Never Again the Burnings? By Donald Michael Kraig We live in a time of social development where we think that although there may be prejudice against Witches, at least the Burning Times are over. I still remember a visit to Europe I made 20 years ago. There I saw a torture museum in Germany and wondered how human beings could have so violated other humans. Only two years ago I visited England and saw a tourist site called, I believe, The London Dungeon, where various torture techniques were pictured using wax dummies. I also remember the disgust and terror I felt when I read a description of the tortures that Witches underwent in Doreen Valiente's book, The ABCs of Witchcraft, Past, Present and Future. The poor women (and men and even animals) had to face horrendous tortures for their confessions to be considered legitimate. The cruelty of thumbscrews (where the thumbs are slowly crushed) and the rack (where the joints are slowly separated) barely scratch the surface of the barbarism of what these people did in the name of God. And then there were the burnings. After being tortured and forced to confess these people were tied to a stake and a large fire was set at the base. Those who did not secretly receive drugs from friends to bring painless death or suffocate from the smoke, would scream in pain as their skin was burned from their bodies. The Burning Times occurred during a period of great human deprivations. Learning and science, reading and writing, were limited to those who were rich, part of the Church or high in the military. For the masses, fear and superstition were a way of life, fueled by the power hunger of the Church. If your cow stopped giving milk, don't look for a reason, just find the Witch who cast a spell and burn her. If your wife isn't pregnant, she must be in league with the devil. If somebody dies in an accident there's no need to discover the cause and try to prevent it in the future. Just burn a Witch every time an accident occurs. After all, a Witch must have caused it. Luckily, we live in modern times. There is no chance for such a thing to happen today, right? Wrong. It happens today. It is happening right now. In a small village, a mob came up to the shack of a woman. The woman inside, a grandmother, was 82 years old. They dragged her outside and put a necklace on her. The necklace is a tire soaked in gasoline. Then they lit the tire and burned the woman to death. In another town a mob came after two women and marched them to a riverbank. There the mob took stones and threw them at the women until they were dead. Then the mob set fire to the battered and bloody bodies. These killings did not happen 500 years ago. They didn't even happen 50 years ago. They took place in December, 1994 in rural areas of South Africa. These murders had three things in common:
1) The murderers were friends and neighbors of the victims
2) The women were killed because they were accused of being Witches
3) The killings are not unusual. And no, I did not get these stories from a tabloid like the Weekly World News! It was reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times for Wednesday, December 28, 1994. The story, written by Bob Drogan, goes on to say that at least 100 accused witches have been incinerated or stoned to death in 1994, sometimes by their husbands and children. However, a local police colonel admits that only a small number of the killings have been reported. Whenever something unusual happens in some rural areas of South Africa, Witches are blamed. Some people, either banished from their homes or seeking to escape their former friends and neighbors, come to a refugee camp for accused Witches set up by the police. The camp is on an easily protected site at the top of a desert rise surrounded by sharp thorn bushes. The area is called Witches Hill. When a Witch is killed, there are few reprisals, few trials. A local lawyer says, If you don't participate in the killing, it's an offense according to traditional law. So the whole village shares the guilt. Eighty percent of all murder cases in our region involve witchcraft. During the Burning Times of old, the church and state used Witch trials to obtain the properties of the accused/condemned. Today in South Africa there is no difference. If you have a business competitor or a family feud, simply accuse your foe of Witchcraft. Like magic (pun intended), your competitor is gone or the feud is over. Even good fortune can be a sign of Witchcraft. A man who had lived in poverty for years had two sons who went to a city and got jobs. They sent money home to their father who then had the audacity to buy some furniture for his hut. His neighbors couldn't figure out how such a poor man could afford such things. Without asking him, they came to their own conclusions: he used zombies. Just as there were witchfinders in the original Burning Times, so, too, are there Witch hunters—called nyanga, in modern-day South Africa. In a rural area, if someone is accused of Witchcraft the village elders will call for a tribal court. All the families in the area contribute to the hiring of the nyanga. And what does the nyanga do? He gives the instigators a hallucinogenic potion to drink and then tells them to shout out the witch's name. The question, of course, is why is this happening? We could say that this is only occurring in a superstitious area of a third-world country. But that wouldn't be true. According to the article in the Times, even university students will use razor blades to scar themselves to ward off evil spirits before they take exams. Millions of people put their bed up on bricks in order to prevent sexual attacks from tokoloshes—ugly trolls similar to the Western Incubus or Succubus. The real reason is that South Africa is going through a time of rapid change. Whenever such changes occur—whether the changes are for good or bad—people look for scapegoats. There must be another cause for this change. It couldn't be that we are responsible for our actions, could it? While that may sound outlandish, it is not. It is happening right now in the U.S. Several years ago in California a law was passed limiting taxes. That's fine, but if you have less coming in, you have to expect less to go out. Instead, Californians have demanded more services with fewer taxes. The result is that cities and counties are taking risky investment chances to make up for the shortfall of funds. Recently, Orange County had to declare bankruptcy because of their speculative financial practices. So who is to blame? People are yelling at their supervisors or their treasurer. Of course, they didn't say a thing when the speculative financial dealings were bringing in money. The truth is, it is everyone's fault in Orange County. Other areas, which have followed practices similar to those of Orange Country, may soon be facing their own fiscal crises. They will need someone to blame. So who do we blame for the problems in out country? In the last election the country blamed the democrats. In the next one they will probably blame the republicans. Here in California the people who were blamed were welfare cheats (which to many people here is a code for lazy African-Americans) and illegal aliens (an odd expression since a person may commit an illegal act, but how can a person be illegal?). Other potential scapegoats are liberals, conservatives, satanists, African-Americans, McGovernite counterculture leftists, right-wingers, Jews, the religious right, etc. There is a Taoist saying that the only constant is change. An ancient Greek philosopher described this by saying that you cannot step in the same river twice. People today remember TV shows (and perhaps their own childhood) where the father worked and the mother stayed home with the children. The reality today is that most families cannot do this—both parents must work for the family to survive and thrive. They don't remember that the good old days were also filled with legal segregation and diseases such as polio were a major killer of children. Our memories are very selective. As changes increase, people will look for scapegoats. When one scapegoat is dealt with and the changes continue to occur, they will look for other scapegoats. After we discover that the changes in society are not the fault of liberals or conservatives, African-Americans or Jews, will we make the decision that we are all responsible and act accordingly? Forgive me for being cynical, but I doubt it. So after all the other scapegoats are passed over, who will be left? I fear that the answer will be the same one used by some fundamentalist preachers today, the inquisitors of the past and some of the people of South Africa today: Witches. If we are to make Never Again the Burnings a reality, I believe that we must be prepared to point out the absurdity of the ideas of our detractors. No, I am not trying to say we should walk in fear or paranoia. In fact, I refuse to do that at all. Rather, I suggest that we be prepared to stand up for what we believe, so that in our homes, towns and cities, at least, Never Again the Burnings remains a shining light that represents truth and justice. 1995 by Donald Michael Kraig | 
