Forces that drive social insanity - Witch Craze

[Born Free]

Interview with researcher of European witchhunts provides insights into the mindset that fuels such insanity.

It is also informative about the dangers of the failure to separate Church and State.

This interview by Philip Adams of Australian Broadcasting Commission - Radio National - Late Night Live, has some content that informs the fear and ignorance that is an element of Mormonism IMO. (NOTE: This RA and WM audio file will only be on the website for one week from today! It will also not be viable on a dial-up connect to the internet, sadly!)

This is the second interview, so once the program starts move to where this interview starts at 27 mins 30 secs with the Witch scene from Monty Python.

The program is the Thursday 2nd June

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/lnl/

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/lnl/s1383351.htm

Witch Craze

Summary from ABC RN website.

The European witch-hunts spanned over 300 years, but the high point of the witch panic was the sixteenth and seventeenth century. All told, somewhere between 40,000 to 100,000 were killed across Europe - mainly in the area we now call Germany.

Oxford University historian, Lyndal Roper has spent years pouring over the records of German witches trials and a myriad of other fascinating documents.

She has gleaned some fascinating perspectives on the social, economic and psychological underpinnings of witch hunts.

Guests on this program

Lyndal Roper
Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford

Publications

Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Europe
Author: Lyndal Roper
Publisher: Yale University Press

[miss taken]

Hi Daryl,

I don't know much about this area, but we went to Stratford upon Avon the other day, and visited a place called Falstaffs Experience, not a particularly good museum to visit for the money, but it was okay.

It described the witch hunters, one in particular, their visits to Stratford, and then the number of women they killed on their travels through the country.

It didn't go into a lot of details on the reasoning, but the reign of Elizabeth 1, and her predesessor, had been characterised by religious hatred and supression, and the big hunt took place during the civil war about 100 years later, the bloke who conducted the hunt was a complete loony bin himself, and it seemed his main motive was money (isn't that just always the case...sigh)

Superstition also seemed to run extremely high at that time, and there seemed to be a revulsion once christianity came in to many things pagan. It all sounds so wierd to modern ears, but it seems that there really was this great fear of village witches and what they could do.

http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html

(the link above is really good)


http://www.hulford.co.uk/familiar.html

Mary

(Bet Dogzilla knows a bit more about this! Thanks for the links)

[peter_mary]

Hi Daryl,

I don't know much about this area...

Mary

(Bet Dogzilla knows a bit more about this! Thanks for the links)

Yeah, well be careful, 'cause she turned me into a newt.

[I got better...] :D

Peter_Mary

[dogzilla]

Actually, I don't really know that much more about the witch hunts than y'all do. I just sit up and pay attention when people start using such words... a girl's gotta watch her own back, ya know?

Peter_Mary, if you'd made me a samich like I asked you to, you wouldn't have flippers and gills. The spell will wear off by the weekend. You'll be fine. ;)



Seriously, all I could tell you is that a lot of herbal lore was passed down verbally for centuries. Sometimes, though, s**t happens, as we all know. Like cows won't give milk or the milk spoils overnight or some puma eats one of your sheep or something. If anything unexplainable happened anywhere near someone who happened to possess knowledge of some of this herbal lore, the ignorant masses put two and two together and came up with five, so off to the witch hunt they went.

I'm especially careful, living here in the Bible Belt, as I do. I don't do tarot readings for people unless they specifically ask me to do one for them. I won't take a penny for it if I do one either. (That just seems so wrong to me and I couldn't tell you why.) I don't push herbal remedies on people unless they come to me and ask for one, "Hey Dogzilla, got anything for gout?" (Why, yes I do, go drink some black cherry juice once a day for a week and drink this raspberry tea once a day for a week. Clears your gout right up.) And I never, never, ever tell anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line that I'm pagan unless I'm quite sure they won't hunt me down and tie me to a flaming stake. (Or a flaming steak, as I'm also a vegetarian. D'oh!)

You might think I'm silly and foolish and a little paranoid, my little newt friends ;) , but a cross was just burned in someone's yard in Durham, North Carolina just last week. This stuff still happens.

(Cite: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/26/crosses.burned.ap/index.html)

[peter_mary]

Peter_Mary, if you'd made me a samich like I asked you to, you wouldn't have flippers and gills. The spell will wear off by the weekend. You'll be fine. ;)



Actually, if I had my hands back and could stay out of the creek for longer than 3 minutes, I'd make your damn samich... :rolleyes:

And I never, never, ever tell anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line that I'm pagan unless I'm quite sure they won't hunt me down and tie me to a flaming stake. (Or a flaming steak, as I'm also a vegetarian. D'oh!)

No, no, no! They throw you in the water to see if you float! You know, like a duck! Or very small rocks!

::gallops away with squire clapping coconut halves together::

Peter_Mary

[Born Free]

When I first listened to this interview, I started after the Monty Python sketch, so I came back to it after when I had to locate the exact starting point for you guys.

The logic by which the villagers were to determine whether to woman was a witch had a certain familiar ring about it. Did anyone else recognise it?

Daryl

[flotsam]

I really enjoyed listening to this program. Man, that host guy has such a nice voice. He should be in radio.

The thing I found to be most interesting was the interrogation process. The host wondered at first if the witches essentially told the same story, but the scholar said that actually, new stories and information was added to the cannon of witchcraft confessions ever time a new witch was tried.

The interrogators were so bent on finding out new things about the devil that they would push and push and push until the witch gave up a story or something that was new.

THe scholar also said that she saw a kind of intimacy graowing between the interrogator and the witch. That somehow the interrogator had to have some sort of sympathy with the witch in order to get her to confess "well."

This is just fascinating to me on a number of different levels. First, in the realm of public, unacknowledged storytelling. I first noticed this phenomenon while I was in Atlanta Georgia. There were these guys that would come up to the tourists and tell them about how they needed some money for a bus ride home or an operation or something, and quite frequently came away with a dollar or two. It wasn't until later that I realized that these guys were essentially storytellers. And they were so good that people would give them money. I know a lot of MFAs who will never make as much money at storytelling as those guys in Atlanta.

And then there was me at the car dealership. We brought one of my wife's friends along with us because she knows cars. Anyway, we got to the negotiating part, which I was terrible at. I kept thinking that I was supposed to be relating with these guys as people, and that they'd do the same to me. But I was wrong.

My wife's friend had to take over because I didn't understand that I was supposed to be spinning a story that showed how unable I was to meet the price they were asking. It didn't matter what was true about our bank account. It also didn't matter what was true about how much or little the car was worth. What mattered was that we convicingly tell the salesman that if he kept the price high, we couldn't buy for a dozen reasons. And of course, they had their own stories about why I needed to take their price.

Anyway. These seem like examples of public storytelling. It's a social dance. And it seems like those witch trials were much the same. What the people were after wasn't the truth, it was a good story. When the witch finally told a good story, she was executed. Whew!

But then, the thing about gaining sympathy for the person you were interrogating was wonderful. "I'm trying to help you here," the interrogator is saying. "I"m trying to save your soul." ANd he really means it. He's serving her eternal good. ANd eventually the woman starts to believe it. Here's a man who will save her, so she turns on her antenna to feel out what he wants and gives it to him. She puts herself in his power, and tells the story he's looking for because he has an authority she believes in.

Much the same thing goes on in highly charged church situations as well, I think. THe bishop is trying to help you, and you finally acquiesce to his authority and let him guide your storytelling. He helps you reinterpret your actions to see the devil in them, and how Jesus can get you out of Old Scratch's clutches.

Testimony meetings are kind of the same thing. Public storytelling with a structure, but also a mandate to add some new experience to the cannon.

Now if only we could execute the testimony bearers who bored us.

[Born Free]

I really enjoyed listening to this program. Man, that host guy has such a nice voice. He should be in radio.

<snip>

Much the same thing goes on in highly charged church situations as well, I think. THe bishop is trying to help you, and you finally acquiesce to his authority and let him guide your storytelling. He helps you reinterpret your actions to see the devil in them, and how Jesus can get you out of Old Scratch's clutches.

Testimony meetings are kind of the same thing. Public storytelling with a structure, but also a mandate to add some new experience to the cannon.

Now if only we could execute the testimony bearers who bored us.
flotsam,

Great observation re "the game" at Church and F&T meetings, and on story-telling. Check out the thread on faking spirituality.

I think you make a great point in your email about the need to be needed or accepted and the crazy places that leads.

This interview is a web version of a daily radio program on our national broadcaster each night at 10pm and repeated next day at 4pm. Each night his interviews will be of that calibre, whether he agrees with their perspective or not (he is an aethist and formerly a card carrying communist way back in his younger years). You can access the past weeks interviews of that website I posted, but they only stay there a week, which is a bit disappointing.

Daryl