Osho on Pain of Witch and Beauty of Witches

Question: I have felt inside me a deeply Buried, Revengeful, Cold Rage against all men who have ever forced, Raped Killed Or Hurt Women. This feels like something I have been Carrying within for lives. Please help me uncover and Befriend this old witch.

Osho : The first thing to be clear about is that it was Christianity who condemned the word`witch'; otherwise, it was one of the most respected words, as respected as `mystic' -- a wise man. It simply meant a wise woman, the parallel to a wise man. But in the Middle Ages, Christianity came to face a danger. There were thousands of women who were far wiser than the bishops and the cardinals and the pope. They knew the art of transforming people's lives.

Their whole philosophy was based on love and transformation of sexual energy -- and a woman can do that more easily than a man. After all, she is a mother and she is always a mother. Even a small baby girl has the quality of motherliness. The quality of motherliness is not something connected with age, it is part of womanhood. And the transformation needs a very loving atmosphere, a very motherly transfer of energies. To Christianity, it was a competitor. Christianity has nothing to offer in comparison to it -- but Christianity was in power.

It was a man's world up to then; and they decided to destroy all witches. But how to destroy them? It was not a question of killing one woman but thousands of women. So a special court was created for enquiry, to find out who was a witch. Any woman said by Christians to have had an influence on people and who people respected was caught and tortured -- so much so, that she had to confess.

They wouldn't stop torturing her until she confessed that she was a witch. And according to the Christian mind, to Christian theology, the meaning of witch was changed: a witch is one who is having a sexual relationship with the devil. You don't hear any more of any devil having a relationship with any woman. Either the devil has become a Christian monk, a celibate, or... what has happened to the devil? Who was it that was having sexual relationships with thousands of women? And these women were mostly old women. It doesn't seem to be rational.

When young and beautiful women were available, why should the devil go to the old, the very old women? But to become a witch, it was a long training, a long discipline, a long experience. So by the time a woman was a witch -- a wise woman -- she was old; she had sacrificed everything to attain that wisdom, that alchemy. They forced these poor old women into saying that they were having sexual intercourse with the devil. Many of them tried hard... but the torture was too much.

They tortured these women in many ugly ways, just for one thing: they should confess. The women continued to try to say that they had nothing to do with the devil, that there was nothing to confess. But nobody listened to them; they went on torturing them. You can make anybody confess anything if you go on torturing him. A point comes when he feels it is better to confess rather than to unnecessarily suffer the same torture every day. And it would have continued for his whole life.

Once a woman confessed that she was a witch and was having a sexual relationship with the devil, her torture was stopped and then she was presented before a court -- a special court made by the pope -- and before the court she was to now confess. And once she confessed before the court, the court was able to punish her -- because it is the greatest crime in the eyes of Christianity. In fact, even if the woman was having a sexual relationship with the devil, it is none of the business of anybody else -- and it is not a crime, because she is not harming anybody.

And the devil has never complained to any police station, "That woman is dangerous." On what authority was Christianity burning these women? The only punishment was to be burned alive so that no other woman dared to be a witch again. They destroyed thousands of women and completely removed a very significant part of humanity. And the wisdom that those women contained -- their books, their methods, their techniques of transforming man, transforming man's energy....

Don't think that witch is a bad word. It is more respectable than `pope' -- because I don't think a pope is a man who can be called wise; they are just parrots and nothing else. It is possible that it may be connected with your past life, and the wound has been so deep that still some remembrance in your unconscious goes on reminding you. And that creates the hate for men, because what was done to you was done by men. So it is a simple association, but that association has to be dropped. It was not done by men, it was done by Christians.

And the Christians have done so many crimes, and they go on doing them. It is unbelievable. And they go on talking about truth,talking about god...speaking lies..And these are religious people trying in every way to deceive the world, to deceive the human mind, to pollute with ugly lies. So don't be against men as such; just being against christian astrocities is enough... For two thousand years Christianity has been killing people in the name of religion, in the name of God, in the name of Christ, in the name of the nation -- so it is perfectly right to condemn them.

But not every man is a Christian. To be a Christian is a degradation; it is becoming subhuman. But it will be good to go through a hypnotic process to find out more clearly. Perhaps you may remember what were the techniques of the witches -- how they functioned, how they managed to change people -- because unless they were a danger to Christianity, Christianity would not have killed them. It was a real danger, because Christianity has nothing to offer in comparison.