WITCHES,

WITCHES, MONSTERS, FEARS

A SHORT EXCURSION

BETWEEN LITERATURE AND MYTH

Throughout centuries, man has always searched (and found out) the way to get scared.

Most likely, the frightening, the fear and the feeling of terror, were born from casual events: the force of elements, hungry animals attacking, body pain, sickness.

And, up to this point, man has acted exactly the same as all the other animals on the planet, trying to escape these feelings via defensive behaviours.

Then, one day, man began to "invent" the fear; we don't know very well how this happened, and probably we will never know, but we can suppose that this search for terror has been inspired by a self-satisfaction desire. This could appear contradictory, but if we try to think of the feeling of relief that warms us after a big fear, when everything has passed and we are saved and safe... we find it logical that this "liberation" (and the pleasure which comes from it) would have never existed without the frightening that we felt before.

It would be too long to present now here a "history of the searched fear"; I'll only say that it is a very ancient history, and that most likely one of the most ancient "searched fears", if not the most ancient of them all, is the religious one. Man, as soon as he has been able to think beyond his five senses, has immediately invented religions. He did it to encourage himself, he did it to think that not everything was finished when the flesh was cold and the heart stopped beating; but he did it to get scared as well: it's a matter of fact that almost all religions are based on terror, a terror coming from the punishment that, after physical death, waits who, in life, has not followed the right rules.

Obviously the "relief", in this case, comes from the clear conscience, from being convinced of having acted in the right way, from being sure to avoid the tortures beyond and enjoy just the pleasures of Heaven.

Terrors invented by man are of various kinds. Due to the restricted space we have, we'll talk here just about three of them: witches, other worlds' creatures and unconscious' terrors.

WITCHES

Horrible old women with hooked noses, but seducing girls with sweet eyes as well, witches are a typical example of "humanization" of the religious terror; Christianity, the most widespread religion in the world, has got between its foundations the existence of "fallen angels", celestial creatures who, being rebels against God, were thrown down in Hell; Lucifer is their head; he is also called Satan, Baal-Zebub, or, most commonly, the Devil; he is the supervisor to all the tortures that wait the ones who didn't follow the rules, and he tries in thousands of ways, even during "this" life, to entice us in his reign of eternal pain.

As we can see, the Devil is a big terror, one of the strongest; but, in the meanwhile, he is ethereal, no man of common sense can maintain of having really seen the Demon; so, man, who lives with senses, in the end, felt the need to incarnate the Devil in someone; since man is man and world is world, all the civilizations have been ruled by males, so, nothing could appear more perfect than embodying the Devil in a woman.

The witch is the Devil's servant, she is his minister, she executes his orders, she eases his job, she updates him about last news during the conventions, and she's his lover too, for in these conventions she joins him in the flesh.

We don't know if the "witch terror", through the centuries, has found its "liberating satisfaction" more in escaping from the witches' hands or more in being able to torture them in the most refined ways and finally burn them on stakes. For my opinion, both the pleasures were strong, and, knowing the sadism which hides in human soul, I daresay that the second pleasure often won upon the first one.

In "The Blair Witch Project" movie, a story is narrated about a witch who, in our days, still haunts (directly or via the followers of her "cult") a forest in Maryland. The movie is masterly in showing us practically nothing; we can just slip irresistibly in the pure gloom and terror feeling which entraps the three boys who entered the forest to shoot a video regarding the witch. Marco's very nice website will give you any information about this movie and other terrors.

If you want to know something about witches in Liguria, you can look at this page in which I'm telling you some oddnesses about Western and Eastern Liguria witches.

OTHER WORLDS' CREATURES

Far before the actual science-fiction was born, man started to look at the sky, and, especially at night, when all that dark up there seemed to have not an end, he started to imagine that, inside that darkness, incredible horrors could hide.

From these fears, a literary genre arose which had to find in Howard Phillips Lovecraft its first and unequalled master. In the page you can visit clicking on the image aside, I shortly describe his work.

UNCONSCIOUS' TERRORS

After visiting "divine" terror and after exploring "outer space" terror, man had nothing else to do than looking in the most frightening place of them all: inside himself.

Although Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote before Lovecraft, he has been the precursor of a literary genre which was to flourish far later than Lovecraft.

We learn from his tales how, in the end, the most tremendous terrors, the things which most scare us and throw us into the deepest gloom, these things are inside ourselves.

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