Witches Feminism and the Fall of the West Read online

  Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West

  Edward Dutton

  © 2021 by Edward Dutton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher.

  Radix & Washington Summit Publishers

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  hardback: 978-1-59368-078-7

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  Printed in the United States of America

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  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Dr. Bruce Charlton for his valuable advice on developing this book and for his many important ideas on its subject matter. I would also like to thank Professor Guy Madison for reading through and commenting on earlier versions of this manuscript. Mr. Richard Spencer, Mr. Nils Wegner, and Ms. CK edited the work and prepared it for press, and Mrs. J. LeDarc designed the cover. I’m grateful to all of them.

  I was inspired with the idea that modern feminists are the descendants of Early Modern witches by a comment by the Internet content creator Mrs. Robyn Riley. I would like to thank her for her thought-provoking interviews. I would like to thank all of my followers on my Internet channel, The Jolly Heretic, for their stimulating suggestions and, in particular, John Oliver Allen Rayner-Hilles, Esq. I would also like to thank Professor Ray Blanchard who gave me a very helpful interview.

  This book mainly developed out of an earlier project entitled “The Taming of the Gene” which was funded by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, I wish to thank them for their financial support. The development of the ideas herein has benefited from discussions with Dr Michael Woodley of Menie, so I would like to acknowledge my intellectual debt to him. Parts of this book have previously appeared in: At Our Wits’ End by myself and Michael Woodley of Menie and in my books How to Judge People By What They Look Like, The Silent Rape Epidemic; “The Victorian Spinster and the Rise of Feminism” in Family Tree (July 2013), and Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles (In Press), “Early Modern Witches and Demonic Sexual Fantasies: An Evolutionary Perspective” in Mankind Quarterly.

  Edward Dutton

  April 25th, 2021

  Oulu, Finland

  Witchcraft, and Witches, have been, and are, the former part is clearly proved by the Scriptures, and the last by daily experience . . .

  King James VI of Scotland

  Demonology, 1597.

  Once Upon a Time...

  Introduction

  We begin with a folktale. Once upon a time, there were peoples known as the Europeans. We inhabited a world that was cold and harsh, and our various bands battled for survival and dominance. The groups that won out were the best suited to the struggle: bonded to one another and hostile towards outsiders. We were spirited, fertile, and hardy, as this was God’s will. Soundness of body and soundness of mind went together. We lived lives of toil, even tragedy, but we reached the pinnacle of health, intelligence, and organization. We spun a connecting thread between ancestor and offspring.

  Sometimes, though, the witches would come around. When they did, they were persecuted with a vengeance. The witches poisoned everything they touched. They formed communities apart. They disobeyed God with their spells, magic healing, and lives away from men. These women bore marks that announced them as unholy. A person’s face can tell you quite a bit about her soul: Monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. Witches were at the bottom of society because that is where they belonged. Upright people rose to the top.

  The Industrial Revolution, with all its marvels, changed everything. In 1800, half of all those born died as children; two centuries later, almost none did. More and more people who would not have survived in the old times walked among us. They were mistakes made flesh. They no longer uplifted the established rules; they endlessly criticized and undermined them, like the witches of yore. Unwell in body and mind, they were, at best, selfish and impulsive; at worst, they promoted depression and despair.

  Some of these villains were born into society’s highest ranks, or rose there due to their cleverness. The really spiteful ones advocated for ideas that were catastrophic. Worse still, people listened to them, since most are born to obey. The nature of our communities changed, including our outposts and colonies around the world. We all went mad, you could say—everyone, except those who were naturally resistant or too slow to conform. Deviancy became the norm; patriarchy was overturned. Those who were brightest were the first to accept the new religion, as they could talk themselves into anything. They even talked themselves into having small families or no children at all.

  These new witches lived out in the open and were even celebrated. So many women were taken in by their spells: they behaved like men; they cared about careers more than children; they raised boys as girls. Even men listened to the witches. Our societies were feminized, though that didn’t mean they became kinder and gentler. The persecuted became the persecutors, the judged became judges, the last came first. Everything was out of joint.

  These are dizzying times . . . but nothing lasts forever. Those susceptible to the witches’ spells are cursed with barrenness; those who are religious still multiply. We Europeans thus stand at a fork in the road. Some say that the children will bring about a revival of the old ways, though in a population that is much dimmer than in previous times. Some see a civil war or breakdown over the horizon. Others warn of a return to the harsh conditions of the past. Whichever way destiny takes us, the witches, and those under their spell, are not long for this world.

  u

  This book, I’m afraid, won’t answer the question of whether we will live happily—or unhappily—ever after. That will be the subject of future writing. But it is an attempt to tell a story about European evolution, how it was affected by religion, climate change, and the industrial revolution. In particular, it’s a story of how the figure of the “witch” fits in to all this—how she went from being persecuted and despised to acting as a leader and “bad conscience” of postmodern society. In both cases, witches were not the stuff of nightmare or fantasy; they were all too real. And they impacted people and society in ways that have previously been misunderstood.

  The Wicked Witch

  The archetype of the “witch” is burnt deep into the European psyche, recurring again and again in folklore, fairytale, and fantasy. The old hag who lives alone in a spooky cottage on the edge of the village with a black cat: she is wicked, uses magic spells to achieve her diabolical ends, and she is to be avoided at all costs. Until the 18th century, many adults, in rural England for example, genuinely believed in the power of witches, to the extent that people accused of witchcraft could be put on trial and executed. Between 1482 and 1782, up to 50,000 people were executed for witchcraft across Europe.1 This last happened in Britain, in Dornoch, in the Scottish Highlands, in 1722. Janet Horne, an elderly woman, was found guilty of having used her deformed daughter as a pony upon which to ride to the Devil. Horne was stripped, covered in
tar, paraded down the High Street in a barrel, garroted, and burnt.2

  Western adults do not generally believe in witches anymore. But the historical significance of witches is attested to by the way in which adults pass on the folk memory of them to their children through fairytales: Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and many more. This is significant, because fairytales are more than just interesting bedtime stories. Evolutionary psychologists, those who study the evolution of the human mind, generally agree with American evolution-focused literary scholar Joseph Carroll that a vital component of fairytales is “transmitting practical information on such adaptively important matters as resource acquisition, predator avoidance, and social interaction.”3 According to American evolutionary psychologist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, literature of this kind, as well as the oral tradition that precedes it, should be understood as an “information acquisition strategy.” Little Red Riding Hood , for instance, “packs a double emotional wallop by combining our evolved fear of being harmed by animals with our evolved fear of being harmed by strangers.”4 Critics of this theory have asked how fairytales can possibly be more adaptive than simply telling children to stay away from strangers.5 Presumably, the child is better able to absorb this crucial, adaptive information due to the information being presented as an escapist tale, with its assorted surreal elements. This is consistent with evidence that children are better able to imbibe information (that is, better able to learn) if it is presented together with imagination-stimulating fantasy elements than if it is simply explained in a matter-of-fact way.6 Also, these stories have been vetted across generations to be maximally informative and engaging, meaning they are likely to be very useful guides to life, including guides to how to deal with strangers. And this raises the question of what kinds of strangers, in particular, you should avoid. Fairy tales consistently provide children with the answer: Witches.

  Roald Dahl: The Sage of Great Missenden

  As children grow older, their parents stop reading them fairy tales, and place them in the hands of children’s authors, whom the children eventually start reading themselves. The witch archetype in fairy tales has been developed by children’s authors, and most obviously by Roald Dahl (1916-1990) in his 1983 novel The Witches. In this novel, the Norwegian grandmother of the unnamed boy, who is the eye of the story, stresses that witches are nothing like the portrayal in books:

  “In fairytales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broom sticks.

  But this is not a fairytale. This is about REAL WITCHES.

  The most important thing you should know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next.

  REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes, and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS.

  That is why they are so hard to catch”7

  Dahl, who was raised in Wales but had Norwegian parents, presents his child readers with the tantalizing possibility that real witches—who despise children with “a red-hot sizzling hatred” and who constantly plot to “do away with them, one by one”8—are real and live among us. There is a kind of witch-led conspiracy to destroy children—and thus wipe out humanity itself—and Dahl offers these youngsters a dose of truth, such that they can be aware of the conspiracy and fight against it with every ounce of courage within them. They are like the character in the film The Matrix (1999), who eschews the comfortable “Blue Pill” and instead takes the “Red Pill,” permitting him to see reality as it really is.9 And it’s a very good thing that they do take Roald Dahl’s “Red Pill,” because as we will see, he was right. Witches are real. Witches do indeed wear “ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women.” It is true that witches live in ordinary houses and do ordinary jobs. And they are focused on wiping out children, and thus wiping out humanity itself.

  Roald Dahl—who wrote most of his books in his shed in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire in southern England—was known for his frequent re-working of fairytales.10 Literary scholars have argued that Dahl’s novels, such as BFG, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda, tend to have very similar themes to those found in fairytales: children who are abused by their step-families or children who struggle due to lack of food.11 Indeed, Dahl’s fascination with fairytales was such that one of his books was a comical and macabre reworking of them entitled Revolting Rhymes.12 There are also frequent allusions to fairytale imagery in Dahl’s descriptions of characters. Miss Trunchbull, Matilda’s demonic headmistress, is described as the “Prince of Darkness, the foul serpent, the fiery dragon.” Matilda even seems to better understand herself—a precocious, sensitive schoolgirl with degenerate parents—through reading fairytales. Fairy tales help Matilda recognize things about her own situation in life and crystallize in her mind that it is up to her to rescue her beloved teacher, Miss Honey, from the perilous situation she finds herself in.13

  Perhaps Dahl’s focus on the fairytale explains his success. It means that Dahl’s books strike a chord in a way in which they otherwise would not. Beneath the humor and surrealism, Dahl’s novels deal with cutting, poignant, and serious issues. And surely, there could be nothing more serious than the presence in Western countries of an intricate coven of witches, who aim to hurt children physically and mentally, and ultimately to persuade society as a whole to go barren. For, as we will see, this is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today.

  The Rise of the Witch

  We are living in a society that is increasingly dominated by witches. These witches do not fly on broom sticks, nor do they wear pointed hats. They also do not conform to all five of the specific components of the European witch, as set out by English historian Ronald Hutton.14 In this taxonomy, witches who harmed their neighbors were part of a witching tradition via inheritance, initiation, or spontaneous manifestation. They were despised by the public, had made a pact with the Devil, and incited violent resistance from the community. They are, however, quite like witches in far deeper and more important ways. Witches were, in a sense, proto-feminists: they indirectly promoted greater equality between the sexes, by being financially independent, practicing folk magic, and thus competing with the patriarchal religion, or acting in ways which were not consistent with patriarchal norms.15 And they have ideological descendants today, in the form of actual feminists.

  I will show that, in general, the kind of people who were executed for witchcraft in Europe up until the 18th century were of a very specific type. They were unmarried old women who acted to undermine the patriarchal religion of the period. In doing so, they acted to undermine a key aspect of that religion, which was to promote the genetic fitness of the population in order to maximize the probability that the population would pass on its genes. As I will show, modern feminists do the same. The religion these witches undermined was focused on ensuring that its adherents won the battle of what is called “group selection” with other rival groups under pre-Industrial conditions of harsh, Darwinian selection. “Group selection,” which we will explore in more detail below, refers to two or more groups, members of which are genetically related to each other, fighting it out for limited resources. The group that is more adapted to this wins the struggle. Religion, we will see, was trying to ensure that its adherents were optimally adapted to the conditions they faced, such that they were successful in procreating. It did this, as all surviving religions have done, by identifying adaptive behavior and prescribing that behavior as the will of God, such that it was even more likely to be pursued. Groups that were highly internally cooperative and that fought valiantly against outsiders were more likely to triumph in the battle of group selection, so religion promoted such behavior as the will of God. Crucially, groups were more likely to be internally cooperative if they were patriarchal, if females were under male control. This is because if females were controlled by males, then males could be more certain that they weren’t bein
g cuckolded, reducing paternity anxiety. This would, in turn, reduce the need to invest energy in mate-guarding and it would lessen inter-male conflict, thus elevating the cooperativeness necessary to win the battle of group selection. Accordingly, a patriarchal system was also made the will of God. In conditions of intense group selection, of the kind that were seen in Europe in the 17th century when the continent was increasingly cold and over-populated, religiousness, and thus patriarchal religiousness, were strongly selected for.

  The result was a period in which supposed witches were intensely persecuted. They were persecuted because, as widowed or unmarried old women, they implicitly undermine systems of male control. And those who were targeted combined this with other traits, such as being physically unattractive and even having a “Witch’s Mark,” such as a superfluous nipple or some other birth defect. I will show that such traits are more common among feminists than among non-feminists. This was important because religion also promoted physiognomy—the idea that you can infer psychology from a person’s appearance—as the will of God. And, incredible as it may seem to some readers, they seemingly did this because it was adaptive to believe in physiognomy. There is a considerable body of empirical evidence behind it, as I will demonstrate. Those who have mutations of the body are very likely to have mutations of the mind, leading to ways of thinking that are fitness-damaging. Depression, for example, can spread, contagiously, from one person to another, making even those who are not genetically disposed to depression more likely to be depressed and thus act maladaptively, such as by committing suicide.16 Consequently, the removal of witches, based on what they looked like, was for the good of the group.

  We will also see that witches tended to be anti-social, undermining group cohesion under conditions in which group cohesion was vital, and this will also be demonstrated to be true of modern feminists. Witches were often accused of abusing children and particularly of infanticide and carrying out abortions. Many of them worked as healers and, in doing so, actually practiced “folk magic,” establishing themselves as a direct rival to the adaptive, patriarchal religion. So, witches were persecuted, I will show, in order to ensure that the group triumphed in the war of group selection.