So I’m sitting here in the coffee shop in the student union of my school sipping a far-too-sweet iced mocha and reading Irene Silverblatt’s Moon, Sun, and Witches. I’m on the section about witches and the colonial association of women with Satan, both in the “new” world and Europe during the infamous witch hunts where countless women and children were killed in the name of God. According to Sliverblatt, women accounted for 85% of those executed for sorcery (witchcraft) during the period of witchhunts.
Silverblatt spends some time giving the reader a history of the concept of Satan in Christian Europe during and after the Middle Ages. While reading this it dawned on me that the concept of Satan and his (or her) associated attributes are complete inversions of God (and by association, man). I’m sure I’m just hypersensitive to structural inversions because we just covered structuralism in my anthropological theory class last week and are discussing structural-functionalism this week. The influential ideas of Levi-Strauss are fresh in my mind.
Anywho, I busted out a pen and paper and began contrasting Satan and God. Below is what I came up with. Keep in mind these are the concepts of and some things associated with those concepts according to Christianity in Western Europe and colonial America. However, I would argue many of these concepts are still very much alive today. Take a look and lemme know what you think.
| Satan | God (man) |
| Animal/Bestial | Man/Non-animal |
| Material/Earthly | Celestial/Heavenly |
| Black/Dark | White/Light (white light, har har) |
| Cannibal | Non-cannibal (cannibalism taboo) |
| Orgies | Monogamy |
| Flight | Terrestrial |
| Dirty | Clean |
| Low | High |
| Deceptive | Honest |
| Abortion & Contraception | Birth |
I take a Durkheimien approach to God here… assuming that God is a collective representation of society, so here God and man are analogous.
I was first introduced to this idea via the notion of Witchcraft among groups living in Papua New Guinea. My advisor, who did his fieldwork there, used the image of witches held by his friends as an example of structural inversion. He put it simply: this witch is basically everything a good person is not. This can also be seen with Satan, and even our images of cavemen and aliens. The latter are structural inversions, as well. Cavemen are brutish, stupid, brutally strong, hairy. Modern man is civilized, smart, moderately strong to weak by virtue of his superior intelligence, and clean-shaven. Our image of the alien is post-civilized, extraordinarily smart, frail and weak, with absolutely no hair.
If we then examine the concept of witches in the colonial Americas, we see similar inversions when compared with the concept of dominant institutions and the dominant ideals of the “right” or “good” person.
| Witch | Non-witch |
| Female | Male |
| Poor | Rich, or atleast above classification of “poor” |
| Beggars | Disciplined, hardworking |
| Weakness (natural, moral, physical) | Strength |
| Impure/dirty | Pure, in relation to those “impure”/clean |
| Overly sexual | Faithful, monogamous |
| Old (decrepit) | Young? (not sure about this one) |
| Flight | Terrestrial |
| Magic | Non-magical |
| Cannibalism | Non-cannibal |
As we can see, witches share many characteristic with the concept of Satan as outlined above, almost to the point where they could be interchangeable. Indeed, their close association lends itself to this and one could argue they are interchangeable.
As I started mapping all of this out some interesting relationships came to my attention. First, it appears that these inversions could be simplified as inversion of the ideal of a given society. Second, the caveman, man, alien inversion mentioned earlier could translate as evil, man, good or something similar. Our image and classification of the alien fits the role of God; celestial, superior in intelligence, omnipresent by virtue of their supposed ability to travel across the universe by the use of their technologies that exceed the speed of light. Some have even taken this image as far as to say that extraterrestrials are responsible for all the major developments of humankind. So in this sense, the alien fills the role of a classificatory “god.” Man then seems to dwell in a transitional context between the alien and the caveman, to extend the example, or between good and evil. Man strives for the ideal, to emulate God, but is also bound to the earth which is tinged with evil. So by being in such close proximity to evil, man becomes partially evil himself, but by striving to be like God, he also becomes partially good. I don’t exactly know where I’m going with this (caffeine on an empty stomach can lead to tangential thoughts!) but I would venture to say that man, because he sees himself dwelling in the anxiety of a liminal space, negotiates and tries to appease his suffering through projecting his anxiety onto symbolic inversions of himself (as created by society)… *scratches head* What do you all think?
