Yinko
Well-known member
I used to listen to Lore, a horror and history podcast that got picked up by Amazon. I dropped it because I recognized a pattern I found to be irritating, it is not an at all unusual one in society however. This pattern follows two statements of faith and goes like this:
In S1E18 "Hunger Pains" they talk about a Cree Wendigo hunter that tortured and killed his relative under suspicion of being a Wendigo. The fact that the Canadian government had him imprisoned and he committed suicide is lamented by the narrator as removing the final defense of the tribe against Wendigos. The Wikipedia article on the shaman in question (Jack Fiddler) provides a great deal more nuance, but that isn't the point in question.
In S1E41 "Hole in the Wall" they talk about the Paisley Witches from Scotland. Unlike the case of a Native American holy-man killing his tribes members for being possessed by evil, here European holy-men killing community members for being possessed by evil is considered utterly illegitimate. Basically, it's a racist comparison, "their experiences are valid, ours are not".
I also have problems with the further argument that women were targeted as witches due to being intimidating.
One argument that I've heard for the origin of the witch's hat is that old women used to brew beer at home as a cottage industry and would wear tall pointy hats so that they could be picked out in crowds, then when men took over the beer making industry and started mass producing it they targeted their competition. This begs the question, why weren't cottage industries a competitive threat to economies of scale in any other industry over the past 5-600 years? Why is it that micro-brews only became viable again once communication and transportation allowed for smaller breweries to disseminate information and product more easily, and even then at a much larger scale than the old women were at that era?
One also has to consider that even within the witch-craze period, witches were not on the top of the pile. The chief witch was not thought to be a woman. At the time, it was said that sorcerers was 1/1000 as common as witches, but 1000/1 as powerful as well.
As for why women tended to be targeted? In Indo-European historical societies priestly and magical rites tend to be segregated based on sex. Seidhr being entirely feminine while poetry (and later on runes as well) were considered masculine. You have the Vestals and male only religious figures in Rome, similar setups in Greece, etc. When Christianity came in the masculine side of the Indo-European religious equation got taken over, but the feminine didn't really. Ironic since one of the reasons Christianity was so successful in Rome was because the religious life of Roman women was rather sparse. I am not saying that witches were pagan, far from it, rather that practices continue and mutate even if beliefs have changed. The Inch, the Foot, the Yard, the Mile, the Second, Minute, Hour, these measurements all originate from the Bronze Age at the latest. Concepts like the Evil Eye and Ghosts go back largely unchanged to the earliest writing on Earth.
TLDR: People have these two ideas that come together to say something really dumb and I really wish they would be more critical of their own thoughts and come to a more nuanced conclusion.
- The witch trials were completely invalid, no witches were killed, or if they were then it was by chance.
- Minority cultural and religious experiences are valid.
In S1E18 "Hunger Pains" they talk about a Cree Wendigo hunter that tortured and killed his relative under suspicion of being a Wendigo. The fact that the Canadian government had him imprisoned and he committed suicide is lamented by the narrator as removing the final defense of the tribe against Wendigos. The Wikipedia article on the shaman in question (Jack Fiddler) provides a great deal more nuance, but that isn't the point in question.
In S1E41 "Hole in the Wall" they talk about the Paisley Witches from Scotland. Unlike the case of a Native American holy-man killing his tribes members for being possessed by evil, here European holy-men killing community members for being possessed by evil is considered utterly illegitimate. Basically, it's a racist comparison, "their experiences are valid, ours are not".
I also have problems with the further argument that women were targeted as witches due to being intimidating.
One argument that I've heard for the origin of the witch's hat is that old women used to brew beer at home as a cottage industry and would wear tall pointy hats so that they could be picked out in crowds, then when men took over the beer making industry and started mass producing it they targeted their competition. This begs the question, why weren't cottage industries a competitive threat to economies of scale in any other industry over the past 5-600 years? Why is it that micro-brews only became viable again once communication and transportation allowed for smaller breweries to disseminate information and product more easily, and even then at a much larger scale than the old women were at that era?
One also has to consider that even within the witch-craze period, witches were not on the top of the pile. The chief witch was not thought to be a woman. At the time, it was said that sorcerers was 1/1000 as common as witches, but 1000/1 as powerful as well.
As for why women tended to be targeted? In Indo-European historical societies priestly and magical rites tend to be segregated based on sex. Seidhr being entirely feminine while poetry (and later on runes as well) were considered masculine. You have the Vestals and male only religious figures in Rome, similar setups in Greece, etc. When Christianity came in the masculine side of the Indo-European religious equation got taken over, but the feminine didn't really. Ironic since one of the reasons Christianity was so successful in Rome was because the religious life of Roman women was rather sparse. I am not saying that witches were pagan, far from it, rather that practices continue and mutate even if beliefs have changed. The Inch, the Foot, the Yard, the Mile, the Second, Minute, Hour, these measurements all originate from the Bronze Age at the latest. Concepts like the Evil Eye and Ghosts go back largely unchanged to the earliest writing on Earth.
TLDR: People have these two ideas that come together to say something really dumb and I really wish they would be more critical of their own thoughts and come to a more nuanced conclusion.