A Rad Venus Retro Reading Suggestion

I was late to this book but am now pressing it on practically everyone I speak to. How often can you say that about something? In Defence Of Witches – Why Women Are Still On Trial has hefty subject matter but is so smoothly written and widely referenced that it’s easy to roar through on a kind of biblio-adrenal high.

Written by Franco-Swiss journalist Mona Chollet – chief editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and a triple Taurus – the book covers the current ‘cool witch’ culture, hideous history of the gendercide that is even now often minimized as “the witch panic” or “witch craze” and the ways in which Chollet asserts the same sensibility is still at work today.

This is just from the first chapter:

In 2016, Bruges’ Sint-Janshospitaal museum devoted an exhibition to ‘Bruegel’s Witches’, the Flemish master being among the first painters to take up this theme. On one panel, he listed the names of dozens of the city’s women who were burned as witches in the public square. ‘

Many of Bruges’ inhabitants still bear these surnames and, before visiting the exhibition, they had no idea they could have an ancestor accused of witchcraft,’ the museum’s director commented in the documentary Dans le sillage des sorcières de Bruegel.

This was said with a smile, as if the fact of finding in your family tree an innocent woman murdered on grounds of delusional allegations were a cute little anecdote for dinner-party gossip. And it begs the question: which other mass crime, even one long-past, is it possible to speak of like this – with a smile?

…By wiping out entire families, by inducing a reign of terror and by pitilessly repressing certain behaviours and practices that had come to be seen as unacceptable, the witch-hunts contributed to shaping the world we live in now.

Had they not occurred, we would probably be living in very different societies. They tell us much about choices that were made, about paths that were preferred and those that were condemned. Yet we refuse to confront them directly.

Even when we do accept the truth about this period of history, we go on finding ways to keep our distance from it. For example, we often make the mistake of considering the witch-hunts part of the Middle Ages, which is generally considered a regressive and obscurantist period, nothing to do with us now – yet the most extensive witch-hunts occurred during the Renaissance: they began around 1400 and had become a major phenomenon by 1560.

Executions were still taking place at the end of the eighteenth century – for example, that of Anna Göldi, who was beheaded at Glarus, in Switzerland, in 1782. As Guy Bechtel writes, the witch ‘was a victim of the Moderns, not the Ancients’.

Venus Retrograde is classically a good time to research female history and particularly so when Venus is retrograding back to align with Eris-Persephone plus Lilith over August and Hekate is in Leo till Halloween.

Thoughts?