The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World

The witch was a triple threat to the Church: She was a woman, and not ashamed of it. She appeared to be part of an organized underground of peasant women. She was a healer whose practice was based in empirical study. In the face of the repressive fatalism of Christianity, she held out the hope of change in this world.

Western society was on the verge of discovering that a radical materialism could breed horrors far greater than even the worst religious fanaticism.

The witch hunts illustrate the dark side of creating an information sphere. As with rabbinical discussions of the Talmud and scholastic discussions of Christian scriptures, the witch hunts were fueled by an expanding ocean of information that instead of representing reality created a new reality. Witches were not an objective reality. Nobody in ear

The central theme developed in this book is that psi, the paranormal, and the supernatural are fundamentally linked to destructur-ing, change, transition, disorder, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and blurring of boundaries. In contrast, the phenomena are repressed or excluded with order, structure, routine, stasis, regularity, pre

the witch hunts were fueled by an expanding ocean of information that instead of representing reality created a new reality.

Likewise, people who were not poets tried to make exceptions to the materialism which dominated their epoch. They created enclaves of the beyond, of what did not fit into materialist explanations. These enclaves resembled hiding-places; they were often kept private. Visited at night. Thought of with bated breath. Sometimes transformed into theatres