A witching question

Learning about witches is just another funny attempt to cope with existing as a human being.

Being human is a difficult thing.
It shows the desire to grab a something deep inside that defines who we are, while also excluding all of the things that are too terrible and still keep on happening. We call things done by humans like us inhumane all the time! This certainly means that there is the wish to be better being centered deep inside all of us, but it is also a dangerous way to go in your thoughts.

Once you dehumanize someone, how do you deal with the horrors they committed?
How can you even hold them responsible?
And if you still accept them as an aspect of being human, how can you still bare to be one yourself, always carrying this part of existence somewhere deep inside of you?

All that „Malleus Maleficarum“ has taught me about witches so far comes down to test them in torture. If you think of witches as these otherworldly beings that are to be blamed for disasters beyond comprehension, it makes a tragic kind of sense to do the most inhumane things to them to relief them of their status as one of us, don‘t you think? So, every part of their skin had to be tested for pain, and a missing reaction anywhere was a sign. As well as birthmarks, a misscarriage years ago … A witch is a deconstructed person, remember?

I have to think back to a discussion in class when I was still studying special education a few years ago. Someone asked why there was an extra convention on the rights of humans with disabilities and why the convention on human rights wasn‘t just enough. Discussing this, we got to the point that an extra convention was needed to particularly include disabled people as human beings and not leave space for any argumentation questioning this, and up to today it terrifies me that this option is even there.

What do differences even mean?

My interest in this issue is shaped by me once having planed on being a special education teacher in the German educational system that soon turned out to be too selective (and thus discriminating) for me to get along in. Still, studying this subject has allowed me to question all these little differences between people and how they can seem much too huge. It‘s a complex discussion of when someone counts as disabled. In the German educational system, having poor parents or even just one parent available is often enough to build a barrier. So, is this a differences so huge that we need to protect their status as a human being? The income, or the family structure? Then there is this whole IQ discussion which I am very tired of. Does someone with a score of 79 in some test really need such a different treatment than someone with a score of 86? Can we really measure it that perfectly well that these differences matter enough?
It is not my goal to question differences in our abilities and resources, but the way we view them. A few points less in a test we took when tired or irritated today can mean the same as an unlucky birthmark a few centuries ago.
A small difference with huge consequences.

Looking at the global crisis of our time, such as the climate crisis or the injustice in the global distribution of the covid vaccines or the hesitation in German politics to arm Ukraine, I see the inability in so many of us to see us as one.

All of these little differences, may it be features of our looks or the language we speak and costumes we learned early in life and even the money we have available to spend, are being treated as huge differences, while we are all one. We are one population of humans with interesting, funny and important little differences that need to be acknowledged, but never used as an argumentation to keep parts of us from their basic right of safety and integrity. We belong together, and as this one species that we are, we will always fit under one curve which shows the distribution of our curious differences.

When I began to study witchcraft, Dystopia was threatening everything that I had ever thought made me and anyone of us human. Reading about these beings that were accused of causing horrors too severe to be understood, and learning what had been taken away from them, brought me closer to grasp this concept of being human that now and then feels so threatened. To me it means to be someone to someone else. A daughter, a sister, a wife, a friend, or whatever. It means to feel a response from those people close and around and to respond myself. It means wanting to see them safe and unharmed and also having the same desire for my body, because this is a tool I need to be with them.

Living in this world means that all of this is constantly threatened.
I lost so many close people in the lonely years of isolation, caused my our plague.
Now I see the culture part of my family came from on fire in a way I have not witnessed in my life time.

Having my witch with me, reminds me of what I have to never lose despite all of this.