#like for example that time [redacted] said there was nothing worth analyzing

[deripmaver]

lol i know i was the one who posted recently about how much of a double standard there is for when people post anti-casca vs anti-griffith stuff in the tags on tumblr but cmon man. lets all just smoke some weed. watch some slime videos on youtube. play some steel drum music.

[grinoir]

Religious Medievalism: “Stregheria”, Wicca and History - part 1

[TN: This article will break the Introduction to Stregoneria series for a second, but I believe it’s important to set things into perspective about both Witchcraft and this blog. My goal is to put out content, translated or redacted by me, in order to give people the correct historical information. I see a lot people on TikTok messing with things they don’t know, appropriating and distorting practices and cultures and profiting off of it. The only focus of this blog is the practice and the history behind it, I don’t want to “put people down”, I want to make the information available so you won’t hurt yourselves.

Also, I do not support fa***sm, na**sm or any other movement/ideology that oppresses and discriminates people. I’m specifiying this because I’ve received an anonymous ask about it and it kind of hurt just reading it. I hope this will clarify things and make whoever asked me that more confortable with my blog and my content. I’m a history nerd Strega, nothing more.

This article will be a translation, synthesis and re-elaboration of the following articles

https://tradizioneitaliana.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/medievalismo-religioso-stregheria-wicca-e-storia/

https://medievaleggiando.it/la-legittimazione-storica-della-wicca-margaret-murray-e-la-manipolazione-delle-fonti/

https://medievaleggiando.it/il-vangelo-delle-streghe-e-linizio-della-wicca-il-fascino-di-un-falso-storico/

The first being a rectification of the two that follow.

This article will be divided in two parts because it’s way too long to read and to translate, i’m drained af]

THE DEBUNKING OF MURRAY

Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963) was a British Anthropologist and Egyptologist, well known in the academic environment for her contributions in the studies of folklore. Even if she was very criticized and her reputation as an historian was poor, her work became popular bestsellers from 1940 onward.

The most well-known and controversial one is “The Witch-Cult in the Western Europe” published in 1921. In this book, Murray alleges that there was some sort of secret model of pagan resistance to Christianity spreaded all across Europe, and that the witches’ hunt and the proof presented to the trials were an attempt to eliminate a rival cult.

This book was clearly influenced by “Satanism and Witchcraft” by Jules Michelet, that alleged that Medieval Witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism and the Roman Catholic church, that took the form of a secret religion inspired by paganism and organized mainly by women.

To support her narrative, Murray chooses to analyze some of the trials that took place during the great hunt and employs 15 primary sources, mostly British or Scottish (not paneuropean, or sources from the european continent), that describe famous trials. Murray’s analysis of the Somerset Trials in 1664 offer a good example of her work ethics; quoting the testimony of Elizabeth Styles:

“At their meeting they have usually Wine or good Beer, Cakes, Meat or the like. They eat and drink really when they meet in their bodies, dance also and have Musick. The Man in black sits at the higher end, and Anne Bishop usually next him. He useth some words before meat, and none after, his voice is audible, but very low.”

Murray conveniently seems to “forget” to quote the immediately preceding phrase:

”That at every meeting before the Spirit vanisheth away, he appoints the next meeting place and time, and at his departure there is a foul smell.”

Other details offered by Styles are omitted, like when she alleges that the Devil presented to her in the shape of a dog or a cat or a fly, that the Devil offered her followers an oinment to use on their heads and wrists that made it possible to move them from a place to another. Or that sometimes the reunion involved only the spirits of the witches, while their bodies stayed at home.

Murray was fully aware of the fantasy element in the testimonies she included in her books, but she was able, by deliberately manipulating historical sources, to make people believe the fake narrative that a Medieval religion of witches with covens, rites and their own beliefs that relentlessy opposed Christianity really existed.

In her “The God of the Witches”, published in 1933 and clearly written for a commercial audience, she further broadened the scope of her claims on the witches’ cult. In this book, she alleges that until the C17th BCE the there was a religion, older than Christianity, that kept existing in all of Western Europe. Said religion, was focused on the worship of a two-faced horned god, known to the Romans ad Diano; this god presided the witches’ gathering and was mistaken by the Inquisition of the Devil, conclusion that made them associate witchcraft with a satanic cult.

Murray claims the existence of a *specific* non-christian organized cult spread all across Europe that worshipped Diano and relentlessly opposed the Roman Catholic church, but the sources she quotes are late and recount the flattening of the various “pagan” cults to the assimilation with the christian Devil, operated by the Church.

In fact, the Devil that the trials report on, depending on the religion, overlapped with different figures: in British and Scottish traditions the Devil was the result of the demonization of the King of Elphame. In the Basque country, the Devil substituted Mari. In Northern Italy it overlapped with the Donna del Buon Gioco. This means that the “Northern Italian Devil” is different from the “British Devil” and the “Basque Devil”.

This “Devil” is a figure that flattens everything and overlapped and substituted so many different figures, depending on the religion and the figure it ended up overlapping with.

Therefore, Murray’s narrative of a paneuropean cult of the Horned God stems from the analysis of late sources and to the false equivalence of the Devil that presided the Ludus (Sabba) in Scotland (where he masks the King of Elphame) and the Devil of other countries (where he masks other entities).

Since the Devil isn’t the same entity in all of Europe, the narrative of a counter-christianity organized paneuropean cult of prehistoric origin falls too. Instead, what we’re dealing with are Medieval, non-christian rielaborations of different remainders of the Religions of the Gentiles that survived in the Christian age and were absorbed in the legend of the Faery Procession/Procession of the Dominae Nocturnae first, and the legend of the Ludus (Sabba) later.

The following quote by Ronald Hutton, English historian who specialises in Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism and professor at the University of Bristol, confirms this:

“Over a quarter of a century ago, I adopted the expression “Pagan survivals” to describe elements of ancient Pagan culture that had persisted in later Christian societies. In doing so, I was drawing a distinction between such survivals, of which there seemed to be many, and “surviving Paganism”; that is the continued self-conscious practice of the older religions, of which there seemed to be none. This point was worth making because even in the 1980s, there was a persisting belief, based on outdated academic texts, that Paganism had survived as a living force among the common people in much of medieval Europe: it was widespread in other scholarly disciplines than history, let alone among the general public. My formula and approach was adopted by other authors in the 1990s. During that decade, however, a reaction set in against it among historians who preferred to stress the comprehensive Christianization of medieval European societies and to relegate elements that had hither to been identifed as of pagan origin to categories of religiously neutral folklore or of lay Christianity. Some emphasized that the undoubted tendency of some Christians at the time to condemn such beliefs and practices as pagan was a hallmark of a highly atypical, reforming, intolerant and evangelical strain of churchman. Michael’s system of classification, in this volume, may be said to take its place in this, apparently now dominant, set of scholarly attitudes. Revisiting the issue myself, I am inclined to meet it halfway. I am startingto agree that to speak of aspects of medieval culture as “Pagan” might indeed be misleading and inadequate. Moreover, it would be especially inappropriate to characterize fgures such as the lady of the night rides, the fairy queen or the Cailleach as “Pagan survivals” when they seem like medieval or post-medieval creations. However, I have equal diffculty in describing them simply and straightforwardly as “Christian” because of their total lack of reference to any aspect of Christianity, including theology, cosmology, scripture and liturgy; all of them would indeed fit far more comfortably into a Pagan world-picture. […] It may be that the old polarized labels are becoming inadequate to describe a medieval and early modern religious and quasi-religious world that is coming to seem even more complex, exciting and interesting than it had seemed to be before.”

Also Michael Ostling, religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft, confirms this in Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: “Small Gods” at the Margin of Christendom, published in 2018.

“Christians encompass aspects of their prior paganism both by inversion and revaluation. But where traditional spirits remain salient to a Christianized culture in encompassed or inverted form, their ongoing reality ought not to be counted by scholars as a pagan survival—though it is likely to be so construed by Christians themselves. Such “surviving” spirits are not just marginalized or diabolized pagan remnants, they are continually re-performed, recreated through Christian ritual and Christian discourse. We find such re-creation of the small gods throughout Christian history, and throughout this volume: when the Urapmin drive out the motobil by the power of the Holy Spirit, when Andean people frame their propitiation of the yawlu with devotion to the Christian God, when Mami Water appears primarily as a trope of Pentecostal deliverance ministry, when thirteenth-century Frenchwomen see, in an unoffcial Christian saint, their best hope of negotiating the return of their stolen babies from the follets, when the brownie and Robin Goodfellow appear in prayers of protection against them, in assertions of their diabolical status, or in tolerant mention of superstitious old wives who stillbelieve in such “harmless devils,” when cunningwomen insist that they only use “good devils” or that the fairies who facilitate their divination have no fear of the cross, this is because the beings involved have succeeded in taking up a niche within Christian discourse. The “good people” have not departed, have not been driven out by the sound of church-bells or the smell of gasoline. There are no pagan survivals: small gods are Christian creations with which to think the limits of Christianity.”

In essence, Murray’s version of events that describes Paganism as an anti-church, anti-society isn’t backed by any historical evidence.

Sources:

https://tradizioneitaliana.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/medievalismo-religioso-stregheria-wicca-e-storia/

https://medievaleggiando.it/la-legittimazione-storica-della-wicca-margaret-murray-e-la-manipolazione-delle-fonti/

https://medievaleggiando.it/il-vangelo-delle-streghe-e-linizio-della-wicca-il-fascino-di-un-falso-storico/

Michael Ostling. Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

[jaigeddes]

Watch Your Mouth

From time to time, there are moments when I hear someone say something that leaves me flabbergasted. Considering that I love to talk, I think I am more than willing to let most people slide when they pop off at the mouth and say something inaccurate, which happens to the best of us, or either say something wildly inappropriate.

I might be in tune with this a bit more than typical – since I started recording a podcast and I have the displeasure of analyzing everything I say over and over and over again, you become intimately aware of your verbal shortcomings. The way the recording process works is that Landon and I will sit down in the front room of my house and talk into our microphones for about 90 minutes, with the goal of having 45-50 minutes worth of audio worth presenting. As it currently stands, I do all the sound editing and mixing and as a result, I am the one who listens to that recording for what feels like an eternity. The truth is, I am averaging about one hour of mixing time for every ten minutes of finalized audio. Most of that time is spent cutting out ah’s, uhm’s, oddly long pauses, and the occasional conversation that goes down a rabbit-hole.

Since I am working with recorded audio, I have, to a certain extent, the ability to remove part of the conversation after the fact so that the fine folks who choose to listen to that conversation don’t have to fight through periods of absolute nonsensible drivel. I am painfully reminded as I do quality control checks on the recordings that I don’t have the ability to cut everything out. To point out a short example, in our last episode ‘Architects and Chefs‘ when we were talking about how the food you eat is influenced by the place you live, I was discussing my recent trip to Maine and how lobsters seem to have imprinted themselves on every part of that culture. To reinforce that point, I said the following sentence:

“So I was really trying to find out, … the role that lobster’s played in their society.”

Maybe at first pass, this sentence doesn’t seem all that crazy to you, but I am telling you that it drives me absolutely bonkers. I should have used the word “culture” instead of the word “society” because let’s be honest, lobsters don’t have a role in society … unless we are talking about some underwater lobster society because it’s not like they work down at the local bank. This gaff is now recorded and available for permanent ridicule, a new experience despite the fact I have this blog site and you can find no shortage of errors contained within almost every single post. The difference is that if something on this site really bothers me, I can easily fix it whereas, with the podcast, nothing is easily fixable unless the solution is “removal”.

There is a story that will ultimately make it into my rotation of stories, it might be too soon now, but we are working with a consultant who seems to relish the idea of antagonizing people who disagree with them (trying to keep the pronoun’s gender-neutral) … which just so happens to be the city engineers who are reviewing the drawings for one of our projects. We have sailed through every phase of the review process except for the scope of work of this particular consultant. We made it through building review in one pass and with only two comments – both of which were generic boilerplate notes the city wanted to see on the cover. No big whoop, right? Almost done, right?

Wrong.

This consultant has had their scope of work in the review process for almost 9 months, and while a large chunk of this is not a direct result of their work, I can’t help but think that their prickly demeanor is making a frustrating situation untenable. They have no issues with telling the people who work for the city, the people who ARE REVIEWING OUR PROJECT, that they aren’t very good at their job. [ALERT] In case you didn’t know this already, that is a bad idea. This is a small excerpt from an email they sent to the Assistant City Manager … brace yourselves:

“Please don’t misunderstand me.  This has been somewhat of a windfall for me.  I can charge double the fee I get in [redacted] and still get projects because other engineers don’t want to deal with the hassle.

Your city has a terrible reputation and it is getting worse.”

Are. You. Kidding. Me??!!!

I have been trying to think whether or not this was the worst thing I have ever read in an email … sadly, it is not, but it does hold the honor of coming in second place.

Despite our current situation, I actually like this consultant as a person, but I can’t afford to have a loose cannon like this on one of my projects. At some point, I think it is incumbent on all professionals to understand the ramifications of the things that come out of their mouth. I know this person is frustrated, and I’ll even go so far as to say that they have some right to be frustrated … but you have to watch your mouth. There is literally zero upside to this sort of action and they are past the point in their career when they should have learned this lesson. I ended up spending time I shouldn’t have needed to spend repairing the relationship with the city staff, and through reasonable dialog and conversation, was successful in presenting our argument to the city. Rather than punch, kick, and scream, our challenge within the City was handled with patient and persistent conversations during which time, nobody was insulted.

Shocking, right?

It’s always good advice to be mindful of the things you say to other people … but you should really be careful about the things you write because just like recordings, they can live on forever.

Keep it real – and watch your mouth.