2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting

The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World
By John Demos
Viking; 318 pp.

The Gist:
Witch-hunt. The phrase immediately brings two incidents to mind: the Salem trials of 1692 and the McCarthy hearings of the 1950's. But, as early American scholar Demos writes in his comprehensive history, there was so much more. Sixteenth-century Europe, seventeenth-century New England, 1980's America—each period had its own unique brand of fear-mongering, accusation, and persecution. The best that can be said now is that more recent "witch-hunts" no longer subject people to torture and death, only grievous embarrassment and occasional imprisonment.

Highlight Reel:
1. On the insular nature of witch-hunting.: "While the goal for all is separation from a despised 'other,' witch-hunting alone finds the other within its own ranks. The Jew, the black, and the ethnic opposite exist, in some fundamental sense, 'on the outside'...The witch, by contrast, is discovered within the host community."

2. On the inherent sexism of witch-hunting: "For witch-hunting was, and is, a cross-cultural, transhistorical phenomenon—an attacker, a killer, of women almost everywhere...Witchcraft embodies, in each and every one of its disparate settings, a basic impulse of misogyny—a fear, and a hatred, of women so generalized that it crosses virtually all boundaries."

3. From a Swedish handbook brought over to the New World: "A cross should be cut into a broom to prevent witches from riding on it...A psalm-book should be placed below the head of the newly-born child to prevent its being exchanged for a changeling (or elf-child) by the evil spirits...A little of each course from the Christmas table should be taken on Christmas morning and given to the cattle to preserve them against witchcraft."

4. On what Demos considers to be the only real witch-hunt since colonial days, the child sex-abuse crisis of the 1980's: "The Bakersfield case emerged during the spring and summer of 1982...Indeed, one person, a 37-year old grandmother, previously diagnosed by psychiatrists as paranoid and delusional, was the source of all the initial accusations...The upshot was a trial in May 1984—and the conviction of four defendants, each of whom received a sentence of 240 years in prison. From this point on, events mushroomed astoundingly. Soon investigators had identified no fewer than eight supposed sex rings in and around Bakersfield, involving hundreds of suspects. Moreover, Satanism was added to the rapidly fermenting mix; new charges included not only child rape, sodomy, and pornographic filmmaking, but also the ritual killing of infants and animals—plus black candles, strange disguises, and other such accoutrements of Devil worship.

The Lowdown: It's hard to deny the scope and depth and Demos' knowledge on the topic. As he writes, "This book is the end product of an almost half-century engagement with witchcraft study." Yet, the academic in him is in full effect, and as hard as Demos tries to gussy up his dry prose with moving tales of elderly women and eccentric outcasts falsely accused, he can't escape himself. A well-researched cultural history, but cold as a witch's teat.

The Verdict: Skim