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

Or when Prince Harry goes dressed as a Nazi perhaps?

According to wiki (which I don't trust to feel free to correct if it's wrong) it wasn't just slaves that wore Togas.

Not sure I see the wider meaning of a witch. Some people were labeled as witches and not persecuted?

It describes the torture and persecution of women in a highly inaccurate manner, in order to make a political point that has nothing to do with feminism. Even if they were genuinely making a feminist point, it is not acceptable to make up an untrue story about women's experiences, when the real facts are known. Those women's stories matter.

It is also unacceptable to outright lie about the treatment of women in Romano-British culture in order to make later Christianity seem worse by comparison. We don't need to diminish the experiences of one group of women in order to make somebody else's seem worse.

AW, because the meaning of witch isn't all about the witch trials - it has a wider meaning and always has done. It is like complaining that people who go to a toga party either don't know or don't care about slavery.

xpost...

Popular culture, sure. But as I said popular culture doesn't make clear the scale of it. Or the nastiness. Popular culture presents witches as a joke.

I'm still stunned that if everyone except me, my husband and Dittany has known this there are still people going round in witches costumes. Kids dressed up as persecuted women, utterly mainstream, and people know this and don't mind?! When I heard about it they included something about the witches bus tour in Pendle, and I remember being stunned they did that. But assumed it was because what I was being told was not in the mainstream, as it was a feminist seminar. But everyone knows and this still happens!

PS Flimflam thanks for the book ref aaages ago. Looks interesting.

But any number of periods of History could be described as the systematic, misogynistic persecution of women, particularly the Roman Empire. People aren't taught things from that perspective in school because we live in a misogynistic society. I don't see how this film, which dresses one set of misogynists up as goodies and the other set of misogynists up as baddies is advancing feminism. It is just about swapping one kind of partiarchy for another.

Yes, women were persecuted, tortured and murdered. But describing women being persecuted, tortured and murdered can be done for a wide number of reasons, for a number of political and social ends, and in a number of inaccurate ways.

Describing the torture of women does not make the film one that supports women. It isn't as if we don't have the testimony needed to tell these women's real stories.

I'm not sure how people don't know about the witch trials. It is taught in English, History and Drama. DS has done it in both English and History and he hasn't started on GCSEs yet.

I suppose it is possible for people to not know of it is their school didn't cover it. They may also live in an area of the country where witch trials were uncommon, so it may be possible that there is no local folk tradition around it, or local place associations. It might also be possible that their parents didn't bring them up within any kind of English or Scottish tradition.

But even so, it is so much part of popular culture. People generally understand that the term 'witch hunt' in common speech refers to an unjust and irrational persecution of people, and that the term 'witch' refers to women. People also understand what the term 'inquisition' means.

Just asked my husband, 'yeh something to do with Pendle, don't know really'. Also pretty well educated but not a swot. So everyone doesn't know.

This film is about the promotion of no-paganism, which deliberately presents non-Christian beliefs as a mono-culture over thousands of years. In doing so it denies the multiculturism of Christian and Pre-Christian Europe, or the extent of non-Christian cultural change. It also denies the misogyny of Iron Age culture in Europe and of the Roman Empire. It also engages in North American exceptionalism by making out that witch trials are some kind of entirely European problem.

When looked at within the wider context of Neo-Pagan belief, it fits into a general pattern of undermining multi-culturalism and of minimising the treatment of Native people in North America. They make the the claim that Europeans in North America are somehow an innocent group of people who represent some kind of pure ethnic mono-cultural group who were oppressed by some kind of 'other' (in this case Christianity) and are consequently equal in their status as an oppressed minority to Native people, rather than being part of the white majority. This kind of belief is now becoming increasingly common in the UK as well, with various pagans (including people in the BNP) making out that they are oppressed group because they are white, pagan and the UK is their indigenous, ancestral and spiritual home.

If these people were really concerned with feminism, why on earth aren't they reporting what really happened to these women, and why are they making out that the Roman Empire, one of the most patiarchal societies on earth, was some kind of spiritual feminist experience for women?

Dittany,

The Malleus Maleficarum may indeed have proved a popular read. I have a paperback copy somewhere so it may well still be in print.
You are wrong to decribe it as the "inquisitors handbook." It was immediately dismissed by the Holy Inqusition and at least one of the authors fell foul of that institution himself.
It did find favour with secular courts who, contrary to popular belief about the Catholic church, were responsible for the majority of capital sentences handed down to so-called "witches."
The analogy with the holocaust is rather inapt.

I was aware of the whole if dunking, if you drown you weren't a witch, if you don't you are thing. And I do recall a play where a woman got burnt for being a witch. But I did not know there was a huge big thing going on with masses of women (or even people before anyone quibbles that bit) being killed. If you don't know that bit, then all the 'obvious' references don't have a frame to fit together in.

I did not know until a couple of years ago. I am pretty well educated and a swot

This is bizarre, I don't know anyone who doesn't know about the Witch Trials

Most people have read/watched The Crucible, or studied history at GCSE/Alevel/Degree/Post or even just from Tony Robinson documentaries on Sky! Or the episode of the Simpsons where they think Marge is a witch. Its not hidden at all.