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perspective, the persecution of witches can be interpreted as a war between expert knowledge and the non-professional knowledge of the multitude, a war between white patriarchal power and narcosexual knowledge as it was traditionally practiced by women, colonized peoples, and nonauthorized sorcerers. It became a matter of exterminating or confiscating a certain ecology of body and soul, hallucinogenic treatments, and forms of pleasure or excitation. Modern colonial capitalist knowledge came to pathologize those technologies of subjectification produced by the collective and physical experience of rituals, the process of the transmission of symbols, and the absorption of any hallucinogenic or sexually arousing substances. Using the accusation of heresy and apostasy (denial of God), witch hunts did nothing more than conceal the criminalization of practices of “voluntary intoxication” and sexual and hallucinogenic self-experimentation. It was on this forced oversight that electrical and hormonal modernity would be erected.
Somatic Fictions: The Invention of Sex Hormones The sweet ferment of subjectivity eating away at itself. —Peter Sloterdijk14
Everything we are today, our way of comprehending ourselves as free, individual, and desiring bodies, begins with printing, the Industrial Revolution, magnetism and its transformation into electricity, rapid transport, long14. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphères, trans. Olivier Mannoni, Ecumes, vol. 3 (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2003), 26.