Calls for memorial to Scotland’s tortured and executed witches
“Come senators, congressmen, please hear the call,” wrote Bob Dylan in 1964, in The times they are a-changing.
I was a pre-schooler then, with years ahead before I’d understand his righteous sneer. Now I’ve reached the age where I see that in every generation the times need changing, because structural evil reinvents and revisits itself constantly, in the avatars of ego and power. And lest I point too self-righteous a finger, I’m just as immune to temptations of pride, greed or apathy as in fact we all are. Gxd forgive us if we sit on our even slightly dirty hands while evils rise, and we need to change and be changed.
So those words came to mind today as I read this article. Eventually that madness of persecuting witches ended, replaced by (let’s not delude ourselves) other forms of persecution. This Guardian article points out that misogyny is not yet extinct, although in my lifetime it has been weakened in what still to me seem unbelievable ways. In High School there were four of us girls studying Physics. “So”, the burly Physics teacher said, “we have girls in this class”; and proceeded to hurl a textbook called Physics is Fun at us. Despite his attitude, it was fun, which must surely have disconcerted him. If I might boast for a second, I very naively raised my hand to point out his errors on the blackboard and didn’t understand why he wasn’t grateful. Doctors and scientists, including physicists, are no longer all men.
But my Physics teacher had a point (“you’ll never be a diplomat,” my mother often smilingly told me); my calling to be weird and different has undoubtedly caused me subtle forms of persecution over the years, but I revel in its freedom just as, in all likelihood, my witch sisters of the 17th Century did despite the stigma.
Something more sinister about Bob Dylan’s sleazy congressmen occurred to me today, however, in the labyrinth of language. It was often reported in the transcripts still extant that witches confessed to having “congress with the Devil,” or as we might summarise it, sex with Satan. This seems a truly bizarre admission, when poisoning your neighbour’s cattle might seem a more obvious form of black magic.
I can now see two explanations for these testimonies, perhaps. If a witchwoman is pregnant, who is the father? Misogyny would resist a need to blame men (even today it’s still prostitutes rather than their clients who are shamed by society). So a useful line of interrogation under torture would be the ingenious idea of blaming Satan, who of course is not one of us. Representations of Salem make that connection.
However, the second explanation which occurs to me is a double layer of evil. This second layer underneath persecution is an immeasurable tragic horror; what better language is there to describe rape and sexual abuse than being forced into sex with the devil him self? Perhaps my sisters weren’t ‘confessing to the crime,’ but in pitiful desperation, giving a victim statement. Which led all too terrifyingly to that other abuse of power which today we call victim blaming; as alive as ever, until the voices of we too are impossible to quench.
