TWT #1: Deadly Words Jenny jenny@panix.com Wed Jul 26 15:59:36 2000 In 1980, anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada shocked the academic community with her book _Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage_. Favret-Saada demonstrated that some people in rural France still believed in witches. Witchcraft was not an ancient superstition, something killed off by the scientific revolution. Favret-Saada "apprenticed" herself to an un-witcher and eventually left anthropology to become a professional "un-witcher". While her work is controversial, it remains one of the most influential studies of traditional witchcraft.*p*_Deadly Words_ will probably shock Witches as much as it shocked anthropologists -- because the traditional magic revealed in its pages is nothing like modern Witchcraft.*p*Modern Witches tend to define all traditional magic-users as "witches". To us, there's no difference between a village wise woman and a woman accused of killing her neighbors' cows by magic.*p*Traditional French witches disagree with that -- violently. Favret-Saada found that people distinguished sharply between people who harmed with their magic ("witches") and people who broke the curses laid by witches ("un-witchers"). Or, as we might say, there were Good Witches and Bad Witches.*p*"Un-witchers" were what we'd identify as "real witches". They practiced protective magic. Their main job was determining whether or not a person was be-witched. If so, they removed the curse. In some cases they divined the identity of the witch; in many cases, they simply said that the customer was "be-witched" and removed the spell.*p*"Witches" were completely different. No one ever identified themselves as a witch. "Witch" was a term that other people called them. None of the accused witches that Favret-Saada interviewed were actually practicing magic, as far as she could tell. They were simply suspected by their communities, or believed to have the evil eye (which made them unwitting witches).*p*Favret-Saada's research meshed, in chilling detail, with studies of the Burning Times. The victims of these modern witch-hunts were generally not magick-users; they were simply suspect members of their community. And it offered a very disturbing example of how witches could be witch-hunters. By blaming misfortune on malign magick, traditional witches continue to encourage witch-hunting, even now that the government and churches no longer do.*p*Jenny*br*