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> popped in my mind is women I've met in life who called themselves witches, or were interested in the concept, or even just dressed every day like it's Halloween - these aren't people you easily picture being close to their family, being married with children, being optimistic and entrepreneurial

Ummmm, wow. You're explaining away old bigotry against witches by extrapolating your current bigotry ...

For what it's worth, most "witches" I've encountered tend to be optimistic and entrepreneurial; often running their own small businesses -- for instance there are several psychic shops near me (tarot readings are very popular now) and all have been in business for the 8 years I've lived here.

Are you sure you're not talking about goths?

Did I not have enough "perhapses" in my post to adequately communicate the lack of certainty?

"I'm just asking questions but what if it's reasonable to torture single women to preserve entrepreneurship in society? Just asking questions!"

"I'm just using quotation marks to strawman your argument. Just being rhetorically dishonest!"

Correct, this misogynist shit gets no respect from me.

HN doesn’t really like it when we call out obvious misogyny, always likes to give these guys the “benefit of the doubt”.

Sounds like Petey Thiel.

If you have bigoted opinions that you are “unsure” of, perhaps leave off the “perhaps” and say nothing?

It's not bigotry to mock modern-day women who think they have magical powers.

It is if you believe they don't have magical powers because God rarely gives people magical powers, and they fail to uphold His "virtuous, energetic, spiritual, values-driven society."

Doubly so if you bring this up as a non-sequitur to an unrelated paper.

For what it's worth, I have a counter-anecdote: all the women I know who are into witch stuff are married with children and several of them are self employed doing arts & crafts kind of stuff.

> Perhaps religious history of "battling" witchcraft and demonism can be understood as societies having witnessed a similar set of social issues brewing and looking for the root cause.

In the US and Europe at least, witch-hunts and the paranoiac ferver around them arose in the context of apocalyptic Christian belief at the time - Christians believed they were living in the "end of days" and that Satanic forces were being arrayed everywhere to infiltrate their communities and corrupt and undermine their values. "witches" weren't simply pagans, but people who actively and willingly entered into contracts with the Christian devil. Modern day witchcraft and neopaganism bears no resemblance to what people of the time recognized witches to be, it didn't even really exist at the time.

In a finer-grained context, this could have been an expression of anxiety over cultural and political change, and very often it manifested as anti-Semitism (it's no coincidence witches were depicted in caricatures similar to Jews and that their meetings were called sabbats.) racism and misogyny, and like many moral panics today, was often employed by the religious and political powers to their own ends.

One can see it today within the right-wing fringes of Christianity and QAnon, and their conspiracy theories about Satanic rites among the "elites" and "leftists" (which has many elements of anti-witch and anti-Semitic beliefs of yore,) within a movement almost entirely defined by fear of the future and the corrupting influence of secularism and "traditional values."

Much of the historical persecution of witches in Christendom stemmed from Exodus 22:18 in the King James Bible: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. But even that appears to have been a mistranslation: the original text would be better translated as "poisoner" in modern English.

https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2017-08-17/ty-article/th...

And ironically, the justification for a lot of European occultism and demonology comes from the New Testament where Jesus says he gives his disciples power to command demons. It was seen (not by the mainstream Church, obviously) as acceptable to bind the devil's minions to force them to do good. Of course there was an equivalent school of magic to do the same with angels. (angelology - see John Dee and the Enochian script[1])

There was even an old belief (that I think came from the Babylonian Talmud but I'm not sure) that King Solomon used a magic ring that bound demons to build the first temple. This genre of "Solomonic" magic is where the Ars Goetia and its famous roster of demons comes from[0], which pop up from time to time in pop culture.

What's particularly interesting is that, given that literacy of the time was primarily among the nobility and how much liturgical information there is in a lot of texts on ceremonial magic, there must have been an underground of occultists within the priest class of the Church at the time reading and writing all of this.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demons_in_the_Ars_Goet...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian_magic