Starting to write at 05:56
Hi @flightofthesevenmillionbumblebees ,
I am curious to know if any of you have heard of the real life and most famous of such clubs known as the
"Hellfire Club" circa 1752
To be fair it was originally named by it's founder, Sir Francis Dashwood by various other names, one of them being
"The Order of the Friars of St.
Francis of Wycombe".
Please Google the "Hellfire Club". You will get a reasonable, but quite bland overview of both Francis Dashwood, and the Hellfire Club from Wikipedia.
Dashwood moved in the early 1750's to a leased mansion called Medmenham Abbey, where he had the motto
"Fais ce que tu voudras" -
"Do what thou wilt"
inscribed above a doorway in stained glass.
If any of this has held your interest so far, you may consider that motto to have some significance later on.
Certain 'meetings' were held (initially) at Medmenham Abbey, and very unusual for those days they were open to both sexes.
The meetings were eventually moved and held into a series of tunnels and caves in
West Wycombe Hill. They were decorated with mythological themes, phallic symbols and other things of a sexual nature.
Apparently records indicate that the members performed
"obscene parodies of religious rites"
The female guests were probably prostitutes. Some of the male members of the club were rumoured to be members of the gentry, and/or highly placed politicians from both British and American politics.
The West Wycombe Caves in which the Friars met are now a tourist site known as the "Hellfire Caves
Please refer to Wikipedia for further information on these caves.
However the first official Hellfire Club was founded in 1718 by
Philip, Duke of Wharton.
The main aim of the Hellfire Club formed by the Duke was
"to mock religion and its inherent hypocrisies".
The Club leader was called "The Devil".
The club was disbanded in 1721, but went on later to be replaced by the club established by Dashwood, and talked about above.
www.heritagedaily.com
tells us that Dashwood's Club had many rumours about it, talking of black magic, satanic rituals and orgies. The English writer Horace Walpole stated that the practice was "rigorously pagan ..."
in the 1760's the Club declined, possibly because Dashwood was made the
Chancellor of the Exchequer - which he was apparently not very successful at.
This all makes me imagine many of our present ministers as members of Dashwood's Hellfire Club, quite a lot of whom I can easily imagine in some of those rolls - but I had better not name names!
It is thought that here have continued to be "branches of, or copiers of" the Hellfire Club, or at least its ethos, in both Britain and Ireland up to this very day.
Though I feel that I must add that the vast majority of most modern Pagans, Witches, Wiccans and Druids are not members of such clubs, and do not practice so called Black Magic, but neither do the Witches call themselves White Witches. Wiccans today have a motto similar to that of the old Hellfire Clubs, and Aleister Crowly's "Do what thou will be the whole of the law", except it says something along the lines of 'Do what thou will, as long as it harms none', and that usually needs to be incorporated into their Spell Work. Any individual Witch can, at their own discretion and risk, not add the "and it harm none" part of the creed if they are doing a particular Spell against someone like Putin, or a paedophile etc.
I know through experience that the OP and other Mumsnetters who tend to be get put off by long posts will probablynot have read this far, and if they/you have read this, you may think that there is no connection to the OP's thread? Obviously I beg to differ. I must admit that until I read this thread I had never heard of of this Netflix program "Stranger Things", which some of you seem to be saying is based on a computer game called "Dungeon and Dragons"? But I may be quite wrong?
Anyway, I do hope that @flightofthesevenmillionbumblebees and the others of you here who are saying that there is no harm in the TV series, even for children as young as 10 years old, change your minds. Evil, and some humans desire to treat other humans with Evil, to torture them with either physical harm or mental pain, and in the worst, but probably the most profilic cases, both.
and
These Evil humans will usually pick on the most vunerable members of our society - to which I have to unfortunately include us, the females of our species, along with our children, our elderly (of whom I am one now) and our mentally and physically disabled (which thinking about it I am among those last two as well now). So most of you reading this won't believe in, the or even, a Devil, and I don't either, if he is supposed to be the way the Christian Church, and the film industry have portrayed both him and Hell.
However, I do very much believe in the Power of Evil, and the Power of Good. Are they actually 2 different Entities fighting each other? I cannot make that call.
What I do know is that I have felt Evil, both physiologically and mentally, but thankfully and gratefully, not that much so far, but I am not quite dead yet, so there is sadly still time for me.
Very fortunately, I have also felt Good, maybe God? But again not as a sort of benevolent, but mainly ineffective being who has promised us the World as long as we believe in Him. I do believe in Jesus, but as a Very Special Human. My views and beliefs differ quite a lot from the established Churches, so I don't consider myself to be a Christian (even though I was brought up as one and Confirmed as one, in the Anglican Church).
Sorry, I am digressing far too much, I am pretty sure that my person beliefs are of not much relevance or importance here!
What I am trying to say is that that depiction of the Devil on your child's water bottle does represent Evil, and he is supposed to represent Evil. So I would never have allowed one of my children to watch a program at 10 years old about an evil entity, even if the program was about fighting that evilness. We have plenty of superheroes aimed at children of your DC age upwards - I still like them in my 60's - but although those heroes are fighting evil, they aren't portrayed as fighting Evil, small and big children, even us adults will just think they are fighting back against different severities of nasty people.
We, and they, won't be thinking about real Evil, where tiny babies and small children are raped, and that the rapes are filmed so that thousands of other people (usually men) can enjoy and get off on watching them. If that creature in a German prison - the one who German authorities think killed Maddie McCann - is guilty of everything they say, then he is not an evil nasty entity (or human) who could have been stopped before he ever really got started, if only we had a Superhero, or a chocolate bar with the right ingredients in it to stop him. Putin won't be stopped by a Superhero, anymore than Hitler was. Please don't let our impressionable and young be part of, or subjected to something that they cannot possibly understand.
I think that it is human beings who make Hell on Earth, but I also believe in the power of the human mind, and I believe that our Power can be harvested for Evil, for Good, for Indifference, and I believe that indifference can be almost as harmful as evil, sorry. I believe that if people use Ouija boards, weak and maybe even strong minds, can succumb to hysteria? Maybe? Once the evil thoughts, the damaging thoughts, enter our minds, I believe that untold harm can be done, so even as an adult I would never use a Ouija board, and as an adult I would never knowingly let my child be exposed to a game or a film or a TV program where real Evil, the "Devil's" Evil, is supposed to exist, even as a made up being. That character on your DC's bottle is representing something, that represents something, that not one of us should ever treat as just a silly, or even funny game. It is neither.
IMO, even if all of what I think the Devil represents is put aside, can you not see OP how insulting and crass it would be for your DC to take that bottle into a Christian School.
I have just seen the time, 09:05 they will already be at school, did they take the bottle?
You may have already answered my last question, but if I refresh to check, I will lose all of this.
Finishing writing at 09:20