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Why the Wicked Witch Isn't DeadThe timeless allure of witch hunting.

By Johann HariUpdated Monday, April 20, 2009, at 6:57 AM ET

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Why, during times of horror, do humans inflict this further cruelty on their neighbors and themselves? Why do we so often choose witch hunting over solidarity? In those African villages, it always seemed to me that a belief in witches is—at the most basic level—a rebellion against the cold randomness of death. If you live in the Tanzanian bush—or in a German village in 1672—almost anything can kill you, and it probably will: a mosquito bite, a mouthful of water filled with invisible bacteria, a cut knee that becomes infected. Death is everywhere, random and sudden and final. In these circumstances, it is more reassuring to believe there is an evil out there that you can personify and hunt down and kill than to acknowledge the truth: that you are powerless.

The witch-killers always describe a feeling of sweet relief. All the guilt they feel—for snatching food from their starving neighbors, for taking part in atrocities—is channeled outward. The evil is somewhere else—in that child, in that old woman—and it can be killed. But there is always a nasty irony: They believe they are expunging "evil" when in fact they are enacting it.

Yet this doesn't explain why witch hunting keeps taking the same form every time, with only mild variations. Why, in particular, is it almost always targeted at women? In 1486, a witch-killer called Heinrich Kramer wrote Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a staggeringly popular guide on how to identify, torture, and kill the female fiends. Every page drips with misogyny. It says a woman has a "slippery tongue" and is "a liar by nature." Her "carnal lust … is insatiable," and she will indulge it with Satan eagerly.

The Enemy Within Demos believes there is a primal reason for this. "A mother—a woman—is the primal Other, the nonself from which the self is progressively distinguished; further, she disposes a kind of absolute power to meet, or reject, infantile need," he writes. "As such, she retains forever afterward an aura of what a discerning psychologist has called 'magically formidable' qualities." So when we begin to suspect all-powerful dark forces, we suspect women first—because our mothers once held all-encompassing powers over us.

I think this misses a starker and simpler explanation. Women are generally weaker than men. They are less able to defend themselves from braying mobs. They are easier to pin down and turn into a screaming, denying receptacle of evil. The mobs usually choose the weakest women of all—old women and little girls.

The psychological template of witch hunting lies deep in our brains—and recurs in our own societies, generation after generation. Demos offers a potted history of American witch hunts, from the panic about Freemasons in the early republic to McCarthyism to the hysteria about Satanic ritual abuse that crested in the 1990s. It is this last case that shows how vulnerable we are to working ourselves into these hysterias, here, now.

It began in 1984 in California, when a 37-year-old grandmother, previously diagnosed as paranoid and delusional, announced that her grandchild was being abused by a secret ring of Satanists. The children said it wasn't true, and rejected it through hours of questioning. Yet the school became convinced it was—and the children were made to keep talking until they "confessed," at which point they were slathered with praise for their courage. As before—as always—the accusations spread. Our panic about the vulnerability of children created a monstrous irony: In the process of trying to ease our fears, we turned our own children into witch-accusers—and panicked even more. Dozens of innocent people were jailed.

One of the most notorious cases happened barely a dozen miles from Salem. Now, 20 years later, there is a broad consensus it was all a fiction: There were no rings of Satanists raping children. But these histories show the hysteria will happen again. We don't know yet who the victims are, but they are out there, oblivious. There is an enemy within—dormant in our own fragile minds and emerging with paranoid intensity at times of stress. Our only antidote is to insist on evidence. Whenever there are charges against a person or group, we must ask insistently: How do we know? Show me the proof. Show me three times. Show me 10.

The last time I saw Clarice, I tried to tell her softly that there was a long history of people across the world being accused of being witches, and now we all know it is not real. She didn't say anything. She stared at me inscrutably, and a tear ran down her cheek.

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Johann Hari is a Slate contributing writer and a columnist for the Independent in London. He was recently named newspaper journalist of the year by Amnesty International.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

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