The Witch,the Goat and the Devil: A Discussion of Scapegoating and the Objectification of Evil in Robert Eggers’ The Witch

Conflict and Demonization

The opening scene depicts a seventeenth-century New England community as William, patriarch of the ill-fated family at the center of the narrative, defiantly chooses the expulsion of his family rather than compromise his conscience that insists upon “pure and faithful dispensation of the Word of God.” The exact source of contention remains unidentified but there is innuendo that William is too puritanical for the Puritans. In the film as in history, a tragic tale of demonization and violence begins with conflict and division, ostensibly religious in nature.

While the narrative opens amidst conflict and exclusion, outright tragedy first strikes with the mysterious disappearance of baby Samuel. Playing innocently with her little brother as he lies on the ground, adolescent Thomasin closes her eyes, reopens them, and he is gone. It seems improbable that, as father, William later surmises, a wolf would have had time to snatch the child and retreat into the thicket.

The taking of Samuel epitomizes the inexplicable nature of tragedy, craving an explanation that is nowhere to be found. ¹ For the duration of the film, objective and subjective reality become horrendously intertwined. Samuel’s disappearance is immediately followed by an ominous and obscured scene in which a gaunt, long-haired humanoid figure caresses his tiny body before smearing itself and its staff with blood.

Bloodshed and sacrifice dominate the religious imagination of the grieving family. The movie is awash with references to the vicarious suffering of Christ, with copious references to blood and bloody, though never gratuitous, scenes. So too, the subject of original sin is never far from the dialogue. Indeed, the farmstead overlooked by ominous woods is a tragic parody of Eden. The characters crave apples and Caleb regurgitates a bloody one.

Upon the loss of Samuel, a relentless dynamic of lies and accusations takes on a life of its own. If conventional wisdom suggests that the tragic loss of a child often leads to marital breakdown, within the narrative arc of the movie, family tensions are exacerbated by isolation, abject poverty, an obsession with sin, and fear of the supernatural. In the aftermath of tragedy, what might be considered “white lies” and relatively venial failings serve to escalate a domestic witch-hunt. Chief among the sea of accusations is the charge that Thomasin is a witch who has consorted with the devil so as to bring about the deaths of her two brothers and the ruination of the family. This cycle of blame, lies, and accusations is reminiscent of Adam’s indictment of Eve and Eve’s indictment of the snake.

Scapegoating

Amidst a constellation of biblical symbols, the motif of the scapegoat is implied as mischievous twins, Mercy and Jonas and later, Thomasin, identify their goat, Black Philip, as a manifestation of the devil. While the image of a horned devil reflects many strands of ancient tradition, including the Pagan association of horns with divinity, and images of specific deities ranging from Set to Pan, it also evokes the motif of the scapegoat, in Hebrew, azazel (). Leviticus 6:10 envisages a goat being cast into the wilderness each year, vicariously, and involuntarily, bearing the sins of the people of Israel.

The evolution of the Christian concept of the devil has been largely impelled by a perceived need to blame some being or beings for the reality of evil. The motif of Satan emerged in large part as a by-product of the evolution of ethical monotheism in ancient Israelite religion. Kirsten Nielson offers a reminder that the monist worldview, the backdrop against which much of the Hebrew Bible was authored, envisaged both good and evil proceeding from YHWH. ²

Christianity would, in time, crystalize the image of a God from whom only goodness can proceed, as epitomized by the assertion of 1 John 4:16 that “God is love.” So when patristic authors sought to counteract a Gnostic model of Satan as an opposite equal of God, they also sought to exonerate God of having created evil. Jeffrey Burton Russell proposes that their speculation may have, as a secondary effect, perpetuated misplaced certainty about the existence of Satan as a creature, an angel, and hence, a person. ³

As Christianity essentially rejected the morally complex image of God with Satan serving as its henchman, it recast Satan as an enemy of God. Perhaps, as Sallie Nichols suggests, in exorcizing any trace of Satan or darkness from its dominant image of the Godhead, Christianity also exorcized Satan from the imago Dei, that is, the self-image, instead objectifying Satan as Other, even as another person. ⁴ This is not, however, to suggest any dearth of self-reproach on the part of the characters in The Witch or complacency on their part regarding original sin.

The demonization of the Other can unleash murderous potential. Within the logic of the narrative worldview, steeped in references to atonement theology and forensic sacrifice, someone must pay a price for the unexplained tragedies that have befallen Samuel and Caleb. William cries out in desperation, “Who does this then? Who?”

Thomasin’s adolescent brother, Caleb experiences erotically charged reverie, or is seduced, in the forest, showing up some days later half-dead. Following Caleb’s delirious death, William questions Thomasin as to whether she has consorted with the devil. Thomasin in turn accuses the twins of making “covenant with the devil in the shape of Black Philip.” William immediately makes an unwarranted leap. While Thomasin has accused Jonas and Mercy of conversing with the devil, William directly refers to them as themselves being devils. This signifies a lethal tendency to indict the Other not only for consorting with the devil, but as the very embodiment of the devil. Such thinking characterizes human adversaries as hopelessly irreconcilable enemies with whom there can be no dialogue, and rationalizes their destruction. Carnage ensues with Black Philip goring William to death and Thomasin, in self-defense, cleaving her mother.

Under cover of the night at the corpse-strewn homestead, Thomasin ostensibly converses with Black Philip (though the goat is never directly depicted as speaking). She hears a voice inviting her to sign a book so as to be able to live “deliciously,” a promise poignantly elaborated with reference to such meager pleasures as butter and a pretty dress.

The Devil within or without

Mark Kermode laments Eggers’ choice to include a coda scene that arguably detracts from the ambiguity the movie has thus far sustained regarding the question of the supernatural. ⁵ Thomasin enters the forest to behold a coven of witches dancing around a fire and levitating. Kermode fears the scene will be taken too literally by some, a concern that might also apply to doctrinal references to the devil. That said, the coda is not the first visual depiction of witch-like figures in the movie—though more explicit and showing a plurality of apparent witches.

The ambiguity sustained throughout the movie as to the nature and identity of the “witch” is analogous to the theological question, “who or what is the devil?” Eggers identifies his work as a “New England folktale,” suggesting something other than a reconstruction of facticity. Similarly, in relation to the issue of genre, many of the biblical and extracanonical texts traditionally invoked to affirm the ontological reality of the devil are widely regarded by modern biblical scholars as mythical narratives, concerned with truths other than the existence of particular personages or the reconstruction of historical events. ⁶

This is not to say that the Satan evoked by myth is not real. Richard Bell argues that, through myth, the Christian imagination discovers Satan as a noumenal reality, that is, as existing at a level of reality that is not usually accessible to consciousness. ⁷ The Jungian tradition, on the other hand, regards the mythical motif of Satan as representing an archetype, that is, a reality embedded within the human psyche. ⁸ While Bell locates Satan at a level of reality not generally discernible to consciousness, Jung locates Satan within the subconscious itself. Eggers’ invocation of the witch raises similar questions—does the witch exist within or without the boundaries of the self—and more profoundly, confronted with the realities of suffering and evil, does the spatial metaphor regarding the boundaries of the self really matter? Perhaps it does insofar as the devil within, when dredged up to waking consciousness through the symbolism of myth or folktale, can be rendered subject to volition.

Eggers’ designation of his work as a folktale to some extent calls into question the value of positing naturalistic explanations for the dark events. Kermode passingly suggests the possibility that the famished family have been eating crops spoiled with the ergot fungus that may lead to paranoia—and delusions of flying or levitating. ⁹ To some extent, if we take the question of genre seriously, this becomes akin to explaining the mythic Adam and Eve’s pillaging of fruit as justified by a Vitamin C deficiency. That said, the “New England folktale” is a genre within a genre. The Witch is a movie and its characters are developed with a complexity well beyond that of the everyman characters of myth. The environment too is presented with a complexity and innuendo that invites speculation.

The movie ends as Thomasin levitates, either grinning in ecstasy or grimacing in agony, and with arguable undertones of both post-traumatic insanity and emancipation from the paralyzing scrupulosity that has governed her life. The viewer is left to discern who or what the witch is, within the narrative world of the movie and in our tragic world where every few seconds little Samuel is taken.