
A historian's critique of popular conceptions of witchcraft - collate
https://athenaeumreview.org/essay/managing-our-darkest-hatreds/
======
JulianMorrison
I think that while there's a lot of informationally isolated pagans out there
who still buy into the "burning times", hidden matriarchal religion, pagan
survivals in folk customs, etc etc stuff, anyone who's well informed knows
that all that has been shown to be 19th-century romanticism at work. So what
is left is a contemporary mystery religion founded in the 1940s by a
charismatic man, that borrows aesthetics from the popular idea of a witch, and
combines a magical style in the Crowley tradition with western herbalism,
western astrology, Masonic ritualism, and its own theology. And that's fine.

There's room out there too for grimoire traditionalists, cunning-man
revivalists, catholic folk-magic, brujeria, santeria, pagan historical
reconstructionists, and any number of other detailed traditions that aren't
Wiccan. And that's fine too.

I welcome the idea of learning from the past rather than imposing romantic
fantasies over it, but that doesn't mean the past is where everything of value
resides. If you think religions relate to real things, rather than purely
being a human construct, then those things have agency of their own, and exist
in the present day. Authenticity, then, becomes about the strength of
connection.

~~~
api
I heard it put this way: neo-paganism is 99% neo 1% pagan.

~~~
JulianMorrison
And reconstruction is about 50-50, because they do their best but archeology
honestly doesn't know the answers.

~~~
z3phyr
I have a strong opinion that Indo-European polythiestic religions have a
common mythical and structural framework. So it would be easier to revive any
of them by studying and borrowing back from the vast sample of such religions

~~~
JulianMorrison
They have commonality of roots but they barely resemble each other.

To give an example, Dis Pater, Jupiter, Deus, Zeus, and possibly Tiw are
variations of the same name and identity after many centuries of divergence.

------
hprotagonist
One of my favorite posts on such matters is Ortberg’s listicle “ Reasons I
Would Not Have Been Burned As A Witch In The Early Modern Era No Matter What I
Would Like To Believe About Myself And Would Have In Fact Been Among The
Witch-Burners”:

 _I would have named names, too. And I’d have been especially good at
intuiting what names my interrogators wanted to hear (they would not have to
torture or even threaten to torture me) – sharp-tongued gossips and
independent-minded widows and all kinds of people who get described as
“unruly” in modern academic essays. Throw them under the god damn Witch Bus.
Does it disappoint you to hear this? I never asked you to have faith in me,
Goody Watson._

[http://the-toast.net/2016/02/09/reasons-i-would-not-have-bee...](http://the-
toast.net/2016/02/09/reasons-i-would-not-have-been-burned-as-a-witch/)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
So what is the utility of this article? It reads a lot like a sarcastic put-
down of a group of people the author considers naive. I agree that modern
witchcratf sounds naive and a bit silly, but haven't we had enough of internet
put-downs of entire groups of people?

The author clearly has some valuable historical knowledge. She could have
tried to engage with the targets of her snark, and help them see the errors of
their ways. Instead, she addresses some third party that she invites to share
in on the joke, that is on those dumb people who think medieval witches were
pagan, etc. That just borders on an invitation to online bullying, and it's
just wrong.

------
kylek
Though not quite on point with TFA, to anyone interested in this type of stuff
I highly recommend The Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast[0].

[0] [https://shwep.net/](https://shwep.net/)

~~~
dr_dshiv
I am a subscriber! And, for the readers, try Wouter Hanugraff's "western
esoterism: a guide for the perplexed".

We are truly lucky to have such great scholarship

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Many modern witches style themselves as goddess-worshippers, but in
medieval and early modern witchcraft spells, the Virgin Mary plays a much
bigger role. She is referenced far more often than any goddess.

I believe the Virgin Mary is considered to be an aspect of the goddess, like
other female deities and divine figures: Aphrodite, Ishtar, Freya, Bast, Kali,
etc. In that sense, there is no incongruity.

~~~
wbl
Because Catholicism isn't really Christian before Trent. The whole point of
the article is that magic was conjoined to Catholicism not opposed to it.
Saints are small gods. What it doesnt discuss is the way Erasmus and Luther
and Calvin and ultimately the church itself reformulated Christianity in the
process starting the witch trials.

------
kaitai
I gotta say I don't get the article.

The paragraph with the quote by Dakota Bracciale about witchcraft being
practiced by people who were outliers -- may or may not be true. But how does
this claim impunity for magical attacks, as the author states? Some witchcraft
was practiced by rich and famous people -- they wrote about it in books -- and
some of them attacked people magically (or tried to depending on what you
believe). What does being an outsider have to do with launching magical
attacks? Does this parse through the bit about being arbiter of their own
justice? It seems a bit presumptuous -- what do attacks necessarily have to do
with justice?

Say I substitute Christian in for witch. "I will argue that modern
[evangelical Christians in the US] are themselves prodcuts of the very
globalized, commercial, urban and anywhere culture which they set out to
resist, because rather than reacting against those trends, they are turning
what might once have been a genuinely radical alternative into another form of
self-care." I'd stand by that sentence.

One of the primary problems with the article is conflating Pagans who are
pagan as a primary religious affiliation, goddess-worshippers, people dabbling
in planetary magick, people who just want to make a nice herbal face cream
that reminds themselves of some idealised quality, Wiccans, people who
decorate with crystals (she doesn't even mention crystals!! Big business,
folks!), etc. Moreover, I don't understand her wish to distinguish "spells"
from "prayer". Yep, they're meant to do the same thing: concentrate the will
and the heart on something. She seemingly admits that with her hail Mary give
me a parking spot riff (which I too have used!). So why does she think this
conflation of spell and prayer is going to upset the Oracle of Los Angeles?

It seems to me that the author simply doesn't know a lot about modern witchery
and its variety. One internet witchy guru I've read talks reasonably often
about "the queer witch Jesus"; the intertwining of Christianity and
heterodox/local/pagan/witchy habits and belief systems is unavoidable to
anyone with even a cursory knowledge of European beliefs and fairy tales. The
author's portrayal of modern witches as denying this intertwining is simply
ignorant.

And then there's the bit saying, witches historically didn't practice
sisterhood, because other women accused them of being witches (? non
sequitur). Follow it up with the claim that it's seers and healers who most
often accuse other women of witchcraft. Ok. Could be true, could be false.
Then "Any professional woman will understand that she and not her male
colleague is likely to be the subject of accusations from below." I'm an
almost 40 year old professional woman. This is news to me; I haven't really
seen any accusations from below other than "she/he is an ineffective manager"
and "he slept with that undergrad," which was true and also ignored by
everyone ever. What am I going to be accused of? Ah -- like Hillary Clinton,
I'll be accused of killing Vince Foster. The beginning of the paragraph though
implies I should be accused of killing Vince Foster by a seer or healer. Hm.
And then we swing to, "by contrast [...], the medieval Green Knight -- despite
his appearance -- is not a baddie or an evil overlord." Where did the Green
Knight come from?! How do we then get to Beowulf in the next sentence?! One
paragraph that claims feminist solidarity is a joke among medieval witches
that careens through Vince Foster to Beowulf without any argument made? Where
is the editor for this thing????!!!! This is reading like one of the more
poorly-written student papers I've graded -- use enough big words in
grammatically-correct configurations and surely someone will think you're
eloquent and/or actually making a point. It works fine if the essay is graded
by machine [1].

I give up.

If anyone understands how Beowulf and Vince Foster relate to feminist
solidarity, let me know.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834379)

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I fought very hard through that same paragraph as you did, and finally _think_
I figured it out.

The author is upset that modern witches are appropriating from Christianity
the "Good vs. Evil" narrative. Calling Trump evil, or saying Hillary is in a
satanic cult is equally lacking in sophistication in the authors view.

Pre-Christian paganism, was able to practice religion without framing
everything in a binary Good vs Evil debate, and that appears to have been lost
in the modern movement. The Green Knight and the Beowulf example are magical
forces more closely resembling forces of nature, rather than evils that must
be overcome.

Apologies if I am misrepresenting the argument. In my opinion the 'women
hating women' element in the authors piece was not central to the argument
they were making in this paragraph, and would have fit better in other places
further down the essay.

------
catalogia
I have no love lost for new-age fraudsters peddling magical nonsense, but it
still feels a tad cowardly to focus your ire on modern self-styled witches for
espousing ahistorical belief structures that recycle old material in ways that
are at odds with historical fact but is more palatable to the modern masses
when, across the country, there are protestant megachurches doing precisely
the same thing but with orders of magnitude more adherents and orders of
magnitude more political influence.

~~~
SomeOldThrow
This is still a phenomenon worth examining. How is this cowardly? The author
can’t do anything about the IRS. What else is there to say about megachurches
that hasn’t been said?

~~~
catalogia
I didn't say anything about the IRS and I didn't say the phenomena should be
ignored. I think that the most impactful manifestations of the phenomenon
should be the focus of study, on account of being the most impactful.

Cowardice seems likely when somebody ignores the high impact manifestation
that enjoys popular support, choosing instead to lampoon the low impact fringe
manifestation.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Could just be "this is in my ballpark, that is not".

Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require
a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it
on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme
fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?

~~~
catalogia
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft
easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take.

> _Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would
> require a very different kind of focus and approach_

I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict
between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be
equally effective against both.

~~~
JulianMorrison
It's really not. Christianity is a rather uniquely vulnerable religion to
getting rationalist holes poked in it because of its insistence on factual
historicality of a particular set of events[1], and megachurch Christianity is
a deeply weird, heretical offshoot that barely follows mainline Christianity,
and it looks like you could blow barn-sized holes in it with a peashooter,
because it's held together with ignorance and baling wire. You will note
though, exactly how much historical impact this kind of attack has had, namely
none.

Basically what you've got here is a cultural phenomenon dressed up as a
religious one, borrowing some religious functions, taking over the public role
of religion. But its foundations have a lot more to do with ingroup identity,
shibboleths and the peculiar American take on the protestant work ethic.
Trying to understand it theologically just hits a blank wall. You have to
understand it as sociology.

([1] Other religions not of the same lineage shrug off this class of attacks.
Disprove Shinto? Disprove what? It makes no historical claims.)

~~~
ChrisSD
Christianity does not require insistence on "factual historicality of a
particular set of events", or at least not disprovable ones. That's mostly a
Western phenomena, to which American protestants seem particularly prone to
the most extreme version of.

I think you can ultimately thank Thomas Aquinas for this movement. He was
quite fond of a rational basis for God and repackaged the works of Aristotle
for this end. But of course once you start down the road of adding rationalism
to your religion then the whole mysticism of it can start to stand out to
some. So some people started thinking it must be all literal and totally
rational...

Eastern Orthodox Christianity still has no truck with that rationalism
nonsense.

~~~
roca
1 Corinthians 15:14 (and context): "if Christ has not been raised, our
preaching is useless and so is your faith"
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+1...](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+15&version=NIV)

Yes, there are recognizably Christian subgroups that disavow all historical
claims (and reinterpret Paul accordingly), but mainstream Christianity has
always affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus _and_ that (per Paul) this is
essential to Christianity ... long before Aquinas.

N. T. Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God" is a very good read on
this.

~~~
ChrisSD
See my caveat that excludes facts that can't be disproven. An historical
miracle cannot be disproven short of using a time machine.

------
Jd
The problem with this article is that it seems to cherry pick the easiest
examples of pagan identity to criticize and then simply rebukes them by pithy
aphorism.

This makes it an extremely uninformed article. The mainstream witchcraft (i.e.
wiccan) movements stem from Gerald Gardner's attempt to reconstruct Italian
and British witchcraft traditions and turn it into something acceptable for
modern audiences. Both his specific reconstructions and the problems with them
have been well documented (see his own books and those of Valiente).

In many way what happened with modern witchcraft is similar to what happened
with modern Yoga traditions (see Mark Singleton's book the Making of Modern
Yoga), in that a few people tried to create mass marketable phenomenon by
taking some old traditions and then creating a consumable package. Obviously
this often comes with overstated claims considering the guru, authenticity,
etc. Then it also creates identity movements where people create an identity
around their new belief system.

As far as what various pagans did in the Roman empire and how many of those
traditions were gradually eradicated by Christianity, some of those things are
well documented and some are not, partially because of the presence of many
non-recorded mystery traditions in ancient Rome.

As far as people choosing a "pagan" identity as a reactionary counter culture
vis-a-vis a perceived mainstream Christianity that also clearly exists where
Christianity is mainstream. In various forms it seems to have merged with
other reactionary version of feminism.

~~~
Retric
What I find most interesting is the avoidance of any mention of drugs. It’s a
rather large omission from a historical perspective.

