"And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" ~ Matthew 4:3-4, KJV
Much as a lens bends and refracts light to enlarge an image to one's eyes, so does ideology contort the shape of all natural and social phenomena that the human mind experiences. This is a fundamental tenet of historical materialism. Friedrich Engels, in his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, declares that “according to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life.”1 Engels, in a letter to a J. Bloch dated September 21, 1890, later clarifies his point: “The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure---political forms of the class struggle and its results...and even the reflexes of these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into dogmas---also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.”2 His comments give full life to the dynamic at play in determining the seemingly arbitrary ways in which people perceive the world.
There’s a certain unease that takes hold once one comes to terms with the material conception of history. How can one ever wrest total control of what one is thinking if all thoughts are conditioned by one's historical context? Marx’s famous line from his writings on the Coup of 18 Brumaire begins to sound less like an ominous forecasting of would-be political events, and more like a scream that cuts across the dead of night: “The tradition of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”3 At no point can we detach ourselves from our historical past; we're tethered to it as if by an indestructible umbilical cord feeding us the old mythologies of days past.
Robbert Eggers is a filmmaker who, whether he recognizes it or not, fully understands human knowledge as something conditioned by historical limits. This is made evident through the fact that his 2015 film, The Witch, comprises dialogue that the film claims to have “[come] directly from” “written accounts of historical witchcraft, including journals, diaries and court records.”4 In order to get into the mindset of his fictional English-American settler family he had to dive deep into the firsthand accounts of 1640s New England and discover for himself the various fears and neuroses summoned up by the Puritans of that era. Uncritically taking the morals and peculiarities of contemporary society and applying them backwards to an historical past would do nothing but crack the temporal looking-glass and corrupt his subjects' psyches.
The film opens with William, the patriarch of the family of six, defending himself against the village tribunal, booming the words, “What went we out into this wilderness to find? Leaving our country, kindred, our fathers' houses. We trevailed a vast ocean. For what? Was it not for the pure and faithful dispensation of the gospels and his word?” The question goes unanswered, but providing one would grant valuable insight into what follows in the film. It behooves us to remember how Engels stressed that the superstructure of society, which includes “religious views”, can “preponderate in determining [the] form” of how class struggle plays out. Here we see the skeletal outline for why our family has found themselves on New England soil.
Although the film provides no timeline for when the family arrives in New England, we can safely assume they journeyed over sometime in the 1630s, a popular time for Puritans such as themselves to do under the Eleven Years' Tyranny of King Charles I. England by the end of the 17th century was still a predominantly agricultural country with most of its inhabitants living in the countryside producing primarily for personal use; however, between the 15th and 17th centuries England began to see the development of bourgeois commodity production. As early as the 16th century “land was beginning to become a commodity, bought and sold in a competitive market.”5 As the economic base of England morphed with time, so did English morality. Where once it was considered cruel and inhumane to raise rents and shake the foundation of the, then thought to be timeless, relationship between lord and serf, now members of the burgeoning bourgeoisie did everything in their power to compensate for a steadily rising inflation6.
A revolution in the political economy of English society begat a revolution in English morality. This shift in morality necessitated a shift in the English religion: in comes Puritanism. Puritans preached exactly what the bourgeois class valued: “thrift, sobriety, hard work in the station to which God had called a man...with no extravagant enjoyment of the fruits of labour, and unceasing preoccupation with duty to the detriment of `worldly' pleasure.”7 Puritans embodied the class which took direct aim at King Charles, and were promptly punished for it. William and his brood come to New England to shed the old feudal ways of the English monarchy and participate in a new society structured with a proper bourgeois mindset.
The religious garb lasts only so long. The moment William recognizes the crop is garbage he surreptitiously sells his wife’s heirloom silver chalice, and begins to discuss doing the same to his eldest daughter, Thomasin. The proto-bourgeois subject turns family treasure into money, “nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it, let alone more delicate [consecrated objects, beyond human commerce]”.8 What was once holy melts into the commodity, regardless of whether the outward form maintains its sanctified rhetoric. “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.”9
Eggers’ film teaches that human consciousness is conditioned by historical circumstances. The modern subject perceives the world differently than the pre-modern. The idea of a trans-historical perception is ideological pablum, a smokescreen to unconsciously inject the oddities of our day into the oddities of the past. The Witch’s Puritans are much like the “sorcerer” of modern bourgeois society that Marx described in the Manifesto “who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he called up by his spells”.10 But these spirits are distinctly historical and have been wiped away with time. We must recognize that the ghouls of capital who come “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”11 are no different than the witches of the 17th century imagined by the Puritans---they are transient phantoms which prop up a society that “is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change”.12 Only when the proletariat rise in revolutionary action against their oppressors can humanity begin to vanquish the monsters who eternally haunt the corners of their mind.