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

And the idea that I should come on here to document how angry I am with sexist men just so you can be satisfied that no, I'm not the only woman in the world who's never been discriminated against, is frankly absurd.

No, I don't think it is. Yes, you like to make a big noise about your feminist credentials and you like to mock me, I know that. I accept that in many areas you probably have read and experienced far more than me. But the fact remains that here, you are condoning an anti-feminist message simply because it is made by women who seem to be feminists. You're saying it's ok to lie as long as the end message is feminist, without appearing to notice that this is playing right into the hands of misogynists who think feminists lie about, for example, rape.

I get angry about anyone who turns out anti-feminist crap. Right now, that's you, so I'm angry. If you were a man, I'd be just as angry.

thanks, Goblinchild

Wicca is a bit of a hotch-potch, there are numerous versions of it practised in Sussex from New Age and mixed with Native American practises and then the branches that go for a pre-Roman Celtic approach.
Lewes is a well-known area for modern witchcraft.
Yes, the religion was re-invented by Gardner, but he put together bits that already existed, with other ideas and theories that he gleaned from a range of sources, Egyptian, Celtic, Greek, Shamanistic, Hindu etc.
Crowley took a very different path.

Dittany, it's been explained to you several times why those are not minor errors, but serious problems.

If you want to know, when I am furious, I get off the internet and do things. I wrote to Ken Clarke; I didn't sit around defending lies about women on the internet.

Your attitude here is not compatible with feminism. I'm hoping you'll re-read (or read for the first time?) this thread later on and see that you are treating women's history as something unimportant, that can be lied about. I don't know how better to explain - it's like talking to a brick wall.

The torture and murder of real women is all the more reason to get it right, really, and not manipulate the facts to suit some other religious goal.

According to some of those articles, it seems that a guy called Gerald Gardner in the 1950s was instrumental in creating what is now known as the Wiccan religion, and that he had links with the ubiquitous Alesiter Crowley. Is that true or wide of the mark?

'Has anyone on here read Mist over Pendle by Robert Neill, the most famous fictional treatment of the Pendle witch trials?'

There's a blast from the past, I read it when I was 11, and it was a very old book then.

The appropriation of those crimes in some sort of bid to market an every-bit-as-patriarchal-in-reality belief system and then trying to pass it off as feminism is disappointing and annoying. It feels very disrespectful at best and just weak and lacking credibility - these were real events, they deserve better.

Good point, I even forgot that Salem was Protestants.

dittany, I have already told you I am angry at this documentary whitewashing a thousand years of the Christian Church oppressing women. You, on the other hand, excused this and defended the film pretending that during these thousand years women were strong and thriving. See the problem?

Yes, my understanding (but someone on here will know better than me!) is that the Puritan (=extreme Protestant) movement was particularly hot on persecuting 'witches', hence Salem etc. Puritans were v. keen on keeping women under control generally (especially with dress codes etc - rather reminiscent of militant Islamists).

Has anyone on here read Mist over Pendle by Robert Neill, the most famous fictional treatment of the Pendle witch trials? It's rather mixed from a feminist perspective - the 'witches' don't come out of it well, but there's a feisty heroine and it makes clear how bigoted and repressive the Puritans tended to be.

Dittany, believe me, I do get this angry about men doing terrible things to women.

I don't honestly believe the film-makers made a 'mistake'; I think they must have known they were misrepresenting the past and didn't care. It's too blatant. But even if this were not so, you are saying it's ok that they got the facts wrong, so you are condoning the propagating of a lie.

No-one has said that the Christian Church 'equals' women and women's history. As usual, you are attacking straw men.

Women live under patriarchial institutions. We should not pretend they do not, nor should we say that, because they live under the patriarchy, they don't deserve to be represented truthfully. Why do you think this is ok?

That's interesting, I didn't know that about Protestants, but that article writer does say that the new religion followers (Protestants) were even more crazed in their searching out of heretics than the Catholics. That often happens after revolutions, where fanatics kill those who they deem are not followers e.g. French Revolution etc.

Certainly anyone who thinks everything was fine and dandy for women until those nasty Christians came along is dreaming. You dont need to read much about the Greeks and Romans to know how misogynistic they were.

These cultures, which passes their misogyny on to the Christian Church, were pagan but the faux-feminist wiccans and neo-pagans who makes this kind of documentary never want to talk about that.