Witch-Hunts Then and Now
Johann Hari at Slate.com, heartbroken by witnessing the ongoing brutal persecution of women and children as “witches” throughout Africa, reads through two recently released books, “The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World”, and “The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village”, for insight.What he finds are some haunting commonalities as European, American, and African people from different eras find the “other” within their own ranks. Scarred communities responding to collective trauma by lashing out at the primal giver of life.
“Yet this doesn’t explain why witch hunting keeps taking the same form every time, with only mild variations. Why, in particular, is it almost always targeted at women? … Demos [author of "The Enemy Within"] believes there is a primal reason for this. “A mother—a woman—is the primal Other, the nonself from which the self is progressively distinguished; further, she disposes a kind of absolute power to meet, or reject, infantile need,” he writes. “As such, she retains forever afterward an aura of what a discerning psychologist has called ‘magically formidable’ qualities.” So when we begin to suspect all-powerful dark forces, we suspect women first—because our mothers once held all-encompassing powers over us.”
So perhaps the two sides arguing over who exactly were killed during the European witch-hunts are both (to differing extents) right. There most likely wasn’t a surviving witch-cult dating to before the advent of Christianity, but perhaps women were especially targeted because on some level they became representatives of the primal mother. A communal subconscious rebellion against a dark Creatrix who they blamed for their suffering and torment. So the Mother (and her young offspring) must be cleansed and destroyed. Of course Hari points out a far simpler reason for why women were targeted, they were easy prey.
“I think this misses a starker and simpler explanation. Women are generally weaker than men. They are less able to defend themselves from braying mobs. They are easier to pin down and turn into a screaming, denying receptacle of evil. The mobs usually choose the weakest women of all—old women and little girls.”
Hari’s article ends with the “Satanic Panic” and “Satanic Ritual Abuse” madness of the 1980s (a madness we are still feeling the ramifications of) as proof that it can still happen in advanced and “rational” America. Indeed, Hari references former VP candidate Sarah Palin’s interactions with self-proclaimed “witch-hunter” Thomas Muthee as proof that this madness never fully goes away (it can be of little coincidence that Palin’s Third-Wave pals, with their anti-goddess rhetoric get along so well with a man who lies/brags about terrorizing women). That example, and the (so-far) isolated cases of witch-related abuse here on our own shores, should keep us ever vigilant (especially when it is very dangerous to be a “witch” in a recession). We must, as Hari writes, in times of hysteria and panic demand hard evidence and settle for nothing less.
“…the hysteria will happen again. We don’t know yet who the victims are, but they are out there, oblivious. There is an enemy within—dormant in our own fragile minds and emerging with paranoid intensity at times of stress. Our only antidote is to insist on evidence. Whenever there are charges against a person or group, we must ask insistently: How do we know? Show me the proof. Show me three times. Show me 10.”
A reoccurring question at The Wild Hunt has been: “why should Pagans care about witch-hunts in Africa or the Middle-East”? While I have argued (somewhat pragmatically) that as modern Pagans and Witches spread around the globe, we will have no choice but become a factor in places that are persecuting “witches” (as is already happening in India and South Africa), there is another possible answer emerging. That all witch-hunts are connected by a common thread of fear and hatred, and if they aren’t addressed and stopped by the forces of tolerance and rationality, they become like a virus spreading beyond the “host” community.
I certainly don’t agree with everything Starhawk says, but she does have a point that modern Pagan Witches have chosen to reclaim the label “witch” for themselves. It is folly to think the African or Middle-East witch-hunts will forever stay safely away from the “real” Witches in America, Europe, or Australia, or that when it is exported it will be forever contained in immigrant communities. Someday, if we continue to insist that women and children being killed as “witches” if faraway lands isn’t a “Pagan” problem, we might wake up to find our own communities poisoned by a need to find “the other” within their own ranks. What better place for the panicked and hysterical to look than the increasingly public and “out” community of self-proclaimed “Witches”?
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