Word: witched
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...specter of the U.S. in the grip of a hysterical witch hunt, of the President cowering before McCarthy's power, bears only a specter's relation to reality. But it is the specter that flashes instantly to the British mind (and less vividly to the French and German) when America is mentioned. Americans can recognize the runaway inflation in the European myth of McCarthyism. But the myth itself was first pumped up in the U.S., and in the U.S. today McCarthyism is more myth than man-but not the less dangerous for that. The reputation of power, even...
...bleak heathland of Schleswig-Holstein, since the war, witches have been abroad. In one village a woman has been accused of bewitching her neighbors' cows; schoolchildren in another village created a problem by ostracizing one of their classmates, whose mother, they insisted, was a witch...
Clergymen of the area tend to blame such doings on religious apathy. "Church customs have mostly become hardened forms of hollow traditions," says Pastor Wolfgang Baader of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. "He who does not believe in God must fear the Devil." But though authorities shake their heads at witch talk, they shrug their shoulders over what to do about it and point to the case of Farmer Bading of Lüneberg Heath. Hannes Bading called in a witch doctor to fix up his ailing stock, his failing crops, his drying well. The Hexenmeister sold him some "letters from...
Farmer Bading went to work on the neighbors with a will. He clobbered the postman with a shovel, yelling "At last I have you, you witch!" He assaulted startled passersby with pitchfork and stave, crying "Witches! Devils!" and accusing them of blowing poisonous vapors into his barn. At last the authorities ar rested Farmer Bading and turned him over to a hospital for observation. Bading proceeded to pass his psychiatric tests with flying colors. Sane as a stoat, said the examining doctor; he just happens to believe in witches: "So do many other people." Last week Farmer Bading was back...
...nothing so rich and gracious had been anticipated. Wrapped in a black silk brocade robe with great silver buttons, she sat by a coal fire under an oval picture of her mother, and guarded by a Maltese cat. My heart hurt. Could this wreck, this ruin, this witch be the "outrageously beautiful" Maud Gonne? The woman Yeats had called "a classical impersonation of the spring, with complexion luminous as apple blossoms through which the light falls"? The mouth had sunk. The chin approached the nose. How heart-wrenching the mutations of time . . . But as she talked, I felt the upsurge...