I was pleased to see that Netflix has now done for The Cramps what they did for Kate Bush. A viral school dance scene from the streaming site’s original show Wednesday featured “Goo Goo Muck” — bringing the late great psycho-billy band a massive new interest and the closest thing they ever had to a hit song.
That was enough to get me to watch the show, which is basically “What if Tim Burton sent Veronica Mars to Hogwarts?” It’s not as tight as those first two seasons of Veronica Mars, and the monsters aren’t quite as scary, but it’s still entertaining and fun in an Addams Family way.
The biggest monster of all turns out to be a 17th-century witch-hunting Pilgrim who took Exodus 22:18 as his prime directive in life.
That verse — which reads, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” — is a clobber-text with a lot of blood on its hands. But it’s interesting that it wasn’t always regarded as a mass-level license to kill. There were occasional executions justified by this passage, but it wasn’t until the printing press, popular translation, and idiosyncratic individualism removed the text from its earlier communities of interpretation and turned it into something lethally dangerous on a massive scale.
The same Baptist principles of individual soul freedom and “the priesthood of all believers” that can inspire a radical belief in religious liberty and unencumbered pluralism can also help to produce the unrestrained religious fervor of witch-hunts.
And so, thanks to Wednesday, I would up looking back at older interpretations of this vicious verse. How was it understood during all those centuries before it was weaponized by witch-hunters?
Discussion of this passage in the Talmud is fascinating. Many of the rabbis argue for a distinction between actual acts of real witchcraft/sorcery and mere tricks meant to “deceive the eyes.” The latter was regarded as “prohibited,” but not deserving of the same ultimate punishment as actual witchcraft.
Some of the rabbis also further distinguished between trickery meant to deceive and trickery meant to delight: “Rav Ashi said: I saw Karna’s father perform a magic trick in which he would blow his nose and cast rolls of silk from his nostrils by deceiving the eye.” Karna’s dad was neither a witch nor a deceiver — just a funny dad.
But what about actual witches performing actual witchcraft — those whom Exodus 22:18 insists must not be allowed to live?
The Gemara relates: There was a certain woman who was attempting to take dust from under the feet of Rabbi Ḥanina in order to perform sorcery on him and harm him. Rabbi Ḥanina said to her: If you succeed, go and do it. I am not concerned about it, as it is written: “There is none else besides Him.”
I like this. “So you’re going to put a sorcerous curse on me?” Rabbi Hanina said. “Good luck with that.” First prove to me that there’s any such thing as actual magic and then we can talk about whether or how magicians ought to be punished.
Seems like things would’ve gone a whole lot better in Salem if old Cotton Mather had heeded the wisdom of Rabbi Hanina. And I think our “spiritual warfare” friends over at Charisma magazine might benefit from contemplating his example as well.
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