Taking the Red Pill: On Witches, Conspiracies and Monsters
The Politics of Fantasy (2)
In 1608 King Henry IV of France dispatched the lawyer and state counsellor Pierre de Lancre to investigate reports of witchcraft in the Basque province of Labourd, on the French-Spanish border. These reports initially focussed on confessions from a handful of women in the village of Zugarramurdi, which led de Lancre to conclude that an army of demons had established itself throughout the province.
From his base in the Atlantic coastal town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, de Lancre unleashed a savage reign of terror in response to this demonic ‘invasion’. Hundreds of men, women, and children were arrested, and tortured into extracting confessions or denouncing others, which then resulted in executions.
These confessions tended to describe the usual phenomena that appeared in episodes of this kind. There were orgies whose participants pledged allegiance to Satan; shapeshifting witches who transformed themselves into animals; he-goats and the ritual murders of children; vampirism and the casting of spells to devastate crops and harm people.
Initially at least, the population welcomed de Lancre’s investigation, but public opinion was quickly alienated by the ferocity of the repression, to the point when the entire Basque fishing fleet returned from Newfoundland on hearing what was being done to their women in their absence, and hundreds of Basques were fleeing across the border into Spain to escape de Lancre’s reign of terror.
Finally Henry IV withdrew his counsellor from the province in response to these ‘excesses.’ It’s tempting, for a 21st century reader coming across episodes like this – of which there many in the history of ‘early modern’ Europe - to see them as the product of a vanished world of superstition and religious belief that was gradually brought to an end by the Enlightenment and the dawn of the scientific age etc.
Such representations are not entirely false. Religion and superstition undoubtedly influenced Pierre de Lancre’s assertion that Basque women were especially prone to witchcraft because they ate apples and drank cider.
Did de Lancre really believe such nonsense? On the evidence of his subsequent treatise On the Inconstancy of Wicked Angels and Demons, he certainly did, and so did many of his contemporaries.
But not all of them. On the other side of the border the ‘Spanish’ Inquisition conducted its own parallel investigation into reports of witchcraft in Navarre in 1610, which resulted in the burning of eleven ‘witches’ at a mass auto-da-fe in Logroño in November that year.
Yet the following year another inquisitor conducted his own investigation in and around Zugurramurdi, which concluded that no acts of witchcraft had actually taken place, and that the accused were entirely innocent.
So if religion certainly made it possible to accept grotesque stories of witches, demons, and monsters, even the local religious authorities were also able to reject them.
It’s worth bearing this in mind, because there is a tendency when thinking about progress and modernity, to imagine the history of the modern world as a constantly ascending line, in which humanity became more rational and more logical, and more willing to apply critical thinking in its interpretation of reality.
A cursory look back at the history of the last two hundred years or so makes it clear that there is no such ascendancy, and that the ascending line is much more of a zigzag, in which modernity still bears traces of the ‘pre-enlightened’ past, and that even supposedly advanced democracies based on mass education are as susceptible to fantasy and outbreaks of the irrational as their more superstitious predecessors.
Blue Avians and Winged Bipeds
Consider this conversation, that took place between CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and Jitarth Jadeja, a former member of the Qanon cult, last year:
Cooper: Did you at any time believe that Democrats and high-level Democrats were worshipping Satan, drinking the blood of children?
Jadeja: Anderson, I thought you did that. I would like to apologise for that right now. So I apologise for thinking that you ate babies.
Cooper: But you actually believed that I drank the blood of children?
Jadeja: Yes, I did.
Cooper: Was it something about me that made you think that?
Jadeja: It was because Q specifically mentioned you, and he mentioned you very early on.
Jadetha goes on to list other beliefs that he shared with his fellow QAnon cultists: that Cooper was a robot; that Q was a member of military intelligence, and that the people behind Q were actually a group of ‘fifth dimensional extraterrestial bipedal aliens called ‘Blue Avians’.
We also know that many QAnon believers think that Hilary Clinton and other Democrats ate children during sex orgies in a pizza restaurant, and that Donald Trump is engaged in a cosmic battle against this global paedophile conspiracy. The Labourd conspiracy first emerged in a peripheral village, amongst a group of uneducated and no doubt superstitious women, whereas QAnon has taken root in digital communities in the heart of the most powerful and technologically advanced country on earth.
Historians of the European witch crazes have often wondered why seventeenth century ‘witches’ confessed to the bizarre and improbable crimes attributed to them. Did they actually believe the stories they told in such detail? Were these confessions obtained only under duress? Had these ‘witches’ merely heard stories from other people - including their interrogators - and repeated them?
In some cases these unfortunate women were certainly terrorised into making these confessions, but many of them may well have actually believed that the acts they were accused of or claimed to have witnessed took place – and so did the authorities charged with punishing and eliminating them.
Jitarth Jadeja told Anderson Cooper that he was ‘so far down the conspiracy black hole’ that he was ‘picking whatever narrative he wanted to believe in.’ Both investigators and victims of the seventeenth century European Witch Craze were undoubtedly part of a wider ‘black hole’ in which all kinds of narratives became possible, and which were both a terrifying historical novelty and which also bore traces of older ‘conspiracies.’.
The rituals uncovered by the likes of de Lancre echoed ritual child murder tropes previously associated with antisemitism - just as QAnon allegations of murderous paedophile rituals do now.
Such fantasies reinforced the idea of a virtuous community threatened by an utterly evil enemy that was utterly alien to society and yet also formed a dangerous and toxic presence inside it. Faced with an enemy that threatened the very existence of society, the authorities naturally gave themselves carte blanche to use whatever methods they regarded as necessary to persecute and destroy it, as de Lancre did with such remorseless and unbridled cruelty.
Then, as now, the invocation of an evil enemy also reinforced the notion of the virtuous community, and made it possible for the latter to define and reinforce its values - whether genuine or not - through the way that it imagined its monstrous ‘other’.
As Richard Hofstadter famously observed, this kind of ‘paranoid style’ thinking has been part of what we now call ‘conspiracy theories’ for a long time, from the Illuminati and the Freemasons, through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and right up into the present day.
In a 21st century whose dazzling technological achievements are not necessarily matched by any comparable philosophical and intellectual depth in our understanding of the world, it often seems particularly startling to see ‘modern’ men and women embracing worldviews that are no less bizarre and outlandish than those of seventeenth century Europe.
But we shouldn’t be shocked. If anything, the prevalence of such ‘theories’ has been turbofuelled by new technologies, which marginalise or eliminate the need for critical scrutiny, by driving tales of bipedal ‘Blue Avians’ into credulous minds, which then join together in mutually-reinforcing virtual ‘communities of belief.’
Whether dealing with QAnon’s ‘interactive’ revelations or the more recent ‘Great Reset’ interpretations of the pandemic as a tool for global elite dominance, these ‘modern’ theories share some of the same components of their more superstitious predecessors: a Manichean view of politics and history in which the world is governed by hidden and all-powerful evil forces that can only be interpreted and revealed by prophetic ‘truthtellers’; eschatological possibilities of salvation and deliverance; flexible narrrative possibilities that are able to adapt endlessly to changing circumstances without any awareness of their epistemological contradictions.
Their prevalence demonstrates once again that ‘modern’ societies are not necessarily as smart, as well-educated, or as well-informed as they sometimes think they are. Because history shows us that any society, in certain conditions, can succumb to outbreaks of irrationality and unreason that are always latent.
Often products of cultural and political crises themselves, such outbreaks always have the capacity to produce even worse outcomes, and unless we recognise that this as true of our own era as it was of a peripheral Basque province of seventeenth century France, we may well be unpleasantly surprised by what we are still capable of, just as so many Americans were on January 6 last year.