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Witches around the world
The belief in witches is an almost universal feature of human societies. What does it reveal about our deepest fears?
Far more recently, I was reminded of the universal idea of the ‘witch’ by Pizzagate – the QAnon conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and other members of a supposed global elite were killing and eating children in secret satanic rites, conducted while operating a paedophile ring in a pizza parlour in Washington, DC. (Piercing is a major technique among the Kalapalo of Brazil, who call witches ‘masters of the darts’, but it also recalls QAnon’s recent claim that Bill Gates, identified as a member of the ‘global elite’, was promoting COVID-19 vaccination with the aim of injecting microchips into unsuspecting recipients.) From the arresting series of inversions to manifesting as nocturnal lights to flying unaided, many attributions of witches are encountered so often, in different places and different historical periods, that they cannot credibly be explained as mere coincidences, or something that originated in one culture and simply spread to near and distant others.
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