The Burning Times: fascinating docu on women's power before Christianity

LDR you seem very concerned about some aspect of the dates of the spread of christianity (?). I understand it did take quite some time to spread across through Europe. What is your point, what do you think is the correct date?

Yes, but the film makers clearly don't, or don't see the ethical problem in failing to make that distinction. The interviewees were also the consultants for the film.

Thank you for posting this Sakura, I watched it and found it very interesting.

Its true it is not discussed much (at all?) in schools, in my experience, and in some ways I am glad of this, because I want girls to grow up strong and confident and without fear. But it is also important to speak about what has happened. What do you think?

The people interviewed in the documentary claim to be pagans and are well known as Pagan spokeswomen.

'Lucky for me I'm a feminist, not an academic hoping to get academic brownie points.'

PMSL at the idea anyone would hope to get 'academic brownie points' for getting the introduction of Christianity to Europe correct within the nearest thousand years!

You seem to think that because you are very ignorant, it is therefore feminist to be very ignorant. It's not. It's just ignorant. No shame it in, but why on earth not admit it, try to learn a little, and move on?

How could this be a Christian thing when we've objected to their description of Roman culture/religion too?

That should have read 'atheist.'

It isn't a Christian thing. You can do a search on my user name and see that I have declared myself to be an ath and disagreed with Christian perspectives on issues such as homosexuality and the teaching of RE many times.

But the timing of Christianity in their film is not a mistake. It is part of an attempt that they make throughout the film to mis-represent non-Christian European belief systems, and make them out to have far more cultural continuity and be more mono-cultural than they actually were or are. They do so because they are pagans and want to represent the events and women's history in general as being about their belief systems.

Why do you think they just made mistakes Dittany? Leaders of the Pagan movement have been challenged many times over their mis-representation of historical events. It isn't as if they made this film in some sort of bubble.

Took so long typing that, I missed many x-posts!
Sorry you're feeling poorly, SAF.

I was under the impression that 'witch-hunt' was widely understood to mean the entrapment & persecution of targeted citizens by the authorities: also that this procedure is unfair, irrational and sets neighbour against neighbour. I thought this was why McCarthy's 'Communist' scourge of America was called a witch hunt.

There is a similarity with the Nazi rise and subsequent Holocaust. Picking out one element of a society, labelling its members as 'less than' and as the cause of everyone else's problems, is a well-tried means of garnering popular support and unifying a group - and is what persecution means, correctly.

Mediaeval witch hunts weren't specifically targeted at women, iirc. They were more about unifying the majority against a minority, in this case labelled as those who - by blaspheming the Church - supposedly undermined the health & safety of their communities. Obviously their real crime, if they had one, was undermining the local religious leaders. They were just another means of ruling by fear.

That most of those falling foul of the witch laws were women is probably because women were most likely to practice home medicine. There also seem to have been many instances of women being denounced as witches due to sexual jealousy and other secular reasons. There were still lines of female inheritance in some areas, which the Church didn't like: a witch trial got property away from the female owner and into Church hands.

Since there were many specifically female crimes in the Dark Ages - such as 'gossiping' and 'nagging' - that carried the same punishments, it seems unnecessary to characterise the witch laws as gender-motivated.

No, I meant that togas are associated with Rome - a culture built on slavery. Or we sell viking toys like Playmobil to children - a culture built on slavery. Or kids often dress up as pirates.

Witchcraft is now associated both positively and negatively with magic (harry Potter for example) and people dress up at Halloween because Halloween is associated with the supernatural and magic.

dittany, I cannot believe everyone involved in making that film was stupid enough to make a 'mistake' of that scope.

Pre-Christian Roman culture would endorse the idea that, if a woman is raped, the only honourable and decent thing for her to do is to be so ashamed she kills herself. How can it be anything other than anti-feminist to present this culture as some kind of happy-clappy age of woman power?

Sure, Christianity can be pretty horrible to women. But this idea that pre-Christian culture was great for women is about as plausible as Jean Auel's novels, and a good deal more offensive.