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

I have to agree with one thing. "Wicca" is a 20th-century invention. The name is even a modern one. The wiccan religion, as established by that Gardner person, is an amalgamation of various rites, rituals, and beliefs that he picked up who knows where. Wicca as a religion did not exist before that.

However, there were various pagan, nature-based religions around Europe around about the time wiccans like to claim they're religion was being practiced. Many of the tenets of "wicca" were drawn from those other traditions. While it is not correct to say that "Wicca is an ancient religion." It is correct to say that wicca has roots in ancient religious ideologies and that the modern religion of Wicca was drawn from more ancient traditions.

This is pretty much a semantical argument.

It is correct that people generally remember the bad things and not the good. This argument would have validity were I talking about histories or accounts or anything else that's written down or passed along orally.

But what I am talking about is the archaeological evidence. Explain to me why a peaceful religion would have left ZERO traces, while every other religion of the time did leave traces, traces that may well indicate not only a different belief but an opposite belief.

I much agree with ZenMondo: if there indeed were a religion such as the one discussed here, its connexion to Wicca is tenuous at best.

--Cooper

gack I'm getting confused on this messaging system. It seems my posts aren't showing up where I expect them to be and then I end up repeating myself because I think I didn't post it right the first time.. :P

In any case, I can't really argue against your point about wiccans not being the inheritors of the persecution they describe. I think there is some amount of modern persecution directed at wiccans, but the persecutions during the so-called "burning times" were directed at ANYONE who was outside the mainstream. Most of the people involved were not killed for practicing witchcraft in any form, they were killed for being different enough to stand out and therefore seem dangerous. Calling them witches was just the rationalization of the time. I doubt there are any good statistics on this, but I'd guess that the overal majority of them practiced some flavor of christianity.

I prefer to call myself hedge witch, not really because of this trend to consider wiccans part of the Gardener thing - although wasn't his teaching coven based? - but because I actually like the term. The only time I call myself wiccan is when my 6 year old gets upset at the thought of me being a witch. I try telling him that the witches he knows are a different sort, a story witch. His first reaction is to ask if I can turn my boyfriend into a frog. Typical. He's being brought up as a witch, and doesn't even know it.

Sorry, went off topic a bit there.

Replying to various posts in this thread:

Certainly the word Wicca and much of the liturgy specific to Gardnarian Wicca and its offshoots are no older than the early 20th century. Equally certainly elements of the Craft have an extensive history. Interestingly, Gardner probably did not create Wicca since he says quite specifically that he did not in his writings. When I had the privilege to talk to one of Gardner's initiates recently, he was of the opininion that the New Forest Coven grew out of a Theosophical study group.

There are a very few modern Witches who don't call themselves Pagans, and so Wicca is not quite a subset of Paganism.
Strictly, speaking "Pagan" means non-Christian, though it's accepted usage for "Pagan" to mean anything other than one of the Western monotheistic religions. Neo-pagan is a useful term for any Pagan revival in countries which are predominantly monotheistic. Thus, the druid revival in the Eighteenth Century was probably the first Neo-pagan relgion as is most of Wicca.

There is ample archelogical evidence for Goddess worship. Whether there were prehistoric cults which worshiped the Goddess in the ways that modern practitioners would like to believe they did (i.e. to the exclusion of other sprits or dieties in an ideal, peaceful, matriarchal society) is far more debatable. Roughly, there is a correspondence between the level of technology and the type of deities worshiped. Hunter/gatherers were largely anamistic and shamanistic. Horticultural tribes tend to worship a Goddess with other attendant sprirts. Argicultural cultures moved from polytheism to monotheism and were much more patriarchal than matriarchal. We can, of course, only be certain of written historical accounts of Pagan religions and even then only to the extent that we can trust the writers. However, there were certainly historical cults which worshiped the Goddess prior to the rise of Christianity. They are reported in both the Bible and Heroditus, for instance. I doubt that there is an unchanging, unbroken chain of Goddess worship going back to pre-history but that's only because no human institution is immune to change.

Everything She touches changes,
Mertseger

The whole point of this article is to draw a connexion between Wicca and the persecution of an ancient, widespread Goddess society. Leaving alone for a moment the issue of the purported Goddess society's veracity, let's examine its relationship to modern Wicca.

What makes up a religion? Rites and doctrines.

The two share no rites or rituals.
The two share only the most basic doctrines (i.e. the Goddess, kindness to others, &c). These doctrines are found in many other religions throughout the world.

The point is: there's no connexion! Saying that there is a connexion between them is similar to linking the Egyptian cult of Aten, which worshipped a single, male sun deity and preached peaceful living, to modern Xianity or Judaism. Sure they share some motifs. But they aren't the same.

--Cooper

"The two share no rites or rituals"...

on the contrary; rites and rituals are passed down over generations. just because we don't have a bible doesn't mean we aren't a religion.

you claim there's no connection between modern wicca and the religion that was persecuted during the Burning Times, but that's not true. wiccans may be the modern-day evolved version of those practitioners who lived in fear of being discovered, but we're very much connected. how would we exist without drawing on the Ancient Ways?

okay, again, we're arguing over semantics. read the entry! i never claimed that wicca existed so many eons ago, i said it had ROOTS in the Ancient Ways from long ago.

The title sort of screws you over there, mate.

"Wicca: A Legacy of Persecution"

--Cooper

There is a theory that Gardner was an initiated witch in a tradition he was oathbound not to disclose. What he did with Wicca was to create something that accomplished the same thing as his oathbound material without revealing its secrets. So what he created was a NEW way to accomplish what the old material did.

Many people think that a religion's age is related to its authenticity. It doesn't matter if it was invented yesterday if it works. For many people the path of Wicca *works*. Just because Wicca is modern does not invalidate what it accomplishes.

being wiccan, no, actually, being OPENLY WICCAN causes you to be subject to persecution. case in point being pedantic researchers trying to prove me wrong over the semantics of my entry. or my parents, trying to "save my soul" or some such nonsense.

this persecution is due largely to society's views of witches DATING BACK TO THE BURNING TIMES when witches were viewed as evil.

therefore, wiccans inherit a legacy of persecution.

voila! my reasoning. and it's SOUND reasoning at that.

I do believe what sea's trying to say is:

Wicca is some form of modern sect of a witchcraft of sorts, as all religions change, split, and modify over time. Therefore Wicca can therefore be referred to as having a history before the 1940's. Whether you believe that or not doesn't matter, as there only need be one person in this planet to make that connection for it to be justified in their eyes. The fact that there is a considerable number of people who hold this view simply further nails the point home.

yeah, yeah, all that fancy-type-talk.... my stream-of-consciousness postings are rarely that well thought out...

I realise that all religions change over time.

But when you start inventing new rites (as Gardner did), you really weaken the claim of lineage. Perhaps you should change the title to "Wicca: An Inheritance of Persecution". Then it might be internally consistent, at least.

--Cooper

Yeah, and are you to say that absolutely none of the sects of Christianity for the last 2000 years invented new rites? I think not. And since it's inevitable that they did, should they still be considered Christianity? They are anyway. Are the only REAL Jewish people the ones that practice the most extreme Orthodox traditionalism? This arguement is over semantics:

(sea): There's a distinct relationship between wicca and witchcraft!
(you): No there isn't! _I_ don't see it!
(sea): It's right there!
(you): There's nothing there!
(sea): Yes there is!
(you): No there isn't!

etc, etc.

The major rites, i.e. the ones that are mandated in the Bible, have remained in the essence unchanged: baptism (though immersion v. sprinkling is still a debate) and the Lord's supper.

There have been no knew ESSENTIAL rites introduced into Xianity.

--Cooper

Newcomer, diving in headfirst...
Several items relating to several different posts in thread.
1) Hi NYC, where are you at school? I went to the Brearley School for Girls (83rd and East End Avenue) for eight years. I graduated before you were born, of course. Class of '79.
2) Cooper, given the established fact that history is chronicled by the winners, you should assume that religious history has been continually revised and updated to be consistent with the dominant socio-cultural group who did the chronicling. That group was, for the past 1300-1500 years or so, the patriarchal, monotheist, Christian (and/or Jewish, and/or Muslim, but they were persecuted rather a lot) Church, first defined as the Roman Catholic -- as opposed to the Eastern Orthodox Church -- and later with the addition of many equally patriarchal and monotheistic, and rather more uptight Lutherans and other varieties of Protestants. Assume that all presently available religious history is revisionist in the extreme, because it is. Although almost all academically reputable religious histories fall into the category described above, you are incorrect in stating that there is 'no archaeological or anthropological evidence...'. I refer you to the works of religious anthropologist Marja Gimbutas. I also recommend Riane Eisler's 'The Chalice and the Blade'. The latter came under fire as being 'feminist revisionist history'. The fact of the matter is that it tries to reverse some of the distortions that have been so built into people's thinking as regards religious history, that we accept the distortions as being 'correct'. (Analogy: Mercator projection maps distort the areas of the global land-masses very, very badly. When the Peters Projection map, which correctly depicts the areas of all global land masses was introduced, everyone said it looked 'wrong', despite the fact that no one really thinks Greenland and Africa are the same size, as they appear in the Mercator projection. We wear paths in our thinking, and eventually they become ruts, until they are so deep we cannot even see that there might be another way of looking at things.) Both Gimbutas and Eisler have excellent academic credentials.
3) People who choose to express their spirituality through one of the Ancient religions (by which I mean ones no longer extant in large-scale organised senses, like the Greek Olympiad, or Zoroastrianism) are more properly called 'Neo-pagans'. Although they may have read the scriptures, and may have embraced the faith statements, the fact is that human beings in Greece, in the Third Century B.C.E., did not have anything remotely resembling our present weltanschaung. We cannot know what theirs was like. Modern Druids, Mithraists, etc. necessarily adapt the Ancient traditions to fit a modern world-view, because they cannot adapt themselves to be like the original believers in those traditions.
4) Current, living Pagan religio-cultural expressions of spirituality would include (but are not limited to) the various religions of the Nations of American Indigenous Peoples, various tribal cultures in South America, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands, Hinduism, Shinto, and other Asian religions. By and large, people who hold beliefs which fall into these categories do not call themselves 'Pagan'. They call themselves Hindu, or Tsalagi (improperly transliterated as 'Cherokee'). 'Pagan' is almost as pejorative as 'heathen' when used to refer to people whose religions are not 'of the Book' (Judaism, Christianity, Islam).
5) People who apply the label 'Pagan' to themselves usually mean 'Neo-Pagan'. Some also mean 'belonging to a religion that is specifically NOT Christianity/Judaism/Islam', and do not really know what they mean, beyond that. There is an unfortunate (I would go so far as to say offensive) tendency among self-styled 'Pagans' to adopt and then distort, mangle, and jumble Ancient religions, or the religions of other peoples, beyond recognition. For a while, in the '60s and '70s, it was very popular among young Western people to go to ashrams in India and take up what they called, and thought was 'Hinduism'. Their theology was really, really bad. They read the Bhagvad-Gita, and interpreted it through 20th Century Occidental eyes; they watered it down; they made it line up with ways of thinking that reached much deeper than any intentional conversion could change. The 'Hinduism' they practised was quite insulting to Hindus who were born into Hindu families, within a Hindu socio-cultural environment. Likewise, an Osage professor of mine said what White people do to Native American religions is positively outrageous. If these 'Pagan' traditions allowed for a concept like 'blasphemy', their adoption by people who cannot possibly hope to understand them would be just that. Since these traditions tend to be somewhat relaxed, they do not have concepts like 'blasphemy'. But obnoxious is obnoxious, and many people have been quite offended by the mangling of what is, to them, sacred.
6) One of the silliest varieties of mangling occurs in Wicca. Wicca pulls symbology, texts, rituals, and concepts, from scores of discrete sources, and mushes them up together. For example, in invoking the Goddess, Wiccan women often use the chant 'Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hekate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna'. Quite apart from any hideous practices associated with the worship of some of these Goddesses (the word 'thug' comes from Sanskrit 'thuggee' -- bands of roving Kali worshippers who kidnapped young boys for human sacrifice), where in their wildest imaginings did people arrive at the conclusion that any of these Goddesses would be on speaking terms with any of the others? They are supposed to represent 'facets' of the Mother Goddess. These 'facets' come from different cultures, races, historical eras, and major global land masses. The mushing together of things that would normally prefer not to be mushed is called 'syncretism'. Religious syncretism is really very disorderly theology. Lest someone jump to the wrong conclusion, there is an 'equal and opposite' men's chant which mushes together male God figures who do not belong in the same thought-process. Wicca is by no means a female-only phenomenon. My ex-brother was a very active member of a coven when he was in his early twenties. Some Wiccan sects are 'Goddess-worshipping', others go for the 'complementarity' thing, and mush in Yin and Yang, with a fair amount of Jung for good measure.
7) Nearly always overlooked, in any discussion of the 'burning times', is the underlying motivation behind the Roman Catholic Church's vigorous pursuit and murder of 'heretics'. The motivation, as with most large-scale human endeavours (especially wars, holy wars, Crusades, etc.) was economic. The Church were not only interested in weeding out leaders and practitioners of the local Old religions, so they could control the territory and its inhabitants, but also, they could not tax non-Christians. So, they had to take away the resistance. The resistance included shamans, healers, midwives, literate people who were not loyal to the Church, Jews, Muslims, popular or charismatic leaders, people with what we would now call 'mental-illnesses', people who were too clever -- especially women -- or not clever enough, craftspeople, guildspeople, and anyone else who stood between the Church and owning all the land, and taxing all the population. It is much more romantic to sing about the witches who walked into the ocean, rather than burn at the stake, than to think of the burning times as a simple act of economic conquest. Nevertheless, there it is. The Inquisition secured Italy and the Iberian Peninsula for the Roman Catholic church. The more grotesque dramas of the Inquisition were mostly meant as acts of intimidation, a kind of religious terrorism. To a large extent, they worked.
8) If evidence of Goddess-worship exists anywhere, it is right in front of our faces in the form of Mary. The heretical Jewish sect, formed by followers of Ye'hoshua of Nazareth, really did not need a female figure of any importance, because Judaism did not have one. It was when they tried to convert the Pagans of Greece and Rome, and later Gaul and the British Isles, that the apologists for Christianity ran slap up against pantheons which required the presence of a 'Mother' figure. Since one of the best ways to get people to do what you want is to let them do what they were doing anyway, and make them think it was your idea, the early Christian theologians simply expanded the significance of Mary out of all proportion to her presence in the actual Scripture. Then, they told people the Female they prayed to was really Mary. It didn't work with the first generation, but the second were sold before they knew what was happening. And, since the Greeks, Romans, Gauls, and Gaels all had semi-deities for every rock-formation, tree, animal, and action, the Roman Catholic church accreted a huge number of Saints. The people went right on praying to the deity of Overnight Journeys Across Water, but did it in the name of Saint So-and-So. Christianity could never have established the hold it did, if they had not accomodated the need of the Greeks, Romans, Gauls, and Gaels for a Goddess figure (and a wide range of lower-level sub-deities). It is not surprising that Protestantism first settled in and got comfortable in Germanic countries. The Ancient Norse Pantheon does not place heavy emphasis on Earth Mother Figures. Why should it? Fjords are not particularly fertile. They didn't have a Mary to miss, so the stripped down version of Christianity proposed by the likes of Martin Luther and John Calvin was not immediately rejected by Germanic peoples. Protestantism could not make significant inroads into countries where Mother Earth was the dominant part of life.
9) Right before, and around the time of Jesus, in Judaea, there were any number of matriarchal fertility cults. They were not part of Judaism, but the people in the cults were Jews as often as not. One of the most common practices among these cults was the emergence, after a period of training, of a new member, from a cave or pit, whereupon s/he would be doused first with blood, and then with water. The birth imagery is not subtle. This practise, which was widespread, led to dousings with water as initiation rites, and is, of course, the origin of the baptism ritual. After being 'reborn' into the sect, heresy, cult, or whatever group it was, the new member was cleansed. Once the Roman Catholic church came up with the notion of 'original sin' (rooted in the fact that babies passed through a woman's 'dirty parts' in order to be born), cleansing became more of the function of the ritual, and birth less. In Fundamentalist Christian denominations, however, the practice of adult baptism goes hand-in-hand with the idea of being a 'born-again' Christian.
10) Wicca, per se, is an entirely modern conceptual structure. No one anywhere in the world, male or female, considered the whole Earth her/his altar, before this century. Some traditions were more in harmony with nature than others, and this was usually determined by the relative cooperativeness of nature in any given place. It is somewhat simplistic, but also quite accurate to say that the reason the patriarchal, monotheistic Religions of the Book came into existence when and where they did was because that part of the world was desert, and life and death were ruled by the Sun. Agricultural societies have the luxury of a cyclical world view. Proto-Jews were nomadic, the tribes were patriachal hunter-gatherers, and not impressed with the fertility of the Earth, and connecting it to the fertility of livestock, and the magic of female mammals. They were impressed by the blazing sun, the scorching heat, and the way prople had of dying from exposure to either. It's allovasudden later, and the Jews have an angry, punitive, hostile, pushy male God. During this period in early Judaism, they did not even bother with an afterlife. Life was here, this was it, that was all. Dead was simply and completely dead. While the 'Climatic Theory' of religious origins paints with a fairly broad brush, it is nonetheless considered quite definitive. It is important to remember that in the not very distant past, no one had any idea what lay further than a horse could travel in a few days. The whole Earth was not a concept, so how could it be an altar? Wicca applies everything up to and including Einstein's theory of relativity in its philosophy. Those who defend it on the basis that its principles are 'Ancient' seem to be trying to legitimise Wicca by claiming things that are mostly not true, and failing to point out the things about Wicca that make it a useful form of spiritual expression here, now. Wicca's appeal, now, is not that it was the 'religion of our foremothers', because it certainly was not. It does, however, meet the needs of many people in a post-relativist world, for Earth-centred, concrete, non-scriptural, communal, relatively non-judgemental religion. In calling upon all the historic names of Godhead, male and female, it is historically and globally inclusive. This works, here, now. This is needed, here, now. Historical and global inclusivity go back to the mid 1800s, absolutely earliest.

Now that I have Explained It All For You, please feel free to poke holes through everything I said. I did not mean to attack or condemn anyone. When I read this argument thread, what I most noticed was the dearth of actual information. If anyone is interested in a bibliography, I can provide one. If I have inadvertently trodden upon someone's deepest-held beliefs, I apologise. I merely thought some solid information would provide a better basis for discussion than simple faith-statements. Faith-statements are both uncritical, and impossible to argue with, in any reasonable and noninsulting way.

Here endeth this sermon.

Do write back if you have responses, reactions, comments, or questions.

Arpeggio for
Leïlah el Khalil Zendavesta, MAR
(Although I joke that it means 'Master of Arts, Really', in fact, the R is for Religion. This is the academic, rather than divinity degree offered by my seminary. At Harvard Divinity School, it is called an MTS, for Master of Theological Studies. There is no standard academic degree in religious studies at the Master's level.)

Wow. That's a lot of information. As a minor quibble, it really would have helped to have spaces between items.

In response:

Written history is indeed set down, interpreted, and in some cases outright altered by the winners, but part of the job of the historian is to try to work around that fact. Archaeology is much harder to cover up, although it is correspondingly more complicated to interpret (whatever certain writers and documentaries may wish you to believe about 'incontravertable' evidence), and there is very little archaeology to support the presence of a widespread goddess religion, or indeed any widespread religion, in prehistoric times, let alone one which conforms to the principles of Wicca as set down in the article.

I do recognise that you have addressed the issue of early Wicca elsewhere.

While basically I agree with you on the subject of neo-Paganism, modern Druids do not adapt the Ancient traditions to fit their modern world-view. Most moder druids practice a ritual tradition invented in the 19th century by an antiquarian and surveyor named Stukley, who had read Tactitus and was impressened by Stonehenge and Avebury.

I entirely agree with you that neo-pagantraditions are a mish-mash of disparate ideas. Of course, it isn't helped by TV showing supposed wiccans casting essentially Hermetic spells using Latin chants and eye of newt.

As well as the variously invoked goddesses being incompatible, it's also worth remembering for these life-affirming, wouldn't sacrifice a frog types that most of them - in keeping with most of the more powerful goddesses in the near and Middle East, were deities of sex and _death_. Cult practices aside, there's nothing remotely gentle about most ancient goddesses.

On the other hand, anyone claiming an Ancient Egyptian bent to their theology would be pretty much justified in cramming together their deities like that. It was a poor Egyptian deity who wasn't at least three personas, depending on your location and the time of day, and it was standard practice to co-opt everyone else's gods and goddesses into your pantheon as alternative forms, or as servants, lovers or what have you. This is of course because - like the neo-pagans - the Egyptians were cludging together the religions of dozens of city-states, provinces and eras and trying to make a coherent whole of it all.

You seem to be clumping a substantial historical period into the definition 'The Burning Times'. In my understanding, that wonderfully evocative and emotionally-loaded phrase does not usually refer to the conversion period of territorial expansion or even to the enforcement of universality by the Dominicans of the Holy Inquisition, but to the hunting of witches and other 'spellcasters', by itinerant, professional witch-hunters; clerical or laity. The classic examples would be the Salem Witch-Trial panic, or the exploits of The Witchfinder General, Matthew 'One Shilling Per Witch Found and I See No Conflict of Interests Here' Hopkirk.

The fact that - for all the witch-hunters' efforts and all the outbreaks of ergot poisoning - there were probably fewer people burned as witches than as heretics, is sometimes overlooked, perhaps since Christian's inhumanity to Christian dilutes the concept of the persecution of the old ways. It is also often overlooked that a lot of the Dominicans' work involved uncovering unorthodox local practice and extracting - often without torture - a simple recantation and promise to be good in the future.

The conversion period of course was not only economic but political. Often lavish expense was forked out in order to spread your influence and power. The Frankish court spent an absolute fortune on baptismal robes for Scandinavian converts. There is an anecdote about a time when there weren't enough for the number of people who turned up to be baptised, so they gave them these sack-cloth things instead. Supposedly one man stood up and announced his extreme dissatisfaction with this. "I've been to get baptised four times before, and each time they've given me a nice new suit," he complained.

There was a great furore from the diocese of Hamburg-Bremen when the Scandinavian nations were granted their own diocese, since it meant they lost their control over their churches.
Yes; and the tithes.

The Prophet

sea> "case in point being pedantic researchers trying to prove me wrong over the semantics of my entry"

I hate to break it to you, but I'm not persecuting you because of your religion, and I can't see that anyone else is here. I'm discussing a certain aspect of your entry which, after reading around the subject on the Wiccan start page you link to, I'm not convinced is entirely true. As you know, the Edited Guide is supposed to be balanced and factual, so it is important to try and get this right. This certainly isn't the first entry where I've suggested this, though it is the first entry where the author has taken offence like this...

ZenMondo> "There is a theory that Gardner was an initiated witch in a tradition he was oathbound not to disclose. What he did with Wicca was to create something that accomplished the same thing as his oathbound material without revealing its secrets."

Keyword = theory... No trace of Gardner's coven has ever been found, though this doesn't preclude its existance, of course.

This was Gardner's claim - he even gave a name to the coven and a rough location. The mainstream theory seems to be that Gardner was partly making it up and partly adapting bits from whatever religion he feltlike. The insistance on skyclad rituals and the threefold law are apparently his invention, for example. Not that this invalidates anything, even if true.

While people are happy to dismiss this as a semantical argument, I'd say that it's more a question of degree: *how much* of Wicca is from 50 years ago; 1,500 years ago; or 25,000 years ago. Cooper is arguing that pretty much everything is modern, and I'm tempted to agree with him. While there are influences from other religions, I don't see that they are any more significant that the influences of Judaism on Xtianity or Xtainity on Islam.

Hullo Prophet,

'The' Prophet?? You know, a number of people have already claimed someone else was that -- in case you'd missed that detail.

You're right. I should have inserted spaces into my diatribe. Silly of me. I wasn't thinking.

Now I know.

Thank you for your clarification of the different periods which often get lumped together (and not only by me) as 'Burning Times'. If I remember correctly, the witch-hunts among the Colonialists in North America did not all happen at once. The most notorious are the Salem witch-hunts, but there were periodic spiritual 'purges' in a number of different States, which were settled by different branches of Protestants, at different times. Salem, and most of Massachusetts, was Puritan. The best book I've seen on the subject is 'Wayward Puritans', by Kai T. Erickson (Yale University Press). The gist of what was going on there (and it's been a long time since I read that -- it's a sociological study, and I did soc. as one of my undergraduate majors) is that the Puritan community could not, under any circumstances, succeed in living up to their own superhuman ideals and principles. To compensate for the fact that, like mere mortals, their behaviour was not always perfect, they had to have a system for scapegoating. For a while, public punishments and humiliations (one can't go to the loo while in the stocks) sufficed. As repression escalated, so did the internal violence. The 'witches' they burnt were simply Puritans who had accidentally drawn attention to themselves -- there were no 'Old ways' practised by colonists in the New World. Christian persecutes Christian, as you said.

The witch-hunts of what is now Germany, Austria, and parts of Scandinavia were slightly earlier. There may have been a similar sociological pressure which caused them. Remember that these countries were fairly newly Protestant, and had no more official outlets for sin, within the community. Since they collectively could not simply kneel and say 84 'Hail Marys' and call the penance finished, and since their theology was extraoridinarily sin-intolerant (and in the case of Calvinists, assumed anyone who was capable of sin was in any case predestined to fry for Eternity), they had to keep expunging these people -- the perceived sinners, or spreaders of sin, or tools of the Devil. 'Witchcraft' was not used, as you so correctly pointed out, as an accusation anything like as often as 'heresy'. In the Protestant countries, witch-hunts were a doomed effort to cleanse themselves of taint. Men and women suffered *almost* equally. Women, who were slightly suspect in the 'Mary-less' Protestant cultures, were more likely to be accused of something than men, and less able to defend themselves. Widows, especially, along with teenage girls, were targeted. Do I need to explain that?

(In the US, here, now, in cases of abortion where the sex of the baby is known, there is a 4 to 1 ratio of aborted female embryos to aborted male embryos.)

The 'Holy' Inquisition was, in the simplest possible terms, an early attempt at what Hitler did so much more efficiently a few centuries later. It was an economic and political establishment of hegemony. The same 'undesirables' died. The excuses were lame, or fabricated from whole cloth, or based on cultural prejudice. This next is a Thing people Need to Know: both the Nazis and the Inquisitors started, initially, by 'weeding out' homosexual men. When this was found acceptable, they started in on criminals, and visibly mentally deficient people. Then they started eliminating Jewish and other non-Christian people. Only after these social cleansings had been found 'acceptable' did they start persecuting Christians for 'heresy'. The British slang 'fag', for cigarette, and the US slang 'faggot', for gay man, are both derived from the word 'faggot', meaning kindling. During the Inquisition, homosexual men were rounded up, bound together, doused with oil, and used as kindling in the burning of more important heretics. (Source, 'Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality' by John Boswell, Yale University Press). The Roman Catholic Church burnt, and here the estimates vary wildly, at a minimum about 10 million European people, mostly not standing upright. Only respectable heretics were given the privilege of standing upright (where the person being executed dies of asphyxia long before the flames have done much damage -- it is not the worst way to die by fire!) Some people (Barbara Walker) put the estimate of how many people were burnt for 'witchcraft' as high as 9 millions.

No, the RC Inquisition and the witch-hunts in Protestant countries, and the British Isles, and the Colonies, were not part of the same process. If I sounded as though I included the expansionist period in the 'Burning Times', I certainly did not mean to do so. The expansionist period in early Christian history was marked, if anything, by the Christians' willingness to compromise, to gain converts. (Whence the discussion of Mary, and the Saints.) The Inquisition was primarily economically motivated. The Protestant witch-hunts were more sociologically driven: to clarify who We are, we have to identify and eliminate Them. If there is still sin amongst Us, it must be because some of Them are spreading it. Sociological jargon calls this 'Boundary Definition'.

Of course, the archaelological evidence does not show widespread worship of any One goddess. Every hundred kilometres or so, culture, religion, and language changed completely. There is plenty of archaeological and cultural-anthropological evidence of Earth Mother centred religions, plural, in the very remote past (of which there is relatively little evidence of any kind) from Europe to Africa, India to the North American continent.

I enjoyed your comments about Egyptian syncretism. You are right, they were building an empire, and had to incorporate, borrow, co-opt, or destroy the local deities of everyone they conquered. Hindu Gods and Goddesses also often have more than one head, and many arms.

And no, the Ancient Goddesses (and male Gods) were not Nice People. I was raised by a person who was raised Hindu (I wasn't properly raised Hindu, because... aw never mind, I digress some more), and I admit to flinching when *anyone* invokes Kali. If they really understood Her, they'd leave her well and truly alone!

Hekate is not precisely a pretty face, either.

I persist in my argument that Neo-Pagans, up to and including Stuckley himself, can only practise their religions with a modern world view, which they have to adapt the religions to accomodate. We cannot, now, begin to understand what Tacitus meant to himself or his contemporaries. All the research in the world does not take away our modern, post-Darwinian historicist, post-Einsteinian relativist interpretive structure. We are incapable of thinking as our great-grandparents did, let alone as any Ancients did. All we can do is see what it all means to us, with the knowledge that we are prejudiced beyond our own comprehension.

For more on that, I strongly recommend Michel Foucault's 'The Order of Things', or the much drier Thomas Kuhn's 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. From another angle, you could try Sallie McFague's 'Metaphorical Theology'. The whole point is that we are hermeneutically incapable of being from another time, and thinking, believing, or feeling things as they did.

Thank you for a thought-provoking and informative response, Prophet. Doubtless we shall talk to one another again.

Sara (pretending to be Arpeggio) for LeKZ

Hmmph. Drat. The semicolon, close parens, was supposed to turn into a , or maybe I have to type , with a 'nose'? How do those silly faces work?

Arp, irritated w/ self