Short of throwing her in a pond to see if she floats, how exactly does one go about spotting a real live witch? It’s easy, according to wannabe Witchfinder General F. Roger Devlin. All you really need to know is that witches tend to be two-bag ugly.
Witch hunting, irrational as it may appear, is no random phenomenon. Abundant evidence makes clear that a specific sort of woman was most likely to be accused: a childless spinster living apart from men, usually older and physically unattractive … Most were ill-tempered, unpleasant, and lived on the margins of society.
Apparently, some of these women “did indeed practice superstitious arts disapproved by the Church, such as magical healing or casting curses upon their neighbors,” but apparently actual witchery is not necessary for one to be a witch in Devlin’s world.
Witches thrive in easy times, Devlin suggests, like “the Medieval Warm period” (900 AD to 1300 AD), a time of “mild weather [in Europe that] allowed rapid demographic increase and relaxed Darwinian selection.”
But when the “little ice age” hit around 1300, life got tougher and society could no longer tolerate cranky, ugly, uncooperative women, as “[s]uch women, like homosexuals and heretics, tended to weaken rather than strengthen group fitness.” And so the witch-hunting, and witch burning, began.
The true cause of the witch craze, then, was heightened group selection under conditions of scarcity. Note that convictions for witchcraft peaked around the 1640s, as the Little Ice Age entered its harshest phase. Within Great Britain, convictions for witchcraft were most common in Scotland, perhaps due to the country’s poverty and colder climate.
Where is Devlin getting all this? From a new book by the reactionary racist Edward Dutton called Witches, Feminism and the Fall of the West, which, Devlin notes in a review essay posted on the racist web publication VDare, is an attempt to “to bring the best in evolutionary theory to bear on the question.”
But Devlin and Dutton aren’t just creepy evo-psychers; they’re both huge racists and misogynists as well.
Devlin, the reviewer, is an alt-right grandpappy and men’s rights activist who’s most famous for redefining the word “hypergamy” into the stupid misogynistic concept adored by Red Pill idiots. Edward Dutton, the author, is, as RationalWiki sums him up, “an alt-right eccentric English Youtuber, terrorist-sympathizer, anti-feminist, race and intelligence pseudoscientist, Islamophobe, sexist, anti-semite and white supremacist.” He is also the author of numerous books, including one called How to Judge People By What They Look Like.
This, by the way, is what Dutton looks like (in a wig). (Thanks, RationalWiki!)
So how do feminists fit in this whole, er, analysis? Well, they’re basically modern witches, even if they’re not all literally modern witches. (But some are.) Here’s how Devlin describes them, in terms not that different than the ones he used to describe witches.
Like seventeenth-century witches, feminists tend to be childless spinsters: now they are zealots for unrestricted abortion as well. Also like witches, they are disproportionally homely, particularly in a masculinized direction. Having higher than average mutational load, they are more likely to suffer from depression, narcissism, and other disorders which make them unpleasant to be around. The most committed feminists are lesbian to a wildly disproportionate degree.
The existence of feminists today is, Devlin suggests, is due to the same sort of “relaxed” Darwinism that brought about their witchy ancestors.
Again, we must begin by looking at the evolutionary background. Around 1800, childhood mortality began sinking from 50 percent to below one percent, while people also began living longer. Declining mortality salience meant declining stress levels, which led in turn to a decline in religiosity (for religion is in part a means of coping with stress). Lowered child mortality meant that persons with high mutational load were not eliminated from the gene pool, so levels of serious physical and psychological disorders began to increase.
Is he suggesting that we’d be better off if more babies (and mothers) died in childbirth? Sure seems like it.
These witchy feminists are also helping to bring about that “great replacement” (aka white genocide) that all the fashy types are talking about these days. Devlin quotes Dutton:
Females score considerably lower, on average, on measures of negative ethnocentrism than do males, likely because of their high levels of generalized empathy.
This, in his mind, is a bad thing.
It would follow that the empowerment of females, such as permitting them to vote or work in high-status and influential professions, would push society in a less negatively ethnocentric direction (that is, make it less hostile to outsiders).
Devlin makes the point crystal clear, as if we haven’t gotten the hint yet.
Feminism has thus contributed to the fostering of replacement-level immigration to Western countries by outsiders who may themselves be extremely hostile both to Europeans generally and to unpatriarchal women in particular.
He then quotes, seemingly approvingly, a tweet suggesting that women holding “refugees welcome” signs deserve to be raped.
But there’s a silver lining to all these clouds of doom: Eventually the lefty feminist witches will collapse under the weight of their own maladaptivity.
As Dutton assures his readers:
Feminism creates a new “Crucible of Evolution” by spreading dysphoria and brainwashing people to behave maladaptively. Only the carriers of genes that are resistant to this, which is, in part, extreme conservatives and the extremely religious, survive: the anti-feminists will inherit the Earth . . . eventually.
Sorry, fellas. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. I’m putting a hex on you right now.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Could we do a group hex? Count me in, if so!
It’s funny how guys who decry ‘white genocide’ don’t seem to have any kids. I can’t imagine why?
Also Qunts are pissed about that the murder of a young woman is getting more attention than their stupid conspiracy theories.
It really sounds like this guy approves of witch trials. Yikes.
Although, is he aware that some men were accused of, arrested for and killed for being witches too?
Or were they the “manginas” of the day?
Okay, this probably won’t make any of this make any more sense, but just on the off chance it might: what the hell does Devlin mean by “mutational load”?
In Finland it was about half and half, since certain kinds of malevolent magic were traditionally considered men’s business. Most notably, projectile curses.
Then again, the early modern persecution of witches was a fairly small scale phenomenon in Finland. It must be because our climate isn’t as bad as in England, let alone Scotland 🙂
@Nikki the Bluth Wannabe I suspect “mutational load” refers to genetic mutations, with the implication that these mutations lead to greater mental & physical illnesses.
I’m confused. He’s complaining about child mortality going down from 50% to under 1%, but also is upset about abortion…
Oo, projectile curses, they sound handy
Women who were sexually active outside of marriage or earned money as sex workers were also likely to be targeted. A lot of people think witch hunts started in the middle ages, but in truth they started during the Renaissance and lasted throughout a significant part of the Enlightenment. During that period the role of what women were allowed to do was significantly restricted, basically to homemakers and nothing else. Where before women had more freedoms to participate economically. Not equality or true freedom or anything like that, mind you, according to the law they were like children or property.
Well, he looks like a waste of space, breath and time. What do I win?
Group hexing? Count me in.
Arguably, the Little Ice Age did roughly coincide with the persecution of witches in Europe. The climate was slightly colder than in the preceding or following centuries, and the agricultural expansion and population growth faltered somewhat, especially in northern areas.
But let us look into details. One thing that’s always noted about Little Ice Age is that the weather was more variable and unpredictable year by year, decade by decade. All kinds of extreme weather could cause failed harvests, though up here in the North people mostly remember the devastating effects of cold during growth season.
Already in Middle Ages people had lived through alternating famine years and good years, but in early modern era the famines seem to have been longer and more severe. There were also good times between the famines, and Europe’s population generally continued to grow. As far as I know, witch hunting peaks were not particularly associated with major famines and plagues. If there was any causal relationship, it should have been immediate, rather than occurring randomly over long term.
Notably, this never happened during preindustrial times. At least, certainly not in Europe during the Middle Ages. Devlin et al. seem to make a lot of hay of the notion that life was easier during medieval warm period than during Little Ice Age, but in reality it wasn’t much different. Certainly not anything like our modern First World luxury.
@Battering Lamb:
There’s something which I have long been curious about, but never really articulated.
The Catholic church, and most Protestant churches, considered believing in witches to be heresy, and often executed would-be witch hunters. This softened somewhat after the printing of Maleficus Maleficarum (1456), one of the first books to become truly widespread due to the invention of the printing press (1440). By the time the KJV was printed (1611) the whole witch-hunting craze had started to really take off.
Given that the language of the KJV was altered to conform to the cultural and political sensibilities of England of the early 1600s, does anyone know what “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” actually said in earlier versions?
But why does he have such a problem with this? Shouldn’t this be a good thing, since they have such a high mutational load and are destroying the human race, etc? I mean, does he WANT little baby feminists running around, doing extra super high mutaty feminist baby things, probably trying to abort themselves? Won’t he think of the future of the human race for once?
@ snowberry
The original ‘Biblical Hebrew’ word was mekhashepha.
No-one is quite sure what that actually meant when it was first written.
One commonly accepted modern interpretation is ‘one who mutters’. So there’s the suggestion it was aimed at people who did secret incantations.
However there’s another school of thought that has it as ‘one who cuts plants’ which became herbalist.
Then the question is, does that mean witch, or was it aimed at poisoners?
An interesting thing about the peak era for witch trials in Europe is that in some jurisdictions people who brought accusations received half of the witch’s confiscated property in the event of a conviction. In other places there was either no confiscation or the state just kept it.
As it happens, it turned out there were a lot more witches in the former locales.
Underlying a lot of this is the assumption that an easy, happy life will make people weak, and that we’re better off unhappy but strong. They try to justify this by saying that foreigners will come in and conquer you, (which has its own absurdities), but I suspect that these people just value the state of being strong over being happy. I think they would agree that anyone wants to be happy, but that it doesn’t carry much moral weight or much necessity compared with being strong and capable and powerful and masculine. What’s that phrase “Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create strong men” ? Whoever coined that term probably prefers the bad times. They watch post-apocalyptic fiction and feel envious of the strong characters. I have a suspicion of conservative thinking that their values are based on a desire to be “ideal” men and women, except their ideals aren’t based on logic and are largely influenced by fiction and what they think the 1950s were like.
There may be some truth to the idea that hard times increases group hostility towards disfavored members, but it’s interesting that he applies that specifically to women when it applies as much, or more, to men. This shows how his crowd passionately seized upon anything and anything to twist into their arguments.
Notice how feminism, according to Devlin, is simultaneously both weak (an ideology of “childless spinsters” who look like men and are “unpleasant to be around” would always be of minority appeal) and strong (white genocide!). This is straight out of the fascist playbook.
@Alan:
I can go along with that. I hate having to turn on subtitles when the actors are speaking my language.
“not just creepy evo-psychers; they’re both huge racists and misogynists as well”
You repeat yourself.
The modern analogue to witch hunts is, well, witch hunts in some parts of Africa (especially against albino people). And also charges of apostasy in Pakistan. Don’t like your neighbour? A woman spurned your advances? Accuse them of apostasy. Works like a charm: even if the legal system clears them of the charge you can likely get an imam to whip up a mob to go kill them. And they know it so there’s decent odds they’ll just flee and you don’t even have to burn their home, you can just rob them.
@Big Titty Demon:
Yeah I am fairly mystified how this guy imagines that “relaxed Darwinian selection” is being propagated via “childless spinsters”. That’s not how any of this works.
Who knew people’s characteristics and inclinations are all in the genes. And that women who aren’t reproducing can only reduce group fitness (no child ever benefited from having an aunt!), and in olden times knowledge of herbal remedies always lowered chances of survival. I’m learning so much. /s
@Lumipuna
Also, (at least at some point) witchcraft (noituus) was forbidden but magic (taikuus) was allowed. The difference was that the latter was benevolent, and the former malevolent.
@Alan Robertshaw:
My guess would be the latter. It’s certainly plausible that they prescribed the death penalty for murderers who used a particularly cowardly and hard-to-defend-against weapon, and makes a lot more sense as part of a body of law than any of the alternatives that have been suggested.
Notably, the most privileged people in a Bronze or Iron Age society would have feared that weapon above all others. They could pay bodyguards to stand 100 thick between them and an assailant with a knife or a cudgel, but if someone could slip something into their food and water those bodyguards wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans by way of a defense.
And laws are typically written to forbid the things the privileged people fear the most. Well, those and any distinctive or peculiar practices of the people they fear the most, i.e. poor people and foreigners, hence things like sodomy laws and marijuana prohibition.
@QuantumInc:
AKA putting the cart before the horse.
@Masse_Mysteria:
Someone should ask that kook whether it “reduces group fitness” for beehives to have whole swarms of sterile female workers …
@ surplus
Yeah; that does make sense. And it’s probably noteworthy that in Greek and Roman secular law, the same word was used for both poison and magic.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/283219
Combining that with what Masse_Mysteria just said, it looks a lot like “magic” and “witchcraft” might basically have just meant what we’d now call “pharmacology”, via herbal knowledge. The classic stereotype image of witches at work is women in pointy hats cackling around a bubbling cauldron into which various ingredients sourced from nature have been mixed, after all. So, “black magic”, punishable often by death, was using that knowledge for evil (e.g. poisoning people, or drugging them to manipulate them), and “white magic” was miscellaneous antidotes, analgesics, and (weak) antibiotics etc. that people had figured out how to make. The association with women coming from it being part of traditional women’s work to tend the garden and do the cooking, I suppose.
The “voodoo” of the Caribbean peoples seems to have the same pattern: there’s a dark side and a light side and it seems to have an awful lot to do with preindustrial pharmacology.
The use and misuse of herbological knowledge may have led to similar social constructs around the practice worldwide to regulate it. A pre-modern precursor to the FDA, as it were.
The downside is that it lent itself very readily to false accusations in the event that anyone took ill or acted out of character. Until modern science it was difficult to prove or disprove such an accusation. Now, of course, poisons can be tested for, both in a putative victim’s bloodstream and in residues left on food or drink containers, to confirm or rule out poisoning as the cause of an illness or death and to trace any toxin to its source to determine whether the exposure was accidental, and if not to narrow down a suspect list; and belief in superstitious sorts of magic is not generally taken seriously by law enforcement or the judiciary. (QAnoners who have gotten into high places notwithstanding.)