Lessons from the Great Hunt Jenny jennyg@compuserve.com Tue Mar 23 10:41:43 1999 Hi everyone,*p*I'm on the American Academy of Religion's Nature Religions Scholars' mailing list (say that one, three times fast <g>) and the talk recently turned to the Burning Times and inflated estimates of the death toll. Some people were quite enamored with the Nine Million figure, and when I said that the number of deaths was one of the least important issues in the Burning Times, I got "challenged" to name a more important one. *p*The following is my response. It's probably nothing new for old timers at Summerlands, but I think some stuff deserves re-stating occasionally.*p*******************p*I think that the most critical lesson we can extract from the new evidence is that there was no Them in the Great Hunt. There was only Us, and we did terrible things.*p*Ever since the Hunt, we've blamed the horrors on the Others, on the people we don't like. Nineteenth century rationalists blamed superstitious Christians; Pagans blame the Inquisition or Christians generally; feminists blame patriarchal elites. Over and over again, the theme is the same: I didn't do this. People who are not like me are the ones responsible for these atrocities. Often writers identify with the witches and then their stories become, "This is what the awful, evil Them did to the good, virtuous Us." Everyone is the victim of the Burning Times. No one accepts responsibility for it.*p*Trial evidence shatters this dualistic myth. Trial records allow us to "hear" from the non-literate sections of European society: women, the poor, the "common folk". And when these people are allowed to speak, they agree with the male elites. All segments of European society supported the Great Hunt. Each played their part, each bears some portion of the blame. Witch-hunters stirred up fears, but most people were accused by their neighbors. Women and men were equally likely to testify against witches. Doctors blamed inexplicable illnesses on witchcraft, but "white" witches did it five times as often. There is no evidence of a pogrom launched against any group. Witches have nothing in common with each other, in all times and places, except for the fact that they were accused of witchcraft.*p*The myth of the Burning Times harms us in innumerable ways. A few I see include:*p*1) It encourages stereotyping. You have to stereotype to keep the crisp "sides" of dualist history. The Good Guys (Girls?) must be perfect, the Bad Guys utterly horrid. Thus popular writers generally avoid "muddy" evidence, like witch-hunting witches, male witches, and the Spanish Inquisition's efforts to stop witch-hunting. Many of their books are full of the most painful stereotyping.*p*2) It encourages hatred. If you think the Burning Times are what They did to Us, then of course you're going to be pretty angry at Them. Many popular writers encourage their readers to embrace this anger, to wallow in self-righteous indignation over the horrors that They inflicted on Us. This often translates to real hatred, aimed at real people. We're all familiar with the anti-Christian biases that plague Pagan newsgroups. Well, this type of "history" encourages that prejudice. On Compuserve, one woman wrote that she'd just finished watching "The Burning Times" and she was so furious she was shaking. The film made her hate Christians, she said. She wanted to spit on the ones she knew for murdering nine million of "us". We corresponded at length, but I don't think I ever managed to persuade her that Christians were not monsters.*p*3) It blinds us to the ways that we can be part of the problem. Our "history" of the Great Hunt says we're Witches, and thus we obviously can never be witch-hunters. Because we ignore the fact that witches were some of the most avid supporters of the Burning Times, we never stop to think that we might need to worry about ourselves.*p*And we do. In the 1980's, America went through a dress rehearsal for the Burning Times: the panics over Satanic ritual abuse. The exact same rumors appeared (there is a criminal conspiracy of devil-worshipping witches who are killing children and animals). They circulated in the exact same manner, spread by the exact same people, as in the Great Hunt. They even involved the same mixture of Christian demonology and genuine Pagan practices that we see in some of the early witch trials. Sociologist and folklorists noted the amazing similarities between the Great Hunt and the Satanic Panics... but most Pagans didn't. *p*In fact, we started to make all the same mistakes that our forebears made, mistakes that made witch-hunting witches far more common than witch-hunting doctors. We insisted that these panics had nothing to do with us. They were "about" Satanists ("black" witches, as they would have been called in the Burning Times). We were Witches, and Witches were completely different from Satanists (just like Benandanti were completely different from Streghe, as one witch told the Inquisition). Many Pagans admitted that this Satanic conspiracy might exist -- we accepted the demonology of the modern witch hunters, exactly like early witches embraced the fabrications of the Malleus Maleficarum. I even saw some articles from this period which suggested that we should use our magickal abilities to protect our communities and to divine the names of these evil devil-worshippers. That is *exactly* what "white" witches did in the Great Hunt. And it led to thousands of deaths and innumberable acts of mob violence.*p*The Burning Times were starting up around us... and we didn't notice, because our history blinded us. Our history didn't tell us that the Great Hunt was a rumor panic, a fear of a non-existant conspiracy that drove decent people to do indecent things. No, our history said that the Burning Times was something like the Holocaust. And therefore we were able to look directly at the Great Hunt's twin and not recognize what we were seeing.*p*Jenny Gibbons*br*(jennyg@compuserve.com)