the old gods too openly, or when they simply occupied too much space in a community’s imagination.
There is also the problem of rebranding. A man accused of sorcery in one age might be called a scientist, a psychologist, or a holy man in another. The male practitioner of forbidden knowledge is often absorbed into the establishment; the female practitioner is more often consumed by it.
The erasure of men from the public’s recognition of the full scope of identities of the victims of persection isn’t accidental; it serves specific purposes of power. The dominant narrative of the witch hunt as a “woman-hunt” simplifies a complex phenomenon into a convenient morality tale about patriarchy’s hatred of female autonomy. Acknowledging male victims complicates this, suggesting persecution often targeted deviation from gender norms itself – effeminate men practicing “women’s magic,” or overly powerful men challenging ecclesiastical or state monopolies on spiritual authority. It shows the hunts were as much about enforcing rigid masculinity and femininity as they were about hating women.
Focussing solely on women lets societies off the hook for broader societal controls. If it was only about misogyny, then fixing gender equality solves it. But recognising men were also targeted reveals deeper currents: fear of uncontrolled knowledge (herbalism, astronomy), threats to economic monopolies (medicine, divination), suppression of indigenous culture under colonialism or state-building, and the use of magic accusations as tools for personal vendettas, land grabs, or political elimination – affecting anyone perceived as a threat, regardless of gender.
What’s more, trial records often survived unevenly. Male accusations might be under-reported in chronicles focussed on “sensational” female cases. Post-enlightenment historiography, seeking rational explanations, sometimes overlooked cases where male victims didn’t fit the emerging stereotype. National myths (e.g., Soviet downplaying of shamanism) actively suppressed uncomfortable truths.
It’s easier to demonise the “evil witch-woman” than to confront that the persecutors – judges, priests, mobs – were often ordinary men and women enforcing ‘social order’. Seeing men as victims forces us to see the perpetrators not as cartoonish villains, but as participants in a systemic fear that could turn on anyone stepping too far outside the lines defined by power.
The forgotten men also remind us that persecution is not a morality play with a single villain and a single victim. It is a machine, and it feeds on difference. Whether it is a runic carver in Iceland, a shaman in Siberia, a minister in Salem, or a healer in Papua New Guinea, the accusation of magic is always an accusation of illegitimate power. The state, the church, or the mob decides who may speak to the unseen, and who must die for trying.
We do not know most of their names. Their graves are unmarked, their confessions extracted under torture, their drums turned to ash. But if we pause on the gallows with George Burroughs, if we listen for the silence where a Sámi drum once sounded, we might hear them: the forgotten sorcerers, whispering from the dark that the fear of magic has never been about magic at all. It has always been about who is allowed to know, and who is made to disappear.
Typically, up until now perhaps, when we have envisioned the witch hunts – the flickering flames, the whispered accusations, the tortured confessions – our cultural imagination, shaped by centuries of art, literature, and even feminist reclamation efforts, has overwhelmingly fixated on women. The crone, the midwife, the herb-wife: she has become the near-universal symbol of persecution for magic, sorcery, or deviation from religious orthodoxy. Yet, we must now remember that buried deep within the trial transcripts, ecclesiastical records, sagas, and colonial reports spanning continents and millennia, lies a quieter, equally tragic truth: men, too, were hunted, tortured, burned, and broken for practicing shamanism, rune magic, sorcery, or what authorities deemed witchcraft. They are the forgotten victims – not because their suffering was less real, but because their stories disrupt the comforting, gendered narrative we’ve constructed, and because acknowledging them forces us to confront far more complex motives behind the persecution than simple misogyny alone.
The Path Forward
Remembering the forgotten men is not about diminishing the horrific, well-documented suffering of countless women accused as witches. It is about achieving a fuller, more honest understanding of the phenomenon itself. It reveals the witch hunt not as a singular expression of hatred towards one gender, but as a multifaceted tool of social control – deployed whenever established power felt threatened by alternative knowledge, spiritual autonomy, cultural persistence, or simple non-conformity. The man beaten for drumming a Siberian shamanic rhythm, the Norse skald condemned for carving love-runes, the Ukrainian healer silenced by the NKVD, the Papua New Guinean man killed for alleged sorcery – their stories are threads in the same dark tapestry. To truly learn from the shadows of the past, we must illuminate all the faces caught in the firelight, not just the ones that fit our preferred narrative. Only then can we grasp the full, terrifying machinery of fear that turns neighbour against neighbour, and silence the voices of those who walked differently through the world – whether they walked as woman, or as man. Their forgotten screams demand we listen harder, lest we repeat the silence.
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