I know what these creatures are. I have always known. There has never been the slightest doubt with me. This is such a raw and painful moment. I am striving to reach you, and you are only telling me farewell. I have said other things, that I would tell you the whole story, that I would open the files to you, that you are needed on this very matter by us all. When persons cannot or will not acknowledge and confront aspects of their destiny—such as a sudden infirmary, an inexplicable death, the birth of a child with special needs—the destiny become repressed. It is then often projected on figures outside themselves, such as gods, sorcerers, demons, and witches. I do not use the word project pejoratively. Projection is a common and normal function of the human mind, and we all do it continuously in less pretentious ways then those cited here. Many talented people experience their visions in art or music as coming at least partially from outside themselves. As an artist paints a landscape, it is impossible to tell how much comes from the landscape that one presumably sees and how much is projected from one’s own sense of form. Indeed, one’s genuine art depends on what one projects rather than on what exists objectively out there. The line between inner and outer reality is impossible to draw sharply, as the physics as the brain studies of Karl Pribram make clear. However, here we will be talking mainly about the destructive aspects of the projection of destiny as it shows itself in witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

Witchcraft has been a sad and serious problem in European and the West since the twelfth century, particularly in the Catholic and Protestant churches. In the thirteenth century the Inquisition petitioned Pope Alexander IV (1254-61) for permission to add witchcraft to the ecclesiastical functions to be judged by the Inquisition. The pope refused, but he left the door open by stating his belief that all witches were the servants of Satan. By the end of the fifteenth century, witchcraft was assimilated with heresy, and those found guilty by the Inquisition of practicing witchcraft were burned at the stake. If a person did not believe in witchcraft, one’s very disbelief put one in danger of being accused of heresy. If you believed that no compact does or can exist between the Devil and a human being or that there is no sexual intercourse between the Devil and human beings, or that neither devils nor witches can raise tempests, rain-storms, hail-storms and the like, you were already suspect of being in league with Satan. Even the leaders of the Protestant Reformation believed in witches. Luther wrote, “Paul reckoneth witchcraft among the works of the flesh, which is not lust or lechery, but a kind of idolatry. For witchcraft convenath with the devil. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

John Calin also was a believer in such sorcery and frequently quoted a passage from the New Testament: “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the World.” Witchcraft not only denied the ethical standards of the day, but also the aesthetic ones. The customary repulsive aspects of the witch’s sabbath are present in extant documents: “The corpses of newly-born children were eaten by them; they had been stolen from their nurses during the night; all manner of revolting liquids were drunk and there was no savour in any of the food.” It is easy to understand that the aspects of destiny that we have called cosmic, like the eruption of volcanoes or Earthquakes, associated as these phenomena are wit emotions of awe and terror, should be seen as the workings of some supernatural power. However, the commonplace things of life were also susceptible, in any imaginative or hysterical persons, to being called the work of witches. Thus, continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil. Male importance, to cite and example among the many things projected, was widely cited as being caused by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

A couple, let us say, had been preparing for weeks to be married, and in the evening, after the strain and stress of the marriage ceremony, the groom finds himself important. Out of his bewilderment, anger, and feelings of inferiority, he could well have fantasies that some enchantment caused this embarrassing phenomenon. Pierre Bayle wrote in the early eighteenth century: “Several men are unable to consummate their marriage, and believe that this importance is the effect of a spell. From then on, the newlyweds regard each other with an evil eye, and their discord at times descends into the most horrible enmity; the sight of one makes the other shiver.” It I said, he adds, that witches say certain words during the nuptial benediction, which is called “knotting the braid.” “That is why there are some good mothers who consent to anticipating the wedding night in order to foil the witch.” Thomas Aquinas takes up this question under the rubric “Whether the effect of sorcery are in impediment to matrimony.” While he concludes that witches cannot impede the consummation of a marriage, the stronger spirits of evil, like demons and the devil, can do so. The catholic faith insists that demons do indeed exist and that they may impede pleasures of the flesh by their works. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Anne Marie de Georgel declares when she was washing her clothes one morning near Pech-David above the town, that she saw a man of huge stature coming towards her across the water. He was dark-skinned and his eyes burned like living coals; he was dressed in the hides of beasts. This monster asked her if she would give herself to hum and she said yes. Then he blew into her mouth and from the Saturday following she was borne to the [witch’s] Sabbath, simply because it was his will. There she found a huge he-goat and after greeting him she submitted to his pleasure. The he-goat in return taught her all kinds of secret spells; he explained poisonous plants to her and she learned from him words for incantations and how to cast spells during the night of the vigil of St. John’s day, Christmas Eve, and the first Friday in every month. He advised her if she could, to make sacrilegious communion, offering God and honouring the Devil. And she carried out these impious suggestions. Anne Marie de Georgel then admitted that she has not ceased to do evil, practicing all manner of filthiness during the years which passed from the time of her initiation to that of her imprisonment. Sometimes these victims make theological statements of considerable sagacity. This Anne Marie went on to say that the struggle between God and the Devil had gone on since eternity and would have no end. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Sometimes one is victorious, sometimes the other, and at this time the situation was such that Satan was sure to triumph. How ironical that her being burned at the stake was itself a demonstration of the triumph of Satan. Why are witches predominately female? Whereas some of the pronouncements from Inquisition use the phrase witches of both sexes, there is no doubt that witches are chiefly woman. (The term for a male witch, warlock, is unfamiliar and rarely used.)  The Malleus Maleficarum (1486) writer by two leaders of the Inquisition in Germany, H. Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, often called an “encyclopedia” of witchcraft, has one section entitled “Why is it that Women are chiefly addicted to Evil Superstitions?” The authors write (with seemingly perverse delight) “concerning witches who copulate with devils,” and they seek the methods by which such abominations are consummated. On the part of the devil: first, of what element the body is made that he assumes; secondly, whether the act is always accompanied by the injection of semen received from another….whether one commits this act more frequently at one time and place…and whether the act is invisible to any who may be standing by. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

These authors speak often of the fragility of females and state, concerning women, that when they are governed by a good spirit, they are most excellent in virtue; but when they are governed by an evil spirit, they indulge in the worst possible vices. Indeed, the word woman is used to mean the lust of the flesh. However, women also have brought beatitude to men, and have saved nations, lands and cities, as did Esther, Judith, and Deborah. Referring to the fact that original sin is blamed on Eve, Institoris and Sprenger remark that “we find a change of name from Eva to Ave [as in ‘Ave Maris’] and the whole sin of Eve is taken away by the benediction of Mary.” This condescending diatribe against women makes one winces, but it also casts light on the dynamics of the repression and projection of destiny. It seems obvious that this lust of the flesh is largely a projection of the men’s own unacknowledged sexuality. The femme fatale phenomenon throws light on the helplessness a man may feel under the attraction of a beautiful woman, especially if she is unavailable to him. Many men resent such attractions, as though these waves of passion take control of their own lives away from them. Throughout history, paintings of the courtesan, the prostitute, the beautiful but possibly insensitive woman bear witness to the power of the femme fatale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Sex is a vivid part of our destiny in that we had no say about whether were born male or female. Sex seems to take over our bodies willy-nilly. Our biological development brings with it new and, to the pubescent, strange and powerful desires and fantasies. Growing boys and men often experience sex as intrusion and the powerful yearnings as something beyond their control. The conflicts males have about their sexuality can be accentuated by monastic life, as illustrated by Saint Anthony’s sexual temptations in the desert and by Origen’s self-castration. All of this generates hostility toward the women on the man’s part. However, good men repress this hostility—perhaps under a Victorianlike code of putting women on a pedestal—even though this hostility is shown in semirecognizable form in men’s groups, men’s humor, and so on. Male anger arises from the situation in which the woman seems to hold power over his glands, some secret influence over his internal organs that may be shown in his involuntary erections. This at first surprises him, then bewitches (the word is apt) him, and finally enrages him. It is easy to imagine these uncontrollable and tantalizing surgings of emotion as evidence that one has been bewitched. So strong can the repression be that one never pauses to consider that the source maybe one’s own destiny in reference to sexuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

What better way to handle this bewildering attraction, this succumbing to the charms of the femme fatale, than by ascribing the secret influence to a witch? Sometimes the witches are young women whose only crime is their beauty, and sometimes the witches are antiquated and wizened and senile. However, the man can easily remind himself that the antiquated witches had this magic power in their youth, and they still remember the secret of it even though they do not tell. The bewitched man, attracted in ways he can do nothing about, passes on to another his suspicion that so and so has witchly powers. Others become suspicious, and soon so and so becomes a witch. Her denial only adds to the conviction. The erstwhile attracted man can tell himself he acted righteously and helped rid the World of the harmful one. Thus, his hostility and his erotic passion are relieved a thousandfold as the woman is burned at the stake. All along there were protest against the cruel and inhuman treatment in the attack on so-called witchcraft, but the protesters objected at the risk of being accused themselves. One Jesuit and poet, Frederick Spee, assigned to the task of confessor to witches condemned to death in Wurzburg, was appalled by the method of the trials and in 1631 published an anonymous attack on the persecutions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

In 1583 Reginald Scot subtitled his book in witchcraft proving that the Compacts and contracts of Witches with Devils and all Infernal Spirits…are but Erroneous Novelties and Imaginary Conceptions, and laying bare The Unchristian Practices and Inhumane Dealing of Witch-tryers upon Aged, Melancholy and Superstitious people in extorting Confessions by Terrors and Tortures. Toward the period a number of people argued that the fears of witchcraft were themselves the result of superstition and the human imagination. Pierre Bayle, in 1703, in a public letter, asserts that one hears among the common people that “an illness has been given to such and such persons by a witch.” However, he argues that these “are an effect of the dominion that the imagination exercises over the other faculties of the body and soul.” The diseases mentioned are maintained by the anxieties of the mind and by the panic-stricken terrors of the soul. He tells of a nun who sincerely felt herself possessed and adds, “see what the imagination is capable of, once unhinged by too contemplative a life.” Bayle reminds the person to whom one is writing that “you did not put too much stock in what I wrote to you about the bitterness that accompanies the devout life. You have persisted in telling me that mystics seem to you to be the happiest mortals in the World. It was thus necessary to convince you by means of a great example that they do not always enjoy those ineffable sweetnesses that you have read in their writings.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

We note here Bayle’s insight that the evil projected on witches was the result of mental difficulties on the part of the mystics and others who repressed their own evil tendencies and pretended to experience perpetual sweetness and peace. Bayle points out that witchcraft is the effect of an intense but twisted imagination. “Remove this cause,” he states like a modern psychotherapist, albeit in overly simplistic terms, “give a full confidence to the ill person, and he will have a tranquil mind, and that will be his cure.” In the sixteenth century Michel de Montaigne tells us of talking at length to “a prisoner…a real witch in ugliness and deformity, long very famous in that profession,” and gives his conclusion: “It seemed to me a matter rather of madness than of crime.” In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes also became convinced that the belief in witchcraft was a delusion based on self-persuasion. Even the Grand Inquisitor of Spain came to see that self-delusion in the persecution of witches, and the fact that the presentation of witches itself led, by its suggestive self-fulfilling effects, to the appearance of the symptoms of witchcraft. There was, finally, the touching recantation of the twelve jurors of Salem (where a score of convicted witches had been put to death), who solemnly stated: “We justly fear we were sadly deluded and mistaken, … [and] do therefore humbly beg forgiveness.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Witchcraft and the persecution of witches were ultimately overcome by Cartesian rationalism, the philosophical belief that the body and the mind were separate and dud not influence each other. In our day this rationalism takes the form of the factual, scientific explanation of the adversities that befall us. I propose, however, that this solution is not enough. What are we to do with the destructive projections (which have been and can be shifted to underrepresented populations as well as witches) that are not cured by the clear and simple ideas of the rationalists? Parents may want to know the facts concerning the crippling of their child in an auto accident, but this does not assuage their grief. Sadness and grief, joy and exultation are emotional responses, while scientific explanations are rational phenomena. Thus the acknowledging and confronting of death, serious illness, the fact that one was born into a certain race and culture at a certain historical period (to cite some random aspects of destiny) are essentially feeling, emotional phenomena. Logical data are on a different plane. A healthy society must make room in poetry, art, and music for the expression of those emotional and mythic activities. This is why our forbears, like Bayle and Hobbes, spoke so often of the role of imagination in the projections on witches. It also may throw light on why women were regarded as being more disposed to superstition, since women in Western culture by and large react more emotionally than do men. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Light is thrown on the more emotional aspect of female behavior by contemporary research into the differing functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, begun by Dr. R.W. Sperry at the California Institute of Technology, and is not accepted in scientific quarters. These studied demonstrate that the left hemisphere, broadly speaking, channels logical, rational aspects of our experience, and the right hemisphere channels mainly the emotional, poetic, artistic ones. In our culture, women are reputed to develop the right-brain functions, and men depend more on the left brain. Thus, it can be asked whether women, in our culture, are more addicted to what Institoris and Sprenger called evil superstitions. We here state that this was simply a question of women being emotional, poetic, and imaginative. This can be said only in a general sense, and should not be made into a rule. There are many exceptions, however. In witchcraft women were being punished for being more poetic, more emotionally sensitive, more intuitive than men (all things that could be regarded as fragile). This is also why our argument here does not fall under Calvin’s stricture when he attacks the trifling philosophy about the holy Angels which teaches that they are noting but good inspirations or those impulses which God arouses in mortal’s minds, [and] those mortals…who babble of devils as nothing else than evil emotions of perturbations which come upon us from our flesh. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

However, the acknowledgement of fate and other aspects of one’s destiny is by no means a trifling matter. On it depends our freedom as human beings and our very existence. We note that it is the conventionally good people—the faithful Catholics and Protestants, the ethical bourgeois citizens, the monks and nuns—who seem to have been most ready to ascribe witchcraft to other persons living on the fringes of their communities. These good people are most apt to repress the evil tendencies within themselves and to pretend that fate does not exist, and therefore, they are most likely to project their unacceptable urges on to other persons. Thus, goodness without the humility that John Bunyan expressed on seeing a condemned mortal being taken to the gallows, “There but for the grace of God go I,” can itself lead to evil. Whenever I hear the customary platitudes “I love everyone” or “I have no enemies” or “Illness does not exist since God is spirit,” I sigh and find myself wondering: Which aspect of destiny is the person repressing? Where will the projected energy rear its destructive head?” “Very little is more worth our time than understanding the talent of Substance. A bee, a living bee, at the windowglass, trying to get out, doomed, it cannot understand,” Stan Rice Untitled Poem from Pig’s Progress (1976). #RandolphHarris 14 of 14