In another conversation with my son, this time about our experience at Colchester Castle and having lived in a house that had connections to the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, I found myself thinking about this and the modern times we live in. And how, again, there are parallels.
The witchcraft ‘craze’ that swept Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries cost the lives of many, mostly women. Historians argue about how and why it started so abruptly and, equally as abruptly, disappeared, but I’ve always felt it was one of those instances where the beliefs of the bottom perfectly met the needs of the top and so became something that they could unite over.
King James VI/I (Scotland and England), for example, was convinced of the Divine Right of Kings perhaps more than any other Scottish/English monarch before him which led him to be more absolutist than perhaps any other monarch. It was similar to that of Louis XIV of France who held to the belief of absolutism in monarchy. That, in essence, kings were the secular choice of God, as the Pope (in the Catholic religion) was the spiritual choice of God. For the Protestant James VI/I, as the Head of the Church, he was God’s choice in both instances. End of. And he felt the need to stamp that authority on his population. Although Louis XIV didn’t suffer the same fate as Louis XVI, and while he is known as the Sun King, there was a lot of unrest in France around his rule from economic to religious strife but he, too, was determined to stamp his absolutism on his population. Similarly, the latter two centuries of the Inquisition (especially Spanish and Italian) were focused on stamping in doctrinal uniformity and stamping out Protestantism.
In essence, the elite wanted to reinforce their power and intended to pursue it relentlessly.
So, in many respects, the stage was well set for James’ treatise Demonologie which talked about the scourge of witches and witchcraft with a fundamental tenet that witchcraft was treason because it threatened the divinity of the King as it involved the worship of the devil and not of the King and God. Whether he truly believed what he wrote is likely up for debate which I’m not going to go into here. Suffice it to say, his work created a scapegoat. The distraction from all the ills of the lives of the ordinary person of which there were many. The problems that plague, crop failure, religious uncertainty, economic troubles etc created. You could point a finger at someone now. The witch. Usually the unmarried/widowed woman in the village who was possibly a homeopathic healer who you normally turned to and now turned against. Because invariably, she had no one to back her up. She was usually childless, had no family around her and so was an incredibly easy target. A scapegoat that was replicated across Europe and reached the shores of the US.
Remind you of anyone?
There’s a lot going wrong in the world at the moment. Nature is turning her anger on us in the form of natural disasters, and we are aiding and abetting it by destroying the only planet in the habitable zone’s ability to support human life. The global economy is in turmoil largely because of decisions made in 2008/09 such as Quantitative Easing where there was no plan on how and when to stop and which was exacerbated by the meltdown of 2020. And we have no idea how to recover from it. Western hegemony is declining rapidly but the western leaders are no longer strong enough, strategic enough or have enough backbone to arrest the decline. New powers are emerging – India, for example – and the west is terrified (I’m not saying their emergence is wrong for a moment, it’s the change that is being resisted). And we have a handful of people thinking it is their God-given right to make more money than anyone will ever need, to keep the population subjugated and to wreck the environment. Then we have complicit governments who allow the very rich to avoid tax along with the large corporations but heap the taxes on the rest of the population with very little obvious advantage – this isn’t a call for a wealth tax; it’s a call to close all the loopholes for avoidance which is basically legal evasion.
What leader in their right mind wants populations to put all that together? What would the impact be if they did? Civil war? Significant change in the way the countries are operated and run?
Where on earth could the scapegoat be?
It occurred to me that illegal immigrants are the new witchcraft trials. They are the distraction being created to keep us all looking somewhere else while the so-called elite shape the world in a way that suits them, not the majority. I know this sounds conspiracy-theorist but isn’t it strange how the western world appears to be so focused on illegal immigration? Look at the US, look at Europe. Convulsed by it. It’s on our news, in the papers, lighting up social media. The truths that are manipulated to be more sensational than they really are. This is all exacerbated by spineless governments unable to call out reprehensible behaviour on an even and fair basis, thereby convincing people there is something to be more scared of than there is. While in the background you have billionaires and large corporations running rampant, generating more wealth for themselves while not allowing it to trickle down in any meaningful sense.
I remember just after the first lockdown I saw a post on X where someone was complaining that sales of Veuve and Ferraris were going through the roof. The poster was upset by the conspicuous consumption; I just saw that jobs were being created and secured after a very uncertain time, and I still hold to that. But when you think about the likes of Bezos who wants to shut down an historic city like Venice for his three-day wedding, you know things have gotten out of hand. That is when wealth tips into greed. When Musk essentially bribes the Board of Tesla to pay him $1tn, that is also when wealth tips into greed. And when these people are not helping even their own employees – we all heard about the layoffs in Tesla when Musk was getting a pay rise, and we all have heard the horror stories of the workers in the Amazon warehouses. Make your money by all means, but not off the pain and misery of the people helping you rake in that wealth. We all have a duty to act in service of our communities, the multiple communities that we operate in, and the Musks and Bezos’ of this world are no exception.
We are being distracted from the real problems in the world – rampant greed, corruption and the degradation of our planet to support humanity in the process. We are arguing amongst ourselves about, really, the most ridiculous things. Why is a family spat amongst the Beckhams headline news for God’s sake and being raked over endlessly? Why are we tearing ourselves apart over gender issues? Why are we allowing our institutions of research, learning and debate, the bastions of free speech, to become places of hatred, recrimination and censorship where dubious funders are controlling the narrative?
The witchcraft craze was, in part, a very convenient way for the elite to secure their power. To put a stranglehold over the people and impose beliefs and ideas because people were distracted by the fear of the witch either being a victim of one or being accused of being one. Now, we are distracted by the fear of the illegal immigrant amongst other things so that the so-called elite can secure their wealth and get their hands on the earth’s resources.
I say it’s time to stop being distracted, call out what we are seeing and peacefully demand change.
Let’s not be distracted anymore. Let’s open our eyes and focus our attention where it’s really needed. Then, Trump won’t feel he can talk about Greenland and Canada the way he does. Then, these resource-destroying data centres will be questioned. Roads being built on sacred land can be stopped. Fights outside hotels can be averted. Free and open speech can be enabled again. And those who would seek to destroy a way of life we are all entitled to – a free one – will be thwarted.
Louisa Simpson 