By Ephraim Agbo
A TikTok slideshow flickers into view: grainy portraits stretched by AI filters, eyes glowing faintly, faces subtly distorted. A whisper-track hums beneath an ominous score. The claim arrives with theatrical certainty: a modern queen, the video alleges, slips beyond palace walls at night through witchcraft, flying to engage in illicit supernatural sex. There is no evidence, no source—only atmosphere. Millions watch. Thousands share.
The allegation is medieval in substance, yet unmistakably modern in form. It does not appear in a pamphlet nailed to a church door or whispered in a royal court, but in the frictionless intimacy of a smartphone feed. It is tempting to dismiss this as internet absurdity. That would be a mistake. What is unfolding is not novelty but inheritance: a 500-year-old technology of gendered political defamation, newly optimized for algorithmic distribution.
To understand why such a claim still circulates—and why it finds an audience—we must stop treating it as a bizarre rumor and start reading it as a cultural artifact. The witch accusation is not an error in the system. It is the system, updated.
I. The Original Code: Witchcraft as Political Erasure
The modern smear does not invent; it iterates.
In late medieval and early modern England, “witch” was never a neutral description of belief or practice. It was a political instrument—elastic, stigmatizing, and devastatingly effective. To accuse a woman of witchcraft was to move her from the realm of debate into the realm of moral emergency. Her influence became illegitimate. Her body became suspect. Her voice became dangerous.
The 1441 trial of Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, offers a foundational case study. Eleanor was no peasant healer on the margins of society; she was a woman of rank whose proximity to power made her threatening. When factional rivals sought to neutralize her husband’s political standing, they did not argue policy. They accused Eleanor of necromancy—alleging she used sorcery to foresee, and possibly hasten, the king’s death.
The trial was not an investigation but a performance. Eleanor was forced into public penance, stripped of her titles, paraded through London, and imprisoned for life. The charge of witchcraft did not merely punish her—it erased her from political relevance. The lesson was clear and enduring: when a woman’s influence cannot be contained, it can be demonized.
This formula would repeat itself with grim consistency. Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother-in-law to Edward IV, was accused of witchcraft during the Wars of the Roses to delegitimize her family’s claim to power. Anne Boleyn faced accusations that fused sexual deviance, incest, and occult influence—charges less about belief than about spectacle. The witch trope provided a narrative shortcut: it transformed political rivalry into moral panic.
II. From the Stake to the Screen: The Smear Evolves
The bonfires have gone cold, but the symbolic architecture remains intact.
In the modern era, “witch” functions less as a literal claim and more as a cultural shorthand—a dense bundle of insinuations about female power, sexuality, and corruption. It signals that a woman’s authority is not earned but stolen, not visible but occult, not legitimate but invasive.
This explains why the trope resurfaces so reliably around moments of institutional anxiety. Royal transitions, deaths, marriages, divorces—these are periods when symbolism matters more than governance. The rise of Queen Camilla after decades of tabloid warfare provided fertile ground. Online narratives cast her not simply as controversial, but as unnatural—a corrupting force within a sacral institution.
The witch claim externalizes discomfort. It translates grief, resentment, jealousy, and resistance to change into a myth that feels emotionally coherent. The target is not only the woman herself, but what she is imagined to represent: decay within continuity, disorder within tradition.
III. The Platform as Accelerator: Algorithms and Emotional Yield
What makes this iteration different is not the accusation, but the infrastructure.
Social media platforms—particularly short-form video ecosystems like TikTok—are not passive hosts of information. They are optimization machines designed to maximize engagement, not truth. Their algorithms reward content that provokes rapid emotional response: shock, disgust, arousal, anger. Accuracy is incidental.
A claim that a royal figure “flies by witchcraft to have sex” is algorithmic gold. It compresses taboo, scandal, power, and fantasy into a single, instantly legible narrative. It requires no proof—only vibes.
Studies from digital research institutions and disclosures from platform insiders have repeatedly shown that sensational misinformation travels faster and further than verified reporting. Once such content enters the feed, it is replicated across subcultures: conspiracy communities, royal gossip pages, meme accounts, ironic reposts. Each iteration strips context while amplifying affect.
Crucially, the absence of a source becomes an advantage. Vagueness invites participation. Viewers do not ask, “Is this true?” but “Have you heard this?” The rumor becomes collaborative folklore.
IV. The Sexual Core: Why the Smear Always Returns to the Body
The allegation of supernatural sex is not accidental embellishment; it is the heart of the charge.
From the Malleus Maleficarum onward, witchcraft accusations have obsessed over women’s sexuality—depicting it as excessive, predatory, and demonic. Sexual autonomy was framed as evidence of moral disorder. Power expressed through desire became proof of corruption.
In modern digital form, this logic persists. Sexualized witch narratives perform two functions simultaneously:
- They maximize virality, tapping into taboo and voyeurism.
- They delegitimize authority, framing influence as seduction rather than competence.
These stories rarely stand alone. They nest within larger conspiratorial ecosystems—Illuminati myth, satanic elite fantasies, occult bloodline theories. Within these frameworks, facts are irrelevant. The narrative is immune to falsification because it operates symbolically, not empirically. It circulates for emotional effect, not verification.
V. Journalism in the Age of the Recursive Lie
The role of journalism here is not to debunk loudly, but to contextualize rigorously.
Responsible reporting must resist becoming an amplifier. That means shifting focus away from the allegation itself and toward its mechanics and meaning.
- Name the phenomenon: Call it what it is—a viral conspiracy narrative, a digitally manipulated meme, an unfounded claim.
- Interrogate absence: Where are the documents, witnesses, institutions? In an age of surveillance, the lack of evidence is not neutral—it is the story.
- Historicize the trope: Show readers that this is not new madness but recycled ideology.
- Expose the machinery: Explain how platform incentives reward emotional distortion.
- Equip the audience: Offer verification tools, not moral scolding.
The goal is not to argue believers out of belief, but to reframe the question. Not “Could this be true?” but “Why does this story exist, and who benefits from its circulation?”
Conclusion: An Old Ghost in a New Machine
The witch accusation endures because it is efficient. It is a pre-packaged cultural toxin designed to destabilize female power using fear older than reason. Its journey from Eleanor Cobham’s forced walk through London to a TikTok slideshow is not a rupture but an evolution.
What has changed is scale. The scaffold has been replaced by the scroll. The crowd no longer gathers in a square but in an algorithmic feed. The punishment is no longer death, but perpetual suspicion.
When the next viral witch hunt appears—and it will—our task is not astonishment. It is recognition. This is not madness resurfacing; it is history repeating itself with better tools.
The witch never died.
She was simply uploaded.
No comments:
Post a Comment