Last witch killed in Europe in 1782 to be exonerated: Give it 200 years and Guantanamo will be a finished chapter too
“Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.”
(Macbeth, Act 2, scene ll)
Man is a deeply irrational animal. To paraphrase Jesus: our brains have many chambers – and not all of these rooms are used for rational thought. Sigmund Freud is rightly famous for investigating some of these dark territories.
Still, it takes more than one Livingstone to discover and map the whole world and one Freud does not make a full picture. So, to stay with the cartography image, if we would write down what we really know about the inner workings of our brains, it would look like one of those medieval maps: Bits in the centre are filled in more or less accurately but most of the map is a blank – and most of these unknown territories come with that famous little phrase, ‘Here be dragons.’
So, today this little article in one of the online newspapers:
Swiss authorities are preparing to exonerate the last woman in Europe to be executed for witchcraft. Anna Goeldi, a maid in the small alpine region of Glarus, was beheaded in 1782 for being a witch after she confessed under torture to conversing with the devil and poisoning the daughter of the house. But her name could now be cleared following a decision yesterday by local lawmakers to recommend a reversal of the conviction.
Witchcraft and witch burnings: how utterly ridiculous, right? Well, yes – and no. It’s just the kind of thing the human mind continuously does. We build whole worlds, philosophies and religions out of the cloth of shadow, out of the mortar of our dreams – and we always seem to need our demons.
So, yesterday it was witchcraft, today it’s terrorism. Where once most of Europe feared the omnipresence of the Devil and hunted down all who worshiped Him and did His biddings, we now have Osama bin Laden – and we spend billions of dollars and waste countless lives, make war on other countries and enforce draconian laws in our own, to fight this latest, painted devil.
Time moves on: the human brain still chases the same old shadows.
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