BTW, enjoy.
Um…er…do some of you folk have any idea of the notion of ‘witch’ back in medieval times? While the ‘authorities’ might have ascribed supernatural powers to these women, they were, for the most part, just ordinary women whose skills threatened (or surpassed) those of the patriarchal hegemony. They were women who spoke out politically or who had medical skills that threatened the burgeoining practices of bloke doctors.
Witchery was never primarily a ‘religious’ concept. The Church seized upon it to placate it’s powerful (and beneficient) parishioners from the disaster that would befall them if women were able to attain the same status as them.
Have you deserved it yet? You’ll get it someday…
Well, since I DID get promoted because the people who make the decisions aren’t morons, no one got any cash. But I’d always rather have evil retribution than just cash. Money alone just can’t buy you the happiness and joy that watching an idiot suffer can.
While there is some truth to this point (although it, too, has been exaggerated from time to time), the salient point regarding “witches” in the context of modern Wicca or Paganism is that the victims of the early Renaissance witch hunts (very little witch hunting actually occurred in the Medieval period) were, in fact, Christians, not Pagans of any sort. They were accused of consorting with the devil specifically because that was the only frame of reference that the Europeans had at that time. It is unlikely that any pagan was actually ever hunted down as a witch (or that there were enough pagans in all of Europe to provide the rationale for a single hunt).
It is unfortunate that the 20th century movements to re-establish various pagan belief systems happened to sieze on the word “witch” and the earlier “wicce” (in English) to identify some of their adherents, leading to a lot of misconceptions. The word witch, as far back as can be documented, has always had the meaning of “practicer of necromancy” or “caster of curses” or “sorcereor.” The claim that wicca and witch came from “wise person” is wrong and has caused some people to link the “burning times” with a Christian assault on paganism. It was not. The pagans had been defeated hundreds of years earlier and the victims were Christians.
The witch hunts were clearly evil, and were inspired by fear and ignorance (and, not infrequently, jealousy), but they were not acts of interreligious warfare.
Once again, life imitates art.
Thank you.
I have mostly stopped calling myself Wiccan and taken to just saying ‘pagan’ instead because of the goofiness associated with the ‘Wiccan’ title. sigh
Ohhhh… The haughtiness.
I identify as a “witch” for reasons stated in earlier posts. A witch was a woman (or a man) who was a healer, a midwife, an herbalist. This is the archetype I identify with. As far as the label being invented by Christians, and therefore I’m somehow deluding myself, that’s rubbish. Some people call it “reclaiming,” I see it more as calling a spade a spade.
And no, I don’t buy into the “Burning Times” crap. I don’t know any witches or pagans personally that actually do.
And you can come up with as many cites as you want that will now dispute the origins of the word “witch” and it’s association with “wicce,” but one could come up with just as many supporting the opposing theory. Semantics. It doesn’t effect your spiritual path, or it shouldn’t anyway.
I have to laugh at folks who derisely cackle that modern paganism is so far removed from paganism of Days Of Yore. So what? What’s the point? Well, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam sure don’t look like they did in their original form, and their origins aren’t nearly as old.
And I’m with Opal, another reason I avoid the Wiccan tag is the fluff-bunny New-Agey Doofus connotations it conjures(snort).
Wow. I never realized the murderous demon-goddess Kali bore such a close likeness to the Pepsi girl (If you look closely at that picture, you can even see her terrible fangs!)
That, or the “I’m a teenager trying to piss off my parents by being, like, all rebellious and Wiccan!” types. I’ve known a few serious pagans of various types and know they’re not all like that. Unfortunately, if you look at most of the introductory books out there, that’s who they seem to be written for. :rolleyes:
I’m sort of a pantheist with possible pagan tendencies, if that makes any sense – at least I am some days. I have to admit that one reason I haven’t done much more than some reading on the subject is the “pagans are such fluffyheads” stereotype. I KNOW they’re not, but I don’t feel up to defending myself about it (to my immediate family, anyway). I hope that doesn’t make me a coward.
Actually, if anyone really wants to go after the gold medal in the martyrdom Olympics (hmm, that might be offensive to the neo-Hellenistic pagans), then perhaps the “Burning Times” folks should look into joining one of the groups that actually DID get burnt in a serious way: heretics rather than witches.
Sure, elderly women who trafficked in herbal poultices and whatnot may have been persecuted throughout Europe and the New World during the pre-modern era, but you know who else was ostracized and persecuted by the (overwhelmingly rural) populace at large? Just about everybody who was different, under the right circumstances. For crying out loud, accusations of witchcraft were an attempt by people who didn’t have the tools of science at their disposal, living in a world whose laws seemed arbitrary and often downright vindictive, to ascribe order to their surroundings. There’s no need to impose some modern patriarchal vast right-wing conspiracy on the issue. Were our forebears morally right, by modern standards? Hell no! Were their feelings understandable? Surprisingly so, I think. Read some secondary source documents like “The Return of Martin Guerre” (the book upon which the inferior movie was based), and you may find, as I did, that a lot of mainstream “knowledge” about the thinking of pre-modern “regular folks” is not very accurate.
Which gets me back to the big target of the actual burning: heretics. I’m thinking of folks like the Cathars, or the head of the Knights Templar. Christians who consciously took risks within the context of their society, knowing on some level what the likely outcome would be. In reading texts like the Malleus Maleficarum, the non-religious reader like myself is left with a great feeling that, as misinformed as the authors were and as tragic and blood-soaked their legacies have proven to be, they were profoundly sincere in perceiving what they felt to be a serious and immediate danger to the basic structure of their worldview.
Again, let me reiterate that I’m not rooting for the Inquisition here. I’m just saying that these folks really honestly thought they were fighting the Devil, in a completely literal way. And their response, as barbaric and disproportionate as it seems today, was sadly congruent with civil justice at the time.
I guess the point of this disjointed response to an increasingly disjointed thread, if any, is to express concern at the race for that elusive “most oppressed” status. In our efforts to point out how crappy things are for me, how no one understands the exquisite suffering of a unique and beautiful snowflake like myself, its easy to forget about folks like the Cathars or the Templars, who might actually have a story that bears telling, but who don’t have their own special bookstores nowadays, and who, rather than being kept down by The Man, were a little to close to being The Man themselves to be appealing role models to the sorts of people who use phrases like “the Burning Times.”
Actually, pagans flourished in Lithuania long after the rest of Europe got rid of them: paganism flourished in Lithuania officially until the end of the 14th (!) century, and unofficially until the 18th century. There’s a Lithuanian neopagan afoot. Maybe Marija Gimbutas had something to do with starting it.
Miller, Kali is not a demoness, nor is she murderous. Her fierce aspect shows her annihilating evil and illusion. Her devotees regard her as a loving Mother.
That Kali picture at the Yahoo! group I linked to is definitely the cutest one of her I’ve ever seen. Incongruously cutesy. But more usually there are lots of terrifying pictures of her.
[Margaret Cho] He has to do the parade all by himself![/Margaret Cho]
When the gods were fighting the demon Raktabija, whose every drop of blood would turn into another demon when it hit the ground, the goddess Parvati took the form of Kali. She ordered the other Gods into the fray, and covered the battlefield with her tongue to catch Raktabija’s blood.
Raktabija was slain, but his blood infused Kali with his evil, and she went on a killing spree, decorating her body with the limbs, skull, and entrails of her victims, until her husband Shiva intervened by throwing himself under her feet, restoring her to her senses.
So, yeah, I think murderous and demonic are, at least occasionally, apt descriptors.
So, um, Kali is Dark Willow?
::sorry, couldn’t resist::
The point, unfortunately, is that this was never true (until it was invented in the 20th century). The use of the word witch always meant a sorceror, associate of demons, inflictor of curses, and (as interpreted by Renaissance Europeans) a consorter with the devil. There has never been a time when the English word witch (or its variants wycche, wicce, wicca, etc.) ever meant a healer or a wise person. They just never had that meaning until it was erroneously bestowed upon them in the 20th century.
Given the number of people who now believe that witch meant wise person, I do not tend to associate self-professed witches with evil-doers. However, it is unrealistic to expect everyone to realize the new meaning that was bestowed on the word among a tiny group of adherent, fifty years ago, in contrast to the clear meaning that has existed in English for over 700 years.
tomndebb - I think Witch meant that healers, herbalists, wisewomen and the like were often LABELED as witches by ignorant people. I don’t think the word “witch” was ever synonymous with healer (well, maybe it is now.)
However, I would tend to doubt that, as well. The position of midwife was honored right up until it was pushed out by the advancement of medical colleges in the late 19th century. Similarly, I have never seen any actual demonstrations that people who possessed good herbal lore were despised. (Going back to Chaucer, we find him ridiculing the physician as a fraud, while incorporating herbal remedies in several of his tales.)
There is, indeed, an incident in which representatives of the church demonstrated a hatred for knowledge in the form of a woman. In the fifth century, a mob of rabid monks murdered the Alexandrine mathematician, Hypatia. However, she was noted, not for her herblore and medicine, but for her mathematics and philosophy and her murder appears to have been incited by one group of Christians opposing the support that she provided a different group of Christians.
In contrast, when we review the actual victims of the “burning times,” we initially find (especially in Germany) that priests, mayors of cities, lawyers, and other well-off men were quite often the principle victims. (It may have varied, somewhat, in Great Britain, where I have found less detailed information.) After the initial German outbreaks of witchhunting, the movement did tend to change its course and focus more specifically on women. However, the best way to determine which women would be targeted had little to do with knowledge and much to do with economics. (Diane Purkiss, in her The Witch in History and Jenny Gibbons in her article Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt have demonstrated that holding the position of midwife tended to protect a woman from accusations of witchcraft.) There have been a couple of studies of the Salem trials that turned up an interesting subtext that the accused held property or rights to property that was later “inherited” by accusers.
In the interest of promoting The Straight Dope, we should recognize that a number of tracts published in the early 1970s were high on polemics and low on facts and that continuing to repeat the conclusions of those flawed sources harms Wicca by making it seem dishonest. I do not question the honesty or sincerity of modern witches–I challenge their scholarship.
Thanks ** Life On Wry**. That’s exactly what I meant.
And I suppose “healer” was redundant, as an herbalist was pretty much one and the same.
A good choice, apparently.
It seems that the newt spell has been less than permanent lately.