by biaothanatoi » Wed Jun 28, 2006 1:45 am
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Bio, you really should read Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. Accepting the testimony under torture of these women (primarily) makes very little sense.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>Testimony extracted under torture cannot be accepted outright - but nor can it be rejected outright. Take the Inquisition documents on the witch-boy of Bamberg, who seems to go in and out of dissociative states under questioning, and who described incidences of sexual assault in his past. My point is not that the witch hunts were justified, nor that we do a Margaret Murray and accept the testimony material as primarily true ... but rather that the Arthur Miller version of Salem doesn't account for the evidence. <br><br>I know that you are just positing some possibilities below, but they raise some interesting points, so I'll go through them one by one. My response isn't intended to suggest that you believe them per se. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>1. In general "anti-christian rituals" would be expected to look in the way Inquisitors "discovered" they did when they tortured their victims.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>But the Inquisitors did not "discover" this ritual structure. The earliest records of the etiquette of the "Black Mass" (complete with profane host, ritual sex, etc) dates back to the early Gnostics, which in turn related to some of the illegal activities of pre-Christian mystery cults. What is startling is that the testimony elicited by the Inquisition (under torture or not) has such strong parallels to the ritual sexual acts of the Gnostics a thousand years earlier.<br><br>But let's ignore that for a moment. If the Inquisitors could "invent" an anti-Christian sacrament by reversing traditional religious practices ... surely anybody else of their time could as well - particularly those motivated to imagine such things and put them into practice. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>2. Inquisitors took some folk legends (which do not really resemble anything Wiccan or satanic at all...stories about flying and battles in the sky...often to determine the fertility of crops for the next few years..things like this) and grafted on their own ideas of what witches and demons got up to at night.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>If the cultural millieu of the medieval ages was replete with images of witches, demons and sorcery, as this theory presupposes - tales which the Inquisitors could have drawn on to create the cultura chimera that drove the witch hunts - you are describing a cultural landscape which nurtures images of malevolent witchcraft and sorcery. <br><br>Again - if the Inquisitors could internalise those images and put them into practice to justify widespread torture and executions - it stands to logic that others could as well. <br><br>There are grimoires and books on demonology and necromancy from the dark and middle ages. We know that there was a subculture of occultism and black magick - nurtured perhaps largely by deviant monks and priests, who were (after all!) the only people who could write those books. Pope Innocent made an edict against devil worship amongs the clergy in the 9th century! We don't know how prevalent this subculture was, but it was there. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>3. Inquisitors took some folks legends and ALSO some other stuff that more nearly resembles what we call RA or Satan worship which they discovered in their investigations but then ended up making LOTS of innocent people confess to these crimes.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br>What I don't think we should loose sight of is that - if RA is being practiced now, it was probably being practiced then - <br><br>and therefore stories of young women "waking up" in the middle of the forest at night, unable to account for how they got there, before engaging in a group ritual that included sex witih Satan in a "dreamlike" state ... may inhabit the cultural consciousness <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>but that doesn't preclude them from being drawn from</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> factual accounts of dissociative ritual trauma. <br><br>You only have to observe the monthly cycle of an RA survivor, and watch their PTSD symptoms cycle up around the full moon, equinoxes and solstices, to start wondering about where the "folk tales" come from. So I guess what I'm saying is that the distinction that you are drawing here between "folk tales" and "other stuff resembling RA/Satanism" might not be as discrete as you suggest.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>4. The stories started as manufactured by the Inquisitors but then others looking to embrace "the dark side" decided the stories were true and desired to participate in these rituals.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>Documentation of these practices pre-dates the Inquisition by many centuries, and we know that they were being practiced at the time (at least by a priestly elite), so I doubt this.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>5. My favorite pet theory...that inquisitors (who did engage in torture or at least employ those who did, after all) were simply projecting their own evil practices onto the torture victims.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>There's some interesting work around on the dynamics of torture. I suspect we are all capable of it if we've been victimised enough - the "containment theory" of sadism suggests that we hurt others in order to see them experience the same trauma that we have, thus creating a momentary "it's not me" sense of relief, superiority and escape. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>real evidence that not only were there rituals but that the group was also providing "poison for hire" services or something like that.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>The "Affair of the Poisons" documents a similar phenomenon in the court of Louis XIV in 17th century France - a network of people providing abortions, poisons, spells and practicing Black Masses. It's interesting that, historically, ritualistic abuse goes hand-in-hand with the most profitable and transgressive crimes eg it was poison a few centuries ago, but now it's porn/prostitution/drugs ... not to mention a whole lot of blackmail.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Suffice it to say that it is painstaking both in its sourcing of material and in critiquing his own arguments along the way...acknowledging weaknesses and drawing fairly clear lines between what is supported and what must remain speculation. I think you would like it.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>Sounds good - I'll see if I can pick it up. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Back to this case at hand....I don't like Crowley...so I've never been comfortable with Wicca. It's actually a little strange (well, maybe not) that Debbie got hooked up with this coven. Usually, she has said she's "pagan" and not really Wiccan.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br>After Wicca, I moved into the reconstructionist movement within paganism, which looked at pre-Christian faiths as authentic and viable religions. It suited me better and I credit it for re-launching my intellectual interest after my adolescence effectively shut it down. It got me reading Plato and Aeschylus and basically opened up philosophy and art (and sciences and maths) for me.<br><br>So I'm not anti-alternative religion at all. But I left Wicca because it had such a cultic millieu to it - and I practiced it on three continents. In Melbourne, they were having BDSM parties in which the "high priestess" wandered around naked with a strap-on. In England, it was as shallow as a children's wading pool in some areas, and then in others, it was sex magick and hypnosis and Crowley. In America, it was fluffy Unitarian commericalism with a weird Protestant self-perfection ethos. <br><br>The fact that the BDSM and ritual sex has been boiled out of Wicca by 70s feminist spiritualism and 90s commercialism doesn't make Wicca OK. Is Scientology OK because most believers don't know that Hubbard was a paedophile and a practicing Satanist?<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>But if they do come, at least I can meet them and get some sense of them. If they strike me like that Highlander wannabe...they gotta go.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>Power to you - sounds like the only way to go. <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=biaothanatoi@rigorousintuition>biaothanatoi</A> at: 6/27/06 11:47 pm<br></i>