S11 E2: The Witching Hour

Heaven Bent

Heaven Bent Media

Cults, True Crime, Miracles, Toronto Blessing, Prophecy, Religion & Spirituality, Bethel Church, Christianity, History, Church, Revival

4.3 • 897 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At one youth group night in 1993, a church leader taught Tara Jean about the 'witching hour'. Why does this ominous time of night still haunt her decades after she left the church and where does this concept come from? On this episode, retired professor Sabina Maglioccom, author of "Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America.."

*The first 3 episodes of S11 are temporarily available under S9, for Apple subscribers and patrons on Patreon.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Heaven Bent, Season 11, The Spirit of Fear.
0:26.9	I'm Tara Jean Stevens, and you've accepted my invitation to join me as I demystify the things
0:33.6	from my religious upbringing that still haunt me today, decades after I left the church.
0:41.0	On the first episode, The Antichrist. And now on episode two, The Witching Hour.
0:51.7	Hi, my name is Sabina Malyoko, and I'm a retired professor of anthropology and the study of religion at the University of British Columbia and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at California State University, Northridge.
1:06.6	And you accepted my invitation to join me to dispel the stereotypes about witches from a secular point of view as the author of witching culture, folklore and neo-paganism in America. Thank you for that. And to start, even though I think so many of us already know the answer to this question. What are the stereotypes about witches today?
1:29.3	Well, I think when we think about witches, especially in the context of Halloween, since it is just a few days before Halloween,
1:36.3	we think about a figure that comes to us from Western folklore, the stereotype of the harmful witch or the evil witch. And this is the stereotype of
1:46.3	the witch from folk tales and legends. Folktales, for example, that have been animated by
1:54.4	Disney. So I think we're all familiar with the evil witch from Disney's Snow White and
2:00.2	and other Sleeping Beauty and other animated folk tales like that.
2:10.2	You know, she maybe lives in the woods.
2:12.2	She harms other people.
2:14.2	She practices magic.
2:16.1	She eats children.
2:17.1	She eats children, for example, in Hansel and Gretel,
2:20.8	so she's cannibalistic. And we also have witches in legends. Legends are a little bit different
2:26.6	from fairy tales and folk tales in that they are told as true, whereas fairy tales and folk tales
2:32.5	are intentionally told as fiction. They're intended as
2:36.0	fiction. Everybody understands that their fiction, with a possible exception of very little
2:40.8	children. Legends are told as personal narratives or as something that happened to a friend of a
2:46.1	friend. And the witches in those kinds of stories are much more real.
	...

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