Page:The Myth of the Burning Times and the Politics of Resistance in Contemporary American Wicca.pdf/4

 [7] Although reading Starhawk back into Bruno is a bit risky, it nevertheless represents an effort at achieving an effective narrative, even if the historiography is suspect. This hints at Purkiss’ ultimate concern: she appears to hold history’s prophetic value even higher than Wiccans, which is ironic given her charges. For Purkiss, this kind of play is anathematic in a game of more historical than thou. Purkiss’ real objection appears to lie in her attitude toward difference and Wiccans’ own resistance to social organization.

[8] Purkiss accuses witches of indifference to social ills, engaging in a sort of narcissism. It is here, however, that one finds Purkiss’ chief objection: Wicca, as a movement, has traditionally eschewed reification into formal pressure groups that push for objective, societal changes. Rather, Wiccans have spoken for the individual and her or his relationship to the social structure, a method that has proven efficacious. Most important, however, is that this resistance to reified social movements preserves the difference of individual and smaller forms a polity - not a small achievement in contemporary culture. For Wiccans, this is a major lesson from the Burning Times, the tolerance and preservation of subjectivities against cultural pressures to make them into productive units.

[9] The early-modern period brought these developments concomitant with the employment of “normalizing” pressures. Michel Foucault’s research into the history of madness illustrates this process. Authorities allowed medieval deviants to remain in their particularity, albeit on the margins - literally - of village life. The classical age, as Foucault calls it, instead recognized the productive capacities of bodies and sought to rehabilitate them, or re-incorporate deviants into the social body. This process of institutionalization reversed to flow of forces from an external, coercive one, to an individually operative, inward one. Individuals no longer took pleasure from their peculiarity but instead felt shame and guilt due to their deviance from an externally imposed norm.

[10] One finds similar themes in witchcraft persecution narratives. Gerald Gardner, a major figure in the emergence of modern Wicca, presents prototypical persecutions - usually featuring both torture and execution - in graphic detail. Although Gardner’s uncritical acceptance of anthropologist Margaret Murray’s disputed studies make him a suspect witness for any empirical investigation, his importance in formulating the “Burning Times” mythology cannot be understated. The mythology, at least in abstract terms, narrates the inscription of the emerging order and its “truth” upon the body of marginals, often associated in persecution narratives with the witches’ bodies.

[11] Elaine Scarry discusses the phenomenology of this process. Torture serves several functions, but the first is to eliminate the subject’s “voice” and exterior environment through the inflicting of “blinding pain.” The tormentors aim primarily to destroy whatever the subject was, Journal of Religion & Society