A historian's critique of popular conceptions of witchcraft

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.

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...

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.

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/

>> 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.

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

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.

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.