Greets,
I was quite miffed by the article on Witchcraft. The WHOLE witches on brooms came from the Christians. I cannot believe you read such tripe from such out dated and horrid sources. The witches used brooms in their rites, because they had to mask the fact that they had magickal items in their homes. This is why the cauldron was also popular. If you had a wand, then you would be the next bbq. Witches jumped over brooms at Beltain as a form of sympathetic magick, to show the crops how high to grow. Now some Xian saw this and made up this vision of witches riding brooms. Wicca is a real religion recognized by the US government. We are among the most popular and persecuted religions. The misconceptions about witches are immense! And articles like this only feed the flames of hatred, and ignorance. Next time you write about witches you may want to talk to some, just to get it straight.
Blessed Be,
Rev. Banshee
knowledge is power
It’s likely that this could turn into another religion topic, but I might point out that you should also post your disagreement in “Talk Back to the Master” (home page).
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
Duh…silly me. I guess that would be the “Comments on Cecil’s Columns” forum. Pardon.
Veni, Vidi, Visa … I came, I saw, I bought.
I’m moving this to the “Comments” folder, because that’s where it belongs.
Lynn/SDStaff Lynn
For the Straight Dope
The column the OP is referring to: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/990903.html
The OP has also started another thread in the BBQ pit (which is where this one originated).
Lynn/SDStaff Lynn
For the Straight Dope
I’ve seen somewhere that witches were supposed to use their brooms to turn into crows, with the whisker end of the broom forming the wide tail feathers of the crow. Probably apocryphal, but a neat image.
“Tell em about the Twinkie.”
Well, I’m willing to entertain all theories, but at least Cecil’s has some basis (weak, maybe, but there). Banshee says: “The whole witches on brooms [thing] came from the Christians.” This is based on what?
Banshee said:
Do you really want to base a claim of being a “real religion” on what the US government thinks?! I wouldn’t.
Any citations to back this up? How popular? Persecuted how?
Why? Cecil tried to get to the, er, bottom of the issue. While Cecil is never wrong, he may have been misinformed. So why not inform him properly instead of ranting on about “hatred” and such (I read the answer and can’t find a hint of “hatred” there, so I’m not sure what you’re jerking your knee about).
Yeah, because we know that none of them will have any biases.
“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
– William Kingdon Clifford
Banshee_? Why in the world have you assumed that Cece got his information from Christians? There were two quotes that may have been taken from Christian trials of or polemics against witches, however, they are in the context of a study on the subject that has no evidence (as given) of a Christian bias. The statements are used as examples of ideas current at the time that Western Europe had a great belief in witches.
Rather than foam at the mouth over a perceived prejudice, why don’t you provide an actual commentary on Mr. Harner’s work?
Tom~
I myself am a little confused on how one can be both “most popular” and “most persecuted” at the same time.
In fact, modern witchcraft’s connection to anchient paganism is dubious at best. The most obvious reason for this is that the pre-christian Celts (to whom most modern groups of witches trace their beliefs) were a pre-literate society. All we have left are physical remains (and not many), the heavily biased aaccounts of the literate societies around the Celts (first the Romans, later the Christians) and an oral tradition that is a bit dubious after 3000 years. It is really impossible to reconstruct the substance of their beliefs in any signifigant fashion. This is not to say that modern paganism is not a valid religion. It simply cannot really claim the history it would like to. To say that modern Wiccans are default experts on the pagans of millinia ago is like assuming a Mason is an expert on the Knights Templar.
Furthermore, the term “witch” is a very genral one. Wiccans often assume that any mention on “witches” is a reference to them or thier spiritual forefathers/mothers. This is simply not true. All cultures had witches, not just Western Europe. The example that comes first to mind is the witch in the Golden Ass, a second Century Latin work written by a Greek. When mothers scared thier children to bed all over the world with tales of witches, they did not mean “people with this set of distict religious beliefs”–they meant “evil old ugly woman with magic powers” and didn’t worry about the details.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/990903.html
OK, I don’t know or care if the christians made up the riding on brooms thing, the part that I found offensive is “If drugs work for religious types, they’ll work for pagans, too.” I’ve been living under the delusion that paganism IS a religion, I thought I was a religious person. I am now very curious about what Cecil regards as a “religion”. Perhaps the great one meant something like “If drugs work for Christians, they’ll work for Pagans, too.”?
BTW, David B, since you are obviously the only one able to judge what a “real” religion is, please enlighten us. It could save the whole wide world a lot of problems.
This is a reposting of an email I sent to Cecil after the column appeared.
Banshee calmed down enough to elucidate:
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And from which witch’s diary did this nugget of history come from?
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Why does jumping over a broom clue in the crops, ‘Oh, I must grow that high!’? Couldn’t the witches just tell the crops? Or hold up their hands to show how high? Or crouch down then stand up slowly reaching for the sky? Do the crops see the dead straw lashed to the dead wooden pole and think, ‘Woa, she means business!’?
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If a witch could actually jump as high as the top of a crop of wheat, then she is flying.
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If your rant is intended to make people take Wiccanism seriously, it’s having the opposite effect on me. (Sort of like the effect fundie Christians have.
I’ll admit up-front that I don’t know much about Wicca, but I have a few additional thoughts, and you all can correct me where I go wrong.
I don’t really get the Wiccan adoption (or cooption) of the term “witch” for Wiccan practitioners. I don’t object to it, but I think if you use the term “witch” to describe yourself, you have to be prepared to have many people assume that you are a witch in the traditional sense. And I think that historically, witches were considered to be practitioners of ‘black magic’ who were in league with the Devil and who acknowledged his supremacy in their lives. I’m not saying that’s what witches are now (or even were then), and I’m not saying that persecution and execution of people in the name of witchcraft was ever okay, but that’s what most people meant by “witches” historically, and that, to many, is the image conjured up by the term even today. I’m also not saying that Wicca is or ever was the same as Satanism, but many people apparently thought witches practiced Satanism, not Wicca or paganism. So it seems to me that Wiccan use of the word “witch” is largely an attempt to take a word that has negative connotations and give it positive connotations – I see nothing wrong with that, but it’s a difficult transition and I’m not surprised many people have trouble with it.
And what are the historical antecedents of Wicca, anyway? Matt cites to pre-Columbian Mexico and China, when I guess I’ve always assumed Wicca was based more on European paganism. Am I wrong? I don’t think Cecil was attacking the broom as a religious symbol or saying Wiccans can’t or shouldn’t invest it with meaning or use it in their rituals; he was trying to explain where the image of witches riding on brooms came from. On that specific point, Matt’s source says only that “the tale was invented by Witch persecutors,” without any explanation of who, what, where, or how the legend originated. I don’t think that sheds much light on the specific question.
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European witches? At what time and in what specific country? Are you talking about the human-sacrificing Druids and Celts? The slave-owning Goths? The homocidal Vikings? What gods did they worship? Or was the secularistic New Age movement born in 700 AD? Were they really casting spells because they had shamanistic powers, or, like the Pagans that they were, were they performing religious rituals in worship of a god or gods?
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Do you really believe that as a group, every witch has only performed spells of the healing and love category? They never cursed anyone? Never used their powers in a selfish way? Never used their powers in self-defense against another person? Never dabbled in the dark side of the force… er, in black magick?
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Does a vacuum cleaner have the same, or even greater power in ritual magick as a broom?
Peace.
Wicca is a strictly phonus-balonus modern invention, based on an outdated and repudiated article in the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Much as I hate to say it, Cecil’s column this week was really lame. It wasn’t even a half-assed attempt to explain anything. Most likely he came across this dubious theory about broomsticks many years ago (the book he cites was published in 1973, note), and he’d just been waiting for an opportunity to use it somewhere, if only because it is outrageous. Lame, I say.
moriak asks:
Much greater. The false “white” spells of the dabblers of ritual magic have no effects whtsoever. On the other hand, cats, the stereotypical witches’ familiar (as I am sure the readership will know), run in mindless terror from a running vacuum cleaner. Thus, the immense superority of that appliance is clearly and empirically demonstrated.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Easy there, Wyzardd. My dictionary lists “one who has no religion” as a viable definition of “pagan.” As a second definition, true. But I reckon it’s not all that big a deal to anyone but the minority who choose to embrace “pagan” as the label of their personal belief system.
There’s always a bigger fish.
I don’t know about any of this stuff. All I can say is, I’m never gonna see Angela Lansbury in quite the same way again.
Rich Barr
massivemaple@hotmail.com
AOL Instant Messenger: Hrttannl