The Enemy Within

I just finished reading The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-hunting in the Western World by John Demos (Viking).  In the book, Demos explores the history of witch-hunting as well as the reasons - and, he argues, essential need for it.  As such, it is both a clear time line and a sociological study of the famous witch-hunts of Europe and colonial US, and a treatise about the more general idea of scapegoating and finger pointing, complete with modern day examples.

The book is divided helpfully into four sections.  The first chronicles witch-hunting in Europe, which took place mainly in Germany and Sweden, and cost thousands of lives.  The second section moves to the pre-Salem US colonies.  The third section is dedicated entirely to the Salem Trials.  And the fourth section looks at modern witch-hunts, which, while absent of any so-called "witches," nonetheless follow similar patterns of paranoia, exclusion, and punishment.

On the whole the book is a fascinating read.  Though history is not a subject that comes easily to me, Demos does a fine job of being concise and linear, and his writing is peppered with narrative stories that illuminate the more factual material.  It's a great play-by-play of the witch craze, and for me, at times, an emotional one.  As Demos explains, though anyone could hypothetically be considered a "witch," it was almost always women who were singled out in an act of mass misogyny.  Additionally, the accused often posed an unintentional threat through having at least one of the following elements:  having too little or too much wealth; not exhibiting "womanly" traits and being bolder or rougher in personality than the ideal; mental instability; practicing folk magic or non-Christian, superstitious traditions; being a widow; and the list goes on.  Later in the book, Demos' arguments for comparing classical witch-hunts to more recent incidents (Anti-Freemasonry, McCarthyism, school child abuse scandals, and so on) are impressively balanced, and show that every age has the potential for hysteria and demonization - though usually the demons are the accusers, not the accused.

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