White witches are not persecuted. Modern witchcraft among white people is not what women were persecuted for during witchcraft trials. You being judged by monotheistic religions has nothing to do with the mass executions of innocent people, largely women, well before even your grandparents were born. I hate to tell you but most of those women didn’t practice witchcraft. They were considered witches or under “the devil’s spell” because of sickly partners, the death of their infants, false accusations by people who didn’t like them, etc. You don’t have centuries of generational trauma when the “oppression” of white witches is extremely modern.
Also, not for nothing, but it's probably worth remembering that an awful lot of the people who were burned and oppressed for supposed witchcraft were actually Jews.
White (culturally Christian) witches are very into rewriting history to place themselves on the pyres, when in reality, their ancestors were the ones who formed the mobs, often specifically against ethnic minorities. Oppression isn't a game or a costume, and some of us are still actually harmed by the religious bigotry of these institutions. And honestly, it's a slap in the face to hear white witches throw around terms like "generational trauma", without even bothering to consider that some of us learned that our ancestors were burned at the stake from the Yizkor prayer for martyrs at our synagogues on Yom Kippur – not in a hot take citationless wiccan blog post written in 2015.
You're not "the descendant of the witches they couldn't burn" – you're a descendant of the bigots who did the burning, and you need to unlearn just as much racism and bigotry as the rest of white Christendom does.
This. This is the one.
Yeah. Speaking as a Pagan, though not a Witch myself, our trauma is of a different character than the serious generational trauma experience by our Jewish, or Romani, or Indigenous comrades, who were the folks actually getting drowned and tortured by the Inquisitions and Witch Trials. Like, the entire moral of the Salem trials is that there was no Witch. A Christian town descended into a frenzied madness, persecuting and murdering a series of slaves and town-outcasts that they already didn’t like.
We, as modern Pagans? We don’t descend out of that trauma except by way of the persecutors. Culturally, my closest connection to, say, the conquest of Saxony is by way of the people forcing others to convert at swordpoint and then killing them anyway, NOT by way of the victims. Because they died.
My person trauma at the hands of Christians is not of that character. I was not targeted and persecuted as an outsider. I was abused as a Christian. This leading me to choose to stop being a Christian. This is very different from someone who experienced persecution by christians entirely from the perspective of an outsider!
We cannot rebuild ourselves properly if we fail to understand these things. We cannot pull the weeds of Christendom from between our stones if we choose to pretend they don’t exist.
We cannot pull the weeds of Christendom from between our stones if we choose to pretend they don’t exist.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
