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

[sakura]

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ANd why women are feared to the extent that they are accused of witchcraft and killed for it

Exactly my worry, GB.

'it is not a good idea for this film to imply that the existence of statues of women goddesses proves their point that women in pre-Christian times were actually powerful.'

But that is not what the film is about. It is about women being tortured to death for carrying out spiritual healing. It does make exaggerations and says numbers are difficult to know exactly, but the high figure quoted is 9 million and I went away with the impression that 9 million witches were killed. Looking it up afterwards, it is a lot less. It also makes some basic errors about dates and Trier etc., but it is not a BBC production up for an Oscar. They should re-edit it and remove these mistakes, but it was an interesting programme that throws light on how women healers were persecuted.

Is there evidence - good solid historical evidence - that 'we' (by this I am assuming you mean western European cultures) worshipped goddesses, though? I am genuinely asking this. I like a nice goddess-myth as much as anyone, and I am very fond of that Crossbones graveyard which I walk past every Thursday* but I do feel the discomfort LRD and others have outlined above, about constructing a 'past' that may or may not have happened.

*on my way to sing Patriarchal Chamber Music

swallowed, I think this film is dishonest and offensive, I'm sorry that's blunt but it is the way I feel. They did not advance any evidence that women goddesses were linked to some kind of woman-power tradition handed down to modern witches. They just didn't. As to the feminine being recognized in the Christian God - read Julian of Norwich. Look at the iconography of Christ as the Pelican. Just google anything to do with Mother Christ.

None of this is obscure, an it's been discussed in this section before. It's not a 'pretence' at all. Just more evidence that the presentation of the divine as feminine does not prove that women were respected as figures of power.

It has a lot of different case studies. The section on witch hunts looks at both the ones in the past and ones now. It is gendercide.org.

I've not heard of it before, but am going to look at some of the other areas they have written about.

I genuinely don't know. I'm not a historian or an archaologist. I asked what the evidence was.

Cross-post.

Swallowed, I didn't make that point of out cynicism, I promise. Can you not tell I'm angry and upset, really? I know tone doesn't come across on the net but I am upset by this and I've said from the start how I feel. To falsify women's history is a horrible thing. I can't pretend it seems any other way to me. It is a stupid, awful thing for women to present falsified history as feminism, and yes, that does have a bearing on the rape debates. How can it not?

Please someone tell me I'm not on my own seeing this?

swallowed, why do you think the film showed an image of the goddess Sulis as a precursor to talking about the pre-Christian time when women's power as witches comes from? What was the point of it if we weren't meant to think the two times were the same?

No, of course you're not alone. And plenty of others have made that point about the need to be academically and historically rigorous.

I'm sorry, I'm going to stop for the night.

Dittany, you should be ashamed.

Oh for heavens' sake, I know about the Greeks and the Romans and the Norse goddesses and all of them. Of course I do. (I also know about the Hindu pantheon worshipped on my mother's side of the family.) It's the Women's Power Goddesses, the deities of female energy stuff we all used to go on about, that I am asking about.

THe 'pre-Christian religion' to which LRD refers above, adding that we don't actually know all that much about it.

MotherInferior, there were goddesses in Greek culture, in Roman and in Norse culture. Norse religion wasn't mainly replaced with Christianity until quite late, and people often combined the two after Christianity was introduced. There was Goddess worship in Celtic society.

In Britain, there was Goddess worship in the late Pre-Roman Iron Age. Whether this was a belief that arose in Britain or was imported from mainland Europe as part of Celtic influence is unclear. We don't know if before the Iron Age, the Ancient British saw Gods as being like humans, much less gendered humans, at all.

See my post above. That's the 'goddess-worship' referred to quite a lot, including on this thread. And I do not know much about it, and/or the evidence for it, and I think this is interesting. In point of fact I do not think that whether or not goddesses were worshipped actually matters very much in terms of where we are today, in the multicultural 21st century UK, but I like the idea of it.