“It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Few historical practices garner quite as much retrospective sneering as witch burnings. Compare anything to a witch burning, or a witch hunt, and you immediately conjure images of angry scolds looking for social outcasts to blame for their problems, marginalized women targeted for their unfortunate low status or their refusal to conform to society’s rules, and paranoid, baseless allegations of all kinds of misconduct. Caricatures of old-timey black-clad Puritans in ridiculous hats crawl into our nightmares, their censorious visages warning us against enjoying literally anything. Little appears to us as more regressive, more outdated, and less charitable than an old-fashioned witch trial.
We only believe this, of course, because serious people no longer consider witchcraft efficacious, and therefore do not think it a threat. Few in the developed world actually finds in our latter day self-described sorcerers, for indeed such people walk among us, anything more than a partly amusing, partly annoying curiosity. Labeling something a “witch-trial” implies immediately that the questioner is out for blood, and the subject of the investigation a hapless victim. But as Lewis reminds us, we get away with this only because we have relegated witchcraft to the status of a pre-modern oddity no longer worth our time. If such people did pose a threat, then not keeping tabs on spell-casters would be an oversight. Letting people who have the power to cause crops to fail and induce miscarriage walk around un-monitored seems ill-advised. But as far we think we have come form this world, it is still with us in some form.
We can laugh at witch trials all we want, but they made up only one of numerous practices throughout human history that look bizarre to us. We as moderns must realize, however, that to those who lived in such times, witches were real. They may not have existed in any ontological sense, but when your culture employs an ontology that permits their existence, and when everyone takes their existence for granted, it enters people’s mental reality every bit as much as our belief that the moon goes around the earth. And witchcraft is not the only example, not at all. In pagan Rome, the state could not engage in its undertakings without consulting the appropriate auspices, the strangest being the interpretation of the sacred dance of the chickens. Other peoples have held their rulers personally responsible for the weather, and the shamans of the Kogi people of Colombia still believe that their prayers sustain nature itself. We can safely look on these beliefs with modern paternalism, but to those who experience them, they actually are real.
If you ride too high on your horse, though, you run the risk of falling off. Finding examples of baseless nonsense in our own society requires very little effort. Tarot card and palm readers own commercial real estate alongside pawn shops. Newspapers still publish horoscopes; astrology is garbage, sorry if this offends (I lied, I’m not). You don’t have to look all that far to find people peddling healing crystals – you can buy them on Amazon for crying out loud – and some companies even hire feng shui consultants. Chiropractors operate openly, and people use essential oils for aromatherapy. Homeopathy too earns its place in the hall of fame of goofy practices that, however real they might seem to those who practice them, don’t really pass muster as measurably useful. People who call themselves witches even try to “hex” public figures they dislike. The jury is still out on the efficacy of such practices. You cannot look at the popularity of “The Secret” and its borderline delusional doctrine that our thoughts themselves shape reality and tell me that we, as a culture, have really moved as far past our pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment forebears as we like to imagine.
Leaving traditional religion entirely to one side for now, we live in a world that very clearly still wants to find what lies behind reality and what makes it work. The mystical and the irrational still fascinate us, and they still structure certain aspects of our lives – if you’ve ever met athletes, you’ll know superstition persists in abundance. We still read fantasy novels, and we still watch horror movies, entertaining the parts of our psyche eager to believe that reality has more to offer us than we can see. Even when at a base level we know these things to be fiction, we pursue them anyway because some part of us would really like for them to be fact. As much energy as we spend making sense of the world, life seems strangely more livable when we find the things we can’t explain.
As cruel as the old witch burnings were, they emerged in a world trying to make sense of its own goings-on. Like early man’s bloodier religious rites, they were unkind expressions of a deeply-felt belief that the world was governed by mystical forces, and that those who abused them deserved punishment. Clearly we have not altogether moved on from this base desire. Our post-modern mysticism may not result in the violence of a witch trial, but it is no less rooted in fascination with the less comprehensible aspects of nature – even the weather, which we understand pretty well now, still seems like magic. Thankfully this sense of wonder does not drive us to kill. But when we look at witch burnings and call them barbaric, we should recognize that we too cannot make sense of our world. The difference between us and them, truly, is that we either don’t think witches exist, or that that burning them is not a solution. And that should both comfort and terrify us.