Page:The Myth of the Burning Times and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary American Wicca.pdf/2



[2] According to Wiccan accounts, the early-modern period in European history, roughly 1450-1700, witnessed the victory of an emerging rationalism, a new ethos which separated people from the Earth and encouraged exploitation of the environment and the colonization of individual bodies, forcing them into restricted economies as productive units. Those who resisted, collectively known as witches, paid an ultimate price. Witches stood for the deeper desires of the human psyche, the freedom to experience powerful emotions and not fear their awesome power (Foucault 1988a: 280-82). It was an experience of liminality, of not only living on the edge of the village, or the heaths, but on the edge of consciousness, living in a larger world than what most knew. Others would even come to witches to seek the wisdom of their journeys without having to embark themselves. But something went horribly wrong on the way to modernity. Purveyors of the emerging scientific-rational world no longer considered liminality desirable and sought to reduce human experience to the empirically verifiable. Those bodies who refused to speak with this new, more rational voice were executed, usually burnt or hanged. The methods for eliminating enemies of the empirical order have since become more elegant and insidious but still exist, ready to re-incorporate the marginal into the social body. This is the world contemporary Wiccans protest, and the Burning Times image provides them with a powerful model for imagining new ways of constructing themselves and their communities.

[3] For Wiccans who uphold the myth of the Burning Times, the early-modern period contains a repository of symbols for organizing their contemporary struggle against oppressive cultural forces. It is not, however, a foundational mythology or a narrative that explains why people must behave a certain way. Rather, modern-day experiences of oppression from the mainstream society have encouraged Wiccans to find historical analogues that might provide a language for contemporary concerns. This is similar to what cultural theorist Edith Wyschogrod refers to as the ficción, or an account written in a heterological sense, defying traditional conceptions of “what happened,” at least from the perspective of mainstream historiography. Wyschogrod writes:


 * By ficciones I mean what fictions become when they take themselves up into the story of their own ontological errancy. Both fact and fiction are transformed when shards of metaphysical history through which they have passed, in a return of the repressed, percolate at the surface of the narrative (32).

Put differently, ficciones do not re-present that which happened in a fact or fiction model, but rather present the kernel of contemporary concerns read through a historical lens, enhancing the affective sensibilities that remain hidden in mainstream historical writing. The ficción is not a lie or a fabrication; it is, rather, an attempt to explore possibilities, discarding that which “could not have been” but retaining that which “could have been” (Wyschogrod: 216). As Wyschogrod demonstrates, this method attempts to avoid the totalizing effect inherent in any attempt to state, “It could only have been thus” (214). Moreover, to question its empirical verifiability on the basis of a totalized reading misses the point of the contemporary discontent it narrates. As such, ficciones attempt to preserve the passionate sense of suffering that mainstream accounts cannot convey.

[4] Wiccans deploy this practice to illustrate the genealogical development of oppression and discriminatory attitudes toward women and other marginalized peoples, much as German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche and French theorist Michel Foucault trace the rise of bureaucratic, objective structures of power in their accounts. Wiccans review a time before their practices seemed “deviant” or “evil,” thereby calling into question the assumptions of mainstream culture that their Journal of Religion & Society