The Burning Question

I am no fan of witch hunts, as I make clear in this Horror to Culture article. But I am also not a fan of the opportunistic way in which those with an ideological ax to grind will cherry-pick and misrepresent information or revise history.

Like many horror hounds, I grew up fascinated by Pagan culture. I read many treatises on ceremonial magic(k), witchcraft, alchemy, occultism, and mysticism—modern and ancient.

Naturally, the sources of information on occult practices are bound to be dubious at best. Esoterica strives to remain esoteric.

Historical sources, likewise, are bound to present problems, especially where they seek to represent the worldview of monolithic religious organizations, nationalist ideologies, or political pressure groups.

If we try to view the history of any ideology through its own sources, we are often going to be left with inflated numbers both for and against it.

We can never know, for instance, exactly how many Christians the Romans threw to the lions.

Likewise, though we have records indicating how many people were tried and convicted of witchcraft, we can also be certain some of it must have happened off the books.

We can also be sure, however, that the Neopagan movement of the twentieth century misrepresented the numbers of the Burning Times grotesquely where they estimated it in the millions, and also where they insisted that it was a problem which only afflicted women.

Giordano Bruno, for instance, would certainly have disagreed.

That the number of people executed for witchcraft or sorcery during this period was more likely in the tens of thousands rather than the millions doesn’t diminish its ignominious designation, but it must always be recalled that the rise to power and the justifications for such persecutions always rested on just such historical revisionism.

The old saw that history is written by the winners does not entirely apply.

After all, when the Christians were being thrown to the lions, it was most certainly the Pagan Romans gaining victory after victory over them.

Yet their ideology overcame the Roman Empire and became an empire of its own, assimilating and distorting the Pagan perspectives of those it assimilated in much the way the Romans had.

Power changed hands, but persecution continued!

Fast forward to the twentieth century, and you can see this pendulum swinging faster between the poles of secular and religious thought, with each side fighting the other for the very freedom to think!

The Communist revolutions of yesteryear did not yield in their zeal any better results than the theocratic or capitalist states they sought to depose.

The witch hunts continued under different names, as we saw with the Holocaust, which can accurately claim numbers in the millions—a modern real-life horror the depictions of which were recorded in real time by a technology which has become digitized to the point that we can no longer trust it to accurately record anything.

We must now, in a post-truth world, ask if any image or story we see is AI, a deep fake, or selective news coverage.

The problem of cherry-picked data and hand-picked narratives continues to rear its ugly head in everything we do, and on a scale that makes the misrepresentations of the Church and its history—by either pundits or detractors—look like child’s play by comparison.

This is a problem that we all face together, dear reader, and I ask you to consider, whatever you believe, how honestly you represent your own narrative and that of our culture.

Shall we journey into the shadows to shed light on what is hidden, or hide in the shadows to lurk and pounce on that which is in the light?

A vital question the answer to which, in more ways than one, may literally make the difference between life and death.