witchhunt4

A man abuses his wife. He might have been abused as a child and pass that on, but suppose he is motivated by despise for women, like, I think, most wife-beaters. So after a few years of marriage, in spite of all the devices he has developed to keep her mentally at a distance, she is getting too close and he hits her. It’s a pattern. Half a year later he does it again and then those incidents become more and more frequent and serious.

For a long time his wife has shifted it all aside as not belongingto her real life and who he really is,but the moment arrives when she can’t do that anymore and she breaks up with him. Then all she has shifted aside comes up and she starts rewriting history … why did she put up with that? “You thought you deserved it” says Oprah Winfrey, “you had a very low self-esteem…” It’s the mother of all demons: the slave-soul. The slave-soul is a creature without self-respect, she is inferior by nature and accepts it. It doesn’t exist. None of those demons really exist, but they rule the world.

“At times I have felt like a battered husband or boyfriend but I loved her” says Simpson. He is not afraid of demons, he knows they don’t exist. For in the end people are not just afraid to be seen as a demon; they are afraid to be it.

The wife-beater wakes up a demon that came into being years before. Children cannot help loving their parents. To be despised by someone you love creates that demon, it’s the worst humiliation in the world.

In Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé loves Jokanaan who despises her; she wants his head in a silver charger. (Of course the witch-hunters called that play erotic; they don’t understand it, so “it must be something sexual” …) Wilde wrote that play in French to have it translated into English by his friend Alfred Douglas, who intensely hated his father. He probably hoped Douglas would recognize himself in Salomé and his father in Jokanaan.