There are certainly enough news stories of similar situations
Are there? I don’t recall any of the, say, Salem witches as being mentioned as routinely going around and spewing insults and curses like OP’s example (correct me if I’m wrong). And if it’s infertile women, why were so many men accused of witchcraft? And why do description from many places about ‘sorcerers’ or ‘shamans’ being lynched by their tribe emphasize the sinister secrecy and normalcy of the poisoners who finally received justice? (You mention Maxwell—I am not an Epstein enthusiast at all, but if Maxwell was going around all those yachts and hoity-toity parties or supposed social media profiles spewing curses and maledictions at a level that would make someone with Tourette’s blush, I have certainly missed any coverage of this.)
If anything, cases with such overt obvious illness probably makes them less likely to be accused of witchcraft, because they are so obviously ‘touched’ and nothing they say means anything. Why indeed would Satan wish to recruit as his mortal pawns such foolish inept loons who cannot so much as keep a civil tongue in their head while going about the more important business of spoiling the milk and attending the black masses?
I don’t specifically mean spewing insults, and I doubt OP did, either. It was mentioned to be the final stage of a long descent from normal social behavior, and I would expect, in the general case, that we’d see very strange behavior that switches to be considerably more normal in settings where consequences might emerge. The tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community OP discusses likely had less severe and immediate consequences for weird behavior out in the open than you’d usually see, since everyone knew each other and there was less inclination to involve the authorities when a strange woman started pushing somebody else’s stroller.
I was thinking more along the lines of someone who is socially aware and consequence-averse enough to put on a facade of normalcy when people are looking, but otherwise exhibits the same impulses (e.g. towards child abduction and other bizarre fixations).
Maxwell was not meant as an example of this, but as an alternate explanation for folkloric witches—someone who is sane but too evil to explain using an ordinary person’s model of human behavior.
Are there? I don’t recall any of the, say, Salem witches as being mentioned as routinely going around and spewing insults and curses like OP’s example (correct me if I’m wrong). And if it’s infertile women, why were so many men accused of witchcraft? And why do description from many places about ‘sorcerers’ or ‘shamans’ being lynched by their tribe emphasize the sinister secrecy and normalcy of the poisoners who finally received justice? (You mention Maxwell—I am not an Epstein enthusiast at all, but if Maxwell was going around all those yachts and hoity-toity parties or supposed social media profiles spewing curses and maledictions at a level that would make someone with Tourette’s blush, I have certainly missed any coverage of this.)
If anything, cases with such overt obvious illness probably makes them less likely to be accused of witchcraft, because they are so obviously ‘touched’ and nothing they say means anything. Why indeed would Satan wish to recruit as his mortal pawns such foolish inept loons who cannot so much as keep a civil tongue in their head while going about the more important business of spoiling the milk and attending the black masses?
I don’t specifically mean spewing insults, and I doubt OP did, either. It was mentioned to be the final stage of a long descent from normal social behavior, and I would expect, in the general case, that we’d see very strange behavior that switches to be considerably more normal in settings where consequences might emerge. The tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community OP discusses likely had less severe and immediate consequences for weird behavior out in the open than you’d usually see, since everyone knew each other and there was less inclination to involve the authorities when a strange woman started pushing somebody else’s stroller.
I was thinking more along the lines of someone who is socially aware and consequence-averse enough to put on a facade of normalcy when people are looking, but otherwise exhibits the same impulses (e.g. towards child abduction and other bizarre fixations).
Maxwell was not meant as an example of this, but as an alternate explanation for folkloric witches—someone who is sane but too evil to explain using an ordinary person’s model of human behavior.