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

Cross-post.

What SGM said!

Here is some info on the documentary from Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Times

I didn't realise that protestants were part of it. I got the impression that it was only Catholics, but apparently not.

www.twpt.com/burning.htm

Sakura (and anyone else): you might like to read the Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles. I can't remember what she says about the persecution of witches, but it's a fascinating rewriting from the female perspective.

dittany, they did write women out of Christianity before 1100. Watch the video. Read this thread. They said Christianity was 'new' in 1132.

There were women in that thousand years who were struggling and working; they were real people who don't deserve to be ignored. You may not like that they lived under a Christian Church. They may not have liked it either, but some of them managed to cope with that patriarchial structure and still make something of their abilities. Would you like us to pretend Maggie Thatcher wasn't a real woman leader just because the government in this couuntry is a patriarchial structure?

Why do you think it's ok to lie about women's history? Why is it not important enough to be reported with truth? Why do you need a fairytale to remind you to be angry about women?

Btw, does it not occur to you how awful it is that you are posing as a feminist and saying it's ok for women to lie about what's happened to women? Do you not realize you are weakening every feminist argument there is about rape myths?

It is not ok to lie, and especially not ok to lie and justify it by saying you're making a feminist point.

claig - it was always my understanding that witch hunts were worse where Protestantism was strongest, and correspondingly fewer tortures/executions in the more Catholic states

I don't particularly want to undermine feminist effort, but I don't want the truth about women's experiences to be reduced either. That documentary did not say 'feminist effort' to me!

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.

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.

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?

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, 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?

Good point, I even forgot that Salem was Protestants.

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.

'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.

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?