by Lin Barrett

Created on: June 18, 2009

How different are Satanists and witches? That the two beliefs would be confused with one another at all is the result of a centuries-old smear campaign.

Satanism became confused with witchcraft when, around the time of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church became convinced that it was losing out to the pagans. In the countryside, that was probably true; let's not forget that "pagan" means "country dweller." The Church was a power only in the cities, which were few and far apart. Most people lived in the country; many hamlets did not have a church or even a visiting priest. That meant that the residents did not pay tithes to the Church.

The Catholic Church of that time was not shy about pursuing increased revenue. It took a look at its competition, and probably for political reasons, decided that the craft of the witch was no longer to be tolerated. One of the tenets of that faith is of course that the priestess runs the show. This was anathema to the priests, but the pagans' veneration of the Goddess of Witchcraft was too strong to be attacked; also, they had their own ready-made goddess, Mary, who could be offered to pagans as the acceptable goddess-substitute. It was the witches' god that the priests chose to target, as he was seen to be in direct competition with the Christian Jehovah.

For witches, just as the Goddess is the embodiment of everything female, the God is the embodiment of the male. Our pagan ancestors looked around them at male animals: what did they have that female animals lacked? They had horns, and they had visible sex organs. A god who embodies masculinity should have both, they reasoned.

Archaeology has uncovered several depictions of this god; he often sits in near-lotus, holding arrows in one hand and a cup in the other. Since he is naked, his sex organs show. Sometimes, for reasons we do not now understand, he has the feet and legs of a hoofed animal. (The ancient Greeks gave several of their deities this attribute. The Jungians, a millennium or so later, opine that the animal parts of the lower half of the body show the Greeks' awareness of our connection to the animal world. Few Jungians are also ancient Greeks, but it's as likely an explanation as any.)

So: there he sat, a perfect target for the priest's wrath, and bearing an unfortunate resemblance to descriptions of Satan.

The priests began the careful work of attachment to the God of the pagans the name of the Christian God's foe. Five hundred years later, the uninformed take for granted that witches worship Satan.

The witches' God is not and never has been Satan, despite being labeled as such for more than five hundred years.

How different are Satanists and witches? Despite the success of this half-millennium smear campaign, they do not worship the same deity. One could make a strong case that Satanism is an offshoot of Christianity, and therefore not related to witchcraft at all, let alone identical to it.

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