ABSTRACT
As might be expected, magic was associated from ancient times with those members of the social body who, due to their physiology, were thought to be closer to the forces of nature. e concept of binary opposites ‘man-culture’, ‘woman-nature’, which was the foundation of ancient Greek thought, also formed the basis of the French Structuralist School.1 Today this model is disputed: woman never was exclusively a being of nature, but was always a member of a speci c cultural group, even if she occupied an inferior position. is symbolic a nity of woman with nature did not have a happy end when taken to its limits. In Euripides’ tragedy Bacchae, the women of ebes turn into maenads who devour deer, having le their infants in the cradle, indi erent to their supreme social mission.2 e central concept of this seminal text, which has totally escaped the simplistic Western adherents of ‘nature worship’ and the ‘return to nature’, seems to be that our unconditional surrender to the irrational part of our soul leads to disaster. It is, however, sad to note that at the end of the twentieth century humanist studies showed a tendency towards the return to irrationality. us the German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr, in his otherwise interesting book Dream Time (1990),3 revived the old dichotomy of ‘Man equals Civilization’, ‘Woman equals Nature’ on the basis of anthropological material gathered from the German-speaking world, the Balkans, Africa and
Melanesia, as well as comparative material from classical antiquity. His aim was to prove that magic and everything associated with it, for instance, the werewolf, rests on solid truth. Women in particular were presented as making up the majority of magicians on account of their unbridled sexuality. It is hard to believe that certain feminists – Germaine Greer, for example – adopted in all seriousness these portentous-sounding trivialities and proposed medieval witches as models for contemporary women! Of course, Anglo-Saxon popular culture o en makes such associations: in Oliver Stone’s lm e Doors (1991), Jim Morrison’s mistress tells him that witches were the only free women.
