Are We Still Hunting Witches?

Being lazy and tired, I decided to hang out a few more minutes in bed. The t.v. is at the foot of the bed. What better way to sleep while awake than to turn on the tube?

It was a film. After all, that is the reason I switched to satellite. Thousands of films-movies galore-and no commercials. Unfortunately, most of the films are grade B or C or even D and are played again and again and again.

This one was a film based on a Dean Koontz novel called "Servant of " something. With satellite you have the advantage of getting a summary of a film. This one had a description something like this: Detective ends up protecting young boy against the designs of a cult leader who thinks the boy is the anti-Christ and must be killed.

At last, I thought, a film that deals with this "devil" theme in a new way. At last we will be treated to a film that portrays some of the craziness of this whole "possession" phenomenon.

For about thirty years moviegoers have been treated to some form of devil film after another. The grandaddy of all such recent films was the Exorcist which, after twenty-six years, has been re-released.

The story of the Exorcist is a prototype. An innocent twelve year old girl is possessed by the Devil. (Ever wonder why the Devil never goes after grizzled old farts, like me? It's always someone innocent and pure.)

This beautiful, innocent child (played by Linda Blair who later had to combat her own real hard drug demons) becomes the voice of evil. Only a priest can save her. Not a rabbi, not a minister, not even a good intentioned agnostic and certainly not an atheist. Only a priest can save her. And a priest does save her. The forces of good triumph, the possessed child stops pissing on the floor, stops barfing across the room, stops speaking like Mercedes McCambridge and stops swirling her head around on its axis. The priest dies of course. But good in the form of an organized Church, triumphs.

This has become a film habit. After the Exorcist came three other Exorcist movies and various Omen movies. Again the Devil takes hold of an innocent who only can be saved by the Church.

Funny thing about all these movies is their common theme: Good in the form of a priest triumphs over the devil and evil in the form of a possessed innocent. Of course, the films utilize ever more sophisticated technology to generate an array of gurgles, horrific glowing eyes, horrific demons, slimy snakes with human faces, slimy humans with snake like faces. Actually, the visualization of evil hasn't really progressed very far since the Middle Ages. Most of these nightmarish demons look like they had been lifted from the battlements of Notre Dame Cathedral. And Bruegel was far more imaginative in picturing the horrors of hell.

It is all very medieval, this Manichean struggle between good and evil, this war between the servants of the Devil and the servants of the Church. It is very medieval.

So let's, as All Smith used to say, look at the record. During a four hundred year period in Europe up to three million people, mostly women, were killed as witches. It received the full fledged support of the Church in 1231 as Pope Gregory IX created the papal inquisition for the apprehension and trial of heretics. To add a little more spice to the procedure, Pope Innocent IV, in 1252, sanctioned the use of torture to extract confessions from suspected evil doers. Two and a half centuries later, Pope Sixtus IV in 1478, granted the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain the autonomy of their own inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition under the leadership of the Inspector General, Tomás de Torquemada. His was a sweeping exorcism. He presided over the burning of over 2,000 people at the stake. And, the same year that Columbus sailed for North American continent, Torquemada achieved the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

The Inquisition functioned as the prosecutor, judge and jury. In most of the cases, the charges included either possession by the Devil or a pact with the Devil. The princes of the Church conjured images of demons, succubae, incubi, and the whole host of devilish associates.

This exorcising of evil was all very scholarly. In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII (yet another Innocent) apparently was sexually fearful. Pope Innocent had become known for giving his illegitimate children sumptuous Vatican weddings. However, he had come to fear the influence of witches. Perhaps it was just aging. Viagra wasn't around. And, a common accusation against witches was that they stole the penises of men and kept them in boxes, rendering the unfortunate male impotent. In any event, Innocent appointed two German Dominicans, Jacov Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer as Inquisitors into witchcraft. The good Pope said that this was necessary because there were reports that in the dioceses of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Salzburg, many women were engaging in sorcery "to make the conjugal act impossible". Sex, witchcraft and exorcism-sounds like a classic Hollywood formula.

In any event, these witch hunters produced a book, Malleus Malificorum or Hammer of Evil. There was a sexual hysteria inherent in these early exorcists. For them, any woman could be accused of causing impotence and therefore a witch. Sexuality, itself, was considered to be evil and women its main force. In accordance with Church doctrines, unbaptised babies were instruments of the Devil. Therefore, midwives became a prime target for the witch hunters as these were the women who first had contact with the infant. And, finally, these astute Dominicans, developed a variety of methods by which The evil spirit could be exorcised.

Now, as we enter the third millennium, the spirit of Torquemada lives. What in heaven's name is it all about? How can the darkest superstitions of the Dark Ages find success at our cinematic box offices? First is fear.Without fear there is no superstition. In fact, without fear there is no hate. Second, there is a kind of righteousness. This is a temporary feeling of security that comes when we see evil outside of ourselves. [Over time I have found that the more righteous I feel, the more fearful and full of it, I am].

What incredible things we humans can do when we place evil outside of ourselves. And Christianity has no monopoly on righteousness-no exclusive claim to the definition of evil. In the fifteen years following World War I, most Germans lived in fear and powerlessness. The Allied Powers had broken the back of the German economy. A depression swept across Europe. And a little housepainter rallied a nation in fear-a people feeling powerless-to destroy the external evils:

Jews, Communists, Gypsies. The Nazis simply had to see these as evil to destroy millions, efficiently.

Wilhelm Reich, a pioneer, with Freud and Jung, of modern psychiatry once wrote a book on the Mass Psychology of Fascism. He knew it well as he fled his homeland while the Nazi's stamped out all opposition.For Reich, the real evil of Nazism as that it externalized evil. For the Nazis, evil was elsewhere-the Jews, the Communists, the gypsies.

How many Armenians did the Turks massacre in 1915? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Or take Rwanda. What does it take to hack your neighbor, his wife and children to death? What does it take to massacre entire villages? All you need is God on your side and the Devil on your neighbor's. That's all. Oh yes and there is Bosnia. Serbians massacring Muslim men, women and children. Croats killing Serbs. What a carnage in the name of God-in the name of destroying evil.

What does it take to machine gun an eleven year old Palestinian boy because he was breaking a curfew imposed by an invading Israeli army? Just a view of a faceless, evil enemy.What does it take for a Palistinian to walk into a Seder and explode himself as well as Israeli women and children? Just a view of a faceless, evil enemy.Last February in Gujarat, India, Hindu mobs murdered as many as two thousand Muslim men, women and children. In the name of God! What does it take for a Hindu man to set fire to a Muslim man or a Muslim man to bludgeon a Hindu child? God on your side and evil on the other.

What does it take to capture a passenger plane, butcher a couple of stewardesses and plunge the plane into buildings where thousands of people worked? All you need is the conviction that God is on your side and evil on the other side.

As long as people project evil outside of themselves they are capable of unimaginable atrocities. From the auto da fé of Inquisition Spain to the smoldering ovens of Auschwitz to the flames of September 11, 2001-ashes are the legacy of men dedicated to eradicating evil. These men have wrought unspeakable horror.

As long as we see evil outside of ourselves, we lose our humanity. As long as we project our own fears and darkness externally we become righteous robots.

And robots can be manipulated. People in power have used the fear and threat of evil for ages. Us. And Them. Us and Them. Us and Them. A barbaric concept dating from the dawn of civilization. Who knows? Maybe once upon a time in our ancient history the tribe was "Us". Everyone else was "Them". Maybe once upon a time when food was scarce, the very survival of the tribe meant demonizing all others. All others were a threat. All others were enemies. All others were "Them". Us against Them. The more fear, the easier to manipulate.

It is about fear. It is about the fear of evil that can take over an innocent child and turn him into a monster. Let's go back to that Dean Koontz movie. The fundamentalist leader is out to kill a nine-year-old boy who she thinks is the anti-Christ. Throughout the movie she sends her minions to kill the child. Thank goodness he is saved by a conscientious detective. Thank goodness? Whoops! Turns out that the little boy really is the anti-Christ. And, at the end, evil has triumphed, the little bugger has managed to destroy all of his enemies and his friend the detective (because he refused to be his step-dad).

What a twist! Or is it? There still is the devil. This time he is in the shape of a little boy who, presumably, would be better off burned at the stake or at least strangled. Talk about family values!

It seems strange but we are caught in a time warp. Do people really believe that there are demons out there ready to leap into our bodies and souls and take possession of us? Do we really believe that evil lies outside of us?

The solution was as simple as it was for the inquisitors: you just eliminated the evils. Exterminate them. This was the ultimate exorcism.

How many millions of people have died because others saw them as evil? Pardon me if all this talk of "evil" that we hear these days makes me nervous. Perhaps we have become more sophisticated since the Fifteenth Century. Then, the righteous could destroy evil one by one at the stakes. Today, high tech weaponry can incinerate as many people in one second as it took Torquemada and his Inquisition years to kill.

This is 2003 not 1493. There are no devils outside of ourselves. There is no darkness out there. If we confront our demons-if we can accept that every human being has dark and light-then, perhaps, we can avoid a Twenty-First Century high tech Inquisition and Holocaust.

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
Adolf Hitler

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