Witches Have More Fun
When Christians Ate Babies and Other Fake Conspiracy Theories
QAnon is just a medieval lie with modern brand marketing
They’re eating the babies! In fact, they’re covering them in bread dough and the followers of this demon-worshiping cult then stab the infant to death. In the grisly conclusion of the foul ceremony, they drink the blood of the murdered child.
There’s more. Let me quote from a source, who I can only refer to as ‘M’:
“It is well known what happens on their feast day …The light goes out and … the followers entwine in unnameable passion. Brothers with sisters, mothers with sons, fathers with daughters.”
According to M, the members of this sex-crazed cult call themselves …. Christians!
Christians are eating babies and having wild incestuous orgies!
Back to reality. M was Minucius Felix, an early Christian author, who wrote about the beliefs of the average Roman in his Octavius, a classic work of Christian literature. He’s reporting a very common belief of the pagan Romans about a crazy cult that was gaining followers, circa 2nd century AD
The Romans were very good propagandists, and it wasn’t unusual for them to lob charges of blood rituals and orgies against conspirators and other trouble makers who might upset their way of life.
In particular, the subversive Christians with their disgusting ideas of brotherhood, love, and a place in the hereafter for ordinary shmoes were an easy target.
There’s a teeny kernel of reality in their understanding of Christian practices. It’s not too far a flex for the Eucharist, through a game of telephone, to become the basis for the baby eating libel.
It also didn’t help matters that as missionaries spread the Word, they may have quoted from the gospel of John — that would be John 6:53 — to explain what was going on: “ye eat of the flesh of the son of Man..”
Probably not the greatest introduction for pagan newbies to this new religion.
And the orgies might have sprung from the Agape meal or “love feast,” which some denominations still encourage.
Sex and violence as a way to demonize enemies was an old idea even by the time the Romans were dealing with the Christians. To disparage the uppity Christians further, Romans imagined they worshipped not an evil horned God — Satan hadn’t been invented yet — but rather a donkey-god.
The Romans naturally had strong he-man and comely she-women as their gods. What better way to ridicule the Christians than to imagine they prayed to a big-eared braying beast of burden? This was how the Romans got to “own the Christians” and make them cry.
It’s about at this point the I should note that conspiracy theorists always view the intended targets as both pathetic but also having special powers and privileges. Almost as if these losers were laughing at upstanding citizens by breaking rules. They had to be punished.
There’s obvious connections to QAnon and Trump’s paranoid followers. At the end of this post, I’ll connect all the dots to show that what Trump has actually done is expose the hypocrisy of his MAGA fanbase while glorifying his own bad behavior. Stay tuned.
We have the medieval Church to thank for putting all the conspiratorial ideas together into a package that would be familiar to us moderns.
Over the course of centuries, they had to workshop on a few different groups before they got the formula right.
Against the Cathars and later the Waldensians — two early non-conforming medieval Christians sects — the Church leveled charges of incestuous orgies and demon worship. The Fraticelli, a northern Italian heretical sect, was also accused of orgies and infanticide with the added touch of eating the victim.
That’s a throwback to the same accusation made by the Romans against the early Christians! For those who want more background on these conspiracy ideas, I’ve put together an amazingly informative short bibliography at the end of this post.
The devil worship charge had to wait for the Church’s own evolving marketing strategy that required them to bring in a Mr. Satan.
They finally got the formula right by the 15th century.
Witches — usually but not exclusively women — would meet at night in a sabbath. (NB: That’s the Jewish sabbath festivities, not of course the more wholesome Christian agape meal.)
The Devil would appear as himself or in the form of a black cat. The witches were supposed to have carried out acts of evil or maleficium since the last meeting and would report back to the boss about their progress. To cap off the evening, the body of a newly killed baby, the child of one of the witches, was cooked and eaten.
The sabbath ended in a chaotic orgy with the party goers having sex with random male demons employed by Mr. Satan.
It’s the material for B-level Hollywood horror flics, but the model has obvious staying power with modern American suburbanites who believe the Q variation of it — i.e., involving Democrats (rather than Waldensians).
One way to interpret this psychosis is to think of these tall tales about witches as providing a psychological outlet for guilt-ridden medieval Christians. The witches represent an inversion of Christian norms, and stories of orgies and sex reveal not-so-deep insecurities … and more than a bit of envy.
In short: ‘we’re following the rules and feel like shit while the bad witches are having tons of fun.’
In the better documented witch trials of 17th-century Connecticut — there were witch hunts before Salem! — we know that some of witches were seen as “lewd” or “naughty” or suspected of having affairs and more.
What better way for jealous neighbors to get their revenge than to make accusations of witchcraft? Even more revealing, the charges often came when the women were older and owned more property, which was conveniently taken away after they were found guilty. Men associated with these women also faced witchery charges.
What are Hillary, Michelle, Joe, and Barack but modern day witches in the eyes of QAnon and puritanical Evangelicals?
In the past, the people bringing the witch charges would at least try to actually live the norms they preached — they would have been on the pious and modest side of the aisle.
That’s not the case this time around.
With Trump and other MAGats — pointing to you Gaetz, Boebert, Giuliani, Hegseth, Musk, etc. — the hypocritical mask has been ripped off. If the MAGA cult was, LOL, being honest, these greedy, lying, sex offenders would themselves be considered modern-day witches.
Not anymore.
Fascist movements are the party of the beaten down lower middle class. As Trump (and the Nazis before him) learned, this is an emotionally impoverished class, betrayed for doing everything right and still feeling down and out. They also have a not-so-hidden hatred for following the rules!
Of course, we know they’re major hypocrites. But Trump is effectively telling them for the first time they are living a lie!
The dropping of pretense by Trump is the real appeal of MAGA to its followers.
In effect, Trump is saying they can be like him: an average Joe in the contracting business who doesn’t follow rules — doesn’t pay taxes, stiffs his workers, divorces, cheats, and has sex with porn stars. He’s doing everything the lower middle class were told not to do, and he’s a famous billionaire!
The joke of course is on them. I’ll end this post with what is actually running through what’s left of Trump’s mind about his suckers, I mean MAGA followers:
‘You low-IQ losers. You think you can get away with what I do? You love your family? Fuck you. You go to church? Fuck you twice. You’re a proud veteran who owns a floor contracting business. Fuck you three times. I’m a draft avoiding, porn-star fucking billionaire who wouldn’t know the bible from a phone directory.
You want to be like me but you can’t. I’m a winner and you follow the rules for losers. And if you did try to break laws like I did, I’ll call you a disgusting criminal and throw your ass in jail.’
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part II. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994 pp. 57–58.
Arno, Mayer. The Lower Middle Class as Historic Problem. JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1876000?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Carlsen, Carol F., The Devil in the Shape of a Women: Witchcraft in Colonial England. New York; WW Norton & Co., 1998.
Cohn, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Lipset Seymour M., Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1981, pp. 127–182.
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