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1a.: Re: The Burning Times. From: gaia_d

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1a.: Re: The Burning Times.

Posted by: "gaia_d" Gaia_D@yahoo.com gaia_d

Thu Feb 24, 2011 9:22 am (PST)

Before this topic goes away, i think the following information should be
entered:

- From the "Wiccan Pagan Times", "Falsehoods of the Burning Times" :
>http://www.twpt.com/burning.htm

"Falsehoods of the Burning Times" By Arthur Hinds (excerpt)

"It is common knowledge in the Pagan community that during the Middle
Ages the Catholic Church burned alive nine million witches in an attempt
to destroy the Old Religion. This "common knowledge" is a lie on all
counts

"This "truth" is repeated often and with much emotion. It has become a
source of slogans and fight songs for Pagan warriors striving for
acceptance and religious freedom. It is a powerful legend of persecution
and perseverance and it is a lie. I make that assertion in such a strong
fashion not to insult anyone, but to fracture a false and deeply
embedded belief.

"Let us begin with the most glaring error. Even allowing for lost
records, reliable scholars say that no more than 110,000 people were
tried for witchcraft in all of Europe. Roughly half of these people were
executed. 60,000 people killed is 60,00 too many, but if this figure is
off by a factor of 10, or even 100, it would still not equal 9 million.
There simply were not that many people executed as witches. So where
does that number come from?

The earliest reference to 9 million that I can find is from the
witchcraft museum once owned by Gerald Gardner on the Isle of Man.
Gardner bought the museum from a man named Cecil Williamson in 1952. In
1951 Williamson had put up a memorial to "the estimated nine million
people killed during the witch persecutions in Europe."

"Where did Williamson get this figure from? It is unlikely that he had
court records unavailable to scholars before or since. Perhaps
Williamson was given this number by someone he trusted and he just
didn't check it out for himself.

"Maybe CecilWilliamson simply made it up. That is the most likely
explanation. Perhaps he wanted the witch persecutions to sound even
worse than the Holocaust. We may never know for sure who lied and why,
but we can be certain that the number is wrong.

"We generally have an image of the Spanish Inquisition interrogating
witch after witch and sentencing them to death. The Spanish Inquisition,
and their blood thirsty brethren elsewhere, were concerned with heresy,
not witchcraft. In fact, until the fourteenth century the Church
considered it heresy to even believe that witches could exist--God
simply would not allow such evil to live. The Burning Times was not the
pet project of the medieval Church.

"While it is true that some people were killed for practicing harmful
magic in the Ages, the vast majority of victims met their fate in the
Early Modern period of European history. We're talking about 1450 to
1750, the time of the "Renaissance" and "Enlightenment." The
prosecutions came not in a steady stream of accusations but in waves.
The greatest numbers occurred from 1450 to 1500 and 1580 to 1650. There
was a final and blessed decline in the late 1600s through the 1700s.
Salem caught the tail end of the beast

"The beast that was the witch craze was controlled, if such a thing
could be controlled, by the Reformation and Counter Reformation. It was
the zealots of the new denominations that sparked the real witch
hunting. Reformers spread out into the countryside to rid the earth of
pagan influenced Catholicism. The Catholic Church had treated many
holdover pagan practices in a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
When the reformers started their campaign, the Catholic Church responded
by doing the same thing --as if trying to show that they were as "bad
ass" as the Protestant upstarts.

"It was mainly a battle of individual zealots, and the effects were
quite spotty. There was no countrywide sweep looking for Satan worship.
There was no Big Brother checking everyone's ID cards. Only in Germany
and Poland was the horror widespread. There were many determined
reformers in these lands, and so these countries claimed the greatest
number of deaths the greatest number of convicted "devil worshipers?"

"Who were these "devil worshipers" sentenced to death? Most of the
convicted were women who lived alone and independent of male control.
Many of them were beggars and midwives. This position of independence
was very threatening to the status quo. A beggar who was refused charity
might mumble oaths beneath her breath. If a cow died the next day, week,
or month, surely it was from a curse the beggar had laid upon the
refuser. If a mother or baby died during childbirth, who better to blame
than the midwife. Widows with land, women who refused marriage
proposals, and women who dared to speak up for better treatment might be
fair game. Once the accusations started in a community, independent
women had every right to be afraid .

"This is not to say that there were no practitioners of the old ways put
to death. I am sure that many of the victims held what we would call
pagan beliefs. I am saying that, all in all, that is not the real reason
that most of them were killed. It was for political and social- reform
reasons. Of course, these are still not very good reasons for killing
60,000 people......"

(End excerpt)

I hope everyone will take the time to read the entire article, here:
http://www.twpt.com/burning.htm <http://www.twpt.com/burning.htm>

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