We’re still getting revisionist history or wishful thinking or both in many of the books now available on Witchcraft, Wicca, and neopaganism. Ten years ago, for example, I still believed that the Inquisition had burned nine million witches during the Witch Hunt of the Middle Ages. I have since learned better.
To recapitulate the current, unromanticized scholarship very briefly: (1) The Witch Hunt was really a war against women. (2) It occurred not during the “dark ages” but during the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, at the same time the famous humanists were translating classical literature and creating great art and architecture. (3) Most of the accused considered themselves to be good Christians. They did some healing and made a few charms, but they seldom attempted any serious magic. (4) Most of the persecutions occurred in the lands where religious wars between Catholics and Protestants were the bloodiest and religious bigotry the most virulent. (5) Most of the executions were carried out by civil authorities. (6) The population in Europe was simply not adequate for nine million people to have been killed. A more realistic number may be 15,000 executions.1
That said, I believe that one murder of one woman is too many.
Another of our favorite myths tells of the Indo-Europeans, or Kurgans, galloping out of the Russian steppes and into Old Europe, where they totally obliterated the civilization of the Goddess. The Indo-Europeans are our favorite villains. But they’re our ancestors, too, and we need to remember that even our beloved Celts were Indo-European. Nevertheless, we like to think that all good things were matrifocal and matrilocal until those equestrian bastards arrived and forced their dominator society on great-grandmama and great-grandpapa.
The only author I know of who explains what most likely happened around 4500–4000 B. C. E. is Riane Eisler. Relying on up-to-date scholarship, Eisler2 says that the invasions were “mass population movements” that included women and children and were triggered by dramatic climate changes in central Asia, or “Saharasia.” Farming never was possible in this area, and the further depletion of the environment led to pastoralism. Life was so hard that people came to associate life with pain; eventually, inflicting pain became a way of life. With further changes in the climate, the pastoralist society was forced to move into new lands just to survive. I am vastly oversimplifying a scholarly chapter of Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure; please read it for yourself for the supporting evidence.
So why our preference for revisionist history? One reason is that “real” history is just too bloody, too martial, too male-dominated. Another is that the history of the standard-brand religions is … well, ditto. What did the history we learned in high school focus on? Wars and kings. What did you memorize in confirmation class? The conjectured words of holy men who were jealous of other gods (and who demonized the goddesses) and who excommunicated and declared war against heretics and apostates. It is a fact that Western Civilization has been dominated by men. In classical Greece — where democracy was invented — for example, women were confined to the home. They never went out. From ancient times until recently, mothers and daughters were the property of the fathers (which is why daddy still gives the bride away). Until recently, religious women in the standard-brand religions have had to content themselves with being “handmaidens” of the Lord and servants of the bishops and the priests and the preachers. These are, of course, vast generalizations; for detailed documentation, read books by authors like Mary Daly, Patricia Lynn Reilly, and Uta Ranke-Heinemann.3
What I’m asking you do to is think for yourself. Don’t accept what you read just because someone published it. Some publishers don’t believe in fact checking or fail to recognize sloppy scholarship and plagiarism, so a great deal of imaginative literature gets published as nonfiction, and naïve readers swallow it whole. I believe that it’s time for Witches to grow up and leave the old tales behind. Mythology and folk tales can be both entertaining and instructive, but let’s recognize them for what they are. Like The Mists of Avalon, they may present a kind of spiritual history but they are not factual history.
What we need are intellectual rigor and common sense. If we are to thrive as a valid, legitimate religion in the modern world, we need to know our history. It’s true that there was a civilization of the Goddess in Neolithic Europe. From that time until our own, it’s true that the goddesses have been diminished into fractions of their former selves. We are not so much re-creating an archaic religion as inventing a new religion. But let us work to create a kinder, more tolerant, more diverse religion than the religions from which we have fled.
So can it be. So must it be. So let it be.
1. See Jenny Gibbons, “The Great European Witch Hunt,” in PanGaia (Autumn 1999), pp. 25–34. Also worth reading is Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998).
2. Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), chapter 5
3. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). Daly is a very angry woman, and this book can be a real eye-opener. Patricia Lynn Reilly’s A God Who Looks Like Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality (New York: Ballantine, 1995) is anodyne to confirmation class. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, translated by Peter Heinegg (NewYork: Doubleday, 1990), was fired from her professorship at