The Meaning of the Witch Hunt

I won't tell you what I remember most about her, but they were barely contained beneath her black tank top.

Ordered a bourbon and coke and she handed it to me. Short, with a round face. Black hair with bangs. Better than average odds that she was a fan of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Pale, you know the type.

This was back when I was drinking.

I've heard that somewhere on Earth there exist bars where the owners don't pump music so loud you have to shout in order to almost make yourself heard. Civilized places where you can enjoy a drink and quiet conversation without any oppressive sense that you're expected to get on the dance floor before the night's over. This was not one of those bars.

("Nobody's looking at you," they say when they try to get you to dance. You know, that rhythmic grinding they call dancing. Doesn't look anything like Swan Lake. I'd judge myself if I ever caught myself dancing like that. Nobody's looking at me? How about I'm looking at me?)

I think there was a band on the stage. One of the downsides of living in Kentucky is that they play country music in public places even though nobody actually enjoys it. It's a cultural thing: listen to country in public, complain about the awful music in private.

Anyway, that's all stage dressing and eye candy. Plus a little local color from the exotic Bluegrass State. What I really wanted to talk about is a Tweet I saw recently. Some book reviewer for crime novels Tweeted that he'd read two crime novels in a row by male authors where a sad sack male protagonist walks into the bar and gets hit on by a female bartender, ending up in bed with her by the end of the night.

Punch line was exactly what you'd expect. Standard crowd-pleaser all about how this is why we should read more female crime novelists.

Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with the obvious responses. I will note that the burden of all the books I have to read on account of random Tweets is severely impeding my ability to research the history of witchcraft and (hitherto unsuccessful) attempts at eradication of same.

And I don't even read crime novels!

I don't want to get buried in shop talk here, but (as usual) digging into the facts of the matter is unfortunately destroying the major tropes of witch stories for me. The Ivanhoe-style tale, where you have the young and beautiful woman standing accused of witchcraft and needing to be rescued by the dashing and heroic knight is (quite simply) ahistorical. The real thing didn't happen like that.

The Name of the Rose is a bit more realistic, but it still presents an unlikely situation. In that novel, the woman in question only gets caught up in suspicion of witchcraft because there's already considerable worry about supernatural forces at play in the unnamed abbey.

And granted, I'm sympathetic to any novelist's urge to threaten a young and beautiful woman with the stake. Dramatic. Picturesque. Immediately wins the crowd over to her side.

Anyway, it's not like I'm saying it never happened that way. It could. It did. And sometimes there were excesses and hysterias, like the famous case at Salem in 1692.

The modern prejudice is to attribute stupidity to pre-modern people. It would be idiotic to wantonly execute a fertile young woman, a potential mother, unless there were iron evidence of a serious crime. No matter what nasty situation she might have gotten herself caught up in.

She's not the witch. And the Inquisition's interest is to find the witch.

(Who is, in fact, quite likely to be an old, never-married woman living at the edge of town. Also quite likely to have a number of warts and a bit of an antisocial personality. God alone knows what she gets up to or why the young ladies sometimes visit her at night.)

Another modern prejudice is to take pre-modern documents at face value. Attentive reader, don't we read today's news articles and scientific papers with at least one layer of irony, skepticism, and an eye for euphemism? Pre-modern people were also capable of hiding their true meaning beneath a layer of jargon.

But enough insinuation. What I'm really saying is that there's no novelist yet who has bothered to consider the witch hunting phenomenon in all its glorious ambiguity. Degraded modernity is eager to sympathize with the witch and view the Inquisition as a mad exercise in tyranny. Well, that's what three centuries of democracy will get you.

Examples. Let's stick to the grand and picturesque, leaving the more intimate matters aside.

It's well known that William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth with the idea of pleasing James I, King of England–who had until that time ruled in Scotland as James VI. James was notoriously paranoid about being assassinated–and for good reason, since there had been several attempts on his life. Most famously in 1590, where he had been the target of a plot led by the Earl of Bothwell. Macbeth: the Scottish setting, the plot involving the downfall of a regicide, and the haunting presence of three witches…

The Bard's creation was clearly (and successfully) calculated to win the favor of the King.

But let's stick to the matter at hand. James was a man fascinated with the subject of witchcraft. After the failure of the 1590 plot to assassinate him, he led a years-long clampdown on witchcraft. (Easier to accomplish in Catholic Scotland than in Protestant England, where at the time belief in witches had the scent of popery about it.)

The members of the 1590 plot (there were over 100 in all) had included a number of alleged witches who happened to be expert poisoners. But that wasn't the King's only run-in with the Adversary's servants. When James married, his journey to Denmark was delayed off the Danish coast because of a sustained squall, allegedly summoned by witches. (We should note that skepticism about witchcraft was always relatively high in Britain, while such threats were generally taken more seriously on the continent.) These experiences gave rise to the King's interest in/horror of witchcraft, culminating in a number of trials and the publication of his 1597 work, Daemonologie.

(Which was, unsurprisingly, one of Shakespeare's major sources for the depiction of witches in Macbeth.)

James' case is not unique. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, poison-mixers implicated in plots against royalty were often charged with witchcraft. Kings of France, England, Scotland, and more would not infrequently find themselves facing witchy plots against their rule. Even popes weren't free of this menace.

We should also note that the charge of witchcraft was not merely a euphemism for a poisoner. In a world where kings ruled by Divine Right, to plot against a reigning King drew tantalizing near to making a pact with Satan. Just look at the massive amount of political theory one John Milton had to invent in order to justify the execution of Charles I. And then think of the ambiguous nature of Satan in Paradise Lost.

To clarify: not all cases tried as witchcraft took place in the exalted realms of highfalutin power politics. This is only meant as an example of one of the kinds of situations that could lead thinking, intelligent men to take charges of witchcraft seriously. Royalty, unlike elected officials, always has an incentive to ensure that the populace "be fruitful and multiply."

And so. There hasn't been a novelist yet who has dared to peel the many-layered onion of the witch hunt. And probably with good reason. To truly interrogate the subject would be political dynamite that would (no doubt) involve the slaughtering of a number of modern sacred cows in utero. The best modernity seems able to manage is a hackneyed communist metaphor à la Mr. Miller.

And for those of you still wondering about our well-endowed bartender.

She hit on me. I told her I was very depressed, that life was basically suffering, and quoted some of Schopenhauer's lines about the emptiness of human existence. That got her going (as it does) and we ended up in bed together by the end of the night.

I think she took the morning after pill and I haven't seen her since.

She loved Edward Scissorhands.