Students at publicly funded Texas universities are now able to enroll in courses about witches, black magic and the supernatural — under the guise of women’s studies.
Texas Tech University is offering Women and Gender Studies course 4301 titled “Witches, Bruxas, & Black Magic” in a course listed June 12 on the Lubbock campus’ website.
The Christian Post is reporting that according to the course description, students will “study beliefs and practices, past and present, associated with magic, witchcraft, spirituality, magical realism, and religion.”
The course curriculum will cover topics including “ritual, symbolism, mythology, altered states of consciousness, and healing.”
While witches and black magic are familiar topics to many people, bruxas might not be as well known. A bruxa was a pre-Christian female witch figure from Portugal during the Middle Ages and is considered a type of vampire entity known for “bloodsucking attacks on infants.”
Bruxas are said to assume the form of a duck, rat, goose, or other animal and can only prey on their victims in the middle of the night. Texas Tech, a public research university, received approximately $80 million from taxpayers in 2021 under a higher education funding bill signed by Gov. Greg Abbott. A request for comment from Texas Tech was not returned by press time. This story will be updated if a response is received.
University of North Texas (UNT), another state university, is offering students an anthropology course on “Magic, Witchcraft and Religion.”
The course description lists two required textbooks for the course, one of which is Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities by Pankaj Jain.
While there are a number of course readings listed on the UNT website, only two had overly Christian references: a PBS video on a Christian theme park in Kentucky and another video on a Pentecostal congregation in West Virginia.
The University of Texas (UT) is also offering a History of Witchcraft course in which students will examine “witch beliefs and witchcraft prosecutions in western Europe and colonial America, mainly between 1100 and 1700″ and looks at the role of religion in prosecuting witches during the age of the Reformation.
The stated “main purpose” of the course — which falls under both women’s and religious studies — is to explain the prosecution of more than 100,000 people, most of whom were women, for the crime of witchcraft in Europe and colonial America between 1450 and 1750.”
