Dispelling Modern Witchcraft Myths

“We call to the Great God this night of longest day. Join us as the Sun, fiery Lord of the Heavens who blesses our land with the sunshine that makes our world grow! Join us as the Creator who joins with the Great Mother to bring forth new life! May your purifying light and fire bless us this night and drive away all that is negative in our lives. Be a part of our rites as you are a part of our lives! Hail and Welcome!” (from a Midsummer Ritual, Patheos)

Gavin Ashenden, speaking about baptism, says that “we need to reinhabit a metaphysical world in which repentance from the reality of sin is the way into the Church, and the struggle with the reality of the devil and the demonic are the marks of authentic pilgrimage.”

His blog explains why he is upset with the changes approved by the Church of England. As Trevor Grundy notes in “Religious News”:

“In the traditional service, godparents are asked whether they are ready to renounce the devil and all his works for the sake of the child being baptized. The new wording, approved Sunday (July 13), only asks whether parents and godparents will “turn away from sin” and “reject evil.”

And another member of the local clergy says that the devil is very real, and the Island of Jersey is rife with witchcraft.

Now this can easily make people prejudiced. Someone else I know says they have seen witches at the dolmens.

The problem is that what is happening is that a model of witchcraft is being applied in a modern setting to people who are definitely not witches in the traditional sense, in popular folk-beliefs.

This is the witchcraft that was the focus of one of the worst mass panics in history – the period of the 16th and 17th centuries which were the time of the witch-craze, when thousands were burnt or hanged after accusations that they were witches.

The model story, which invariable proved to be true in the confessions - made after duress or torture had been applied – was of witches meeting in secret in covens (usually of  unlucky 13), to partake in a black mass – an inversion and perversion of the Christian Eucharist – and worship the devil. That itself betrays the cultural background of the story. 13 is not universally unlucky; in Italy, for example, it is 17.

Of course, in these stories were fantastical elements, of witches flying to their meetings, or flying out to sea, and conjuring storms while riding the wind. These elements are usually expunged from the kind of narratives that Gavin Ashenden would have us believe, or they are explained away as hallucinations caused by ointments. Although it would be strange if Gavin Ashenden did so, as his main argument is that we should not be restricted to the limitations of our world-view.

In fact, as Norman Cohn pointed out in “Europe’s Inner Demons”, there was originally an accusation made against the early Christians by Pagans on dark rites that was almost identical in form to that attached to witches later on by Christians!

Most accusations against people accused of witchcraft were in fact done not by witch-finders – Hammer films have a lot to answer for – but by neighbours who wanted to settle grudges.

Such accusations could be deadly, once people found themselves caught in the net, but it should be noted that it was the civil and not the religious authorities who tried people for witchcraft, and if found guilty sentenced them to death. It was the Civil Courts in Jersey and Guernsey who sentenced many people to be strangled and burnt.

That dark period seems to be omitted in Philip Bailhache’s book “A Celebration of Autonomy: 1204-2004 800 Years of Channel Island's Law”. It was the relative autonomy of the Channel Islands which allowed the Island’s judges to sentence people to death for witchcraft, which was perhaps not something to celebrate.

Accusations from neighbours with grudges can be seen more recently. When we look back at the Occupation years, as the BBC points out:

“Dozens of letters were sent to the German Field Commander informing on other islanders who were selling or hoarding food, helping escaped slave workers, or listening to the radio. The post office tried to intercept as many of the letters as they could - steaming them open and destroying them. Letters that got through often led to death or deportation for those that were informed on.”

Louisa Gould was denounced to the Germans for helping a Russian slave worker; she died eventually in the Gas Chambers in Ravensbruck. Who denounced her? Her neighbours.

This is the pattern of the witch trials, as documented in historian Robin Brigg’s “Witches and Neighbours” in which accusations come from neighbours, and as Briggs shows, contrary to popular notions about men persecuting women, most of the accusers tended to be women themselves.

What has this to do with modern witchcraft at the dolmens? It is true that rituals are performed at the dolmens, but these are by modern day pagans – such as Wiccans or Druids. Calling them witches, and attributing to them all the baggage that is the legacy of the witch craze is not only mistaken, but also betrays a mindset that can be seen clearly in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”., where it is also alluding to what was called a witch-hunt of Joseph McCarthy and panic about reds under the bed.

In other words, it fosters fear and panic and superstition, and a frame of mind in which people are demonised. It begs the question: where is the devil? With the Wiccans and Druids and their earth-magic, with their ethical beliefs against doing harm, or those who would cast them in the role of witch, and drum up hatred and fear?

We should have learnt by now that demonising a group of people, like the Nazis did with the Jews, or in more recent times, in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, leads to violence, murder, and a disregard for justice.

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament call the figure of Satan, “the accuser”. It seems to me that those who accuse others of dark witchcraft which has its roots in blind prejudice and fear have far more in common with Satan than those who practice peaceful earth rites.

Here’s part of a Wiccan ritual:

Oh great Goddess and God,
All nature vibrates with Your energies
And the Earth is bathed with warmth and life.
Now is time of forgetting past cares and banes,
Now is the time for purification.

Oh fiery Sun,
Burn away the non-useful, the hurtful, the bane,
In Your glorious power.
Purify me! Purify me! Purify me!

There’s not much there about evil and devil worship, not surprisingly, because neither Wicca nor Druidry have anything to do with that either now or historically. They are pagan, but not Christian perversions, they have no concept of  a devil, and as can be seen, both here, and with the quote from which I started, they actually have a lot in common with Christianity in this desire for purity and purification.

And here’s part of another one:

Take the Herb Pouch and hold above your head, saying:

By thy power, oh sacred herbs, may the Lord of the Sun
Burn away the hurtful, the troublesome, and the painful,
Leaving me purified through His warmth and Light.

It is about time that the fog of ignorance and fear was dispelled. I’ve written this post to try and dispel some of that ignorance.

Renouncing the accuser (Satan) in the baptism service should also mean renouncing the very human impulse to accuse and blacken others.

When you hear people taking about a lot of witchcraft in Jersey, when you hear about people talking about devil worship, you may understand why local pagans don’t make a big show of their beliefs and rituals.

I’ll finish with the close of another Pagan Midsummer ritual, which as you can see, has high ethical principles underpinning it and rather like baptism, uses water for purification.. 

I would point out that the use of water in rituals for purification is very widespread in many religions, including ancient and modern paganism, and not the monopoly of Christianity. Examples can be seen, for instance, in the ancient Babylonian Tablets of Maklu. Purification by water was an important part of Greek and Roman personal religious practices predating Christianity. And in 632 BC, Epimenides of Crete purified the entire city of Athens with water. So this part of the ritual is looking back to a precedent in ancient paganism, not Christianity.

Dip the forefinger of your right hand into the cauldron water, and trace a pentagram on your forehead, saying: Let my mind be open to the truth. 

Anoint your lips saying:
Let my lips always speak the truth.

Anoint your heart area, saying:
Let my heart seek the ways of the Goddess, now and always.

Anoint the centres of your palms, saying:
Let my hands be gifted to work in magical ways.

Anoint the soles of your feet, saying:
Let my feet ever walk upon the sacred paths!

A Harvest Prayer

By way of difference this week, I've been re-reading my Greek mythology, so here is a very Pagan poem or prayer for Autumn, drawing on the Greek pantheon:

A Harvest Prayer

Aiolos, O Guardian of the wind
Of storms across land and sea
Though mortal man has sinned
Pray not to let the tempest free
 
Euros, bring warm autumn sun
And favour harvests in the fall
Let festivals  make merry fun
Pray turn aside the fiercer squall
 
Pray that Gaea's gift to the sky-gods
Brings golden apples, sunsets fine
For not by chance, cast die or odds
Comes ripening vine, and last of wine
 
Pray to the gods, their outstretched hands
Cast blessings on our autumn lands

Gods and Monsters: A Review

Tony Robinson's series "Gods and Monsters" concludes its run this week with a look at the gods (and goddesses) of ancient Britain. This week he looked at:

1) Lindow Man, and the ritual killing of people when harvests were bad.
2) The Wicker Man, the mass killing of people in times of desperation, perhaps warfare.
3) The cult of goddess Cybele and the story of Attis, and the ecstatic rituals in which self-castration of men featured strongly.
4) Beserkers, the Viking Warriors who were prepared to die for the gods, and enter Valhalla.

He has a host of experts on the period to interview and guide him through re-enactments. And these are not fringe people, they are well-known experts in the field such as Miranda Althouse Green and Sir Barry Cunliffe. So why does the presentation seem so bad that what originally was a show on Channel 4 has now been tucked away on More 4?

One commentator on Facebook said: " It is almost deliberate attempt to frighten folk who don't know their history into fearing paganism." And they have a point. Robinson is contrasting Christianity as a system of mercy and compassion, which has no sacrifice because Christ is the final and once and for all sacrifice, with Pagan sacrifices, which he depicts as a contract with the gods? But is that fair?

Certainly human sacrifice did play a part in a number of Pagan societies, but we have to place it in its context. Let's look at Robinson's examples:

1) Lindow Man, and the ritual killing of people when harvests were bad.

Miranda Althouse Green takes Tony Robinson through a re-enactment of a ritual sacrifice, with the casting of lots to choose a victim, and then the theatrical ritual slaughter. It's very graphic, and when Robinson is to cut the throat of the victim, we see blood splatter, then cut to her fallen, unmoving on the ground. But just because it is re-enacted like this, it doesn't mean it happened this way. There are no texts describing this sacrifice, so there's a degree of imagination in any reconstructions. We must be extremely careful not to make assumptions and rule out alternatives.

A good example of bad interpretation is the "goddess figurines". The stone age Venus figurines were first described as stone images of the goddess, which they may have been, but to assume they must have been is to display a blindness to the interpretative framework brought to identify them as a "mother goddess" whereas they may have been fertility icons or amulets, or  emblems of security and success. We just don't know, and we don't have any extract texts. TV doesn't deal with this kind of ambiguity well. Bettany Hughes recently presented the viewers with them as images of a goddess for worship.

With regard to Lindow Man, Robert Connolly, senior lecturer in physical anthropology at the University of Liverpool, and Ronald Hutton, professor of history at the University of Bristol and the author of Witches, Druids and King Arthur have both cast doubt on whether Lindow man does represent a ritual sacrifice.:

Mr Connolly believes that the man may have been murdered in a violent attack. "This isn't an elaborate death," he said. "He was clubbed to death. A small group of people believe it was a ritual killing, but it makes a better story. With respect to my archaeology colleagues, they like ritual sacrifices. The museum and several other people just want it to be a ritual sacrifice."  The two men say that many of the wounds could have been inflicted during peat-cutting activities or from the man having been trampled by a horse.  They argue that Lindow Man's throat cartilage shows no sign of the trauma associated with strangulation and that the decorative necklace, being made of animal sinew, probably shrank in the wet so that it looks like a garrotte.  Mr Connolly said: "We do not have evidence from this body of ritual sacrifice in Iron Age Cheshire. We mustn't write it into the books until we have evidence. That is disrupting history. That is not historical evidence. It wouldn't stand up in court." (1)

But even if Lindow man does represent a sacrificial rite, we have no way of knowing how widespread that was. To say this was what the Celts did is to make a major generalisation about the uniformity of Celtic culture. To take a modern example, some societies, taking their legislative framework from Christianity, have abortion as illegal in the law of the land. Others have abortion as acceptable.

The recent and tragic case of an Indian woman who died of septicemia after giving birth to a still born child, because doctors in Ireland interpreted the law that way does not mean that every society whose legislation comes in part from roots in Christianity would have the same result; even in Ireland, it is now being disputed as to whether the medical team in fact acted properly within the law. The rule is that some instances do not constitute a general rule, and where the evidence is scant, and lacks documentary backing, there is even more need for caution before taking sacrifice as widespread.

In fact, the way in which law developed in Ireland, with the Brehon laws, and the fact that Ireland - a Celtic heartland if ever there was one - had so few witch trials, along with other Gaelic speaking areas - the Isle of Man (one case), the Gaelic speaking Highlands of Scotland, Wales - is suggestive that there may have been a certain antipathy to that kind of propitiation of the gods in Celtic territories, even if it occurred in places.

Robinson is also very deceptive in his presentation of Celtic society as a rural farming one, by implication, almost a society of yokels. While there certainly was farming, Francis Prior has also noted (in Britain BC), the elaborate metal working from this period. The sophistication of the Celtic society is being overlooked.

2) The Wicker Man, the mass killing of people in times of desperation, perhaps warfare.

Regarding the Wicker Man, the evidence here is again patchy.

Caesar's Gallic War, which mentions "figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men which being set on fire, the men perish in the flames", and Strabo in his Geography, who mentions "a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing". Aylett Sammes (c1636-c1679) gave the first illustration of a Wicker man, and this imaginative construction formed the mould from which all other designs have been drawn, as with the film. However, Strabo is probably deriving his material from Caesar, and Caesar is only describing practices in Gaul, so it is dangerous to extrapolate from this to a widespread practice. Virgin sacrifice is not mentioned in this context, but only introduced by Frazer.

But clearly sometimes such an event did take place, what we don't know is how often. Barry Cunliffe made great play of how the screams and the smell of roasting flesh would have been terrible, but let's again remember that in the 16th and 17th centuries a supposedly Christian society cheerfully burnt -  or in England hanged - people as witches - as many as 40,000-60,000 perished in this way. This is well documented, and in Jersey and nearby Guernsey, while some witches were exiled, there was still a savage amount of burning. Burning of witches was not propitiating the gods, but it was seeking explanations for misfortunes and looking for scapegoats. It was very like an act of propitiation; it was a purging of society of evil, in the hope that God would look kindly and not condemn it for its sins.

The lack of records about a Wicker man may mean simply that the sources have been lost, but it could also mean that it was an act of desperation, a kind of ritual propitiation to the gods, on an occasional scale. We just don't know.

3) The cult of goddess Cybele and the story of Attis, and the ecstatic rituals in which self-castration of men featured strongly.

I've come across this one in the 1970s when I was at Exeter, and reading Frazer's Golden Bough on a particularly dull evening, although Frazer actually gives two accounts, while Robinson only tells the one about a pine tree:

Two different accounts of the death of Attis were current. According to the one he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he unmanned himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. The latter is said to have been the local story told by the people of Pessinus, a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and the whole legend of which the story forms a part is stamped with a character of rudeness and savagery that speaks strongly for its antiquity. Both tales might claim the support of custom, or rather both were probably invented to explain certain customs observed by the worshippers. The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service of the goddess. (2)

What I hadn't seen before, which was very interesting, was the instruments with the figure of the goddess used to perform an act of castration, which was very ornate, and quite remarkable. Tony Robinson makes a lot of the cult of Cybele, and suggests that this was pretty terrible. We wouldn't do that now, or would we?

Of course, he neglects to say that our own Christianity society had a practice of emasculating young boys so that their voices could be preserved. These were the castrati:

A castrato (Italian, plural: castrati) is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. The voice is produced by castration of the singer before puberty.

This is well documented, and first appeared  in mid-16th century, but the practice shockingly continued to the 19th century, and was only banned in Italy in 1861. Some sang in churches, but the main impetus was opera - in the 1720s and 1730s, at the height of the craze for these voices, it has been estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated annually in the service of art:

The last Sistine castrato to survive was Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato to have made solo recordings. While an interesting historical record, these discs of his give us only a glimpse of the castrato voice - although he had been renowned as "The Angel of Rome" at the beginning of his career, some would say he was past his prime when the recordings were made in 1902 and 1904 and he never attempted to sing opera. He retired officially in March 1913, and died in 1922. (3)

Of course, again, what we don't know is how widespread and popular the cult of Cybele was. We know it was an import from Asia Minor - Robinson misleadingly suggests it was Roman in origin. In fact, while it did have a certain popularity, and became almost a craze for a while, most Romans were vehemently against it:

A traditionally conservative people, most Romans took a dim view of such behavior. The Roman Senate was repulsed enough at this behavior to issue edicts condemning and criminalizing its "bacchanals." So, in spite of their gratitude to Cybele for her help in defeating the Carthaginians, this was just not a way the majority of Romans were willing to comport themselves. Still worse, the priests who oversaw Cybele's worship were eunuchs, men who'd been castrated when they joined the cult. That was definitely not something Roman mothers dreamed of for their boys. (4)

4) Beserkers, the Viking Warriors who were prepared to die for the gods, and enter Valhalla.

It's likely that political sensitivity meant that Tony Robinson did not note the most obvious modern counterpart to the Beserkers. While looking at their ferocity, and frenzy, and appearing amazed that they'd be willing do die, and reach Valhalla, he didn't look at Muslim suicide bombers, who expect to go to Paradise. It's a good comparison, because not only is it very close in terms of psychology, it also demonstrates something else. Most Muslims are law abiding citizens, and don't try and blow themselves and others to kingdom come. Likewise, we must see the Berserkers in context. They may have been some of the warriors, but they certainly did not represent Viking society as a whole.

In the same way, the crusaders were hardly paragons of Christian virtue. In the Fourth Crusade, they sacked the Christian city of Constantinople. Speros Vryonis gives an  account of the sack:

The Latin soldiery subjected the greatest city in Europe to an indescribable sack. For three days they murdered, raped, looted and destroyed on a scale which even the ancient Vandals and Goths would have found unbelievable. Constantinople had become a veritable museum of ancient and Byzantine art, an emporium of such incredible wealth that the Latins were astounded at the riches they found. Though the Venetians had an appreciation for the art which they discovered (they were themselves semi-Byzantines) and saved much of it, the French and others destroyed indiscriminately, halting to refresh themselves with wine, violation of nuns, and murder of Orthodox clerics. (5)

Conclusion

Ancient paganism did practice ritual acts that we would find quite revolting, and that's something that is perhaps too easily airbrushed away by modern pagans looking for pagan antecedents. The Middle East, which is a region I've studied, had bloodthirsty empires slaughtering people in war on a grand scale, and also animal and human sacrifice, as well as slaves being put to death to follow rulers into the afterlife. There was certainly some barbaric sacrificial rituals in Britain. It wasn't all tree hugging sweetness and light.

But not all ancient paganism was like that, and human sacrifice, I think, was probably more exceptional that Robinson suggests, especially in Britain. Tony Robinson's rather lurid presentation distorts the past by just focusing on those areas where it was like that.

His contrast with Christianity as a religion which did away with sacrifices is fine on paper, but the historical record tells a very different story. Certainly people did behave in terrible ways, but let's consider a Robinson style history of the last five hundred years - what might loosely be termed Christian civilisation:

This is Christian society over the last five hundred years: 60,000 witches burnt at the stake in Europe. People hung for stealing a sheep. The ultimate spectacle - prominent people hung, drawn and quartered so the crown could see. Public hangings. Castrati. Slavery and the slave trade. Licensed piracy - privateering. Child labour down mines, up chimneys. The mass slaughter of a push in the First World War. Mass murder of thousands with the atomic bomb.

If someone drew up that as a record of early modern society, we'd be tempted to say it was a distortion to just focus on that, and it did not do justice to the complexity of society, and the way in which it changed and developed over time. That would surely be right. But Tony Robinson has done something very similar with the ancient world with his Gods and Monsters, producing a picture that is a gross distortion of those he calls "our ancestors", as if everyone was involved in those kinds of rituals.

Links
(1) http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146411507
(2) http://www.bartleby.com/196/81.html
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato#Castrati_in_the_European_classical_tradition
(4) http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/chapters/12CULTS.htm
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade#Sack_of_Constantinople

Respect The Dead

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38910

Respect The Dead
Responsible department: Ministry of Justice

We support King Arthurs call for a debate in parliament and a change in the Law so that Pre-Christian human remains are afforded the same protection as are the Christian remains, and that re-burial should always be the aim and the first option when human remains are brought to light by Archaeology or Development.

Ostensibly, the focus of this petition is Stonehenge, but the petition is wider than that; it calls for a general policy on re-burial of remains from all archaeological sites.

It's a good idea, but not at all practical in Jersey, and I suspect other sites. The site itself would be more damaged because you would need a secure chamber to hold the bones, probably something concrete, otherwise sooner or later someone would come along and steal them.

But where on earth would you put bones found, for instance, at Mont Grantez? They can hardly be placed back in situ, as they would be exposed to the elements and theft, or even the odd dog out with its owner for a walk. The dolmen can't be put back under earth because farmers have already destroyed a major capstone. I sometimes think people who dream up these petitions have their hearts in the right place, but very little thinking about the reality.

In fact, the few bones that are placed within dolmens (compared to the total population) shows that the ancients didn't have the same concern with burial that we do.

William Price, the Welsh Druid who pioneered legal cremation, certainly had a very different attitude to death.

In the later half of the 19th century, overcrowding in cemeteries was becoming an issue. In 1874 Sir Henry Thompson, Surgeon to Queen Victoria, had visited Italy and saw a demonstration of equipment used for carrying out cremations, and with like minded friends, formed the Cremation Society of England. But despite their trying to persuade people of the benefits of cremation, progress was slow. This was mainly because of lingering ideas of the resurrection of the body, seen as the reconstitution of a corpse from its elements. Christianity, especially in the Middle Ages, had seen a very strong focus on a literal resurrection, with depictions in wall paintings of graves opening up at the last trump to release the dead, now brought back to life.

William Price, an eccentric, who was nonetheless quite brilliant - he was a Doctor, and a Chartist,  established the first Co-Operative Society in Wales, designed distinctive Round Houses, and was fluent in English and Latin as well as his native Welsh - believed he was a druid because he was descended from a lineage that went back to ancient times. He fervently believed that the ancients had practiced cremation, and as a doctor, he also argued the case on medical grounds. The case which swept him into the law courts, and established cremation as legal, came about after the death of his son:

On the hilltop, chanting wild laments over the napkin-covered body, he had offered the boy to the elements. Some enraged people, rushing up the hillside, assaulted him by threatening to throw his elderly body into the burning flames, and called the police. The criminal trial that followed aroused interest not only in England, but throughout the world, enough for the father of the Sherlock Holmes tales to write his first published work on the Welsh eccentric himself.

In March, he conducted his own defence brilliantly at the Cardiff Crown Court trial over his son's cremation, a typical showman who played to the crowded gallery, claiming, 'It is not right that a carcass should be allowed to rot and decompose in this way. It results in a wastage of good land, pollution of the earth, water and air, and is a constant danger to all living creatures.' He was acquitted by Justice Stephens, paving the way for the passing of the Cremation Act of 1902. Price was bold enough to challenge existing beliefs and defy convention, question the justice system, poured scorn on orthodox religion, despised the law and belittled medical theories. (1)

William Price was was found not guilty, and this ruling effectively made cremation legal. He died in 1893 and, only to be expected, was cremated on the hillside overlooking Llantrisant, observed by twenty thousand spectators - an event which made headline news in the next day's Times.

But Price was not wholly wrong. Evidence exists of several kinds of burial practices from Neolithic times in Greece (2):

- Primary internment of the dead in simple pits (simple inhumations), usually in a contracted but also crouched position

- Cremation of the dead, partial (Early Neolithic) or complete (Late Neolithic), accompanied by vases, or cremations in which the cremated were in several cases placed in vases, the first known in Greece and some of the oldest in Europe, and

- Collecting the bones (skull, thighs, ribs) of the dead individual and burying these beneath the floors of the house (Prodromos in Karditsa) or in a specific part of a cave (a kind of ossuary in Alepotrypa in Diros).

With regard to the Neolithic tombs of the British Isles, the Channel Islands and Brittany, Francis Prior suggests that

to understand Neolithic tombs one must regard them as we do modern shrines, temples and churches insomuch as they were not just receptacles for dead bodies. In addition Pryor considers two other points, firstly these tombs were not the exclusive final resting places of Neolithic people, burials have also been found in causewayed enclosure, settlements, flint mines and isolated graves. Secondly, we cannot assume that it was only the 'elite' or ruling classes who were buried in these tombs as there is as yet no evidence to prove this.(4)

But what of the burial practices, and the treatment of the bodies themselves? In "Monuments of the British Neolithic" (2003), Miles Russell points out that "the stone-chambered or stone-structured long mounds of Western Britain have produced sometimes considerable quantities of articulated, disarticulated, disassembled and cremated bone".

Tim Sandles notes that the treatment of the bodies was not, perhaps, in the same kind of way we would consider respectful:

These bones often came from several individuals and were usually mixed up, they were placed in the tombs after the bodies had completely or partially decomposed somewhere else. So what does this mean? Now we are getting to the more gruesome part, it is assumed that when a person died their corpse was taken to a mortuary enclosure where it would be left to have its flesh removed by the local wildlife. This method is sometimes referred to as excarnation or a 'Sky Burial' and it meant the copse was laid out on some platform and the birds, animals and insects would then devour the body thus resulting in the complete de-fleshing of the bones. Such places have been described as a, "reeking necropolis whose awful silence was broken only by the din of crows, (Edmonds, 1999, p.120). Castleden (2003, p.91), gives examples of where bones have been found that show evidence of having been gnawed by rodents and scavengers or having snail eggs laid on them. In some cases bones have been found with cut marks on them which suggest a degree of human intervention to assist the defleshing process. Castleden considers that it would take about a month to remove the flesh from a skeleton and a year for it to become completely disarticulated. (5)

So what of the call to re-burial of the remains? It is not clear whether the Neolithic peoples would have understood the rationale behind this. In a way, although the call is coming from the modern Pagan community, it seems more to do with ideas about the body that have come through the Christian heritage of the Middle Ages. "Respect the dead" seems more to draw upon that heritage which looks on the body as a sacred vessel than more ancient times. Indeed, perhaps William Price, with his talk of the dead body as a "carcass" from which the living spirit has departed comes closer to the sensibility of the ancients.

"It is not right that a carcass should be allowed to rot and decompose in this way. It results in a wastage of good land, pollution of the earth, water and air, and is a constant danger to all living creatures"

Links
(1) http://www.llantrisant.net/price2.htm
(2) http://www.fhw.gr/chronos/01/en/nl/society/burial.html
(3) http://www.neolithic.gr/pdf/burial_customs_en.pdf
(4) http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/early_tombs.htm
(5) http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/early_tombs.htm

Christianity and Modern Paganism

I've been looking at people who like to blend Modern Pagan and Christian traditions. I think there is a good deal of value in both traditions, and each has something to learn from the other, but I think they should be kept distinct, and in some respects they complement each other. I don't think that hostility is good, as it invariably leads to efforts to purge one side or the other of insights that they might find valuable.

Of course, like the old Venn diagrams we used to have in school mathematics, they are like circles with an overlap; there is common ground. But each has its own distinctive nature and voice, and I've seen various attempts (from 2004) to combine the two - Christian Wicca, for example.

Fundamentally, there are inherent contradictions between (for example) the God / Goddess duality of Wicca and the Monotheism of Christianity. That's not to say that those can't be smoothed over, but what you have is something that is not quite Christianity or Wicca.

John Macquarrie (a writer I much admire) wrote "The Mediators" in which he looks at seven figures each in a different religious tradition whom could be called "mediators"; it's a clever choice - "saviours" wouldn't fit all the different people. Macquarrie likes that phrase both because he sees such persons as conduits of the transcendent and because it seems more inclusive (and less given to misunderstanding) than "saviour" or "prophet" or "sage." The "mediators" are Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Krishna, Jesus, and Muhammad.

In the book he tries to "put forward as faithfully and impartially as I can accounts of nine great mediators of the spiritual life, and in order to do this, I try to confine myself to facts and hypotheses which are open to my readers", and says he wants to show that these mediators all brought "to a group of human beings a new or renewed sense of holy Being" (again he finds a term which is more neutral than "God").

In it he wrote:

In 1964 I published an article entitled 'Christianity and Other Faiths'... [and] I continue to hold the views I expressed then... I believe that, however difficult it may be, we should hold to our own traditions and yet respect and even learn from the traditions of others. I drew the conclusion that there should be an end to proselytizing but that equally there should be no syncretism of the kind typified by the Bahá'í movement.

There will be no attempt to show that any one of [the mediators] is superior to the others... what has already been said... has shown the impossibility of any such judgment. No human being - and certainly not the present writer - has the exhaustive knowledge of the several mediators or the requisite criteria for making such a judgment. Neither does he or she have the detached situation that would enable a purely objective view of the question. Only God, I suppose, could make such a judgment.

I do not deny for a moment that the truth of God has reached others through other channels - indeed, I hope and pray that it has. So while I have a special attachment to one mediator, I have respect for them all and have tried to give a fair presentation of each.

In this respect, I think an analogy from language can be useful. Language users naturally borrow and adapt loan words from other languages, but they incorporate them into their language in such a way that it is still recognisably that language. English borrows extensively from everywhere, but is still English. Where French borrows from English, it remains French. That I think is like the way different religious traditions may borrow and adapt from each other - which is something we certainly see with Christianity in its long history.

A premature syncretism, in this model, is more like Esperanto. It is a language designed to be a universal language. But it is not universal, for the simple reason that languages don't work like that.

Macquarrie is against syncretism as such because he sees it as a method "prematurely merges the different traditions and is in grave danger of becoming shallow and sentimental." I think there's a degree of truth in that, which is why don't think it's a good idea to deliberately merge the traditions.

What I think a more deliberate syncretic approach will probably do is create something that inhabits a kind of no-mans land between Christianity and Paganism, and like a no man's land, it may be difficult for those inhabiting that space not to get criticism from both sides. Their language, like esperanto, will not be something which will be understandable by ordinary people. In that respect, it may end up more cut off than either tradition.

He also says "We have got to recognize that grace and revelation are present and universal. This, however, does not mean that all religions are to be merged into a syncretistic faith, for we cannot travel on all the roads at the same time."

Paganism: A Very Short Introduction - Part 2

I've been reading "Paganism: A Very Short Introduction" by Owen Davies, and he packs a huge amount in to 144 pages. Here are a few more notes.

Regarding the term "pagan", which has become something of a contested term, as having origins as "country dweller". Davies notes that its meaning changes over time. It is clear that by the 5th century it was being used by Christians as a cultic term, which he notes was ironic, because while it carried overtones of rusticity - the yokel beliefs - it was mostly in the urban centres that the main resistance to Christianity lay. So it was being used as a term that was both description and derogatory, much as anthropologists like Frazer used the term "primitive".

What is remarkable in the later history is the extremely rapid way in which Paganism gave way to Christianity. When Rollo the Viking settled in Normandy, but was defeated at first by the Frankish King, Charles the Simple (879-929), he was granted control of Normandy (as a buffer zone) and part of the deal was to convert to Christianity, and he was duly baptised as Robert.

As was the custom, all his subjects converted as well. His son, William Longsword, was a devout Christian, and sealed the alliance by marrying a Frankish princess. What strikes me as so totally different from the way in which we frame belief is that changing from a Pagan system to a Christian system is done almost casually, as a political act, and then the subjects follow their leader, literally. But the assimilation, even at the top, is so rapid, that by one or two generations, Christianity is established in the practice and thought of the population, not just as following the leader, but as something believed by the next generations.

The downside is, of course, that the same kind of rapid assimilation seems to have happened with a lot of Christians later in lands that had been conquered by Islam. While there was freedom for them to practice their faith (as long as they didn't proselytise), the dhimmi status (2nd class citizen paying extra taxes) also led to fairly rapid assimilation of many of the peoples, as if you wanted to move up the social scale, you had to convert.

And, of course, both religions soon came to exercise a stronghold of power of the peoples who had converted. In Christianity, the strictures against deviance only emerged as an official force with the establishment of inquisitions from the 12th century onwards. Islam, by contrast, had built in strictures which mandated the death penalty for apostasy (and which are still in place today).

Looking across the oceans, in the Americas, there was a difference between the Catholic approach, in which the explorers and adventurers played into their status as demigods, and that of Francis Drake further north in North America, where he made it very clear to a local Chief that he was not a god, and not to be worshipped. Drake ordered that the Bible be read to the chiefs of the local Miwok tribe, and with gestures towards the sky, made it clear he was a man, and not a god. He was there to trade and treat with them, as another human being. Cortes, on the other hand, played the part of a god for all he could, and doesn't seem to have been much criticised by the Catholic church for that at the time.

The case of Scandinavian Paganism is interesting because we think we know a lot with texts about Odin, Loki and the Norse gods. In fact , this is not the case, as Davies points out. He notes that there is actually very little known about the ancient paganism there, because the Icelandic sagas (our principle source) were written between the 12th and 14th centuries, long after the Viking settlers of the 9th cent, and 200 years after the adoption of Christianity. "While the authors of most of the sagas and eddas draw no doubt upon oral stories, some of their work is clearly the product of poetic imagination".

So it is very difficult to determine what is oral story written down, how it has been altered (after all this was written down by Christian monks), and get behind that. The archeological evidence shows some evidence of a highly localised religion, based on animal sacrifices or blot; the stories suggest that these were done "to strengthen the gods and make them more predisposed to helping humanity". But the sagas depict indoor sacrifices in large halls, whereas the archeological evidence - in contradiction to that - suggests outdoor sacrifice in groves. Sites such as that at Froso suggests that animals were hung from a tree to represent Yggdrasil, the world tree associated with Odin.

There are some wonderful Viking names - Ivar the Boneless! certainly not spineless as we might interpret that, he came to England, and established himself by conquest as King of York. Wikipedia notes that:

‎"There is some disagreement as to the meaning of Ivar's epithet "the Boneless" (inn Beinlausi) in the sagas. Some have suggested it was a euphemism for impotence or even a snake metaphor (he had a brother named Snake-in-the-Eye). It may have referred to an incredible physical flexibility; Ivar was a renowned warrior, and perhaps this limberness gave rise to the popular notion that he was "boneless". The poem "Háttalykill inn forni" describes Ivar as being "without any bones at all"."

Unlike the older study of paganism, Davies stresses ambiguity, locality, and fieldwork in archeology. I hope that books like his will exorcise the baneful influence of writers like Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941) whose Golden Bough is still used as reliable by many people, although not in academia, where its flaws are all too apparent.

I read it a few times in the 1980s, and it struck me that the main problem is that Frazer tends to propounding relationships between phenomena that are in fact unrelated, and do so by taking selections which support his own case, ignoring those which do not.

Though Frazer was a pioneer in using anthropological data, his methodology was seriously flawed. Victorian anthropologists like him brought together supposedly similar customs of different peoples in different times and places without the slightest regard for their original social context, and without any notion of looking at fieldwork.

It is this method, for example, that allows Frazer to associate Celtic fire festivals with Scandinavian ones, and then, because his argument needs it, to assume conveniently that a practice found only in the former (tossing human images into the fires) must, at some point, have also occurred in the latter, and he presents this as fact, even though there is no evidence for it. He also overlooks the fact that while the Nordic fires occur in midsummer, as in the festival of Diana, the Celtic festival occurs only in the spring and fall. After a close look at such loosely made connections, we find ourselves asking what, apart from the mere co- incidence that there is fire in each, allows Frazer to connect these festivals at all.

It was this facility to group things with a very loose family resemblance that led Wittgenstein to ruthlessly expose the inadequate logic of Frazer's work. A modern example of the kind of approach to Frazer is found in "Pagan Channel Islands" where suppositions rapidly take on the status of fact, mainly to fit the author's thesis.

The Quest for the Wicker Man

"The Quest for the Wicker Man" (2006), edited by Franks, Harper, Murray and Stevenson is a study of history, folklore and pagan perspectives. This is a brief review of the book.

Part of the material consists of a commentary on the making and genesis of the cult film "The Wicker Man". In one chapter, Robin Hardy, who along with Tony Schaffer created the film, explain how they wanted to move away from the gothic melodrama of the Hammer Horror film, and present something quite different, based upon their reading of what they saw as pagan survivals, chief of which, of course, is the "Wicker Man" in which Edward Woodward as the policeman meets his grisly end.

Hardy also explains one of the weaknesses of the film, where a contrast is made between the sacrifice of the communion, for which they placed the policeman in an Scottish Episcopalian setting, and the sacrifice of the Wicker Man, where the policeman is the body and blood of sacrifice. For much of the film, however, he behaves as a Presbyterian low churchman, and his background is at odds with his character, perhaps the reason why it was excised by the distributors in pre-release edit of the original.

However, as Richard Sermon shows in his article on "The Wicker Man, May Day and the Reinvention of Beltane", a lot of the background upon which they draw is the work of anthropologist Sir James Frazer, who in his 12 volume "The Golden Bough" conflated different practices from around the world in support of his thesis, with cheerful disregard for context, geography and history. Like Frazer, the film also brings disparate elements such as "sympathetic magic, gods from Celtic mythology, classical accounts of the Druids, and a number of mainly but not exclusively English folk traditions and customs".

In the film, as in Frazer's reconstruction, there is a "Pan Celtic year" , consisting of Imbolc, Beltane, Lugnasad and Samain, along with Spring and Winter equinoxes and two solstices. But as Sermon notes, there are serious problems with this kind of conflation. Imbolc, Beltane, Lugnasad and Samain are found in the Goedelic branch of Celtic - Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic - but not found in the Brithonic branch - Welsh, Cornish and Breton, "which therefore casts doubt on the the claim that these were Pan-Celtic festivals". Sermons' second point is that the early Irish texts "do not mention festivals on the solstices or equinoxes, hence the lack of Old Irish names for these". Lastly, he notes that these festivals, supposed to have been observed by the Celtic Britons (although this is problematic) are assumed to have passed from them into English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) folk tradition.

In fact, by way of contrast, when Old English, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Old High German, Old Norse, Swedish, English, German and Dutch are compared, there is more more of a common year than is ever supposed to have existed in the Celtic area, and on linguistic evidence, there are certainly good grounds for a common year in the Germanic speaking parts of Europe. Here is a brief extract from Sermon's table:

Old English: Geola, Lencten, Eastron, Sumor, Middansumor, Haefest, Winter, Middanwinter
English: Yule, Lent, Easter, Summer, Midsummer, Harvest, Winter, Midwinter
Old Norse: Jol, Var, ?, Sumar, Miorsumar, Haust, Vetr, Miorvetr
Swedish: Jul, Var, ?, Sommar, Midsommar, Host, Vinter, Midvinter
Old High German: ?, Lengizen, Ostarun, Sumar, Mittesumar, Herbist, Wintar, Mittewintar

There is nothing like this linguistic parallelism with the Celtic speaking world.

May Day and Beltane are again conflated, but the English May day celebrations were marking the start of Summer with celebration, and the traditions involved the May Queen, and garland, maypole dancing, Morris dancing, hobby horses, while the Beltane traditions in Ireland and Highland Scotland "were very different and involved the lighting of bonfires and rites to purify livestock such as cattle and sheep".

Regarding the Wicker Man itself, this occurs in two classical sources. Caesar's Gallic War, which mentions "figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men which being set on fire, the men perish in the flames", and Strabo in his Geography, who mentions "a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing". Aylett Sammes (c1636-c1679) gave the first illustration of a Wicker man, and this imaginative construction formed the mould from which all other designs have been drawn, as with the film. However, Strabo is probably deriving his material from Caesar, and Caesar is only describing practices in Gaul, so it is dangerous to extrapolate from this to a widespread practice. Virgin sacrifice is not mentioned in this context, but only introduced by Frazer.

An example, not related to the film, of the dangers of geographical over-generalisation occurs where Pliny provides a description of Druids cutting mistletoe. Yet we know both that there were Druids in Ireland, and that mistletoe was introduced into Ireland only in the 18th century, so clearly the association of Druids with mistletoe cannot be transferred across Europe.

In "The Folklore Fallacy", Mikel Koven (yes that is a real name!) notes how people like Frazer stood within a colonial tradition, "which sees the Celtic nations as an undifferentiated whole" As Koven argues "Victorian anthropology and folklore studies tended to conceive the world in grand master narratives. Based on surface comparisons, world cultures were seen to celebrate more-or-less the same calendrical and life-cycle ceremonies; and differences were seen as unimportant cultural deviances... This approach, while superficially appearing to be egalitarian, is in actuality purely colonial: only from a point of cultural hegemony can one hold one's culture up as a template for other cultures and say that they are more or less the same." The "folklore fallacy" of the film is to take Frazer's perspective uncritically at face value; in this, as a literal depiction of his mix of many cultures, it is certainly successful, but as far as the supposed "authenticity" of its paganism goes, it is too indiscriminate in its inclusion of any and all forms of paganism into its supposedly Celtic pagan mix.

Lastly, I would note that having reviewed the film recently, it has a wonderfully eclectic mix, and certainly has not the period feel of the gothic Hammer film. But there are undoubtedly elements which seem more flower-power than paganism, more hippy than heathen, not least when Christopher Lee dons a rather silly wig and sways back and forth in the musical finale as the Wicker man burns. Young girls dancing in a stone circle naked also seems to have a tendency towards a pagan "pan's people" from Top of the Pops. But the repressed central performance of Edward Woodward certainly makes up for this, as does the ambiguous ending, never quite resolved (what will happen next?), and certainly not a simplistic Hammer Horror narrative of good winning against evil.

Witches and Familiars

These are a few historical jottings on the subject of witches and their familiars.

At the time of the witch trials, (16th/17th century), familiars appeared in two forms:

1) animals, usually pets, such as cats (traditionally black, but that is a folklore gloss) associated with a person, or in a folklore tale.

Bear in mind that a cat was not the domestic pet of today, was also kept to keep down vermin. In Shakespeare (Macbeth), it is a "hedgepig".

2) forced confessions, in which the victim told of the devil appearing in the form of a cat, dog, raven, etc. These may not have
existed at all.

The two were conflated in popular imagination.

Note that the "Great Cat Massacre" in Paris (1730), as Robert Darnton has shown, was to do with print shop workers revenge at harsh working conditions imposed by their masters; the masters wives kept many cats as a sign of prestige, "one kept twenty-five cats. He had their portraits painted and fed them on roast fowl". At this time, the workers were being given rotten meat that the cats refused to eat! So this episode, contrary to some internet postings, has nothing to do with witchcraft.

Cat massacres earlier in the Middle Ages seem to have followed much the same pattern, as well as a general animal cruelty of the time as sport for fun! (e.g. dancing bears, cock-fighting etc.) and there is nothing in the records to indicate any association with witchcraft or familiars.

Sites such as Witches Brew (http://www.witchs-brew.org/shadows/animals/familiar.html) suggest that cat torture was to do with witchcraft, but this is unlikely; we forget what horrible entertainments the villagers of the Middle Ages would do to animals "just for fun". The feast of fools in Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" captures the cruelty of the times very well.

There is a precis of Danton's work (with original document extracts) at:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/2539/History/Cat_Massacre.html

There is an excellent article at:
http://www.hulford.co.uk/familiar.html

The Role of the "Familiar" in English Witch Trials

______________________

Other References:

"Feline Fortunes: Contrasting Views of Cats in Popular Culture." by
Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, "Journal of Popular Culture". Volume: 36.
Issue: 3., 2003

"Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe." by Stuart Clark, 1999

"Folk-Lore of Shakespeare." by T. F. Thiselton Dyer, 1884

Paganism and sexuality

Are Pagans More Sexually Open?

My pagan friends suggest that they can be, and in debates I've seen usually Christianity comes in for a bashing. Actually matters are more complex than that. A few historical notes....

The ancient pagan world had many kinds of different beliefs and practices regarding sexuality.

According to Julian the Pagan Emperor, Attis was an orphan left by his mother on the bank of the river. He became a handsome youth, who was in love with Cybele who forbade him to love any other woman. Nevertheless, Attis fell in love with the river nymph Sangaria and had a sexual intercourse with her in a cave. Cybele made him mad, and during this time of madness he castrated himself. Then he was pardoned by Cybele, who caused him to ascend to the celestial worlds.

For the followers of Attis, the highlight of ritual worship for the elect, was to get into an ecstatic frenzy, and then practice self-mutilation of the genitals! One of the few accurate sources in Frazer.

Early Stoicism thought was that sex, like all things, should be in common, and this includes a rejection of marriage and the incest taboo. This changes in Antipater, Hierocles, and Musonius, who argue for heterosexual marriage as the norm. And by Seneca and Epictetus, the pagan Stoic ideal is the celibate male. In fact, where sex does occur, for Musonius and Seneca, it is only all right within marriage, and even then only for the purpose of reproduction.

Moving to early Gnosticism, sex is equated with death. It is part of the material world, and must be avoided at all costs. The later Cathars (of the Middle Ages), who also espoused a form of Gnosticism, saw the "pure" as those renouncing sex, and were vegetarians because they would not eat animals that procreated (except fish, whose method of propagation they thought was spontaneous!)

Returning to ancient paganism, for Plato, sexuality was characterized by mental frenzy as opposed to rationality (Republic 403). The only justification for sexuality to exist at all was for procreation. Therefore, all sexuality outside of marriage should be forbidden by law (Laws 838-9).

The Manichees - an eclectic pagan religion which drew on Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism/Mithraism and Greek paganism, named after its founder Mani, were like the Gnostics, believers that all sex, even in marriage including the birth of children was evil and sinful. Thus celibacy is best. It thrived between the 3rd to 7th centuries.

So I don't think one can blame Christianity for all the woes about sexuality; in fact, one could argue the case that a lot of Christian thinking on the subject was coloured by pagan philosophy, as can be seen by the way in which the "Song of Songs" was sanitised as an allegory, rather than taken as a literal description of erotic love.

Paganism ancient and modern

I had an interesting discussion with a member of the Pagan federation at the weekend. What struck me most was the degree in which the supposed "information" about Wicca in particular, but other forms of neopaganism as well, is derived from a kind of Chinese whispers in which it is disseminated by books, magazines, the internet, but very little accurate checking of sources takes place.

Some of the stuff is plain nonsense. One article I glanced at berated Christians and Muslims for their Holy Wars, and said that Paganism was not like that, it was a peace loving belief. That may be true of modern neopaganism, but ancient paganism was just as violent and bloody. What tends to happen is that all the records - for instance one of the earliest being the death pits at Ur - are either taken as another form of paganism, but not the one we follow, or any records which describe druids, for example, as involved in human sacrifice, or decapitating enemies, is brushed aside as Roman propaganda, as if the Romans were a gentle peace loving people who wanted to portray their enemies in the worst light. (All the animal sacrifice of the Roman Empire is ignored; all the human sacrifice in the Middle East is glossed over.) Given than Roman paganism was quite happy to indulge in mass crucifixions on enemies, burnings, sending Christians into the area to be devoured by wild beasts, it is unlikely that they would have made that kind of moral argument. If anything, they would have reported it because it was their opponents alternative way of waging war, and therefore instructive to know about.

Druids and mistletoe: it is worth noting that mistletoe was, until fairly recently, rarely found in Scotland and did not grow in Ireland until its introduction in the 18th century. So when we read "The holy magic of the mistletoe was well known to the druids", we have to wonder: if it was so important, why didn't the druids in Ireland introduce it there? In fact, the sole source for this is Pliny the Elder, who was a great collator of miscellaneous information, but whose critical sense was non-existence; he never seems to have worried about checking his tales, which is why he reports that one of the attributes of garlic is that by rubbing it, one can de-magnetise loadstones (magnets)! His works are full of this - a mix of accurate stuff, and bogus stuff, all lumped together. The "Golden Bough" of its day!

Halloween or Samhain: this is the 31st October, when the druids and ancient celtic peoples celebrated the time of the dead, or some such stuff, and has been taken over by the Church. But what on earth were the druids doing adopting a fixed Roman calendar for a date? What did they do before that calendar existed? It is more likely that - if they did celebrate such a day - it would have been the astronomical cross-quarter day, which is not a fixed date. There is no evidence they ever adopted a Roman calendar of fixed dates (and how would it have shifted with the Gregorian reform to the Julian calendar which put the solar year back on track?) As usual, lots of nonsense spouted by people who don't stop to think.


Then there is the old idea that witchcraft was an underground pagan religion, most popularised by Margaret Murray on the basis of very selective evidence from Scottish witchcraft trials. Murray carefully selected all the parts the trial records which would support her thesis, and deliberately fudged numbers so she could have enough for her ideas about a coven. Modern historians, examining all the records, and not just Scottish ones, have come to a more complex conclusion, and one that finds no credence for Murray's views. We actually have some records where notes were smuggled out from those in prison, and they tell a story of being forced to answer questions to matters they didn't believe in as Christians, but because their accusers were simply prepared to torture the truth that they wanted to hear.

What of the hereditary witch, who gained her knowledge from her mother or grandmother?

Jenny Gibbons gives one description of this:

"One woman had her grandmother's diary, which contained a couple herbal remedies. From these two recipes, she deduced that gran must have been a Witch, part of an ancient tradition stretching back to the Stone Age."

This is probably why some people say things like:

"As a Hereditary witch, I think I could also be classed as a Hedgewitch, because although I have the gift from my mother, I express it through herbs and such."

From the studies of Owen Davies, it seems clear that this kind of muddled thinking is typical. What may happen is that some things are passed down - perhaps herbal remedies, charms, incantations - what would be better called folk-custom. The individual invariable comes across modern literature on Wicca etc, and absorbs that and what happens is a kind of cultural contamination, where the new knowledge swamps the old, and changes its significance. What this also has to do with is priority claims - basing authority on something inherited, rather than the Wicca that is known to be largely the creation of Gerald Gardner. It is interesting that one of the earliest breakaway groups was Alexandrian Wicca - the tradition founded by Alex Sanders. For many years Sanders insisted he was a Hereditary Witch, taught by his grandmother, but he eventually confessed to basing his tradition upon Gardnerian teachings.

The Farrars, who have been involved in the Gardnerian form of Wicca, note that:

Over 30 years, we have seen no evidence to suggest modern Wiccan practise goes back beyond the 1950's. In fact, we have plenty of evidence to the opposite. We do not feel that this invalidates modern Witchcraft, quite the reverse: although the practise is young, the underlying philosophies are ancient and still valid, even in today's modern society. For us witchcraft is a dynamic, evolving tradition which will has survived for this reason. We believe that the likes of Gardner, Sanders etc. did what was right for their period of history; we feel it is important that we should do what is right for ours! They did make mistakes, but don't we all - its all part of the learning process.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Gibbon attributes the fall of the Roman empire largely to the introduction of Christian monasticism, when "the sacred indolence of the monks" sapped the vitality of Roman civilisation.

Gibbon was wrong!

One of the main causes of the Roman Empire's collapse was galloping inflation. While it was expanding, it was ok, but when it ceased to expand it faced major problems, from soon after the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Once the Romans stopped conquering new lands, the flow of gold into the Roman economy decreased, and the prices of goods increased. The maintenance of a standing army was an increasing burden on the Imperial treasury, and the failure of Emperors to address the problems of inflation led to a rise in depositions. In the period 186-286 AD, Rome had had 37 different emperors - 25 of whom were removed from office by assassination.

To maintain the army meant to reduce living standards back home, and so the defence budget was cut over time, meaning that borders were ill-defended against invasion.

Monks didn't come into it. If anything, at this stage, the monasteries became the few surviving centres of learning (if they survived) preserving texts (such as the codifications of Roman law and learning) as the rest of the Western Roman Empire collapsed under internal pressures and barbarian invasions.

Govt turns to Wiccan queen to save girls

Interesting news story from India. This is the first mention I have come across of a Wiccan "social activist", normally they tend to be apolitical. Maybe change is on the way, and we will see Wiccan Aid alongside Christian Aid?

---

Govt turns to Wiccan queen to save girls

By Bappa Majumdar

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - The government has enlisted the follower of a global pagan witchcraft movement to help curb the country's high female infanticide rate and end the neglect of the girl child, officials said on Monday.

Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, a Wiccan and social activist, has been nominated by the government's National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI) to head a panel tasked with improving the status of young girls, they said.

Around 10 million girls have been killed by their parents over the last 20 years, the government says, as female infanticide and foeticide, although illegal, are still prevalent with boys preferred to girls as breadwinners.

"This is a triumph for Wicca as the establishment was against Wiccans for years," Chakraverti said.

Wicca is primarily a Western movement of nature worship based on pre-Christian traditions and is recognised as an official religion in the United States.

Like many pagan religions, Wicca practises magic. Wicca witches believe that the human mind has the power to cause change in ways that are not fully understood by science.

In their rituals, as well as honouring their deities, witches also perform spells for healing and help people with problems.

MILES TO GO

The Wiccan campaign has made inroads into several rural pockets across India and has helped raise awareness against victimising young women and girls as witches.

Authorities expect that this influence could be expanded to promote the overall well-being of young girls.

Chakraverti, who studied the faith in Canada, is planning to institutionalise Wicca in India. She has set up a "Wiccan Brigade" to stop the persecution and killing of young girls and women on the pretext of their being witches.

"Ipsita is the right person for the task as she is widely travelled, does a lot of social work and feels pain for the downtrodden," NCMEI chief M.S.A. Siddiqui said from New Delhi.

"We are still far away from improving the status of the girl child and this committee will help us reach this goal and will not make any discrimination on the basis of religion and caste," Siddiqui, a retired judge, said.

Domestic violence and sexual abuse involving young girls is reported frequently in the country and a 2006 government survey found that 45 percent of girls were married before the legal marriageable age of 18.

India's adult female literacy rate was 47.8 percent, compared to the adult male rate of 73.4 percent in 2004.

The sex ratio in the country is still one of the world's lowest, with an average of 933 females recorded for every 1,000 males in the 2001 census.

"Education of girls even in big cities was dismal and census figures show that the population of the girl child was dropping," said Chakraverti, adding that tough laws and education of parents were needed to force change."

"Most cannot complete primary education."

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-07-02T143626Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_India-282780-1.xml&archived=False

The Raging River

How did you find your spiritual path?

"I have never felt myself to be on a path of any kind, as my life has more the quality of being carried downstream on a raging river full of rocks, so that all I have to do is try to steer a course through the endless rapids and enjoy the thrill of the experience. " (Ronald Hutton)

Pet Peeves

http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=1189

How Good is the Original Source?
April 3rd, 2007 by Dan Klarmann

Information Reliability. This is a pet peeve of mine. Stephen Jay Gould was a stickler for finding out where ideas "that everybody knows" came from, and often finding the original source to be dubious.

Came across this on a blog today. Nice to know someone else shares my own pet peeves!

Areas of recent annoyance:

Quotations: "Edmund Burke said all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". This was the theme of a poem of mine, and I wanted to include it in my notes. Alas, I could not track down the source in Burke because it isn't there!

Dawkins: not his anti-religious stance, but his attack on Steven Jay Gould's Noma which takes a simplistic reading of Gould's "Rock of Ages" (if Dawkins ever read it) and then trashes it.

Peck: His "People of the Lie" section on excorcism draws heavily on Malachi Martin, who was a fantasist, conman, and possibly a rather wicked man (cf "Clerical Error: A True Story") (see also http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1394702/posts)

False History: S.V. Peddle is the latest in a long line of people to concoct a history to say what they want it to be, in his "Pagan Channel Islands: Europe's Hidden Heritage". Lovely photos, but for a serious exploration, Heather Sebire is much much better by far!

Synopsis (from Amazon) with my comments.

Around three to five thousand years ago, an ancient people began building stone sites and monuments on the Channel Islands, creating a landscape as rich in mythology as any archaeological site in Greece or Egypt.

But without any text to explain their beliefs unlike those in Egypt, for example.

Since early Christian times, the dolmens (stone chambers) and menhirs (single standing stones) have been reviled as the domain of witches, ghosts, and dragons. They were thought to bring bad luck and sudden death to all who came near.

This is amazing! I've lived on this island all my life, read numerous histories, and I've never come across anything like the fantasy presented here. Some dolmens were linked to druids, none as I recall were linked to witches.Rocqueberg, a Jersey site notorious in folklore tales (two different tales) has no neolithic remains.

Yet, they have also been cherished as sources of healing, female fertility, good harvests and buried treasure, as well as the dwelling place of friendly fairies.

Where does "female fertility" creep into the dolmens and menhirs? A menhir, for goodness sake, is a phallic object par excellence!

Despite the fact that these structures were seen as a threat by the Christian Church, which was determined to erase the Paganism of the past, a good number of them remain.

Actually, it was farmers keen on building material who were the greatest threat!

The superstitions surrounding the dolmens and menhirs, in particular the dire consequences said to ensue following their destruction, have preserved many of them to this day. The authors recount the terrible fates which have befallen several Channel Islanders who have dared to disturb or destroy these ancient sites.

The Curse of Hougue Bie! Hasn't got the same ring as Tutenkamen!