The Enemy Within (36 page)

Careful study within the past decade or two has reconstructed another, far more plausible lineage. It now seems clear that Wicca qualifies, at best, as an “invented tradition.” Moreover, a single person can be considered its principal inventor: a man named Gerald Broussard Gardner (1884-1964). Gardner was English by birth and education, but traveled widely in other parts of the world (especially the Far East). He made a career in business; became an avid, if amateur, folklorist; and emerged toward the end of his life as a prolific author on “witchcraft today” (the title of his most famous book). A number of his writings, mostly from the 1950s, laid the foundations of Wicca, as understood and practiced ever since. These drew, in a highly eclectic fashion, on various folklore investigations from the past two centuries, including some that had explicitly construed witchcraft as an ancient, pagan religion. Indeed, the ingredients of Gardner's rather steamy brew reached all the way back to classical Greece and Rome (the goddess Diana, the god Pan, Bacchanalian fertility rites, the adoration of nature) and out toward Eastern religions (Hindu chakras). However, their most important source was the Romantic movement of the 19th century, with its nostalgia for an Edenic past. Seen in full historical context, then, they expressed a deep reaction against the “modernizing” thrust of industrialization, urbanization, mass society, and rapid social change. As such, they would continue to resonate strongly with Wiccans for decades.

In the years since Gardner's work of “invention,” Wicca has blossomed in new directions. For example, it has acquired a strongly feminist slant (as a manifestation of specifically female spirituality). It has also, on some of its fringes, been broached by neo-Nazi and skinhead sympathizers in search of an “Aryan” cultural ancestry, and Celtic traditions have become very popular with many Wiccans. These still unfolding developments carry it further and further from any putative roots in pre-modern witchcraft. It remains, then, very much a creation of its own—and immediately preceding—times. And, as noted, a “smiling” one at that.

 
So the trail of witch-hunting peters out. Or does it? In fact, the term—the metaphor—has survived to the present day. All sorts of human imbroglios may now be characterized as witch-hunts. Political “Red Scares” come quickly to mind. But other more localized, even private, events are also described thus. Police investigations, corporate restructurings, projects to reconstitute schools, churches, and civic organizations, family struggles: the list goes on and on. The metaphor comes easily—perhaps too easily—as a mode (most often) of moral reproach. Wherever appears some allegation of subversive intent, of conspiratorial menace, of concealed betrayal—just there the “witch-hunt” label may be directly affixed.

Is there a genuine continuity between the witch-hunts of the pre-modern era and their supposed equivalents in more recent times? Are some parts of the metaphor, as it is commonly used nowadays, more apt than others? And does this usage help us to understand— perhaps even to combat—certain darker tendencies in our own social and political system? Such questions can serve to frame a highly compressed and selective
tour d'horison
of American history since the mid-18th century. Along the way, six separate episodes will be spotlighted for particular attention. Each will be summarized and measured against the profile of traditional witch-hunting. Our spotlight will also touch broader themes and tendencies that, while lacking any sharp episodic focus, appear to reflect the same basic mentality.

 
If the beginnings of modern science helped erode the conceptual basis of witchcraft, they also ironically produced a rise in what might be called “paranoid thinking.” As one historian has written, “the century or so following the Restoration [of the British monarchy, in 1660] was the great era of conspiratorial fears.” In all parts of the Anglo-American world, public affairs were increasingly understood in terms of “plots” and “designs,” “cabals” and “schemes,” intrigue and hidden intent. This tendency cannot be explained as individual pathology, for its prevalence was virtually society-wide. The best historical accounts attribute it to a convergence of social change (the early growth of the market economy, a rapid process of political mobilization) and the cultural impact of the Enlightenment. As the natural sciences began to assume their modern importance, life in many sectors became progressively demystified—with increasing emphasis on chains of very specific cause-and-effect linkage. Some of these belonged to the realm of nature, but many others embraced human purpose and action. In effect, a space had opened up on the landscape of experience, to be filled (at least in part) by the agency of particular men and women:
he/she/they have planned, and caused, these particular events, not “Providence,” or fate, or other cosmic forces.
This relatively novel concept was especially conducive to a focus on conspiracy;
the difficulties we face have been craftily, secretly, wickedly plotted by our enemies.

Such was the case, for example, with the political movement leading up to the American Revolution. Patriot leaders stressed a darkening “scheme” against their traditional liberties—even, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” Still, there would be no witch-hunt, actual or metaphorical, as a result. A considerable number of Loyalists—people who rejected the move toward independence—were forced to flee their homes in the colonies, and some were subjected to cruel persecution. Yet many others hung on where they were and managed well enough. Loyalists were cast as individual opponents, no more and no less; they were not demonized as a group. Fears of dire conspiracy pointed overseas toward the British parliament and king. With real, massively consequential, combat under way—with soldiers in the field, including such “demonic” foes as regiments of foreign Hessians—there was little motive to focus on enemies within the patriot community itself. Both now and later on, countersubversive activity would follow—not coincide with—direct experience of warfare.

Revolutionary-era anxiety did help open a way for the first of the many political and social “scares” that would dot the later course of American history: the so-called Bavarian Illuminati crisis of the late 1790s. As with other such events to come, its alleged source lay far from American shores. Some two decades earlier in Bavaria, at the University of Ingolstadt, a small group of “enlightened” reformers had organized themselves as a “society” to counter religious (mostly Jesuit) influence in educational life. Because they maintained a protective shield of secrecy, little is known of their actual doings. But their adversaries would soon identify them as a deeply threatening element—opposed to all religious and governmental authority, espousing “Epicurean” values and the pursuit of “sensual pleasures,” and aiming for a wholesale transformation of conventional social arrangements. Though quickly suppressed at its German points of origin, the Society of Illuminati was thought to have spread its malignant cells through other parts of Europe, and to have directly inspired the most shocking excesses of the French Revolution.

Inevitably, its reputation crossed the ocean to America in a series of published exposés. An initial cry of alarm was raised in May 1798, on a national fast day, when a prominent Massachusetts minister, Reverend Jedediah Morse, preached against the imminent threat of “Illuminism.” According to Morse, “We have in truth secret enemies . . . scattered through our country whose professed design is to subvert and overturn our holy religion and our free and excellent government.” Indeed, he claimed to have identified one specific group of Illuminati in Virginia (through “an official, authenticated list” of members) and another in New York; from these, he declared, “have sprung fourteen others scattered we know not where over the United States.” Morse's sermon was published and widely distributed, and then inspired additional sermons, commencement addresses, holiday orations, and newspaper editorials. These, in turn, would disseminate a virtual catalogue of (alleged) Illuminist horrors: espionage, plots against civic order, incitement to class hatred, an “end justifies the means” philosophy, and personal “vices of the most gross, savage, and monstrous complexion”—all shrouded behind elaborate efforts of concealment.

The wider context was a growing sense of peril in American relations with France and a deep revulsion against the “radical” course of the ongoing Revolution there. Conflict between American and French vessels at sea had become endemic; full-scale warfare seemed more and more likely. If it came to that, an internal conspiracy linked to the enemy would be insupportable. Even without war, Illuminism posed a grave threat; having already poisoned one republic, it might easily do the same to another.

To be sure, there was more shadow than substance in these dangers. No actual conspirators were ever accused, Reverend Morse's “authenticated list” notwithstanding. But the Illuminist scare did serve, in conjunction with other forces, to create at least a small group of victims. In 1798, Congress passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which (among other things) criminalized certain forms of writing and speech about the government or its officers. These laws led to 15 indictments and 10 convictions of offending editors and publishers, at least some of whom would serve time in jail. Fears of the Illuminati helped create the atmosphere in which such actions could be organized and sustained.

 
As with many similar episodes, the end of the Illuminati scare came very fast. The election of 1800, bringing defeat for the Federalists and the start of Thomas Jefferson's presidency, left American politics in a radically different place. “Jacobinism” and Revolutionary France no longer gripped the public imagination; the Illuminati were scarcely spoken of anymore. For the next quarter century, the nation moved into, and through, a new set of preoccupations: trade embargoes (in which Britain, much more than France, played the role of villain); the War of 1812; the so-called Era of Good Feelings.

The mid-1820s saw the start of another rampant “scare.” The target this time was the Order of Freemasons. In fact, the Society of Illuminati had itself been associated with Masonry, since both seemed tainted with a dangerously modern spirit. But now a huge wave of antipathy toward Masons began to run entirely of its own accord. Its source point was the abduction, disappearance, and apparent murder in upstate New York of ex-Mason William Morgan, who had authored an exposé of the order's “secrets.” The resultant anxiety and outrage spread rapidly across the entire northern half of the country. (The South remained largely unaffected.) Individual Masons were thrown heavily on the defensive. Masonry as a whole was vilified as anti-American, anti-republican, anti-Christian, antifamily. Unlike the case of Illuminism a generation before, a political movement was born—with conventions held, candidates nominated, and public officials (including 25 congressmen and 1 state governor) elected. There was an anti-Masonic ticket in the presidential election of 1832. Both judicial and legislative committees, formed for the express purpose of investigating Masonry, unearthed dire evidence of a conspiracy against established institutions and principles. (Or so the investigators believed.) Eventually this movement, too, would run its course, as anxiety about the Masons diminished and public attention shifted elsewhere. But it did take its toll—if not in lives lost, then certainly in careers altered, reputations damaged, friendships broken, communities rent asunder.