One of the events that the ethnos of New England – the cultural section of the United States that has controlled most of its institutions since the War ended in 1865 – is most known for is the Salem Witch Trials. But while that episode is hundreds of years in the past, the face of the witch is still the one she presents to the world.
The witch – that is to say, in Carl Jung’s terminology, the ‘evil stepmother’ archetype, the ‘displaced anima’:
‘Some typical qualities of the displaced Anima are:
‘Uncontained, constantly seeking external affirmation.
Lack of creativity.
Moody.
B*tchy.
Poor relatedness, behaviour in relationships designed to isolate the person from others.
Masochistic.
Greedy, grasping.
Self centred.’
We vividly see these characteristics in the women (nearly all Yankee born and bred) who have dominated US foreign policy in recent years:
Madelaine Albright salivated over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and Serbian civilians.
Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power pushed for war in Libya in 2013 that unleashed total chaos there.
Victoria Nuland has overseen the vicious destruction of the Ukraine by the US-EU.
With this bunch in mind, we are forced to wonder if there is more to a television show like Motherland: Fort Salem than simply a fictional drama: ‘A trio of witches is trained to become powerful weapons for the American military.’
But how did this happen? How did this archetype come to dominate New England, and through her, the rest of the States and their peoples?
One of the most perceptive of the Southern Agrarian writers, Andrew Lytle, takes us back to the land and sea division:
‘In New England, at least the coastal areas, there was always the sea to intervene, holding up a distant image and not the familiar, seasonal one such as land allows. Of course there was a sea-board in the South and farms in New England, but the county and township represented the difference. Both the sea and land are feminine images, but the sea takes only men; and so the communion between husband and wife was interrupted and for long periods of time. Relate this sea-faring to the theocratic oligarchies, and we discover the cultural forms acting upon man’s relation to woman, which at one time made witches. What is a woman deprived but a witch, especially under the discipline of a Puritan distortion of the senses’ (Stories: Alchemy and Others, University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., 1984, pgs. xvii-xviii).
Yet even still, nothing was foreordained. New England could have followed the example of Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), whose father and husband were both governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Though well-educated and an exceptionally gifted writer, she checked her ambition and kept herself subservient to the patriarchal social order in which she lived.
She chose instead the example of another Anne – Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), the Antinomian heretic (Antinomos = ‘against the law’) who minimized the role of good works in the life of a Christian, claimed direct revelations from the Holy Ghost, etc. Like Mrs Bradstreet, Mrs Hutchinson was also a talented and intelligent woman, but as the foregoing shows, she used her considerable gifts to undermine the traditions of New England. One of her statements is telling: ‘As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway.’
The episode with Mrs Hutchinson was not the origin of New England’s troubled history; that began in the preceding centuries back in Old England. However, it did set the stage for the revolutionary acts of ‘women’s liberation’ that followed – from women’s suffrage to equal rights between the sexes to contraception and on up to the rejection of womanhood altogether along with gender reassignment surgery.
Displaced anima indeed.
Dixie, being closer to the land and to tradition, developed in another direction. Returning to Mr Lytle,
‘Man’s attitude to woman is the foundation of society under God. In the South, because of the prevailing sense of the family, the matriarch becomes the defining image. The earlier insistence on purity, an ideal not always a fact, was not chivalric romanticism but a matter of family integrity, with the very practical aim of keeping the blood lines sure and the inheritance meaningful. Before machinery was made which lessened the need for the whole family to do its part on the farm, husband, wife, children, cousins, dependents, servants all served the land and were kept by it, according to their various demands and capacities. The parts of the family made a whole by their diversity (Stories, p. xviii).
This is the archetype of the good mother, the integrated anima, the opposite of New England:
‘Self soothing, self nurturing and self loving.
Access to creative inspiration.
Strong centre and contained inner life.
Capable of empathy.
Able to make value judgements beyond the realm of pure rationality.
Access to feeling life.
Good relatedness.
Happy.’
Understandably, New England has tried to couch its distortions, errors, and heresies in Christian language, but that will only bring them more harm in the end. The Holy Elder Cleopa of Sihăstria (+1998) explains:
‘EC: Magic with holy items and books is the fourth type of witchcraft and is called “ghitia”. These wizards mix their witchcraft with prayers, psalms, and other holy words, addressed to the Mother of God and the Saints, so that they can fool those of weak faith more easily. Such witchcraft is common especially among ill-meaning, the old, as well as Gypsy women, and is aimed at deceiving those who have a weak mind.
‘This is what St. John the Chrysostom says about this:
‘“You say that that old woman is a Christian, and that man is a Christian diviner, and when they enchant or open the Book, they neither say, nor write any other names than those of Christ, the Holy Theotokos and the Saints; so what harm do they do? To this, I answer you that for such acts it is right to hate that bad woman and that evil charmer and book diviner even more, as they use God’s name in a shameful and dishonourable way.
‘Even if they are Christian, they work like pagans. Because even devils themselves, despite naming the name of God, are still devils. Some, wishing to justify themselves, say that the enchanter woman is Christian and that she says nothing else but the name of God. It is precisely for that reason that I hate her and turn away from her even more, because she uses God’s name in a shameful manner. Despite calling herself Christian, she shows herself to be working the pagans’ work.”’
Furthermore, all the visions and dreams and so forth seen by the Hutchinsons, Mathers, and others and quickly believed by them, which supposedly revealed how special and ‘chosen’ they were, shows in reality how deceived they had become by the devil and the demons. Elder Cleopa says elsewhere in the same interview,
‘Inq.: Is it sinful for Christians to believe in dreams and visions?
‘EC: St. John of the Ladder says that “whoever believes in dreams is like the one who chases one’s own shadow and tries to catch it”. He also says that “the devils of empty glory (vanity) are prophets, in one’s dreams. They shrewdly invent images of future things and tell us about them in advance. And if the sightings come true, we wonder at them and take pride in that, as if we had the gift of foreseeing (prophecy). Those who listen to the devil have often turned into fake prophets”. And he continues: “Devils know nothing about future things based on prior knowledge, since doctors, too, can tell us that we will die, beforehand.” Then he concludes, by saying: “The moment we start to believe the devils’ dreams, they begin to mock us even when we are awake. Whoever believes in dreams and sleep visions is completely inexperienced. And the one who doesn’t believe either is a philosopher.”
‘So, it is a sin to believe in dreams and visions, because it is through such things that devils deceive us very easily and throw us into the terrible sin of pride and vanity, to the point where man ends up trusting himself more than the word of God. With this tempting contrivance, the devil has deceived many Christians and monks, eventually throwing them into the pit of perdition. And if, however, someone doubts one’s dream or visions, one should confess to one’s Priest and ask for his advice, as it is through one’s spiritual Father that God speaks.
‘Inq.: How many reasons are there for people to deceive themselves by empty visions and dreams?
‘EC: There are seven reasons for which Christians are deceived by visions and dreams into believing that they are from God: pride; vanity – which is the first daughter of pride; a weak and inexperienced mind; the thoughtless zeal of some Christians, who pray and fast a lot so that they can have visions, and of whom St. Isaac the Syrian says: “It is from great illness that the one who has false zeal suffers.” The fifth reason for deception through visions and dreams is failure to listen to one’s Spiritual Father and the stubbornness of some believers – especially the proud ones – which makes them easy pray to the devil; the sixth reason has to do with people failing to disclose all their personal lives (inaccurate confession) to the Priest. The last reason for Christians’ deception through dreams and false visions is failure to know oneself and to read the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Fathers.
‘Wise Sirach talks about these matters also, when he says: “Divinations and omens and dreams are folly, […] for dreams have deceived many, and those who put their hope in them have failed” (Sirach 34:1-7). May the ones who believe in dreams and visions easily, without much searching and advice, receive penance, just as the ones who resort to magic and enchantments – namely, may they be stopped from taking the Holy Eucharist for up to seven years.’
It could have been different for New England; no one forced her to make the choices she has made. She could have followed the path of St Audrey of Ely, for instance, who is of the same stock of southeast English men and women who settled New England 1,000 years later, or any of the other holy Orthodox saints of the region.
She still can.
But until then, we all must endure the prattling of hypocrites, as the inheritors of Yankee Antinomianism in Washington City lecture the peoples of the world on the necessity of upholding the ‘rules-based international order’.