Glenn Wm. Shuck⁠Rice University

“ By constantly rooting out vestiges of objectified power, one might yet approach a polity that emanates from free individuals, a limit condition re-negotiated in every moment across time and space not allowing for the development of harmful absolutes. ”

“ More traditional models use an opposite approach, seeking to transform individuals in an objective, “top-down” technique, disciplining subjectivities into conformity with the “norm.” This is precisely what Wiccans resist when they appropriate the Burning Times mythology. Call it patriarchy, bureaucracy, capitalism, or whichever label one prefers, it represents the forced assimilation of individuals into an economy that circumscribes meaningful dissent and individual difference. ”

“ Consumers can, however, use fictions to resist power by producing “anti-stories” (1984: 106-7) . Anti-stories open up new spaces for expression, whereas “rumors totalize” (1984: 107) . In this sense, the Wiccan myth of the “Burning Times,” along with contemporary ritual and practice, serves as an anti-text - a construction of la perruque designed to open up alternative spaces.
[17] De Certeau describes a victory of the anti-text over the totalizing discourse of a culture. ”

“ But if you retell the horror without creating the dark anew, you feed it. You do not break the mold. We need to dream the dark as process, and dream the dark as change, to create the dark in a new image, because the dark creates us (Starhawk: xxviii) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ Purkiss’ reading is not necessarily incorrect, at least in its scope, but it does reduce Wicca to only one of its aspects, what she calls the radical feminist one. While the feminist aspect looms large in contemporary readings of the Burning Times, it is related to a larger phenomenon. “Witches” were not only healing women, they also included the elderly, infirm, widowed, mysterious, or the politically and geographically unfortunate, if one uses Boyer and Nissenbaum’s research on Salem Village as a guide. ”

“ De Certeau’s tactics, while opening a limited space for resistance, do not totally favor the ethics of self-transformation so prominent within Wiccan discourse. For Wiccans, resistance also involves a creative aspect, one that critics like Purkiss overlook. Just because Wiccans have thus far failed - if that is the proper term - to develop a centralized movement does not mean their readings of the Burning Times lead only to feelings of victimization. ”

“ For Wiccans, transformation begins with individuals and extends outward to social structures. This method seeks to free itself from the “disciplinary” models that characterize contemporary social discourse, instead preferring what Foucault calls the ancient Stoic approach - a means of self-transformation that records incongruities and lapses only to help the individual improve herself or himself, rather than formulate punishment. ”

“ One might object that the individuality and diffuse nature of this population would make it difficult to generalize, but the indisputable commonality they share seems to be a focus on self-development and celebrating individual differences. ”

“ 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 temptation always exists to reify the movement into a “PC Paganism,” or an externally imposed morality that undermines the delicate process of negotiating an ethics of community between free subjects. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, and take hold of its power and appropriate it. ”

“ Through the exploration of the early-modern period, Wiccans also seek to explore the possibility that individuals, or subjectivities, might once again carve out alternative spaces within society where they might practice self-transformation unmolested by authorities. ”

“ Contemporary American Wicca encompasses a diverse group of Pagan practitioners, who call upon ancient pre-Christian and Native American mythologies, along with developments in the Western Spiritualist tradition, to construct novel religious formations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They question a movement that allows itself to be crippled by an historical narrative, especially a false one that can only support a permanent status of victimhood. This is the position of historian Diane Purkiss. Purkiss not only misinterprets the nature of the mythology, but also narrows the story itself. [3] She writes:
Once upon a time there was a woman who lived on the edge of a village. ”

“ The creation of this type of alternative community, one that resists the pressures to normalize behavior and institutionalize forms, remains an idealistic process, however, as Sarah Pike’s work on Neo-Pagan festivals demonstrates. ”