People in power hate nature. They would never admit they do, but the evidence is there in black and white and has been for millennia. One only has to cast their mind back to the witch trials of the 15th to 19th centuries to see this in action…
Witchcraft is rooted in pre-Christian pagan beliefs that view nature as divine and believe in the interconnectedness of all things. A practice centred around worshipping the superpower that exists within the natural world, witchcraft goes against later religions such as Christianity. Presenting fearmongering and forced compliance under the illusion of choice, unlike witchcraft, Christianity is heavily focused on morals and so-called ‘sins.’
Because paganism came first and spoke more about nature, and how nature is the superior force as opposed to some human god, when Christianity became the mainstream religion, witchcraft had to be abolished, hence the witch trials.
Witches weren’t evil or ‘in touch with the devil’, they were good people aligned with the principles of the world. In their mission to achieve one-upmanship of the world, however, people felt the need to distance themselves from witchcraft.
Witches were blamed for all the things that people couldn’t understand, such as sudden illness, floods, droughts, and crop failures. Despite nature being the cause of all these things, because people have consistently believed that humans are ‘better’ than nature, they didn’t think that nature itself could have such an impact on the world (too weak), and therefore they went looking for a scapegoat.
What is the devil, exactly, if not just nature existing in a society that wants humanity to reign?
When humans created religion, to not abide by its scripture and instead listen to the universe is to submit and relinquish our superiority. It’s to be on equal footing with every other creature that roams the earth. It’s to be awakened to the fragility of humanity.
Alas, as birds born in a cage think that flying is an illness, just because something [abiding by humanity’s self-imposed rules] feels familiar, it doesn’t mean that it’s right.
Those accused of witchcraft often displayed behaviours that were seen as ‘argumentative’ or ‘antisocial.’ Even something as simple as being critical of others could see someone being persecuted, because ‘how dare they go against the status quo…’
In total, between 40,000 and 60,000 people were found guilty of witchcraft in Europe. 75% of these people were women.
Given that most of the persecutors of witches were Christian, it has been suggested that the portrayal of women in the bible is what led to so many more women being accused of witchcraft than men (in the bible, it is Eve who is tempted by Satan to eat the forbidden fruit). Generally, the only times that men were accused of witchcraft were when they were charged in connection with a female witch, as their spouse, child, or sibling, for example.
Alas, as the idea that witches were women and the cause of all of society’s unsolved problems spread, so too did the witch hunt.
The snowball effect
We have seen the same thing happen time and time again. The bigotry gets old, but the problem persists.
Despite what Christians would have us believe, witches were not ‘products of the devil’; they were products of an uneducated group of people who spread their lack of intellect onto another group of uneducated people who spread their lack of intellect onto another.
Only the first group of witch hunters know why they did what they did, because the witches’ closeness to nature, and therefore the truth, scared them; the others merely jumped on the bandwagon and, like a game of Chinese whispers, were told several things, of varying mistruths, along the way.
It’s always the enlightened ones who are punished, because ‘How dare you stray from the status quo.’
As witches were punished for being at one with nature yesterday, so too are queer people punished for being at one with nature today. Not because either is objectively ‘wrong’, but because a small group of people have made enough noise, over time, to convince the world that they are.
Society has convinced us that gender roles actually mean something (or rather, a small group of people turned big group of people have convinced us so) … They have convinced us that the conditions of male and female are dependent on things as superficial as our hair length and our choice of clothing. ‘If you have long hair and wear dresses, you’re a girl. If you have short hair and wear suits, you’re a boy.’
We have been fed the lie that gender itself actually means something when really it is nothing more than a social construct.
I’ve been called sir when I’ve had long hair and ‘darling’ when I’ve had short hair. I’ve been called gay by youths when I’ve been with a man and nodded at by OAPS when I’ve been with a woman. It’s not about how we look at all. It’s about who’s looking.
Don’t let one bad apple turn the whole world sour.
The world doesn’t hate queer people, despite what we are seeing in the media. And nor does it hate immigrants, or witches, or any other marginalised group. If it did, then why would the animal kingdom have so much evidence of queer life within it? If the world ‘hated’ queerness so much, then surely it would make everyone and everything straight… And similarly, why would the world have split itself up into continents 200 million years ago? If the world hated immigrants so much, then surely it would have stayed as one supercontinent, Pangaea, so that no one could immigrate.
In our longing to understand the unfathomable complexities of the universe, whatever the world tells us, we strive to do the opposite, giving ourselves a superiority complex as we believe that we are better than nature.
‘If the animal kingdom is queer, then humans are straight. As if the world is separate, then humans should not immigrate.’
The world doesn’t hate queer people or immigrants or witches, society does, and that’s why they make scapegoats out of them. Because they are so aligned with nature, fluid and free, they mirror the world that people so desperately want to distance themselves from.
Unapologetic in their refusal to conform, queer people, for example, do not care for the frivolities of aligning with a socially constructed idea of gender or sexuality. Unfortunately, however, the impact of religion has ingrained itself into the minds of one too many people who do care about such things. Too many people believe the patriarchal spiel of the bible, ‘A man should not lie with a man’, and it is such steadfast beliefs that lead to hate crimes.
Despite the coverage in the media at the moment, whereby reports of an increasingly right-wing world are taking centre stage, there are, in fact, far more kind people in the world than there are evil.
It’s unsurprising, however, when we are constantly being fed the rhetoric that ‘everyone hates transgender people’ and that ‘everyone thinks that being gay is a sin’, that people, in their bias to ‘fit in’ (how ironic), either A) join in with spreading this hateful narrative, or B) believe it.
You don’t see journalists reporting on the people who stepped in to stop the two lesbians on a train from being further assaulted; you just see the images of their busted noses and blood-covered clothes. Similarly, you don’t see reporters interviewing trans activists who are doing great things, setting up businesses, and fundraising for gender affirming care; you just see the interviews on violations to trans rights. It’s important to report on these things, of course, but it’s also important to report on hopeful things, too, for if you don’t, then people lose that hope.
‘If the whole situation is hopeless, then there’s no point in acting.’
Alas, in the media, we are only ever shown one side of anything. One narrative. And that narrative is always the one that upholds the status quo. Why? Because, as humans, we long for familiarity. Finding comfort in the constant, we forget that, if only we dared to strive for more, life would open up to us in unimaginable ways.
We forget that outside of the newspapers reporting on yet another homophobic attack, there are countries decriminalising homosexuality, and gay couples getting married when, just over a decade ago, that was a distant dream, even in the UK, one of the most progressive countries in the world. We forget these things because we’re not told these things. To find these things out, we must go looking for them, since positive news stories never make the headlines. It’s always the doom and gloom that sells.
When hate crimes can only take place when enough people with the same bigoted views share a mission and lack enough intellect to carry it through, hopeful stories must also be covered in the media.
Not knowing about the positive stories sees society painting a picture of hopelessness, which isn’t the case at all. Times might be hard, but there is always hope. Sometimes, you just have to peer through the cracks for just that little bit longer in order to find it…
ANARKISS 