So first, what do those terms mean? Broadly, they’re two different forms of handling interpersonal disputes, or dealing with crime. 

Retributive justice is the one our current justice system uses, where the focus is primarily on punishing the perpetrator. Retributive justice can mean detention, suspension, expulsion, jail time, monetary fines, some kinds of community service, exile, or in more severe cases, corporal punishment or the death penalty. It’s the lens most people view the world through, where if someone hurts you, hurting them back is the correct response.

Restorative justice is a very different approach, where you instead focus on helping the victim recover from what happened, and rehabilitating the perpetrator to prevent this from happening again. Restorative justice can look like verbal or written apologies, monetary compensation for costs and trauma, therapy for both victim and perpetrator, education for the perpetrator, mediation between victim and perpetrator, a restraining order, etc. 

When viewed through a retributive lens, The Owl House lets its characters get away with a lot of shit. Lilith cursing Eda, Hunter rounding up Palismen knowing they’ll be killed, Amity tormenting Willow for years, it’s all stuff that, in a retributive environment, they should be punished for, and they’re just not. Eda is only genuinely angry at Lilith for two scenes, Amity and Willow fix their relationship very quickly once Amity starts making amends, and Hunter isn’t punished at all. 

However, I believe the story of The Owl House is best viewed not through a retributive lens, but through a restorative lens.

Let’s look at the Lilith-example again. Lilith’s offense was cursing Eda, which she did because she wanted to win a spot in the Emperor’s Coven. Knowing Eda was better than her, she cast a curse on her, thinking it would only last for a day. But when the time came, Eda forfeited the match, soon after which she transformed into the Owl Beast and was pelted with rocks until she ran. The curse turned out to be very permanent, and Lilith spent the next 20 years trying to fix her mistake by working for Belos to try to capture Eda, since he promised to heal her curse. 

However, when she finally succeeded, Belos went back on his promise. Instead of healing Eda, he ordered her to be publicly executed. When Lilith protested, Belos essentially told her to shut up, that it was the Titan’s will, and left her there. 

So, having realized her method of fixing her mistake has gone real bad, Lilith sneaks down to the Conformatorium to free Eda herself, but arrives too late and finds Luz instead. After a brief fight they end up teaming up, and Lilith leads Luz to the elevator, but they are captured by Belos and Lilith is thrown into the cage with Eda. There, she restores Eda’s partially petrified body, and after fleeing with her, Luz and King, uses a spell to split Eda’s curse evenly between their two bodies.

From a restorative justice point of view, Lilith has done pretty much everything she reasonably could do to fix things. She’s denounced the Emperor’s Coven, returned Owlbert to Luz, helped Luz find the elevator to the execution platform, saved Eda from petrification, apologized to Eda, and while there’s no way for her to cure Eda’s curse entirely, she took on half of the curse at great expense to her own health, in order to ease Eda’s symptoms. 

Eda isn’t angry anymore because in her eyes, Lilith has already fixed things with her. Punishing her more at this point is pointless. What more could Lilith do, really? What other lessons could she learn? The only thing that punishment would bring at this point would be more suffering. 

Let’s look at another example: Amity and Willow.

Amity’s offense was breaking off her friendship with Willow because she was a late-bloomer, bullying her for years, and allowing her friends to do so too. Willow is left with horrible self-esteem issues because of this, and combined with her failing grades, turned her into a horribly shy and withdrawn wallflower (no pun intended). After she’s moved to the plant track she starts actually getting better, but Amity and Boscha especially continue to torment her. While Amity’s bullying of Willow does peter out over time, Willow is clearly still extremely resentful of her. In an attempt to make Willow forget their friendship, Amity accidentally sets most of Willow’s memories on fire, leaving her confused, amnesiac, and unable to grasp basic concepts like that chairs are for sitting in.

Luz pushed Amity into fixing Willow’s brain by going into her mind together and piecing her memories back together. There, the Inner Willow revealed what happened to Luz and the audience.

At this point, Amity shows her that her parents were actually the ones who forced her to end the friendship because they didn’t think Willow was a suitably powerful or influential friend, threatening to make sure Willow would never get accepted into Hexside if Amity didn’t force her to leave. Amity then apologizes to Willow for going along with it, and for the bullying, and vows to make sure her friends never mess with Willow again. 

Willow accepts her apology, but also makes it clear that, while it’s a start, she’s not yet ready to accept Amity in her life again. Restorative justice has not been fully attained, because to Willow, Amity hasn’t fixed everything – Boscha and her squad are still bullying her, and still consider Amity one of them. This changes two episodes later, when Amity tells Boscha to grow the fuck up when she starts bullying Willow again, and joins her and Luz’s Grudgby team despite her personal issues to get Boscha to back off. Willow doesn’t make a grand gesture of forgiveness in this episode, but it is after this point where the two become comfortable around eachother again. 

Did Willow forgive Amity too quickly for years of trauma? Maybe. If she had chosen to continue keeping Amity at a distance I certainly wouldn’t have blamed her. But in the end, Amity fixed the mess she caused as best she could, and has proven herself to want to be a better person, to want to be Willow’s friend again. She worked hard to prove herself to be a person worth trusting, and Willow decided to give that trust a chance again.

And while they did become friends again, that friendship was clearly still affected by what happened, which led to bumps that the two of them had to work through. Like in Labyrinth Runners, where Amity’s overprotectiveness over Willow makes Willow feel like Amity thinks she’s incompetent, and still only sees her as the helpless person she used to be. 

Willow continuing to be mad at Amity and punishing her for what she did wouldn’t be an unreasonable reaction, but it wouldn’t have fixed anything. It would certainly have an impact on Amity, seeing her former best friend rejecting her attempts to make up for what she did, but the hurt on both sides would have continued festering, because deep down, Willow missed Amity too. 

In Hunter’s case, there’s the question of whether he can even be held responsible for his actions. The Palisman-kidnapping in specific was explicitly done under duress – if he failed he would face verbal and physical abuse, and be threatened with his nightmare scenario: getting thrown out of the Emperor’s Coven. 

And that’s not an empty threat either. Hunter has no magic, and Belos has drilled it into him that witches without magic have no future. Without the Emperor’s Coven, his only future prospects would be starving to death on the streets or wasting away in prison. Either way, Hunter would be alone, without family or friends, without a job or job prospects, without anyone to turn to for help. Any child would be terrified of that. Hunter wasn’t always acting on direct orders – in fact he defied direct orders to stay in his room in Eclipse Lake to go look for Titan’s Blood, and then again in Hollow Mind to arrest the rebels. But he made those choices based on the idea that Belos wouldn’t want him if he was a failure, and that he needed a chance to prove that he could still be useful.

And contrary to popular belief, Hunter does know right from wrong. He has a very strong moral compass, he’s just been forced to ignore it in favor of doing whatever the Emperor wants. To shut up that little voice telling him he’s doing the wrong thing, he uses what’s called a thought-terminating cliche, a statement that feels so fundamentally true that the argument need not continue. In Hunter’s case, that statement is “It’s for the greater good.” Sure, kidnapping his new friends and abducting Palismen to feed to the Emperor and threatening someone who’s been nothing but kind to him to take the portal key from her girlfriend and justifying terrorism makes his stomach feel like he swallowed a cactus and saying it out loud makes him sound like a horrible person – but it’s for the greater good. He’s doing it to serve Belos, and Belos knows what’s best. 

So by the time Hunter is out of active danger and able to rest and recover from what happened to him… what would further punishment accomplish? He already knows that he did fucked up shit while working for the EC, and he’s proven time and time again that while he’s not fighting for Belos’s approval, he’s actually a genuinely kind-hearted kid. Punishing him now would likely cause him to react very poorly, because he’s been at the wrong end of that stick so often that he’s developed severe PTSD because of it.

And if you think restorative justice is still in order – Hunter is currently hyperfixated on making sure Belos can never hurt anyone again, and for the long term, he has expressed that he wants to become a Palisman carver when he grows up. While it won’t bring back the Palismen that were killed, it will help the current Palisman population recover and reintroduce Palismen to witches who may have had to give up theirs. 

When viewed through this lens, the writing of The Owl House starts to make more sense. As a show, it is extremely forgiving towards its characters – they’re still held accountable for their actions, but as long as they’re willing to grow and learn and fix the damage they caused, they are very quickly forgiven. 

However, I do understand why these writing choices can be… controversial, so to say. Because it doesn’t feel very satisfying, does it? When someone hurts you on purpose, your first impulse would be to try to hurt them back, that’s just how people work. 

That’s the hardest thing to come to terms with when you become an advocate for prison abolition for example – you’re not just arguing for freeing a guy who got 5 years because a cop found weed in his pockets, you’re arguing for the release, and most importantly, the humanity of some of the most vile, disgusting people this planet has ever produced. Even now, when someone commits a truly awful crime and gets sent to prison for life, my first thought is “Good, I hope they rot in there.” But that’s not justice. That’s just revenge. And revenge is not something we as a society should want to build our justice system on.

It’s not satisfying to see Lilith go from using Luz as a human shield in her fight against Eda to sleeping on the couch in Eda’s house within 2 episodes. It’s not satisfying to see Willow let Amity back into her life when Amity has hurt her so badly before, or to see Hunter become romantically involved with Willow after he literally abducted her the first time they met. But that satisfaction isn’t really the point. Revenge is satisfying in the moment, but an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and if someone shows a genuine willingness to change, it’s often better to give them a chance to.

However, my final point is about what happens when this approach fails. Because not everyone is willing to change. Some people, when faced with the consequences of their actions, decide to dig their heels in and refuse to admit fault, or blame the victim(s), or use those same thought-terminating cliches that Hunter used to justify their actions, “I was just following orders” being a big one.

And thus, we come to Belos.

If Belos showed a willingness to change, a genuine one, not an attempt at manipulation, should he be given the chance to? That vengeful part of me is VERY empathetically saying no. But logically, reasonably, he should be given that chance, if only because he’s a human being and no human being deserves to be mistreated. That doesn’t mean his victims are obligated to forgive him or be around him again, in fact I think that, for the sake of Hunter’s mental health, Belos should stay as far away from him as humanly possible. But he should be given the chance to start over, to truly better himself and do something good with the rest of his life.

But Belos isn’t willing to change. 

Belos is a product of a bad environment and grew up with a cult-like mentality and hatred for witches that he had to adopt for his own safety. It’s hard to break out of that mentality, but not impossible. Case in point: Caleb. The tragedy of Belos’s character to me is that he had so many chances to change, so many people to help him make that leap, but all of the people who offered him that help ended up dead by his hands because he couldn’t handle the idea that he may have been wrong.

At this point, Belos is stuck. Changing would mean not only giving up on his life’s work, but acknowledging to himself that everything he’s done, mutilating his body, killing his brother, slaughtering thousands and installing himself as God-Emperor of a population he despises more than anything in order to facilitate a genocide, was completely pointless.

He can’t admit that to himself. Especially the thing about Caleb’s death. He’s sunk-cost-fallacied himself so far into a corner that all he can really do when faced with opposing viewpoints is dig his heels in even deeper and lash out in a rage at anyone who challenges him. Even now, when his body is literally falling apart at the seams, he’s still trying to commit witch-genocide, because it’s all he has. 

Restorative justice doesn’t work in this case, because the perpetrator needs to be receptive to it. Logically you would assume the show would default to retributive justice, and characters like Willow and Camila do take a very vengeful glee in imagining themselves beating the snot out of Belos. But right now, the primary motivation of the Hexsquad and Hunter in particular when it comes to Belos is to end the threat he poses. As long as Belos is alive and free, he will continue to hurt and kill people, and if he can’t be talked down, he needs to be either contained or killed to prevent him from causing more harm.

First of all there's the Titan's eye with flames in it, which I can only assume references the burning/destruction of the portal door from the season 1 finale. The portal door (as well as the key) notably had a Titan eye on it.

It's also a really interesting detail in general that the Titan's eye is associated with the portal, at least the original/main known one, as Titan's blood is known to cause leaks/portals between realms at times. We also see in the last episode that Papa Titan was stuck in the place between realms and was able to watch over King despite his body having already died.

After the burning eye comes the montage of the main cast of characters showing off some abilities. Pretty normal, but I only just realized the order of it isn't just random. First of course comes Luz, the protagonist, using light glyphs which is her most iconic ability and the physical representation of her character (Luz = light). She wears her main outfit, plus the cloak that Eda made for her. Next comes the first person she befriends, Eda, and then the second, King, and there we have the main trio. Willow appears next, the first kid her age that Luz befriends, and then accordingly, Gus. Next is Amity, who only warms up to Luz later. These are the main cast/allies.

Then we transition to the Emperor's Coven's most important figures, the covenheads, and the most recurring/important characters of this group other than the emperor: Lilith, the Golden Guard/Hunter, and Kikimora. Their section is notably different; instead of each having their own individual animations, they get still frames.

There are a couple things here that I'll talk about and expand on that I actually partially got from watching a youtuber's theory/analysis on these frames before they finished watching the whole show and unfortunately I forgot who it was but when I do remember I will edit this to link that video.

Because these characters don't get animations, the information we do get about them or can make assumptions on is based on the composition and the art itself.

At the top are the nine covenheads, at the bottom left corner is the Owl House, and at the bottom right corner is the Emperor's castle. The most interesting details come from the three framed at the center.

Out of the three, Lilith is placed on the left, visually closest to the Owl House. Compositionally speaking, this makes sense as Lilith is the first of the three to become an ally, she made the most contact with the main cast out of the three before season 2 even started, and she is Eda's sister, who lives in the Owl House. She was also the head of the Emperor's coven before she left, which is important to note for later. We can also see that in the first frame she is wearing the outfit she wore when she was still part of the Emperor's Coven, with an angry/aggressive expression and stance, representing how she was before she left. In the second she is wearing one of her season 2 outfits, with a remorseful expression, as she has felt guilt for cursing Eda and is now living a new life to fight back against Belos.

In the middle is Hunter. He isn't closer to the Owl House or the Emperor's castle, just midway between both. This might represent both the pacing and placement of his character development and role. After Lilith left, he was next to replace her as the head of the Emperor's Coven. Like Lilith, he also had his own redemption arc, though his intentions and the way he changed were different than Lilith. Unlike Lilith whose main intention was always to get Eda's curse healed, which is a reasonably good cause for her to stay as she genuinely trusted Belos to do so, Hunter did not have a reason like this. Instead he was sort of always in a gray area (another reason he is in the middle). He grew up under Belos and it has always been his purpose to serve him, he has known nothing much outside of this and his actions and initial attitude obviously reflected this. He was snarky, rude, the Emperor's right hand man (who we know is really evil), and ultimately he would do pretty much anything Belos commanded even if it hurt others. But we also see that even before Hunter turned around, he was never completely evil either. After all he was still a kid and knew no better than what he was raised around. He was a product of his environment, abused, raised as a soldier, and genuinely believed for so long that he was doing the right thing, even if he did have some internal conflict sometimes. And even as the shining face of the Emperor's Coven, he still did things on his own that Belos definitely wouldn't approve of, like doing his own personal studies on wild magic. As his character development progresses we see his shift in perspective and actions go from almost full submission to the Emperor, to joining the main cast and becoming his own person actually fighting for the greater good. In the first frame he is in full Golden Guard gear with the mask on, and in the second we get a small glimpse of his face. Just like how Lilith's development is represented in the second frame, maybe Hunter taking off his mask is also a representation of his "unmasking", as well as of course serving as a teaser for what he looks like before the full face reveal in Hunting Palismen.

Kikimora is on the right, closest to the Emperor's castle. Out of the three, she never becomes an ally, at least not until maybe by the timeskip. Up until the very end when the draining spell finally takes place, she sticks with the Emperor's Coven, and then after that, she still chooses to be petty and antagonistic when Hexide becomes a place to hide from the Collector. We don't really get to know much about her internal desires or backstory, other than she's obsessed with power, recognition, and revenge, and that part of the reason she never left the coven was because her life was also on the line. Either way, she is the most "evil" of these three, in the sense that even when she knew Belos' plans all along by always eavesdropping on him, she still chose to serve him till the plans followed through. In the first frame we don't really get much about her other than she looks kind of cute compared to the other two, but in the second she looks much more intimidating and get to see what her other eye looks like like when she was putting a spell on Raine in Eda's Requiem.

After this of course comes the transition to Belos, the one who started all the covens and the most evil/antagonistic of all. Then there is the animation that matches the season 1 opening which I have no comment on currently.

At the very end is obviously the show logo. I know the staff/palisman designs integrated into the letters has been pointed out by lots of people before, but what I noticed was the borders.

At the top and bottom are the skeletons of titans. I'm not sure if the circles on the right and left borders have any significance but I also noticed the suns on the four corners of the border. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but when the Collector tells his story about what happened to him and the titans, there are four Archivists:

The Collector and Archivists "come from the stars" and the sun is a star. If the border design is intentional, I see why they specifically chose sun-like designs for the corners to represent how the Archivists were responsible for wiping out the titans.

I don't know something about how the red (obviously) represents blood and death, and the placement of such amongst the monochrome of the rest of the drawing makes it pop. I did that on purpose, and while both Nikolai and Fyodor have pretty black and white designs, I made sure their little bits of color were muted.

But the placement of the blood represents a lot of things I don't quite remember cause I made this a year ago lmoa. But the jist is the idea that Fyodor thinks his hands clean because of the necessity of cleansing the world (we see this also in Crime and Punishment, which is where I get this part of the analysis, Raskolnikov questions if what he did in killing the two women was wrong because of their lower station and how no one really liked or cared for them.) In this, Nikolai is one of his servants - in Fyodor's mind, not Nikolai's lol - in whatever Fyodor's goals are. His hands are gladly bloodstained, and he while he also had his reasons, he understands what it is. Something something Fyodor thinks himself the savior yadda yadda we've heard it all before.

A Witch Hunt With No Witches

I would like you to know that Phillip and Caleb did not grow up in the worst place to grow up Puritan (unless you're like me and you're writing them moving to Connecticut later). Connecticut was markedly more tolerant than Massachusetts Bay.

It's all John Cotton's fault.

The Great John Cotton Conspiracy

John Cotton was a Puritan minister who left England in 1634 and began teaching at the First Church of Boston. He had OPINIONS, and was unafraid to use his considerable influence to push them on others. The ministers considered the “fathers” of both Connecticut and Rhode Island would cite conflict specifically with John Cotton as a reason for their decision to establish new colonies.

Thomas Hooker, who founded the Connecticut River colony, isn’t important here. His conflict was over voting access. He thought things should be slightly more democratic.

Roger Williams, the founder of Providence Plantations, is an interesting case study. He repeatedly got in trouble in Massachusetts. He took a job at the church in Salem—yes, THAT Salem—after he angered authorities in Plymouth by questioning the legality of their charter, specifically the lack of payment to the indigenous people there. He also got in trouble for preaching the wrong things, like tolerance. He believed that the colonial government shouldn’t be punishing “sins of conscience,” i.e. keeping the Sabbath or even requiring the populace to be Christian in the first place. He was generally fine with the beliefs themselves; he took issue with their enforcement.

John Cotton adamantly disagreed, and was involved in the conflict that prompted Williams’ exit from Massachusetts. Williams ran away in the middle of a blizzard right before he was supposed to stand trial. This isn’t relevant; it’s just badass.

John Cotton was also a massive hypocrite. You see, at the same time as he was harassing Williams and Hooker, he was preaching his own unorthodox message. He preached a message of free grace over legalism. If you recall two of the prior points—the “unlimited grace” of Calvinism versus the concept of sanctification—Cotton focused on grace. It wasn’t technically inconsistent with Puritan beliefs, but the majority of the ministers in New England placed far more emphasis on sanctification.

Cotton preaching the message was unproblematic. He was popular, a 17th century celebrity pastor. However, a member of his congregation, one who followed him specifically to New England, was, with Cotton’s encouragement, holding in-home Bible studies discussing these things. The issue was that said person was a woman, Anne Hutchinson.

Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History

Hutchinson’s Bible studies grew incredibly popular, attended even by the eventual governor of the colony, Henry Vane the Younger. Vane is important because he was the primary source of Hutchinson’s political support. Additional ministerial support was provided by Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, Reverend Samuel Wheelwright, whose sermons were considerably more fiery than the generally measured Cotton’s.

Hutchinson and Wheelwright were both quite outspoken in their opinions, including disagreeing vehemently with the legalistic teachings of other ministers. The other ministers couldn’t tolerate the pushback, particularly Hutchinson’s. Wheelwright preached in a small community about 10 miles out of Boston, but the First Church in Boston, where Cotton preached, was the preeminent church in the colony. Did I mention Hutchinson was a woman?

She and her supporters were deemed “antinomians,” or “against the law.” Their viewpoint was portrayed as one that would cause the colony to fall into chaos. Refer back to the discussion on sanctification. For the Puritans, the idea was basically a form of behavioral control, and focusing on salvation by grace was a threat to that. Hutchinson and Wheelwright saw the focus on legalism as explicitly anti-Biblical.

Much of Hutchinson’s ire was focused on the lead minister of the First Boston church, John Wilson. His ego could not handle a woman criticising him, and it especially couldn’t handle that much of his congregation was agreeing with her. As the church authorities tried to figure out how to deal with the rising tensions, he trash talked his own congregation. Members of his congregation, led by Governor Vane, demanded he step down. They were ameliorated by Wilson delivering a very conciliatory speech. It wasn’t to last. It didn’t actually solve the problem.

Massachusetts Pulls a Fascism

Colony officials called for a day of prayer and fasting to deal with the controversy. Cotton invited Wheelwright to preach in the afternoon that day, and the sermon he gave was, to the other Massachusetts ministers, less passionate, more incendiary. Additionally, when Connecticut asked for reinforcements in the Pequot Wars, congregants in Boston refused to sign up because John Wilson was going to be the expedition's chaplain. This was largely attributed to Hutchinson’s influence.

The Pequot Wars are otherwise irrelevant to this discussion, but they do provide a potential model for Belos’ genocidality.

Things had officially escalated beyond the authorities’ control, and the conservatives among the ministers and the General Court determined the free grace movement needed to be destroyed. One of the first actions taken was trying and convicting Wheelwright for what boiled down to “you said mean things about us and we didn’t like it.” The Boston congregation found this unconscionable, and Vane and others got many of the most influential men in the Boston church to sign a petition protesting Wheelwright’s conviction.

Governor Vane was a problem. He was by far the most effective at obstructing the conservatives on the Court from complete control. So shenanigans were pulled in the next election to minimize the influence of voters in Boston. Vane and the other two magistrates who supported Hutchinson and Wheelwright lost re-election.

John Winthrop, now governor, immediately enacted a law preventing new people from settling in Massachusetts Bay without Court approval, a move explicitly intended to prevent the so-called Antinomians from adding more people to their numbers. Henry Vane returned to England in disgust soon thereafter.

Hutchinson stood trial in November and was convicted. In order to remove any possible support from the Court, the Boston deputies who had signed the petition were removed. And, because things weren’t fascistic enough, following her conviction that same petition was used to disarm those who signed unless they recanted and disavowed Hutchinson.

If you wondered what John Cotton was doing through all this, he was there, somewhat defending Hutchinson, but more defending himself. It was Hutchinson’s church trial (the civil one sentenced her to banishment; the church one determined if she would be excommunicated as well) that displayed his true colours. He folded, and he would be the one to elucidate her true crime. There were men attending her Bible studies, and mixed-gender events like that were almost inevitably going to lead to an orgy. Maybe somebody should have said something about this when the governor was attending? Cotton refused to acknowledge his role in any of this, and would spend the remainder of his life picking fights with Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker via pamphlet publication.

Boston and Salem were, at first, the places where you would be most likely to find dissenting opinions. The Antinomian Controversy put an end to that in a dramatic fashion. “Banned in Boston” was a joke that stuck around to the 20th century, and we all know what Salem was known for.

Societal Participation in both Puritan Communities and in the Boiling Isles

The Antinomian Controversy provided a model for how New England would deal with dissent for decades. Belos grew up in its aftermath, and would have seen its impacts, and heard stories of those involved. This provided him a clear model for how to control the populace.

Puritan Ministerial Heterodoxy as Compared to Hexside

The Antinomian Controversy illuminated the supposed need for Puritan ministers to get on the same page regarding their teachings. As mentioned before, nothing that Cotton was preaching, or that Hutchinson was discussing, was inconsistent with Puritan theology. It was the inevitable result of a society created by non-conformists who really wanted everyone else to conform to their particular brand of non-conformity.

One of the first official actions taken was calling a meeting with all the prominent ministers in the colony, with the primary goal being to reach consensus regarding the theology being preached in the colonies. And guess what—they couldn’t! They met again two months later, and still failed in their goal. This was where John Wilson would trash talk his own congregation. They would find consensus in a third meeting, although that consensus was less genuine agreement, more a proverbial middle finger to Hutchinson specifically.

This conflict was inevitable. Two different people reading the same thing and interpreting it in different ways is the natural outcome of the readers being two different people, with different life experiences. However, Christian sects in general, Calvinistic ones in particular, do not nurture a culture of debate. The idea of total depravity does not allow for different people approaching the same topic in good faith. If people can only be good because of God, then disagreement between two of His saints should be impossible. No, one person is right, and one person is of the Devil. People disagreeing on fundamental theology was a threat to their utopian community. It was vitally important for the people teaching people how to interpret the Bible be teaching the same thing.

The primary purpose of these meetings was to ensure consistency in messaging from the pulpit, but the Antinomian Controversy did impact the education of the children as well. Philemon Pormont, the man who established the first formal school in the colonies, lost his job over this. He wasn’t even a signer of the petition, but he was close enough connected that he was no longer trusted with teaching the youth.

Which brings us to Hexside. We see in Hexside’s introduction a need for that informational control. Belos’ messaging relies heavily on people sticking to their assigned roles, and that extended to choosing a coven before you actually choose a coven. From a cynical perspective, this makes sense. When you are pigeonholed down that route from a very young age, you will be less likely to question it. Additionally, limiting how much magic people are allowed to learn to all but those who have proved themselves most loyal to Belos provides an additional protective measure.

Willow’s skill in plant magic had to be prodigious for Principal Bump to switch her to that track. It is unclear if he would have switched her beforehand if she had simply asked. Dabbling in other forms of magic would usually get you in the Detention Track. The existence of the Detention track in general is telling. You can almost see that as the equivalent of excommunication or banishment (more on those later), but at the youth level. If you aren’t going to abide by the rules, you need to be ostracized from the community.

We don’t get a lot as far as how conformity to Boiling Isles standards of education is enforced at the administrative level. Belos mentions funding in “The First Day” and an indication of some level of additional consequences, but we don’t get specifics. This is understandable for a kids’ show, but it does leave some things open-ended. It likely is not funding-exclusive. St. Epiderm appears to be a private school, therefore less impacted by funding limits, but they still have the standard single-track indicators in their uniforms.

This is entirely speculation, but the proximity of the events of the show to the Day of Unity probably impacted how much Belos cared. If these kids were going to be graduating before the Day of Unity, and getting out into the wider community, the impact of multi-tracking would actually be relevant. As far as Belos is concerned, the only thing that changes is the strategy for marking the students.

The Politicization of Suffering and Eda's Curse

One of the big purposes of religion in general is to provide answers to life's big questions. A universal one is an explanation for human suffering. If you were to ask the Puritans, it’s because they did something wrong.

Trigger warning for pregnancy loss and birth defects.

The Antinomian Controversy featured this in a very disturbing way. The most immediate came to light following Anne Hutchinson’s church trial, which resulted in her excommunication. She was alone and emotionally beaten down. One friend braved the wrath of the Puritan mob to support her—Mary Dyer.

The wrath was immediate. Dyer had suffered a stillbirth less than 6 months prior; the baby had the sort of visible abnormality that was incompatible with life. Anne Hutchinson was a midwife, and she was at the birth. Understanding the superstitions of the time, not to mention her own church standing, Anne, with John Cotton’s counsel, decided with the others present to bury the infant in secret with as much dignity as they could manage.

It was not completely secret, however. When Dyer walked out of the Boston Meetinghouse with Hutchinson, someone called out, “Isn’t she the woman with monstrous birth?” The fact that phrase is the one remembered says all you need to know about how news of the stillbirth was treated. It was seen as confirmation that God was displeased with Hutchinson and her followers.

This was not the first such occurrence of the Puritans politicizing tragedy, and it would not be the last. Dyer’s stillbirth would follow her for the rest of her life, which we know because the full extent of her historical significance came later. She converted to Quakerism and was eventually killed for it as one of the “Boston Martyrs.” She went to that death willingly. Massachusetts authorities wanted to give her a reprieve, but she refused, refusing to be used as the Puritans’ political pawn. News of her death was met with outrage in England, which led to greater establishment of Royal control, one key factor that led to the Salem Witch Trials.

When I said it all links back to the Antinomian Controversy, I meant it.

You can see in Dyer’s story, and similar other cases, the way Eda’s curse was treated as a propaganda tool following her reprieve when she was to be petrified. Obviously Eda wasn’t going to do the same as Dyer. First off, it’s a kids’ show. Second, it would have been disrespectful to the sacrifices Luz and Lilith made. Third, it wouldn’t have affected the propaganda.

Eda’s curse itself was definitely used in Belos’s messaging the same way Dyer’s stillbirth was used by the Puritans. And her reprieve was used the same way the same Puritans had intended to use Dyer’s.

Belos’ own words lay it out clearly:

“Children of the Isles. The Titan has told me to spare the Owl Lady's life, but in return, her curse will strip away all her powers. Let her monstrous form be a lesson about the dangers of wild magic.”

We see the effects of this further in Season 2. Eda was a wanted criminal with a bounty on her head. We see in “Separate Tides” that is no longer the case. We see in “Eda’s Requiem,” that it goes one step further. No coven wants her. It is more useful for Belos’ messaging for her to be seen in public as a warning against wild magic. Not that he intended for her to not get caught in the draining spell. But he could put that off until the end, only sending scouts in to take The Owl House a week before the Day of Unity.

Banishment and the Conformatorium

The appearance of the Conformatorium in the very first episode is a clear indicator of what sort of world Luz has found herself in. This is a world with strange monsters everywhere. Is some guy eating his own eyes weird enough to prevent participation in society? It’s his body; he isn’t hurting others. The reveal that the place was being run by an actual 17th century Puritan added considerable context.

Puritans were legalistic in more than just sermons. They did care a lot about things at least appearing legal, which is counter to the “angry mob witch trial” view of people.

They were quite aware of how things would look if they went around executing people for any little thing, hence why they tried to give Mary Dyer a reprieve. Samuel Wheelwright was also an interesting case of this. I already mentioned his trial, where he was convicted on a nonsense charge. Wheelwright himself raised the stakes at sentencing.

The Court and the Ministers threw around words suggesting that Wheelwright’s sermons were heretical. Wheelwright called their bluff. He told them that if his words were heresy, then sentence him to death, but he would appeal to the king. This happened around the same time Henry Vane returned to England, and Vane’s dad was on Charles’ privy council. It was not an idle threat.

The Court caved. His sentence was banishment from the colony. This was not a surprise, and he and his closest supporters had been making plans to leave anyway. They founded Exeter, New Hampshire.

Anne Hutchinson was also banished. She, her husband and their closest supporters, including Mary Dyer and her husband, would found the colonies on Aquidneck Island (aka Rhode Island).

Speaking of Rhode Island, if you recall Roger Williams: also banished. He attempted to establish another colony just on the other side of the border—he had even negotiated payment with the Wampanoag for it—before Plymouth sent a “friendly” letter reminding him he was technically in their jurisdiction. He then set up shop in Providence after negotiating with the Narragansett. Williams cared a lot about that. His connections with the Narragansett were why Hutchinson and her followers ended up on Aquidneck.

In summary, the Puritans weren’t going to automatically kill you if you didn’t conform in the way they expected, but that didn’t mean that they wanted you around. So they’d banish you. That wouldn’t be an option in the Boiling Isles, however, because of the limits of the world itself.

Still, petrifying people for small crimes like writing literal food porn isn’t going to work out in the long run. Belos can’t risk a popular uprising before the Day of Unity. Even if he isn’t subject to anybody back in England, his plan relies on the merciful father-figure imagery. But he can’t have them just running free. To quote Warden Wrath, “No place for [them] in society if [they] can’t fit in.” To better explain it, Belos couldn’t have people bucking the norm around because that might tell everybody else that it is okay for them to buck the norm. But where would those miscreants go if there was nowhere to banish them?

The answer is the Conformatorium.

Examining Belos' Own Words

To tie everything together, it might be useful to compare Belos’ own words against the things we’ve learned. I already quoted his speech in “Young Blood, Old Souls,” which pertained to one specific point. The following quotes help us get a bigger picture.

I will address these chronologically.

From the first speech Belos gives in Hollow Mind:

“Fellow Citizens, we are born into chaos. Our lives anger the Titan.”

There is a clear tie-in to the Calvinistic idea of Total Depravity. Everyone is chaotic (bad, as Belos presents it) from birth. Total chaos is the default state, and that default state makes the Titan, or God, as Belos is presenting him, angry.

“My own family has been hurt by the darkness of wild magic.”

The rest of this speech is less directly related to Puritan ideas, but they This line is a natural extension of the messaging that suffering is punishment from God. If you can spin a good conversion story out of it, you can use your own tragic past for clout points. It’s a common strategy of religious grifters throughout history.

“I have been shown the healing light. It shines in nine hues!”

Light is a common theme in the Bible, particularly Jesus’ parallels. The idea of being a “light shining among men” was at the origin of the establishment of the New England colonies. They wanted to be a city on a hill. Light being a go-to metaphor for Belos, from this perspective, makes sense.

“The wild witches! They have found me, run!”

One well-known Bible verse is “Blessed are you when men shall persecute you.” Interpreting anything possibly perceived as persecution as validation is standard across Christianity. Yes, Belos is lying, but it does explain why he thinks this would better make his case.

From the second of the speeches in Hollow Mind:

“Look at what wild magic has done to your city.”

This is an extension from the previous speech. Suffering and disaster are indicative of God’s judgment. Belos has taken it a step beyond the lie that his own family’s suffering was caused by wild magic; now it is seen in the world as well.

“Now imagine what it is doing to you.”

One’s outward blessings or misfortune are manifestations of the state of their soul.

“A city can rise from the ashes, but a soul…”

This line is evocative of the idea of sanctification. Good deeds, when under God’s grace, purify the soul; bad deeds corrupt it.

“I can make your magic pure again, as the Titan intended!”

Here we see another case of Belos having a Puritan-style God complex. This line reflects the Calvinistic idea of atonement, something that only Christ can do.

From his words to the Head Witches in “Hunting Palismen”

“The larger your covens grow, the more power we will have to unite our realms, where the worthy shall inherit a utopia free of wild magic”

This line, and the similar, lengthier speech in “Follies at the Coven Day Parade,” cements my personal headcanon that the Belos internalized his own Day of Unity messaging as a spin on the sort pre-millennialism that Puritans subscribed to. Uniting the realms where the worthy will inherit a utopia free of wild magic sounds almost exactly like Christ bringing his kingdom to earth where the faithful will reign in a utopia free of sin. Belos being a cult leader is commonly accepted among the fandom, but it’s lines like this that make it crystal clear that he is a Puritan cult leader.

Conclusion - Was the choice of “Phillip” intentional?

Hopefully at this point, I have more than driven home my point that the anti-Puritan messaging in the Owl House is far deeper than opposing “witch-hunting.” If you know the theological and historical background of the movement, you can see a lot of it in, not only the actually Puritan characters, but in the show’s themes, and even the way the Boiling Isles itself is presented.

To wrap things up, I would like to tell you a Bible story. There are two people named “Phillip” in the Bible. One of them is one of Jesus’ disciples, but I’m not talking about him. The one I find interesting is Phillip the Evangelist.

Acts 8:26-31, 35-36, 38-39 (NRSV)

26 Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go [… ] to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” […]

27 Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship

28 and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.

29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.”

30 So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading […]. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

31 He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Phillip to get in and sit beside him

[…]

35 Then Phillip began to speak, and starting with this scripture he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.

36 As they were going along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

38 He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Phillip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Phillip baptized him.

39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Phillip away; the eunuch saw him no more and went on his way rejoicing.

To summarize, the Biblical Phillip met a major figure in the Ethiopian government, who was reading the Bible. Phillip and he had a Bible study, where Phillip explained the Christian interpretation of the passage. The Ethiopian converted to Christianity, and asked to be baptized.

Traditionally, this is the reason given for why Ethiopia is majority Christian. The eunuch returned home and brought Christianity with him. Ethiopian Orthodox is one of the oldest Christian sects, predating even Roman Catholicism, which is not something I was taught. People stopped caring when there weren’t people they could imagine as white involved. In the white evangelical version of the tale, the focus is entirely on Phillip. Also, there is a bit of covert racism, because heaven forbid white people give an African country credit for something they purportedly valued.

Were Dana Terrace and the writers thinking of this Phillip when they gave him the name? Maybe, maybe not, but he did bring an awful lot of the Puritan mindset to the Boiling Isles.

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