Dear Time Magazine, Witches Are Real!

Did you know that Patheos (the site that hosts this website) and Time magazine have an arrangement where Time will periodically run a Patheos article on its website? You probably didn’t know that because Time never runs Pagan articles (they could really have their pick of great Samhain/Halloween articles at Patheos Pagan), and apparently they don’t read Patheos Pagan either. Just three days ago a writer for Time (Jennifer Latson) wrote an absolutely head in the sand article about witchcraft called Why Witches on TV Spell Trouble in Real Life.

(Correction: Time has run one article from Patheos Pagan, and did so back in July of this year. I regret the error. In my defense I was out at the Sirius Rising Festival that week.)

I don’t think Ms. Latson’s article was intentionally insulting. She was simply trying to rationalize the explosion of Witch-themed shows on cable television. Fair enough, that’s the kind of article we all expect this time of year, but her execution was exceedingly poor. I think this was the most poorly constructed paragraph in her article (though, as we shall see, it’s not alone):

The difference, of course, is that terrorists are real, while witches are not. (emphasis Mankey) That wasn’t always an “of course,” however: witches were as real to the colonists as smallpox, and even more dangerous, since there was no limit to the extent and variety of damage they could inflict under Satan’s command. When the Salem trials finally stopped — nine months after the apparent bewitching of a minister’s daughter and niece prompted a community-wide freak-out that led to more than 150 arrests — it wasn’t because the colonists no longer believed in witches. Educated people still considered them a threat well into the 18th century.


Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/panmankey/2014/10/dear-time-magazine-witches-are-real/#ixzz3ILtmujrc