every sideways glance
The wind bites differently when the world has turned on you. It no longer whispers, no longer caresses the skin. It cuts, slices through your marrow, reminding you that you don’t belong. But that’s the point, isn’t it? The witch—they always knew she didn’t belong. And they hated her for it. Feared her for it. She was the other, the mirror to their fragile normalcy, the answer to their silent screams that something wasn’t quite right.
They burned her for it once.
But this time—the fire is hers.
Imagine a small, tight-knit community, perhaps in a suburban town, a corporate office, or even an academic institution. The details of the setting can change, but the dynamics remain the same. The people in the community gather at a town hall, a boardroom, or a social media group, all in quiet conversation, their words heavy with accusation. The person being spoken about isn’t present, but their presence looms large in the room. They’ve become the focal point of every whisper, every sideways glance.
The accusations begin subtly—a misstep at work, a misunderstood social media post, or a behavior perceived as “different.” Rumors spread, not through a formal investigation, but through the organic process of gossip. Each person in the room contributes their version of the story, bending it just enough to fit their personal biases. The truth becomes malleable, shifting as it passes from one person to the next, like a broken telephone.
The story begins the way it always does: a gathering of fearful people, murmuring, eyes shifting, clutching their crosses and laws, their rules and codes. Somewhere, deep within their shared instinct, they know they’ve gone too far. But like all mobs, they feed on fear. They need a sacrifice, a scapegoat, someone to absorb their collective shame, their failures, their sins.
A woman walks among them, head high. She’s known by a hundred names—the alchemist, the deviant, the prophet, the witch. In this time, she is truth, and that terrifies them.
But the irony? She was never their enemy. The witch never held a grudge. She only wanted to show them. To illuminate the spaces they feared to tread. Her crime was knowledge. Her sin, truth unvarnished. And for that, they cast her into the flames.
And you will learn—oh, you will learn—that the real revenge isn’t in fire or fury. It’s in the quiet knowing that history doesn’t forget, that the ground remembers every footstep, every lie, every time you turned your back on truth. The witch’s revenge is not in retribution, but in revelation. It’s the moment when you realize that you were always her, and she was always you.
And it’s too late to take it back now.
She walked into the fire willingly, eyes open, because she knew. The flames don’t end the story—they begin it.
This time, there’s no crowd to cheer. No righteous fury to hide behind. It’s just you and the mirror, and the reflection staring back, the one that you feared all along. The one that looks so much like the woman you burned, so much like the witch you thought you destroyed.
It’s you who feels the heat.
Because the witch, she doesn’t need fire. She never needed it. Fire was your tool, your method of destruction. You burned her at the stake, and now the flames are licking at your feet, and you don’t even know it. The pyres you built, the stories you told, the fear you spread—it’s all coming back, one root, one crack at a time.
The reasons behind the conspiracy can be anything from genuine fear to envy, prejudice, or a desire to maintain social order. Each participant believes they are doing the right thing, casting themselves as the hero of the story, standing against the perceived threat. The conspiracy against the person becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: the more the group discusses it, the more justified they feel in their actions. Doubt is washed away by the collective certainty that they are saving the community from a danger that has been fabricated in their own minds.
Key Themes:
The Role of Authority: Often, in witch hunts, there is a figure who implicitly or explicitly endorses the persecution. This could be a charismatic leader, a powerful executive, or a figure with moral authority. They may not issue direct orders but rather nudge the community towards the witch hunt through suggestion, setting a tone of suspicion or fear.
The Group’s Collective Mind: The community begins to think as one. Independent thought is suppressed because questioning the group means risking becoming a target yourself. People participate in the hunt out of fear of standing out. They may not believe the accusations fully, but silence is compliance. This mob mentality feeds on itself, growing stronger with every new piece of gossip or suspicion.
The Modern-Day Technologies: In a modern context, digital platforms and social media can accelerate the witch hunt. The individual’s actions are analyzed, taken out of context, and shared widely. Rumors spread faster than ever, and the accused has little power to stop them. Online forums, group texts, and anonymous accounts become tools of persecution, and the lines between reality and narrative blur.
Isolation of the Victim: The target, unaware of the growing conspiracy, begins to feel isolated. Friends start to avoid them, colleagues grow distant, and doors that were once open close without explanation. Their side of the story is never heard, because in a witch hunt, it’s not about truth—it’s about control and conformity. Even if they try to defend themselves, their voice is drowned out by the collective roar of the mob.
The Unraveling: Eventually, the group must confront the target. A meeting is held, an intervention staged, or a public accusation made. In this moment, the community fully believes they are justified. But once the person is out of the picture—ostracized, fired, or perhaps worse—the group is left with an uneasy silence. The witch hunt has claimed its victim, but the satisfaction they sought never arrives. Instead, guilt, doubt, and the stark realization of what they’ve done begin to creep in.
The fire flickered, long dead in the hearts of those who had gathered around it. Their torches, once held high with righteousness, now smoldered in the damp, heavy air. The witch was gone. Burned. Scorched from the earth like a mistake they’d been desperate to forget. But the thing about mistakes—especially the kind you light with a match—is that they don’t just fade into smoke. They settle into the soil. Into the marrow of the land.
It wasn’t fire that ended them, no matter how many flames kissed their flesh or how much ash settled in the air like a prophecy. No, it was the silence of the crowd, the averted gaze, the whispered prayers for souls already stolen by fear. A witch never truly dies from the outside in. You kill her heart first—with your superstition, your hysteria, your trembling fear of the unknown. Then the body follows, a slow descent into dust.
But dust... Dust remembers.
In time, the witches always return.
The ground, where they had buried the ashes, began to crack. It started slowly—barely noticeable. The same kind of cracks that had once begun in the minds of the people. Cracks they had ignored because they were too focused on looking outward. Always afraid of the stranger, the witch, the one who dared to think or be different. They never thought to look at the fractures growing inside their own skulls. But now, the cracks in the earth were the same as the ones in their souls.
From that place—those forgotten pits of grief, hate, and blood—the earth sighed. The air shivered. Something cold, ancient, and just began to rise. It wasn’t fire this time. Fire was for the weak, for those afraid to leave marks in the shadows. This time, it was the cold truth of every lie they had told themselves, every story of why the witches deserved to burn, every reason they thought they were right.
The Timelessness: This narrative can fit into any time period, from the Salem witch trials to modern cancel culture. It’s a story about the human condition—the way we allow fear, ignorance, and self-righteousness to drive us to persecute others. It shows how communities can rally around a common enemy to feel united, only to find that the enemy was of their own making.
And so, the witches waited.
Buried beneath centuries of stone and soil, their bones crumbled, their names erased. The mobs that once screamed for their blood long since forgotten, just ghosts now, draped in ignorance. But something lingered. The very dirt held their rage, their stolen breath—whispering in the wind, swirling in the water, rising like smoke from the ground. The world forgot them, but they never forgot the world.
Now, here you are. Modern. Proud. Certain. You’re so sure that your science, your technology, your silicon gods will save you. You laugh at the old stories, sneer at the foolishness of villagers who believed in the evil eye, the curse, the binding spell. You think you've risen above it all, that you're safe in your sterile world of digits and pixels. But deep down, you know.
The witches are not done.
The revenge doesn’t come as a storm of brimstone, no flaming pyre reignited by some ancient spell. No, that would be too easy. Too theatrical. The revenge is quieter. Subtle. You don’t even see it happening at first. The cracks in the system—the black swans no one saw coming, the whispers that creep through the digital static, the tiny revolutions that start with a single breath of defiance.
They never see it coming, do they?
The mob, always thinking it has won. Always thinking it has exorcised the demons, cleansed the filth, rid the world of the unholy. But what they forget is this: the fire doesn’t cleanse. It transforms. And if they had paid attention, if they had studied instead of feared, they would know that transformation is the heart of every alchemy.
But the witch knew. She smiled at the first crackle of flames, at the way the smoke curled into the sky, licking at the stars like a whispered promise. She knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t ending—she was beginning.
Because this time, she was not alone.
The witches were not coming back to punish. Punishment was a game played by the living. No, they were coming back to remind.
They whispered in the wind first. A faint sound, almost inaudible, like the air itself was remembering a forgotten song. “You did this to yourselves.” The words were not vengeful, not accusatory. They were simply true. The people who had lit the fires were long gone—turning to dust in graves and monuments no one visited anymore. But their descendants—the ones who still reaped the comfort of those fires—they were still here, walking on ground soaked with the old lies.
The witches didn’t scream or wail. Their voices were a murmur under every breath the people took, a presence behind every blink, in every reflection. They didn’t need to tear down the cities or level the palaces. They only needed to show the world to itself, to turn the mirror just enough so that those who looked into it could no longer turn away. The world had gone on too long without seeing its own face.
They didn’t burn witches anymore. No, that was too obvious now. But they still crucified truth. Still cast the strange ones aside. Still built pyres of policy, media outrage, and digital witch hunts. They just called it something different now. They had made a thousand new names for the same old crime. But the witches knew.
So the revenge wasn’t a storm. It wasn’t a plague. It wasn’t some apocalyptic wave crashing over the world. That would have been too easy. Instead, it was a slow unraveling. The same way fear had once wound itself into their minds, now truth did the same, picking apart every certainty, pulling the threads out one by one.
The term “witch hunt” has evolved far beyond its literal origins in early modern Europe, where thousands were persecuted on accusations of sorcery. Today, it serves as a metaphor for any kind of mass paranoia, group scapegoating, or the persecution of individuals who deviate from the accepted norms of a society. This dynamic occurs within specific socio-political conditions—often during times of uncertainty, social upheaval, or widespread fear.
The world had grown. The witches—they had multiplied. The minds they once burned now scattered like seeds on the wind. The knowledge they once feared, now rooted in the underground. The witches of old, the scapegoats, the heretics—they had evolved.
And the world—the world was ripe for them.
The revenge was never in the burning. It wasn’t in the execution, the exile, or the crucifixion. No. The revenge was always in the return.
Look around you. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you hear the wind, whispering again, not in fear, but in laughter? The witch’s laughter. Her knowledge seeping through the cracks in their walls, their laws, their churches. They built systems to trap her, to contain the truth she carried, but they were built on sand. And she knew how to move the earth.
Scapegoating has been a recurring pattern in human history, used by societies, political leaders, and groups to shift blame for crises or failures onto marginalized or vulnerable individuals or groups. This dynamic typically arises in times of social, political, or economic instability, and the chosen "scapegoat" is often an outsider or minority whose persecution serves to unite the larger community in fear and anger.
Now, she walks freely. In classrooms and boardrooms, on the streets and in the courts, in places of power where they once thought her kind could never reach. Her name changes, but her eyes remain the same—sharp, burning, eternal. She carries the flame now, the one they lit for her, but she wields it differently.
They called her deviant, mad, heretic.
Now they call her leader, innovator, disruptor.
The witches are no longer silent.
In boardrooms and churches, in schools and in streets, the roots keep twisting. People start questioning. Not loudly, not at first. But you can feel the tremors if you stand still long enough. There’s a crack in the mask, a flicker behind the eyes. They want to know why things don’t feel quite as solid anymore. Why the truths they built their lives on suddenly seem thin, paper-thin.
They wanted her gone. Out of sight, out of mind. But she was never out of mind, was she? She lived in the back of your head, in the quiet moments, in the spaces between words. The witch who wouldn’t die, who couldn’t be silenced, because you cannot kill what’s woven into the fabric of your fear. You can’t burn an idea, not really.
And now, it’s you who’s afraid.
Still fear her. Because deep down, they know the truth hasn’t changed. They are still afraid of her knowledge. Afraid that her return signals the end of something they’ve built, something they’ve controlled for so long.
And they’re right.
Because this time, the witch didn’t come to burn. She came to rebuild.
The first crack is subtle. A politician, red-faced, caught in a lie he can’t smooth over. The kind of lie that unravels entire careers. He was always so sure, always so polished, always so quick to point fingers. But now his voice falters. He feels the pull of something older, something forgotten. It’s like trying to breathe in smoke. His certainty turns to ash in his mouth. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s only the first.
They called her evil, called her unnatural. They said she made pacts with darkness, that she twisted the world to her will. But here's the irony—the ones who bound her to the stake were the same ones who feared the darkness inside themselves. It wasn’t her power they feared; it was their own reflection in her. She was everything they wanted to control, everything they could never understand, everything that lived in the cracks of their society.
In any society, witch hunts can be seen as a kind of Black Swan event—though seemingly irrational, they often serve as a warning of underlying structural vulnerabilities. The social unrest, economic instability, and fear that precede a witch hunt reveal cracks in the foundations of society, which are then exacerbated by the hunt itself.
This is the part they never understand: you can’t kill what you don’t understand. And they’ve never understood the witch, the outsider, the ones who see through the cracks in reality and name the invisible. They thought the flames would purify. They thought they could erase her, make the world safe from her truth.
But every witch knows—fire doesn’t erase. It illuminates.
And now, the world is alight.
Witches walk among you. Not in pointed hats or with brooms, not with spells and curses, but with knowledge, with truth, with the power that was always there, hidden beneath the fear. They are the ones you tried to silence, the ones you made the “other.” But this time, you cannot look away. This time, the witch’s revenge is simply this:
To exist.
And in existing, to reveal the lie of your fears. To pull the veil back, to force you to see what you never wanted to see. The world as it is, the world as it could be—if you only let it burn.
To introduce a scholarly, philosophical exploration of the Black Swan concept in this context, we turn to the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined the term to describe highly improbable events that have massive consequences. The unpredictable nature of witch hunts aligns with Taleb’s theory: societal systems are often blind to the forces that trigger mass hysteria or scapegoating, just as they fail to anticipate or control the outcomes of such events.
Taleb’s work on complex systems and fragility provides a lens through which we can view witch hunts as the breakdown of social systems that are ill-prepared to handle uncertainty. The panic surrounding witches in early modern Europe, or the moral panics of today, reflect societies that are overly reliant on rigid structures of power—structures that become brittle under the weight of unpredictability and fear.
Witch hunts, especially those occurring during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and North America, were deeply tied to the religious, political, and social tensions of the time. The Malleus Maleficarum (1487), written by Heinrich Kramer, became a foundational text for identifying, prosecuting, and punishing witches. This work, widely criticized today, provides a window into how fear, religious authority, and misogyny coalesced to create a society where witch hunts became normalized.
Tens of thousands of people were executed across Europe, their deaths serving as a form of social control and moral reinforcement, allowing communities to externalize their anxieties about changing political and religious landscapes.
You see, they thought they were safe—safe in their judgments, safe in their certainty, safe in their fear. But fear, like fire, consumes everything, including those who think they control it.
It begins with a flicker. Not the kind that catches the eye at first. No, this one simmers, smolders just beneath the skin. You can’t see it unless you know where to look, and most don’t. They didn’t see it the first time when they built the pyres, when they cast the stones, when they let loose the whispers that turned to shouts, turned to flames, turned to screams.
But witches don’t die. Not really.
They become the roots beneath the soil, the rustle of the leaves, the smoke on the horizon. And they remember. They remember the pitchforks, the sermons, the way you watched with eager eyes, as if cleansing yourself with the blood of the other. But the soil remembers too, and tonight it trembles underfoot. Tonight, the roots stir, pulling back against the centuries of silence.
This is the witch's revenge—not a shout, but a murmur that ripples through the very bones of the earth.
Malleus Maleficarum: The treatise gave religious legitimacy to the persecution of witches, describing witchcraft as heresy and endorsing the use of torture to extract confessions. In many ways, it is an early example of how authoritative institutions—churches and courts—co-opted fear and superstition to maintain control.
The Black Death, one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, killed an estimated 30-60% of Europe’s population. In the midst of this catastrophic death toll, people sought explanations, and many blamed Jews for poisoning wells, spreading the disease.
During times of widespread panic and death, societies often look for an external group to blame. Jews, who were already subject to widespread anti-Semitism and isolation, were scapegoated as a convenient target. Their differing customs, religion, and economic roles (often as moneylenders due to Christian prohibitions against usury) contributed to their demonization.
Jews were massacred in violent pogroms throughout Europe, especially in places like Strasbourg, Basel, and Mainz. Thousands of Jews were killed, and entire Jewish communities were eradicated in some regions.
From a psychological perspective, witch hunts reveal the mechanisms of mass hysteria and moral panic. As sociologist Stanley Cohen outlined in his seminal work on moral panics (1972), societies often identify "folk devils"—individuals or groups who are perceived as threats to social order. During witch hunts, these figures become the focal point of public anxiety, often for behaviors or beliefs that deviate from the norm. The classic elements of a witch hunt involve accusations that spiral out of control,
A term coined by psychologist Irving Janis, groupthink occurs when a group’s desire for conformity results in irrational decision-making. During witch hunts, entire communities would become entrenched in the belief that witches were among them, often dismissing critical thinking or dissenting voices to maintain social cohesion.
Psychologically, societies use scapegoating as a way to offload collective fears, anxieties, or tensions. Witches, in their historical context, often represented marginalized individuals—frequently women—who lived outside societal norms. Anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her studies on purity and danger, suggests that individuals labeled as "witches" often functioned as societal scapegoats, their punishment serving to reinforce community boundaries and restore social order.
Look around you.
It’s already begun. The old world is burning again, only this time, it's not the witches on the pyre. It’s your certainty, your hubris, your blind faith in the order of things. You hunted witches because they scared you—because they held truths you were too weak to face. Now those truths rise from the ashes you scattered, and they’re coming for you, not with vengeance but with the reckoning that was always due.
You feel it, don’t you? That slow gnawing at the edges of your world. The creeping instability, the entropy that science said was inevitable but you never truly believed would touch your precious civilization. The witches knew about entropy long before your laws of thermodynamics made it comfortable. They knew that order is a fragile lie, that chaos is the only real truth. You tried to burn that truth with them, but chaos can’t be burned.
They’re in the air now.
You breathe them in when you wake up in the morning, that sense of unease that hums just beneath the surface. The systems you worship—the algorithms, the markets, the governments—they’re all just mirrors, reflecting the same fear that made you light those fires centuries ago. You hunted witches to silence the unknown, and now the unknown is everywhere, pulsing through the wires, leaking out from the corners of the world you thought you could control.
The witches’ revenge isn’t about killing you. It’s about letting you kill yourselves. Slowly. With every decision made in fear, every scapegoat burned to keep your illusion of safety intact. The witches knew something you’ve forgotten—that power doesn’t come from controlling the chaos. Power comes from dancing with it.
And now? Now you get to watch as the dance begins again.
The reckoning was never about them. It was always about you.
For every scream that tore through the night as flames licked the sky, for every stone thrown at a woman whose only crime was knowledge, there’s a silence that follows. And in that silence, a new power grows. The witches are not dead. They never were. They’re in the spaces between your data points, in the glitches in the system, in the blackouts and outages that you write off as anomalies.
Their revenge is simple: They let you continue. They let you live with your choices. They let you believe in your own safety, even as the world crumbles beneath your feet. They let you believe that the witches were the danger, that the chaos was outside of you. When all along, it was in you. It is you.
The witches knew this. That’s why you feared them. That’s why you burned them.
But now? Now, you can’t burn what you can’t see.
The witches are in the storm that’s coming, the one you don’t want to name. The one you feel deep in your bones but pretend isn’t real. The witches aren’t angry. They don’t need to be. They simply wait. Because they know.
They always knew.
And now, so do you.
Witch hunts often arise during periods of economic or political instability, when societies seek explanations for their suffering or challenges. The European witch trials coincided with events such as the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Little Ice Age. These periods were marked by religious conflict, territorial disputes, and poor harvests—each of which fostered a sense of insecurity.
One of the most infamous examples of witch hunts, the Salem Witch Trials occurred against a backdrop of political uncertainty, economic stress, and religious fervor in Puritan New England. Historians have argued that the trials were fueled by factional disputes, property rivalries, and social tensions, as well as by the pervasive fear of the Devil.
In today’s world, witch hunts often take on metaphorical or digital forms—manifesting in what some describe as “cancel culture,” where individuals are publicly shamed, boycotted, or socially ostracized for perceived transgressions. This dynamic mirrors historical witch hunts in several key ways:
In online spaces, groupthink can become magnified, as algorithms encourage users to engage primarily with content that reinforces their existing beliefs. This can lead to echo chambers, where nuanced debate or disagreement is drowned out by a chorus of accusatory voices.
The Witches' Revenge
(A retelling for Xawat)
The flames crackled and snapped like the tongues of liars, their heat distorting the air, the ground beneath trembling under the weight of a ritual meant to cleanse but instead cursed every hand that fed it. They thought they had burned the witches, silenced the ones who dared to dance in the shadows, to speak with the earth in ways that men forgot how to. But what they didn’t understand was that fire only burns flesh—it can never touch the truth that lives beneath.
You see, the witches never needed revenge. Revenge was for the weak—those trapped in the cycle of anger and blood. The witches knew better. They knew that the land itself, the rivers, the roots, the wind that bends low over fields of grain—it all remembers. It all keeps score. They let the flames take their bodies because their power was never in the flesh.
The real revenge was in the quiet. In the slow creeping rot that took hold of every town that ever raised a pyre. The sickness that ate at the bones of the men who watched with glee, thinking they were purging the world of darkness. It came not in the night, not with screams and vengeance—but in the slow, unseen way that the roots of a tree can split stone.
Years passed. Decades. The towns that once flourished, that built their churches over the bones of the "wicked," began to crumble. Crops failed. Rivers dried. The air turned foul with the stench of something unseen, something lost. And the men in their high chairs, their bibles clutched tight, could not understand why their prayers fell on deaf ears. Why the land, once so generous, now offered nothing but drought, famine, and dust.
But the witches understood. They had always understood.
They were never alone. They were never without allies, even as the flames licked at their feet. The earth had always been with them, the wind in their hair, the rain in their eyes, the moon that never judged. These were the forces that saw the truth and held the memory. These were the elements that, while quiet, waited—patiently. They let the men hang themselves with their own ropes of ignorance, their pyres fueled by fear, their righteousness as fragile as dry leaves in autumn.
The witches' revenge was simple. It was nature reclaiming what was always hers. It was the slow decay of stone-built power. The collapse of churches that grew empty as the fields they preached to. It was the blackened soil refusing to yield, the children born sickly, the skies that darkened with every passing year.
The witches' revenge was not the quick, sharp slash of a knife—it was the centuries-long decay of civilizations that thought they could play god. They never needed fire to fight fire. They let the seasons turn, let the years fold into one another like whispers in the wind. The witches knew that all things rot when cut off from the roots of truth.
And now, in those towns where the pyres once roared, where the witches’ cries filled the air, nothing remains but dust. Silent streets, cracked windows, walls crumbling like the lies they were built on. Nature had taken it all back. The earth had swallowed it whole. And the people? They left, because the land would no longer support them, the soil too poisoned by its own hatred.
But the witches—they never left.
They were there in the wildflowers that sprang from the graves they were meant to fill. In the wild winds that howled through the empty streets. In the black crows that circled overhead, their sharp cries reminding those who still dared to wander too close that nothing built on fear can stand. Not for long.
You see, the witches didn’t need to spill blood. They didn’t need to fight back with the same violence that had been done to them. The earth, the real mother, had always been on their side, and she has a long memory. Longer than any man, any king, any priest.
The witches’ revenge was never about fire. It was about watching the men who thought they had power fall to their knees in the dust, as the world they tried to control crumbled beneath them. It was about reminding the earth’s children that they were never gods, never above the dirt they came from.
The witches’ revenge was simply this: they endured. They grew roots deeper than any pyre could burn. They knew that real power does not come from the sword or the flame—it comes from understanding the rhythm of the universe, the pulse beneath the skin of the world.
And now, in the silence, in the decay, the witches still laugh.
