Witch Trial Tribulations of my Other Worldly Novels

There’s yet another cartoon from 2017 circulating on Bluesky, this one a WaynoVision bit of snarky genius, wherein a Puritan man lights a fire beneath a woman labeled “WITCH,” she being tied to a stake, while he says to her, “I’m the real victim here.”

As discussed in two previous blogs posts this month published February 8 and 2, the latter otherwise known as Groundhog Day, there’s a reason we’re now reliving the atrocities of 2017 and it isn’t good.

In fact, we’re in a never-ending loop reminiscent of the movie Groundhog Day, this one wrought with ignorant misogyny. As if these alt-rightwing MAGA cretins aimed to take us back to the Salem Witch Trials—while they claim to be the persecuted (supposedly) Christian white males who are so put upon and denigrated.

Hence, it’s not surprising that I already began addressing the US war on women, referencing the Salem Witch Trials, in my Other Worldly novels published in 2021 and 2022, Being Alien and Alien Sensation. Precisely because I, through my protagonist Rowan Layne, was still processing the vicious misogyny plaguing out nation as a result of the previous presidential administration running roughshod over civil rights and basic human decency from January 2017 to January 2021.

And here we go again.

In Being Alien, set primarily in Scotland, I also addressed women burned as so-called witches in Edinburgh when Rowan asks Scotsman Red MacLeod to tell her about the hotel, The Witchery, where they were staying the night:

               “We’re at the top of the Royal Mile at the gates of Edinburgh Castle, as you know. In a historic sixteenth-century building now named for hundreds of women burned at the stake as witches on Castlehill during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

               “Yikes. The macabre plight of my gender on Earth, to be sure. Do you think I’m a witch in addition to a fairy?” I quipped to cover my concern about potential visions of horrific crimes perpetrated in the name of twisted religious fervor—and patriarchal control.”

               “It was mostly the fae who were targeted as witches, lass. But many persevered despite attempts to destroy them.”

               “Boy howdy. There’s this mug I want. It says: I am descended of witches you weren’t able to burn.”

               “Aye , that you are, lass. Full of feisty spirit forged through the ages.”

In Alien Sensation, the opening scene literally takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, where Rowan Layne is accosted by a fanatical misogynist who sounds like a throwback to the Puritan age when he calls her an abomination and a whore. Her response is one I wish really had taken place:

               “Y’all holier-than-thou males really need new material. Whore?” I shook my head. “The epithet hurled at outspoken women since time immemorial. You think I’m Hester Prynne? You want to burn me at the stake here in Salem? Tell me, do you brand men with the same puritanical standard? Or is this heinous hypocrisy reserved only for females?”

               “Silence, whore!” The stinky man waved his bible as if to threaten me with the written word. Please. More like his putrid presence threatened the now roiling contents of my stomach.

               “We have a thing called freedom of speech, not to mention free association—as in free to associate with aliens—under the First Amendment to our Constitution, drafted not too many miles from where we are now.” I glared. “I’m not moved by your attempt to silence or shame me with pseudo religious control. The US is a secular nation and has been since the ratification of the Bill of Rights.” My gaze shifted to the reporter who’d reentered the room at the sound of a man spewing rot that his network would eagerly lick off the floor to falsify a story…

               “When you file today’s story, do try to refrain from referring to the arrest of a dangerously deranged man as a witch hunt—as your network so often has with the indictment of the former president and his cohorts in crime.” I channeled some Luna Moth Woman mojo, my fictional superheroine journalist. “Bone up on the factual history of actual witch hunts that took place on this very soil—and whom they mostly targeted. It’s men who perpetuated and perpetrated witch hunts in a pathetic attempt to control. The systematic, targeted persecution and burning of females for such oh-so-shocking things as having sex…Given how you’re so preoccupied with intimate details of private lives of women you don’t personally know.”

I share these excerpts now because here I go again. It turns out I’m addressing the very same subject while drafting the eighth and final Other Worldly novel in progress, Alien Origins. Perhaps I somehow always sensed, deep down, that these scenes from Being Alien and Alien Sensation were a prescient precursor to the ultimate culmination of the life story of the DNA origins of Rowan Layne.

Not only are we as a nation going back in time to a not-so-pleasant era in the US we’d hoped we left behind for good, but post-middle-aged Rowan Layne, upon a return to Scotland, learns she must also confront the atrocities committed against women of the Middle Ages.