Before Good and Evil
Sometimes I’ll double up on books and have a fiction and nonfiction title going at the same time. They’re each a palate cleanser for the other. So, alongside A Child Alone With Strangers, I’m reading Jeffrey Burton Russell’s A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans.
I like it when books challenge my worldview by offering a different perspective on history. I’m not a fan of the dry anthropological approach, but hey, you can’t have it all. There’s some interesting stuff buried beneath all that academic prose.
Before the religious dualism of Zoroastrianism, which would later influence Abrahamic thought, many religions were polytheistic and understood the divine in less rigidly moral terms. The strict dichotomy between good and evil didn’t exist as we understand it today. Those traits could coexist within the same deity or spirit; they were more a function of action than a blanket characteristic.
Did a ritual help crops grow? It was good. Did it unfairly harm another? Well, that would be bad.
So, here in the West, the myriad folk practices and forms of sorcery, today conflated under the umbrella of witchcraft, only became synonymous with diabolism through the spread of Christianity.
The ecclesiastical authorities would never allow for the existence of spirits, forces, or deities outside their strict Judeo-Christian hierarchy. Anything not of “God” was necessarily of the devil.
And so, we can trace the development of a worldview that contributed to the persecution of tens of thousands of people accused of witchcraft, many of whom were tortured or executed.
All of that is interesting in its own right, but what really strikes me is the insidious nature of the strict dualistic Abrahamic paradigm. It’s a mind virus. So many of us were born and raised in it. To view reality any other way requires real effort.
I’m happy to have broken free of it. From the outside, I see the manufactured distinction of saved versus lost as a despicable exercise in othering. It has done irreparable harm in the world.
To me, the folk practices that treated the universe and all life as interconnected, that honored the natural world and community, are far superior to the violent death cults that define too much of our culture today.