Osho on Pain of Witch and Beauty of Witches

 

 

Question 2

Osho,

Sometimes people have said that they see in my face that of a very old, hard witch. and i have felt inside me a deeply buried, revengeful, cold rage against all men who have ever forced, raped, killed or hurt women. this feels like something i have been carrying within for lives, and the realization of it is very painful. is this some unknown part of myself, a mean personality in the closet? if so, please help me uncover and befriend this old witch.

 

 

The first thing to be clear about is that it was Christianity who condemned the word `witch'; otherwise, it was one of the most respected words, as respected as `mystic' -- a wise man. It simply meant a wise woman, the parallel to a wise man.

 

But in the Middle Ages, Christianity came to face a danger. There were thousands of women who were far wiser than the bishops and the cardinals and the pope. They knew the art of transforming people's lives.

 

Their whole philosophy was based on love and transformation of sexual energy -- and a woman can do that more easily than a man. After all, she is a mother and she is always a mother. Even a small baby girl has the quality of motherliness.

 

The quality of motherliness is not something connected with age, it is part of womanhood. And the transformation needs a very loving atmosphere, a very motherly transfer of energies. To Christianity, it was a competitor. Christianity has nothing to offer in comparison to it -- but Christianity was in power.

 

It was a man's world up to then; and they decided to destroy all witches. But how to destroy them? It was not a question of killing one woman but thousands of women. So a special court was created for enquiry, to find out who was a witch.

 

Any woman said by Christians to have had an influence on people and who people respected was caught and tortured -- so much so, that she had to confess. They wouldn't stop torturing her until she confessed that she was a witch. And according to the Christian mind, to Christian theology, the meaning of witch was changed: a witch is one who is having a sexual relationship with the devil.

 

You don't hear any more of any devil having a relationship with any woman. Either the devil has become a Christian monk, a celibate, or... what has happened to the devil? Who was it that was having sexual relationships with thousands of women? And these women were mostly old women. It doesn't seem to be rational. When young and beautiful women were available, why should the devil go to the old, the very old women?

 

But to become a witch, it was a long training, a long discipline, a long experience. So by the time a woman was a witch -- a wise woman -- she was old; she had sacrificed everything to attain that wisdom, that alchemy.

 

They forced these poor old women into saying that they were having sexual intercourse with the devil. Many of them tried hard... but the torture was too much.

 

When my back had gone bad, Devaraj and other sannyasins trained in bodywork started traction on me. And I enquired, "What is traction? How was it invented?" They had no idea.

 

It was invented in the Middle Ages by Christians to torture the witches -- to pull their bodies from both ends and to go on pulling to a point where it became unbearable. Many became unconscious; many died on their traction machine. But, by the way, it was found that many old women who were put into traction had had a back problem; when they got out of it, the back problem had disappeared. So now Christians don't use it, but doctors do. Now it is part of the medical world.

 

They tortured these women in many ugly ways, just for one thing: they should confess. The women continued to try to say that they had nothing to do with the devil, that there was nothing to confess. But nobody listened to them; they went on torturing them.

 

You can make anybody confess anything if you go on torturing him. A point comes when he feels it is better to confess rather than to unnecessarily suffer the same torture every day. And it would have continued for his whole life. Once a woman confessed that she was a witch and was having a sexual relationship with the devil, her torture was stopped and then she was presented before a court -- a special court made by the pope -- and before the court she was to now confess. And once she confessed before the court, the court was able to punish her -- because it is the greatest crime in the eyes of Christianity.

 

In fact, even if the woman was having a sexual relationship with the devil, it is none of the business of anybody else -- and it is not a crime, because she is not harming anybody. And the devil has never complained to any police station, "That woman is dangerous." On what authority was Christianity burning these women?

 

The only punishment was to be burned alive so that no other woman dared to be a witch again. They destroyed thousands of women and completely removed a very significant part of humanity. And the wisdom that those women contained -- their books, their methods, their techniques of transforming man, transforming man's energy....

 

So the first thing to be understood is: don't think that witch is a bad word. It is more respectable than `pope' -- because I don't think a pope is a man who can be called wise; they are just parrots and nothing else. It is possible that it may be connected with your past life, and the wound has been so deep that still some remembrance in your unconscious goes on reminding you. And that creates the hate for men, because what was done to you was done by men.

 

So it is a simple association, but that association has to be dropped. It was not done by men, it was done by Christians. And the Christians have done so many crimes, and they go on doing them. It is unbelievable.

 

Just now in the United States, there is a case in the court against the Catholic church, because they cannot have a tax-exempt status if, in any way, they try to participate in politics. And they are participating in politics in every way. They have their lobbyists in the Senate, in the congress; even the president, Ronald Reagan, is a fundamentalist Christian, so they must be influencing him, because that is a fanatic section of Christianity.

 

The magistrate was convinced by all the evidence that was produced by a small group of liberated people -- liberated from the slavery of Christianity -- that these people are lobbying and influencing the law, influencing the government, and their tax-exempt status should be taken away.

 

The magistrate told them that they will be fined one hundred thousand dollars per day, for as long as they don't answer. But this is how the world is: after seven days the magistrate changed his statement -- "They will not be fined, they can simply answer."

 

Now, that is again a proof that a pressure from higher sources is forcing him... that this is too much in a Christian country. That's what Ronald Reagan thinks -- that America is a Christian country and should respect Christian values, and this would be a condemnation of the whole Christian church. So no fine; they can simply answer whether it is true or not. But the thing is out; it cannot remain that way for long. They will have to accept the fact.

 

Our commune was destroyed by Christians hiding behind the politicians. They have money, they have votes, so any politician is vulnerable to their influence.

 

And all over the world they are doing ugly things. Ronald Reagan was going to give a large amount of war material to Saudi Arabia, which the congress rejected because it was strange -- on one hand you go on giving war material to Israel, and on the other hand you give war material to the Mohammedan countries. On both sides your war material is being used, so you have found a good market. People will be killed, and your old-fashioned war material -- which is of no use anymore -- you can sell. Otherwise, what is one to do with that war material? Every day new things are happening, and the old becomes out-of-date.

 

But to sell to both parties is simply so absurd. If you want Israel to be saved, then you should not sell war material to Mohammedan countries. But that is not the question. Who cares about Israel and who cares about the Mohammedan countries? The real care is how many things you can sell. President Ronald Reagan vetoed it; he's still going to sell.

 

The United States has a treaty with the European countries, NATO. Ronald Reagan has proposed to produce chemical war material, which is the ugliest. Only five countries out of sixteen have voted against it, but that does not matter because the majority is in favor. And all the great countries -- England, France, Germany -- are in favor.

 

When chemicals are used in war, it is more dangerous and more ugly -- more inhuman. For example, a bomb will not be dropped here, but chemical gas will be released into the city and whoever breathes that gas will die immediately.

 

There are gases which will melt only your bones; you will live, but all your bones will be melted. So you will become just a bag without any bones. What kind of life will that man have when all his bones are gone? He cannot walk, he cannot sit; he can only lie down.

 

And they go on talking about truth, talking about God... and speaking lies.

 

Doctors from the West have now gone to Kiev and have found that Soviet Russia has given exact information about the disaster in their nuclear plant. Only two persons have died, and America managed to influence the whole world news media to say that two thousand people have died. There is a limit to exaggeration -- two people became two thousand! And now Western experts have gone there and they have confirmed that only two persons have died. Four persons died afterwards, so in all, six persons have died.

 

And these are religious people trying in every way to deceive the world, to deceive the human mind, to pollute with ugly lies. So don't be against men as such; just being against Christian atrocities is enough.

 

And don't feel bad that something is wrong in you. It must be a remembrance. You can go through hypnosis so that you can remember better. That will help in both ways: you will not feel bad that you are having such bad, evil ideas, and secondly it will help you to make clear the distinction between men and Christians.

 

Now all European countries are Christian and they are ready for chemical war. And they will go on reading, "Love your enemies, Love your neighbor," and they will continue praying in their churches... and they will prepare a chemical death for millions of people. And the initiator is a fundamentalist Christian.

 

Ronald Reagan has been brought up in a fundamentalist Christian school, and he has not grown up from there. He is still retarded.

 

You can see the Christian mind: Americans were asked, "If you want your brain to be changed, with whom would you want to change it?" God came last. Nobody cares about God; that's how you can see.

 

If you directly ask somebody, then he will fight that God is the supreme being. But in an indirect way, they got caught. Ronald Reagan is ahead of God, ahead of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and God -- these are just fictions, even to the Christian mind. Otherwise, in the poll God should have come first -- he couldn't even have come second -- and Jesus Christ should have come second. And there are hundreds of beautiful people in the world; Ronald Reagan cannot have any place.

 

But for two thousand years Christianity has been killing people in the name of religion, in the name of God, in the name of Christ, in the name of the nation -- so it is perfectly right to condemn them. But not every man is a Christian. To be a Christian is a degradation; it is becoming subhuman.

 

But it will be good to go through a hypnotic process to find out more clearly. Perhaps you may remember what were the techniques of the witches -- how they functioned, how they managed to change people -- because unless they were a danger to Christianity, Christianity would not have killed them.

 

It was a real danger, because Christianity has nothing to offer in comparison.

 

-Osho, “The Transmission of the Lamp, #2, Q2”