Why We Destroy the People Who Do This Work | The Oldest Work (Part 2 of 3)

At the end of Part One I made you a promise. I said there was a reason we destroy the people who do this work, and that once you saw it, you would start to see it in your own life. This is that conversation, and it is the darker of the three.

We know almost nothing about the druids, the witches and the alchemists, and that is not an accident. The people who feared them are the ones who wrote the history. Rome wrote the story of the druids after Rome had destroyed them. The church wrote the story of the witch while it was busy burning her. That not-knowing is a fingerprint, the mark left behind by the thing that erased them.

Underneath it is a mechanism you are running yourself, probably this week. We hand our shadow, the part of ourselves we cannot bear to own, to whoever will hold it. For most of history that was the one at the edge of the village who would handle death, the dark, the things everyone else feared. Sought in the night, then feared for the power we gave them, then destroyed so we could feel clean again. And there is no safe position in it. Carry the shadow and you are feared for it. Refuse it, hold a boundary, and you are condemned for the refusal.

Every age has a word it reaches for to do the condemning, and it always borrows the authority of its time. Once it was witch and heretic, spoken with the authority of the church. Now the authority is psychology, and the words are narcissist, gaslighter, toxic, abuser. Those things are real. The sin is not the word. The sin is what happens when the word is torn out of the clinic and thrown as a weapon by someone who cannot stand that you will not carry their shadow for them. The burning times did not end. We moved them into the group chat.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the oldest work.

Michael Lauria

The Architect