Rigging up that Titan skeleton has been kicking my ass lately, so have a post attempting to express a bunch of my recent reddit comments into a single cohesive essay.
It Was Never About the Witches - An Analysis of Belos’ Motivations from a Narrative, Historical, and Human Perspective
TW: mentions of incest, domestic violence, cults
Everybody tends to focus on the witch-hunting as the reason for Belos’ genocidal campaign, but I disagree. Belos’ obsession with witch hunting is akin to Luz’s obsession with “Good Witch Azura”: a shield for the real issues at play.
Why do I say it wasn’t about the witch-hunting? I have two big reasons. One of those is because of the narrative structure of the show. The other is because historically, the witch hunts were never about the witches.
First, the narrative reasons
Luz and Belos are mirrors for each other
The show does a lot to play Luz and Belos off each other. They both start off with the idea that they’re something special in this world. They’re both semi-outsiders in Gravesfield; it’s stated that the brothers moved there later. They both have a fascination with glyph magic. I don’t think it is for nothing that one of Luz’s nightmares is becoming another Belos.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to say that witch hunting to Phillip was like Good Witch Azura was to Luz - a sort of an escapist fantasy. Fantasy in Phillip’s case is more the “when I grow up” type than the explicitly fictional sort, but more on that later. Right now, my point is that, in the same way that Luz had a hard time bonding a palisman because “be a witch” wasn’t her deepest wish, “be a witch hunter” wasn’t actually Phillip’s.
Which brings us to the historical reasoning:
It is NEVER about the witches.
Witch hunts don’t happen in a vacuum. Natural medicine was not uncommon. Kitchen gardens would have a selection of medical herbs grown alongside vegetables. Weird witchy sounding superstitions were not uncommon. Most of the time, nobody cared.
We need to start thinking of witch hunts as less about the interplay of science and superstition and more about community scapegoating. The blaming of those things was because they needed to find a witch, so they will take any “evidence” they could find. Women were disproportionately targeted because they were lessers in society, and therefore more expendable.
I say this because there is this tendency to think of ourselves as so much better, so much more enlightened. We aren’t. We just find different witches. Scapegoating when things are going wrong is a way of feeling like you have control over a situation where you don’t.
That is the key ingredient in most witch hunts: a desire for control. Something bad is happening that you can’t explain or do anything about, and you don’t like feeling helpless to deal with it. Maybe it is an illness. Maybe it is the effects of war, or the longer-term effects of a natural disaster. These days we just find different witches. My culty fundamentalist upbringing had gay people. I read a book in history class that claimed the Roman Empire fell because they were okay with gay people. More secular societies may blame immigrants, or completely innocuous religious practices that don’t affect anybody. (I’m looking at you, Quebec.)
Sometimes you do have a case where somebody is spearheading a witch hunt with malicious intent or, in the case of Belos, because they are completely incapable of recognizing that they may have messed up. You need some sort of power to do that, and even then It’s hard to do without the community dissatisfaction to back you up.
So if it wasn’t about the witch-hunting what was it?
We got the answer explicitly stated in the show, within a narrative structure that suggests that it was what was actually going on. (Paraphrased) “Sounds like Big Bro got a hot witch girlfriend and Little Bro couldn’t cope.”
The plans for the Day of Unity were less an obsession with witch hunting, and more the result of a centuries-long crash-out because his brother didn’t want to be his and only his. It wasn’t even choosing Evelyn instead of him. We can tell from the Hollow Mind portraits and the rebuses that Caleb didn’t think it had to be either his brother or his lover.
Yes, that does sound incestuous, and the discomfort of that may be why I often see it left out of analysis of Belos’ actions. It’s inescapable though. The closest real world behaviour I can think of are the family annihilators who think their partner will leave them, or stalker exes who, in addition to their former partner, try to kill as many of the people their partner “chose” over them.
Does that mean that Belos was not racist against witches? Absolutely not, and I never said that. I AM saying that if Caleb had run off to Rhode Island and married a Quaker, Phillip would have been trying to replicate the Boston Martyrs in Connecticut, and later used King Phillip’s War as an excuse to mess up Rhode Island. I’d say lol about the name, but that was one of those wars that was an excuse to kill a bunch of indigenous people, so I won’t.
Puritans hated Quakers just as much as they hated witches; he could have easily justified it. Also, here is my usual rant that witch hunts weren’t Puritan-exclusive, and the thing that made Puritan New England uniquely horrifying was that it was a massive cult compound. One of the factors that led to the Salem Witch Trials was anxiety because it was getting harder for town authorities to establish their usual level of behavioural control.
Side note: The colonies of Providence Plantations and Rhode Island were explicitly established as places for people who were fed up with Puritan bullshit. Both colonies were started by ex-Puritans who got out. And, as ironic as Phillip murdering his brother in the city of brotherly love would be, this is pre-Pennsylvania, so that easy Quaker sanctuary isn’t an option. Look, Caleb was gonna run off to a red island one way or another.
I may have headcanoned Roger Williams as Caleb’s “Good Witch Azura,” because running away from Puritan nonsense in the most dramatic way possible and finding a home where the people Puritans want gone are just your friends and neighbours sounds pretty on-point. Phillip wants to become witchhunter-general like self-proclaimed “Witchfinder-General” Matthew Hopkins. Caleb wants to run away to Rhode Island in a blizzard.
So where does witch-hunting fit into it?
Here’s where we get more into my idea of Phillip’s obsession being more of an escapist fantasy.
The big driver is my history nerd side. There’s no way those two would be able to maintain a living from witch hunting.
First off, that’s rarely how it worked. There was one case where it did - aforementioned Matthew Hopkins - he did his thing in the more populated England. Also, I’m personally convinced he was a con man. He made his money by going to villages that were already on edge because of the English Civil Wars, claiming to be an “expert” with a fake title, and said “I have the answer to your problems, you just have to pay me!”
That is the exact plot of The Music Man, except that Hopkins wasn’t selling musical instruments, he was selling murder.
Then, when that con ran thin and he wanted to retire, he wrote a book so he could still make money from it. It’s play-for-play from the grifter handbook.
That book, “The Discovery of Witches,” was influential in the Connecticut Witch Trials, which is the other reason I like seeing Hopkins as Phillip’s Azura. He even had a book to be obsessed with. Also, Belos did ultimately become a con man in a similar vein with his “wild witch” thing.
Now, conceivably, Phillip could have found a career where authority in witch hunts would have been a small part of the job, but that would have required him to become part of the clergy. That would have required higher education though, and Harvard seems like it would have been financially out of reach. There are records of clergymen complaining that they weren’t paid enough to send their own sons to Harvard; Caleb and Phillip wouldn’t have had a chance.
(Trivia: Harvard College was established so that Puritans in New England could train up new members of the clergy without sending them all the way back to England.)
Do I doubt that it was something he and Caleb shared? Absolutely not. I think the fact that it was probably contributed to Phillip’s crash-out. But, if we see it as ultimately an escapist fantasy that they got the opportunity to act on once or twice, that allows for a sort of nuance that you don’t get when you take the story presented in Gravesfield at face value. To be clear, I don’t think Gravesfield was lying, per se. I do think they were exaggerating a story they found mentions of once or twice to get tourism dollars like Salem.
Phillip can be all-in on the witch-hunting thing while Caleb’s attitude toward it could be just about anywhere. I personally like the idea that Caleb tacitly encouraged it because it kept attention off of him.
Anybody else notice that the source for the most stereotypically witchy nose in the show is a human? And, as orphans, they would have been in that group of society undesirables that would have made them easy targets should a scapegoat “witch” be desired to pin a town’s problems on. And, given the overall themes of the show, I suspect they were both pretty obviously neurodivergent. I mean, literal masks are a whole-ass theme.
At least they weren’t women. Even then, their sex wouldn’t have been a guarantee of safety. Caleb is the older one, so even if he isn’t explicitly aware of the danger, he’s going to be aware of it on some level. He doesn’t get any sort of bigger dreams. They gotta live somehow.
So here are these brothers, almost certainly with major attachment trauma, skirting a pretty dangerous place to be in Puritan society, seemingly united by a fantasy that’s only a fantasy in the sense that it’s not financially viable. At least Luz knew Good Witch Azura was fiction.
Then Caleb falls in love with a witch and leaves. Caleb’s perspective makes sense. The Boiling Isles would have felt significantly safer, and, if he is also struggling with the realization that they had been wrong about witches all along, he wouldn’t want to keep that up any longer. That’s how people get killed.
But, for whatever reason, he has done jack-all prior to temper Phillip’s witch hunter dreams. It is hard to change minds from that. Either because Caleb was too ashamed to say anything to Phillip after so long, or he did, and Phillip didn’t listen, Caleb seemingly abandoned his brother. But not really. He did leave behind the rebuses. He wanted Phillip to follow him.
That’s not what Phillip sees though. Witch hunting matters because that was the thing that, from his perspective, he and his brother shared. Given religious beliefs at the time, “he was bewitched” is not a completely unreasonable explanation for his brother’s sudden switch-up.
It’s also the reason that allows him to keep the idealized version of Caleb that exists in his head. It’s not dissimilar from the way some parents will try to blame others for their children’s actions that they disagree with. “He surrounded himself with the wrong people.” “She’s not gay; it’s because the woke agenda has made LGB123 cool now.” “He stopped talking to me because his partner made him.”
Hey, look, smaller scale witch-hunting!
It can be hard to accept when somebody you supposedly love does something you disagree with. That means giving up control. Taken to extremes, it means denying that person any agency in their own life. That person isn’t a person, they are a thing that you are owed.
(Insert quote from another notable witch about sin beginning when you see people as things. GNU Terry Pratchett)
Suddenly witch hunting has gone from a thing they shared to a Phillip’s coping strategy for his brother choosing to leave him. Caleb didn’t choose to leave. He was stolen from him.
Phillip had evidence that Caleb acted on his own free will though. He had the rebus. That didn’t register in his head though.
I don’t think Phillip set out with the intent of killing his brother. The cycle of grimwalkers suggests that. I’m fairly certain he set out with the intent of killing Evelyn and bringing his brother back.
I rather suspect Phillip may have had a hard time coping in Gravesfield without Caleb as well. I don’t take his view in Hollow Mind of himself as a kid at face value (pretty big age jump between that and Phillip arriving in the Isles), although it is possible he was. Phillip was at least as old as Caleb was when their parents died, which may have factored into Caleb’s thinking. Even if Phillip was older, he definitely hasn’t been set up for success. First off, inevitable attachment trauma in a place unsympathetic to inevitable attachment trauma. Additionally, if we accept my theory that Caleb was afraid of getting accused of witchcraft himself, he did basically nothing to disavow Phillip of that fantasy, at least not enough for Phillip to easily adapt.
Bringing Caleb back also means restoring Phillip to his rightful place in society, and maybe more. He’d be a hero, braving the depths of hell to rescue his brother.
The murder happened when Caleb made it clear that he was not appreciative of Phillip’s rescue attempts like he should have been. If Phillip is forcing him to choose, he is going to choose his wife and kid(s). Phillip can’t accept that though. Caleb would never choose someone over him. This Caleb is broken, defective, and what do you do with broken things?
Everything that follows is an extended crash-out from that action. Suddenly there is no brother to bring back. Maybe he thought that at first that a grimwalker would provide him that, but that notion was pretty quickly dissuaded. To prove himself worthy of returning home, he’s going to need to do something big. Also, there’s almost certainly a revenge motive - witches stole Caleb; they ruined his life - but Evelyn herself was out of reach.
It’s all a blame game. Phillip can’t accept that anything in Caleb’s life isn’t about him. No, the witches made Caleb do it. He can’t accept that much of his current state is the consequence of his own actions. The part that wasn’t, the part that wasn’t in his control, puts blame in an uncomfortable place. He can’t accept that the toxicity of Puritan society, as well as his own brother’s mistakes in raising him, played a big part in his pain. No, much easier to blame the witches.
It’s a very human thing, but Belos wasn’t limited to human solutions. Humans don’t have access to magic that allows them to unnaturally extend their lives, nor immortal semi-deities with access to apocalypse level magic they don’t understand. Humans don’t have access to such a straightforward way to create new emotional security blankets like the grimwalker spell.
Belos was fundamentally human, like Luz, like us. His story is a cautionary tale of refusal to accept blame (or place it where it belongs), and seeing the world as revolving around yourself.
It was never about “witches.”
