h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's a well-done movie alright, but it gives a bad reputation to us witches!...
We would never do such things like that, and this devil worship is just nonsense...

I LOVE children!
But most people overcook them, really...


C.L.

From what I've read about witches and history the idea that witches ate babies etc. was started by doctors in the middle ages who didn't like midwives taking their patients from them. The midwives often had more medical knowledge than the doctors did so people would go to them when they needed medical help. So the doctors started the rumors as a way to get rid of the competition.

Thanks for the historical point, quite interesting and it absolutely makes sense.
Instead, they could have taken the witches/midwives as assitants, and we might have ended up with a more humane, holistic medicine, the way it happened in more traditional approaches (like the Chinese medicine).

Before my dad was born, my granny had a baby who probably could not have lived long, even with medical help at that time. She had chosen to give birth at home, with the help of the local witch/midwife, and the family Bible on her stomach to help the delivery, and the experienced lady had advised that this baby would probably not go past the next Winter. He left them within a few weeks, being Christened because that's what they believed in, having spent most of this time in his mom's arms, leaving everybody sad but at peace. Granny says she has never regreted this brief but joyful encouter with her "little angel". Modern medicine would have put him in a transparent box, hooked up to tubes to turn the weeks into months, in a sterile and inhumane environment.

One of the witches of my coven is also a nurse, and the discrete and selective intrusion of her beliefs in her work adds a dimension that is usually very well received by both patients and doctors, especially when it comes to issues related to passing over... I have the feeling that our modern societies are trying too hard to hide and deny death, making it even more difficult for everybody to accept it as it eventually happens, when more traditional approaches are much more helpful, welcoming it as a fact of life.


C.L.