I have a red birthmark on the backside of my neck. My Mom told me proudly that that is the Van Niekerk birthmark and that she has the same red birthmark on the back of her neck. What my Mom doesn’t know is that if she was born in the 15th century, she would not have bragged about her birthmark. In fact, she would have desperately tried to hide it.
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII gave the unimaginable order to clergy to find and exterminate witches. This was the ideal scapegoat that was chosen as a way to respond to the widespread unrest and recurrent famine and plague in Europe. Can you imagine the head of the church having such power to order clergy to take someone else’s life? I can’t even imagine how much fear this generated in the ordinary peasant societies of that day. This order from the Pope was known as “The Witches Hammer,” which outlined the means clergy could use to detect witches. And yes, you guessed it … the way to detect witches was to look for red spots on the skin (birthmarks). These red spots were supposedly made by the claws of the devil in sealing a blood pact with Satan.
Needless to say, if you had a red spot (birthmark) on your skin during this time, you were doomed. It is estimated that approximately 20,000 people (mostly women) were killed in Scotland. People were beheaded, burned alive, or mutilated. All in all, 100,000 people were killed throughout Europe from the middle of the 15thcentury to the end of the 17th century as part of this purge. What is fascinating is that the clergy accepted this order from the Pope as just and saw themselves as God ‘s agents of condemnation. Had I, as well as my older brother Francois (who has a raised red birthmark on his left cheek), been alive, we would have been hunted down like wild dogs by the clergy.
We may not realize it, but much of these atrocities committed in the name of God are influenced by Greek philosophy that believed the soul is good and the body is evil. According to this philosophy, it doesn’t matter what the body does as long as the soul is good. This philosophy provides convenient food for our human desire to transfer our fears – e.g., of death, our fallibility – onto something else. The soul/body dichotomy was a very strong belief during Jesus’ day and continued into the 1400s to fill the scapegoating backdrop for the Witches Hammer.
Contempt for the body continues today to be manifested in contempt for other bodies – the bodies of slaves, women, laborers, the handicapped, LGBTQ people, animals, and the earth. How easy it is to latch onto a convenient scapegoating philosophy to depersonalize others and demonize them.
Today the Witches’ Hammer is coming down on women in the Christian church. The subtle message to women is: “your body brought sin into this world. That’s your birthmark. The very identity and essence of who you are brought sin into this world.” We slide easily down the slope of seeing ourselves as agents of God to condemn other bodies, despite having taken up an archaic, and false, philosophy, vs. God’s truth.
I wonder what would happen if instead, we confess the truth: “Women brought God into the world.” That for me is the message of Christmas! Those who had no voice brought forth the voice of God. As we listen to the story of Mary, we hear about the Holy Spirit who hovered over Mary and brought forth a new way to be human. God is brought forth through one who was marked by the religious world of her day.
What if this Christmas we shift our lenses and we invite the Holy Spirit to hover over us so that Christ might be brought into our world through us? Just know that not much has changed. To have the mark of the Lamb as your birthmark means that you will be persecuted. Don’t be surprised – genuine love will always attract opposition from the Pharisees. And yet, only true love has the power to conquer evil… it is called The Jesus Way!