Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture

Core: The persecution of witches, heretics, and sodomites was a single operation — the extermination, by a rising Christian-capitalist order, of a pre-Christian sexual and spiritual culture that had accommodated, and in some cases celebrated, what that order would subsequently name as deviance. The modern gay counterculture is not an invention of the nineteenth century but the survival of something far older.

The Mythological Argument and Its Political Function

Evans’s book is not, despite its apparatus of historical citation, primarily a work of history. It is a work of gay liberation mythology — an attempt to construct, from fragments of classical scholarship, medieval heresy records, and anthropological speculation, a usable past for a political movement that the dominant culture had told had no past at all. Understood on those terms, it accomplishes something the academic texts in this collection cannot: it offers not an analysis of how sexual identity was constructed by power but a counter-narrative in which sexual nonconformity is ancient, spiritually charged, and politically insurgent. The gap that narrative fills was real, and Evans’s willingness to fill it — in 1978, from Boston, through a press called Fag Rag Books — deserves respect even where the historical claims do not.

The argument draws heavily on Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis: the claim, advanced in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), that the witch trials prosecuted a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion rather than mere superstition. Murray’s thesis has been substantially discredited by subsequent scholarship — Norman Cohn’s demolition of it in Europe’s Inner Demons (1975) predates Evans’s book and should have given him more pause than it did. Evans extends Murray’s already contested framework to argue that this pagan underground was not merely nature-worshipping but sexually nonconformist, and that the sodomite and the heretic targeted by the Inquisition were understood by their persecutors as participants in the same transgressive culture. Malcolm’s archival evidence — assembled decades later — does show that sodomy prosecutions and heresy prosecutions sometimes overlapped institutionally and ideologically; but the overlap Malcolm documents is a far more qualified and complex phenomenon than Evans’s synthesis requires.

What the book does accomplish, even where the history fails, is to name the convergence that is historically real: that the institutional machinery of persecution — the Inquisition, the witch trials, the sodomy statutes — targeted sexual, spiritual, and political nonconformity together, and that understanding any one of these persecutions in isolation misses the structure they shared. This observation is not original to Evans, but he makes it with a vividness and a political urgency that academic scholarship has rarely matched.

Faerie Consciousness and the Limits of Romantic Counter-History

The book’s deeper project is the construction of what Evans calls “faerie consciousness” — a mode of being that stands outside heterosexual civilisation’s categories of productivity, property, and reproductive sexuality, and that connects the modern gay counterculture to a lineage of pagan, heretical, and liminal figures across Western history. This is the argument that produced the Radical Faeries movement, which Harry Hay and others drew on Evans’s framework to found in 1979, and it is here that the text’s imaginative reach is most evident and its historical controls most absent.

The romantic counter-history Evans constructs has the same structure as Mumford’s organic medieval city: a pre-lapsarian social form, tolerant and alive, destroyed by the imposition of a rationalising, dominating order, and recoverable — at least in spirit — by those willing to look for it. Like Mumford’s medievalism, it is a productive distortion: it forces engagement with questions about what a sexual culture organised around something other than the modern identity apparatus might look like, and it does this with a mythological force that Foucault’s genealogy, for all its precision, deliberately refuses. Unlike Mumford, Evans does not maintain even a qualified relationship to the evidentiary record; the pre-Christian sexual culture he describes is assembled from sources that cannot bear the weight placed on them, and the connective tissue between them is desire rather than evidence.

Positioned against Landstreicher, Evans shares the refusal of the modern identity category and the insistence that desire exceeds its social organisation — but where Landstreicher’s anarchism is ahistorical by choice (the point is not where we came from but what we do now), Evans’s mythology requires a specific history that the historical record does not supply. Positioned against Boswell, both are writing against Christian hostility to same-sex love, but Boswell is a philologist who loses arguments he has made on philological grounds; Evans is a mythographer for whom the argument’s political function determines its evidential standards.

Verdict

An important document of gay liberation thought and a founding text of the Radical Faeries tradition, whose historical claims are largely unsustainable and whose mythological ambition is not diminished by that fact. Evans understood something that the academic literature in this collection has been slower to admit: that political movements require usable pasts, and that the absence of a visible lineage is itself a form of power operating on those denied one. The history he constructed to fill that absence is, at crucial points, more wish than finding — the Murray hypothesis is a ruin, and Evans built on it enthusiastically. But the impulse to connect modern sexual dissidence to the long history of those targeted by the machinery of Christian-capitalist order is not wrong; it simply requires the archival rigour that Malcolm has since begun to provide. Read Evans before Malcolm, to understand what the political stakes of that history are; read Malcolm after, to see what the evidence actually shows; and read Evans alongside Landstreicher, whose anarchist refusal of the modern subject is Evans’s faerie consciousness stripped of its mythology and left with nothing but the present-tense revolt.