When I was 16 years old and at a girl’s house with a friend of mine, the girl we were seeing, who was 15 or 16 years old, informed us she was a witch.
I had known her since grade school, and had never thought all that much of her, but now my opinion of her plummeted. There are no witches, no occult powers, nothing of that sort.
Pretty much the same thing happened about a year later. I was with the same guy, and we were with two girls in my car. I knew the one I was with, but did not know her friend, who started telling us the same thing about occult powers. She was maybe 17.
This time I told her these things didn’t exist, and she got hostile and defensive. The conversation ended at that.
I figured these silly adolescent girls were saying these things for attention, or for other ego reasons. None of them had any talent that I knew about, or were particular intelligent. So maybe they convinced themselves they were witches so they’d think there was something special about them.
A few years ago I ran across a woman, this time in her 40s, who told me she had been a witch and there really were occult powers. Same thing; my opinion of her plummeted. Even if ‘adult,’ she was still a silly adolescent girl. There are no witches.
When the Puritans came to America, they went through a witch-hysteria. Contrary to the myth, they never burned any witches, but they hanged 35 of them, all innocent.
Later, when the persecutors regained their reason, they horrified at what they had done. Not surprisingly, some of the girls were silly adolescent females who claimed, yes, we’re witches!
Had I been a judge back then, I would have told them, “You are a silly, deluded adolescent girl looking for attention. There are no witches, and you are not a witch. Go home and grow up.”
Most probably, these goofy wenches all needed to get…I’m sure you know what they needed. Ray Bradbury knew about that cure in his story, “A Medicine for Melancholy.”
God put the poontang on the silly one. And the word ‘hysteria,’ not surprisingly, comes from the Greek word for ‘womb.’
Thirty-five innocent people would not have gotten hanged in Puritan New England except for delusion. What was done in Europe was a lot worse: hangings, torture, burnings. Thousands of them. To ferret out things that don’t exist.
Even today, people still go through hysterias and believe in witches. Some years ago there was a hysteria about children being sexually abused in a daycare center. There were allegations of human sacrifice in the basement. Witches and Black Masses!
People said kids “didn’t lie about such things,” which is nonsense. Little kids don’t know lies from truth, especially when they’re coached. Innocent people were imprisoned for years until finally released.
Whenever you see mass hysteria, or the belief in any wide-ranging conspiracies by people falsely defined as ‘evil’, it’s always predicated on the belief in witches, no matter by what name you call them.