Reflections on “Pastoral Ethics and Belief Baggage: A Critical Look at Animal Symbolism in Witchcraft” by Claire Ayelotan

Claire’s piece can be read here: https://practicaltheologyhub.com/?p=1298

Fear and the Desire for Control

Why are our societies so obsessed with witchcraft? While I was reading Claire’s brilliant piece, I could not help but remember that we used the same Christian text – Pope Gregory IX’s papal bull Vox in Rama – regarding fear of black cats (but my piece was on another topic: https://practicaltheologyhub.com/?p=1268). Black cats and other animals are widely associated with magic and beyond natural (or supernatural) powers.

Trying to answer the question, we all abhor death, disease, famine, poverty and not being able to get what we want [in Buddhist terms these are part of what is understood as the eight worldly concerns, in Tibetan འཇིག་རྟེན་ཆོས་བརྒྱད་ and in Sanskrit aṣṭalokadharma][1]. These words all have one thing in common – fear. And fear can be, thinking from a Buddhist perspective, perceived as the desire to have control over things.

Yet, we do not have control of things, and our life is like a passing cloud in the sky. We cannot control our internal organs [try talking to our bowels asking them to stop], nor we can control the bodies of other people and animals. We cannot control the traffic, our work environment nor politicians – as much as we want to, it is not how life in this world – or any other – functions.

But still, we are immersed in a culture obsessed with control, productivity with every waking moment – or even during our sleep – constantly monitored by clocks, alarms and self-inflicted supervision.

False Hope and Leadership Responsibility

The power of fear as an afflictive emotion can render us motionless, or it can be a reason to search for a quick solution. In our quest to transcend death witchcraft, superstitions or even unquestioned beliefs can lead us to think we created powers over it and became dominus. This gives us a sense of hope – but is it truly hope?

Fear makes us create mental and emotional fantasies that can be perceived as hope, but it is not the same as hope. Hope does not come from fear; it comes from love – and love is possible when we realise that it is possible to overcome suffering in how we deal with whatever comes our way [i.e. mental overcoming of suffering].

In building our societies, families, communities do we reflect on sufferings like we should? Suffering is an inevitable part of being in the world, and demonising animals, humans or spiritual beings is just lifting the responsibility off our shoulders to put it elsewhere.

But as inevitable that suffering may be, our minds need not to fall prey for fear and other afflictive emotions, creating false hope and rigid ideologies that condemn the world and all those who are against specific doctrines.

Scapegoating and Social Consequences

In Claire’s conclusion, she states: “It is incumbent upon leaders, especially those with substantial influence, to ensure their teachings and sermons are rooted in love, compassion, and understanding, guarding their followers and the broader community from harm and prejudice.”

And she is spot on to affirm that, since without rooting any speech or sermon in love, compassion and understanding, there will never be true hope, just more fear – and more desire to dominate over others, to control and exclude.

And this leads to René Girard’s scapegoat theory, in which a mimetic desire crisis generates the necessity of identifying the “culprit”, escalating violence until the scapegoat is sacrificed. Girard’s theory suggests that communities under pressure often resolve tension by blaming and excluding a scapegoat, creating a false sense of peace and harmony.

The thing is that violence only spirals upwards and leaves no stone unturned. Also, the definition of human and non-human is blurred by the attempts on labelling the ‘other’ as culprit of ‘our’ current suffering, the object that materialises our fears.

A Call for Love and Compassion

Our societal obsession with the supernatural, labelling animals, people or groups as ominous signs should be questioned and properly dealt with, before the violent spiral devours us all.

To sum things up, our control-obsessed culture is created by fear and because of it, many people turn to belief in a cruel and violent mythos, as they think this will create the conditions to avoid suffering and death.

But instead of avoiding what is inevitable – as suffering and death are part of life in this world – these kinds of beliefs generate even more suffering and create fertile conditions for Girard’s scapegoat mechanism. We need to not only break the cycle of violence, but to end its causes. This is why Claire’s call for sermons and teachings grounded in love, compassion, and understanding feels so urgent today.

Religious and secular leaders are immensely responsible for much of the violence we experience today, given that they spread more violence with their speeches and sermons, with the never-ending quest of exerting control and dominion over others instead of becoming beacons of love and hope.

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[1] The eight worldly concerns are the common afflictions that harms us in our everyday lives. It is explained traditionally in pairs, because one has a ‘positive’ aspect and the other a ‘negative’, but both lie in the extremes of attachment and aversion: desire for happiness and fear of suffering, desire for fame and fear of insignificance, desire for praise and fear of blame, desire for gain and fear of loss.

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© Patricia Palazzo Tsai, 2025.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).