While Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell didn’t say anything about Wicca, per se, when she talked about “dabbling into witchcraft,” her more recent “kill the witch” comments will surely distance her further from pagan communities used to dealing (especially around Halloween) with this confusion between the swirling cultural tropes of “the witch” and those who embrace “witch” as a religious self-description.
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon University, the editor of the Pittsburgh Review of Books, staff writer at LitHub, and the author of several…
Tribulation Trail, and other “Hell Houses” are not solely managing hypothetical fears of what may happen in end-times scenarios; they are about managing fears about the present and imagining a way out now. This “way out” is much more than metaphysical. It seems to fit with the material realities of what it is like to be a member of the working class of the U.S., by offering a sense of orientation and self-worth to people who have been demoralized and exploited in almost every other possible way.
