Daily Prompt: Wicked Witch (Haibun – Salem) | Bastet and Sekhmet's Library

Daily Prompt: Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.

Haibun

Salem

Thanks to religious fanaticism and feuding, Salem village entered into one of the darker moments of the history of the American colonial period. The Salem Witch trials. Twenty persons were hung, hundreds imprisoned, including a child of 4 who shortly became irrecoverably insane, her only crime being her mother’s daughter. It wasn’t a Puritan novelty. Over the years between 1300 until 1600 tens of thousands, mostly women, were tried and killed for being witches.

Evil, the moment when our intolerance to anything outside our belief structure becomes bigotry and hate. They may be religious, political or financial ideas, but the moment an idea becomes the cause of innocents dying, it has become evil. We may look back on the dark ages of religious intolerance, because that was the root cause of the witch burnings in Europe and feel enlightened and smug, but we mustn’t think that we are free from that sort of fanaticism. The means may be different, but we are perfectly capable of killing in the name of an idea. To me this is evil.

beliefs born in wisdom
degenerates into hate
evil ignorance

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