“The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils.” Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no…

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“The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils.” Certainly the witch hunters are no longer among us, and we no longer take seriously the accusation of devil worshipping that was once levelled at witches. Rather, our milieu is defined by the modern pride in being able to interpret both witchery and witch hunting in terms of social, linguistic, cultural, or political constructs and beliefs.

What this pride ignores, however, is that we are the heirs of an operation of cultural and social eradication – the forerunner of what was committed elsewhere in the name of civilization and reason. Anything that classifies the memory of such operations as unimportant or irrelevant only furthers the success of those operations. In this sense, our pride in our critical power to “know better” than both the witches and the witch hunters makes us the heirs of witch hunting.

–Isabelle Stengers.Reclaiming Animism