Dig It!

I just read something sooooo interesting (to me, anyway🤓) having to do with the subject- matter of my article Fines and Portents, which Simon so graciously serialized on our site here a few months ago.
There is an article up by Johannes Dillinger in the online magazine Aeon, entitled Rich Witches. The author links witchcraft persecution to the then-pervasive philosophy that economics is a zero-sum game: you couldn’t be rich except by stealing from other people. Hence the title. Anyone who had accumulated wealth was suspect to witchcraft prosecution.
And contrary to the received belief , slightly more men than women were accused and convicted, which makes sense because it had to be easier for a man than for a woman to become wealthy, due. to women’s legal disabilities.
He’s talking specifically about the germnophone population of Europe; more than half of the people put to death for witch craft during the centuries-long witch-hunt terror were Germanophone, which I noted in my article as well.
But here’s the first interesting thing: our Pa Statute, 18 PaCSA 7104, among its myriad prohibitions, makes it a crime, if done for gain or lucre, “to tell where to dig for treasure”.

That didn’t jump out at me when I was writing my atticle, because I had no mental hook to hang it on. But Dillinger notes that in the German speaking European population, everybody routinely used household magic, white magic like the PowWow, to just, kinda, make the environment more conducive to a comfortable existence, ward off disease and spoliation.
‘And, additionally, to locate buried treasure! Treasure-hunting was a widespread practice.
But it wasn’t suspect to attempt to accumulate wealth that way (so even tho this type of divination was technically witchcraft, people were seldom prosecuted for it). Why? The author explains that it’s because if they found it and got rich, they wouldn’t be taking anything from the community; this would just be a windfall, due to capricious Fortuna’s whim.
( I wonder how this idea: that the earth contained buried wealth— got started? What did they hope to find—Hoards of Roman gold coins? And what did Pa’s German settlers hope to uncover in the New World? The word ‘treasure’ in the statute suggests some kind of coin or artifact, not just unmined silver or gold..)

Then the author goes on to link the rise of capitalism (of which the hallmark is that wealth is something created, not something consumed ) with the decline of witchcraft persecutions. Wealth was now something you could earn, or legitimately generate, people no longer regarded it as something which had to have been stolen from others.

Chalk up another win for capitalism!

And I mean that literally. Socialism regards any individual’s slightest accumulation of value as evidence of “hoarding” or of some kind of illicit profiteering. Under a communist regime, baking a birthday cake for your kid will getcha a wee-hours visit from the secret police, tipped off by your jealous neighbors: why should YOU have more flour and sugar, even just a little bit , than THEY do?

Just one more way in which socialism represents a return to the Dark Ages of superstition, fear, persecution.

Thanks, if you’ve read this.

Selah.