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

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.

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.

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.

thanks, Goblinchild

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.

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.

Anyway, as if this thread has not been depressing enough (although was good opportunity to find out how much my 12yo knew about the two main witch craze phases in Europe and why witches are portrayed with green lumpy faces :() we might as well remind ourselves that witch hunting (and you could largely substitute woman for witch) is still alive and well today in India, Africa, PNG and probably other places.

Where's PNG?

S pacific I think? Near Aus?

Aha! Papua New Guinea. Thanks!

dittany

What puzzles me is that you are obviously (and justifiably) outraged by these events and yet you dont seem to have much interest in getting a proper historical explanation of why they happened. Don't you think women's history deserves something better than vague New Age generalisations about the alleged power of women in 'pagan' times versus the patriarchy & misogyny of the Church?

Why for example was it only during a specific period of Church history - the 15th to 17th centuries - that the witch craze really took off? Is it related in some way to the rise of capitalism, colonialism and/or the slave trade, which were also going on at that time? Did it arise spontaneously as a kind of mass hysteria or was it part of a deliberate plot by the powers that be? For anyone interested in the Burning Times, these are really essential questions.

witch hunts today

I said that the message of that film is not feminist, and I stand by that. It not feminist to pretend that women were strong and empowered during a time when we know they were not. The fact that the film-makers identify as feminists makes it more problematic, not less, because they make feminists look bad.

It is certainly not feminist to defend the film on the grounds that its inaccuracies don't matter and that misrepresentation is acceptable if the end message is feminist.

I'm out of this thread, at least for a bit, but I stand by what I'm saying here.

It isn't overall a correct version of events. Most of it is either wrong or irrelevant. It tells us almost nothing about what actually happened to those women during the witch trials.

It is just a lot of nonsense about neo-paganism. They clearly couldn't care less about the actual beliefs or lives of the women involved. They don't even bother to name them.