Halloween food for thought

[entitled]

Halloween Witch

Each year they parade her about, the traditional Halloween Witch.
Misshapen green face, stringy scraps of hair, a toothless mouth beneath
her deformed nose. Gnarled knobby fingers twisted into a claw protracting
from a bent and twisted torso that lurches about on wobbly legs. Most think
this abject image to be the creation of a prejudiced mind or merely a
Halloween caricature. I disagree, I believe this to be how Witches were really
seen.

Consider that most Witches were women, were abducted in the night, and smuggled into dungeons or prisons under the secrecy of darkness to be presented by light of day as a confessed Witch. Few if any saw a frightened normal looking woman being dragged into a secret room filled with instruments of torture, to be questioned until she confessed to anything suggested to her and to give names or what ever would stop the questions.

Crowds saw the aberration denounced to the world as a self-proclaimed Witch. As the Witch was paraded through town en route to be burned, hanged, drowned, stoned or disposed of in various other forms of Christian love all created to free and save her soul from her depraved body, the jeering crowds viewed the results of hours of torture. The face bruised and broken by countless blows bore a hue of sickly green. The once warm and loving smile gone replaced by a grimace of broken teeth and torn gums that leers beneath a battered disfigured nose. The disheveled hair conceals bleeding gaps of torn scalp from whence cruel hands had torn away the lovely tresses. Broken twisted hands clutched the wagon for support, fractured fingers with nails torn away locked like groping claws to steady her broken body. All semblance of humanity gone this was truly a demon, a bride of Satan, a Witch.

I revere this Halloween Crone and hold her sacred above all.
I honor her courage and listen to her warnings of the dark side of man.
Each year I shed tears of respect when the mundane exhibit their symbol
of Christian love.

poetry by angel C 1993 - 1999


i, for one, am glad this type of Christian 'love' has been abolished for the most part.

 

[cantdog]

I believe the crone features are simply the result of age. Consider a thousand years ago. People lost their teeth as they aged, but men's beards hid the result to an extent. Also, truly old people were not very common, so in a small village there might not be anyone else who looked like that. The nose tip does indeed approach the chin if you lose all your teeth.

Now consider that all her contemporaries are likely dead. She may be only marginally supported. But she has a collection of recipes, medical knowledge. She knows the names of your grandparents. She would take on, in fact, for income, the role of witch: wise woman, healer. But the more she mumbled and the weirder she looked, the more sinister her 'powers' might seem.

I don't think most witches were abducted and tortured at all. I think most of them terrified small boys who came around to steal her carrots, concocted poultices and potions, and simply were old and toothless.

 

[entitled]

i respect your opinion, but after doing quite a bit of research on the Inquisition in the past few years, i would have to disagree.

It's my personal opinion that perhaps more of the victims of the Inquisition were abducted and tortured than previously thought. People lived in true fear of the church - not of God - because of what the institution was doing to them.

Perhaps this opinion partly lies in the fact that i'm not a christian, and haven't been for some years. Perhaps not. Perhaps the church and state of the time should be given the benefit of the doubt. However, i believe they don't.

To each their opinion.

 

[Jagged]

I think personally witches have been given a bad rap as far as history goes. There was a time when the village witch was valued citizen. Helped heal the sick, gave blessings, and was a local midwife. Sadly Christianity didn't allow a female dominated religion with a goddess to survive...Though most which burnings and torture were politically motivated and so that those in power could seize land.


When I think of halloween I think children should have images like........

*Jimmy climbed over the fence and walked quickly near the path to a special tree. It was special because it grew candy apples.....actual candy apples and they were a rare treat for a poor peasant boy. Jimmy quickly filled his sack with apples enough for him his sisters, brothers, and cousins...then the rest of the kids in the village. He turned throwing the sack over his shoulder only to see in the moon light........a shadowy form with a round pointy hat.....holding her broom. It was her...the witch!? She ate children, haunted women, and tempted men. He nervously dropped the sack and fearfully stood trying to decide a mode of escape...."I.....I......I am sorry."

The witch kneeled down and smiled with crimson lips. She wasn't the spawn of a demon and a hag but a normal woman. She had very pale skin dark eyes, but clearly a woman of advanced years.

She cackled, "No your not in the least my dear." To this little Jimmy began to cry.

"You would have taken two sacks if you had the chance. So next time Jimmy ask and I will let you pick all you want. Just bring some milk for my cats and it will be a fair trade. Now take your sack and go home, and stay on the path my child."

She wished him well waved as he made his way back down the path before heading in the the darkness. How did she know his name was Jimmy? She never came to the village........




*Just came up with it....hope you all like*

 

[cantdog]

For me, the Inquisition is only a sidebar. I see the witch role going far back in antiquity. You don't have to have been caught up in an Inquisition to be a witch, in other words.

But as regards the Inquisition, you are correct. Nobody stepped up on purpose to be put to the question; of course they were abducted. The whole thing was excused as a struggle against heresy, but it was driven by acquisitiveness. Lands and possessions of these people were forfeit. Lots of money to be made. (They do some of the same things now, to drug offenders. Appropriate their cars and houses, land and possessions, in addition to sentencing them to thirty fuckin years.)

 

[entitled]

For me, the Inquisition is only a sidebar. I see the witch role going far back in antiquity. You don't have to have been caught up in an Inquisition to be a witch, in other words.

But as regards the Inquisition, you are correct. Nobody stepped up on purpose to be put to the question; of course they were abducted. The whole thing was excused as a struggle against heresy, but it was driven by acquisitiveness. Lands and possessions of these people were forfeit. Lots of money to be made. (They do some of the same things now, to drug offenders. Appropriate their cars and houses, land and possessions, in addition to sentencing them to thirty fuckin years.)

Oh, i agree that witches are more ancient than the hills themselves. Or at least close to it.

The modern image of the Halloween witch, however, seems to have originated during the time of the Inquisition. Before that time any person that was even learning the different herbal medicines, or learning to be a spiritual leader in a Goddess-based religion could theoretically be considered a witch. Young or old.

 

[R. Richard]

A lot of witches were older women who had learned herbal medicine over the course of their lives. They used their knowledge to try to make some sort of a living. Many of them had remedies as good as the doctors of those days. Thus, they were a competitor for the doctors and it was just good business for the doctors to revile witches. When you have a group who is already being reviled, it is easy to blame all sorts of bad luck on them. Thus, the idea grew that witches could perform evil magic.

 

[Equinoxe]

So, I edited and added more to the post, it just fleshes out the idea a little more. It's not that long, I swear.

Technically speaking, the Inquisition had very little to do with Witches; the Inquisition, or well the four different Inquisitions, dealt with the heresy. The earliest, the Mediæval Inquisition (including the Episcopal and Papal Inquisitions) were concerned primarily with heretic quasi-Gnostic Chrisitian sects like the Cathars and with sects like Waldensians, which were sort of proto-Protestant -- Alexander IV told the Inquisition not to undertake investigations of witchcraft, unless the accused witches were heretics or schismatics (which incidentally implies that witches could be somehow orthodox). In the case of the more famous Spanish Inquisition, it dealt particularly with conversos, and with the Portuguese Inquisition, it dealt mostly with syncretism between Christianity and Hinduism in Indian and Southeast Asian colonies (particularly in Goa). The Roman Inquisition, which operated in the Papal States of Renaissance Italy (although it still exists in some form as the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith), was concerned primarily with doctrines taught by Catholics which disagreed with Church teachings -- most famously with Galileo (which is a whole different matter and not quite what people believe it to be either).

The Inquisition executed a number of people, the Spanish Inquisition appears to have executed several thousand, but they weren't Witches. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition issued what was called an Edict of Silence in response to Witch panics, which prohibited the discussion of witchcraft (in other words, the Spanish Inquisition enforced that Witchcraft was a non-issue and subsequently was not a force in European witch hunts, which were very rare in the Iberian Peninsula and under secular authority). Heinrich Kramer, one of the authors of the most famous Witch hunting guide, Malleus Maleficarum, was actually censured by the Inquisition.

As for Witch Hunts and the Burning Times, they were prosecuted primarily by Civil government (based in part upon teachings of the churches), although the same is true of a number of heretical sects and such in many countries like France (in which religious deviations were a civil crime). Furthermore, they were very broad in scope, there was no particular "type" which was oppressed, although they were perhaps primarily socially marginal persons; however, they had little or nothing to do with any actual Pagan religions or Witch cults (which for the most part had long since ceased to exist in the areas of Europe in which Witch Hunts occurred). Most of the bulk of Witch trials and executions took place in about 100 years between 1550-1650 in the regions of Europe where Catholic-Protestant tensions were highest and along borders between nations; the Orthodox East had very few executions and the same was true in many Western European countries (the number of known executions of Witches in Ireland can be counted on one hand). Furthermore, a substantial minority, or in some regions even a majority, of the accused and likewise of the punished were men, being about 25% overall and in some places actually outnumbering women (90% of all accused witches in Iceland appear to have been male) -- considering the general misogyny of the Renaissance era though, unfortunately it's not particularly surprising, however, misogyny clearly wasn't the cause of the witch trials. The idea that most of the witches who were accused and executed were healers and midwives is also flawed -- in fact healers were more likely to cooperate with the Witch hunters than to be the subject of Witch hunts. Many actually profitted greatly from it, accusing their rivals of being witches or offerring to help divine the culprit of certain supernatural crimes -- for a small fee. Records show that, depending upon where in Europe one was at the time, the number of healers and midwives who were accused of being witches was between 2 and 20 per cent of the total number of accused witches.

The actual course of these trials and the punishments varied greatly, national courts were more lenient than local courts, and Church courts were actually the most lenient of all; the overall execution rate of accused Witches was about 50%, being only about 30% in national courts but up to 90% in some local courts. However, in York at the height of the Burning Times the Church dismissed about half of all witch trials as having insufficient evidence, convicted only 20%, and did not use capital punishment.

Many of the stereotypes of witches and monsters and such that came into prominence during the height of the Witch trials (werewolf scares and the like were also very common at the time), long predate Christianity and actual derive from the Pagan peoples of Europe. Ancient Europe seems to have punished magickal crimes, that is, Ancient Celtic, Germanic, and Roman society had laws against using magick to harm people -- something which in the early Middle Ages Christianity often actually opposed. In fact, some Synods ruled that it was heretical for a Christian to even believe in witches, under pain of excommunication.

Of course, none of that is an anyway a justification of any of it, the execution of somewhere between 50,000-100,000 people (estimated) for no real crime could never be justified.

It seems to me that the bizarre and interesting twist to this all is that the people who sympathise most with the accused Witches (which I can myself sympathise with, how could you not?), often take the gloating and ridiculous claims of Witch hunters at face value. And now I am reminded of something someone said in a previous discussion on Lit, which has some bearing on the conversation:

Ironically, the belief that many neo-Pagans hold, that "their people" were subject to centuries of unrelenting Christian persecution is, at it's core, triumphalist Christian propoganda.

 

[entitled]

Remind me to reply to that tomorrow. i'm too tired to put the thoughts and facts and whatnot into something even remotely coherent at the moment.