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With the coming of Christianity there was NOT
the immediate mass- conversion that is often suggested. Christianity
was a man-made religion.
It had not evolved gradually over
thousands of years, as we have seen that the Old Religion did. Whole
countries were classed as Christian when in actuality it was only the
rulers who had adopted the new religion, and often only superficially
at that. Throughout Europe generally the old religion, in its many and
varied forms, was still prominent for the first thousand years of
Christianity.
An attempt at mass conversion was made by Pope
Gregory the Great. He thought that one way to get the people to attend
the new Christian churches was to have them built on the sites of the
older temples, where the people were accustomed to gathering together
to worship. He instructed his bishops to smash any "idols" and to
sprinkle the temples with holy water and rededicate them. To a large
extent Gregory was successful. Yet the people were not quite as
gullible as he thought. When the first Christian churches were being
constructed, the only artisans available to build them were from among
the pagans themselves. In decorating the churches these stonemasons
and woodcarvers very cleverly incorporated figures of their own
deities. In this way, even if they were forced to attend the churches
the people could still worship their own gods there.
There are many of these figures still in
existence today. The Goddess is usually depicted as very much a
fertility deity, with legs spread wide and with greatly enlarged
genitalia. Such figures are usually referred to as
Shiela-na-gigs. The god is shown as a horned head surrounded by
foliage; known as a "foliate mask", and also sometimes referred to as
"Jack of the Green" or "Robin o' the Woods". Incidentally these
carvings of the old God should not be confused with gargoyles. The
latter are the hideous faces and figures carved on the four corners of
church towers to frighten away demons.
In those early days, when Christianity was
slowly growing in strength, the Old Religion - the Wiccans and other
pagans - was one of its rivals. It is only natural to want to get rid
of a rival and the Church, pulled no punches to do just that. It has
frequently been said that the gods of an old religion become the devils
of a new. This was certainly the case here. The God of the Old
Religion was a horned god. So, apparently, was the Christians Devil.
Obviously then, reasoned the Church the pagans were Devil
worshipers! This type of reasoning is used by the Church even
today. Missionaries were particularly prone to label all primitive
tribes upon who they stumbled upon as devil-worshipers, just because
the tribe worshiped a god or gods other than the Christian one. It
would not matter that the people were good,happy, often morally and
ethically better living than the vast majority of Christians... they
had to be converted!
The charge of Devil-worship, so often leveled
at Witches, is ridiculous. The Devil is purely Christian invention;
there being no mention of him, as such, before the New Testament. In
fact it is interesting to note that the whole concept of evil
associated with the Devil is due to an error in
translation.
The original Old Testament Hebrew Ha-Satan and the
New Testament Greek diabolos simply mean "opponent" or :"adversary". It
should be remembered that the idea of dividing the Supreme Power into
two - good and evil - is the idea of an advanced and complex
civilization. The Old Gods, through their gradual development, were
very much "human" in that they would have their good side and their
bad side. It was the idea of an all-good, all-loving deity which
necessitated an antagonist. In simple language, you can only have the
color white if there is an opposite color, black, to which you can
compare it. This view of an all-good god was developed by Zoroaster
(Zarathustra), in Persia in the seventh century BCE. The idea later
spread westward and was picked up in Mithraism and, later, in
Christianity.
As Christianity gradually grew in
strength, so the Old Religion was slowly pushed back. Back until,
about the time of the Reformation, it only existed in the outlying
country districts. Non- Christians at that time became known as Pagans
and Heathens. "Pagan" comes from the Latin Pagani and simply means
"people who live in the country". The word "Heathen" means "one who
dwells on the heath". So the terms were appropriate for non- Christians
at that time, but they bore no connotations of evil and their use today
in a derogatory sense is quite incorrect.
As the centuries passed, the smear campaign
against non-Christians continued.What the Wiccans did was reversed and
used against them. They did Magic to promote fertility and increase
the crops; the Church claimed that they made women and cattle barren
and blighted the crops! No one apparently stopped to think that if the
Witched really did what they were accused of, they would suffer
equally themselves, After all, they too had to eat to live. An old
ritual act for fertility was for the villagers to go to the fields in
the light of the full moon and to dance around the field astride
pitchforks, poles and broomsticks; riding them like hobby-horses. They
would leap high in the air as they danced, to so the crops how high to
grow. A harmless enough form of sympathetic Magic. But the Church
claimed not only that they were working against the crops, but that
they actually flew through the air on their poles...surely the work of
the Devil!
In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII produced his Bull
against Witches. Two years later two infamous German monks, Heinrich
Institoris Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, produced their incredible
concoction of anti-Witchery, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch
Hammer). In this book definite instructions were given for the
prosecution of Witches. However,when the book was submitted to
the Theological Faculty of the University of Cologne - the appointed
censor at that time - the majority of the professors refused to have
anything to do with it. Kramer and Sprenger, nothing daunted forgot the
approbation of the whole faculty; a forgery that was not discovered
until 1898.
Gradually the hysteria kindled by Kramer and
Sprenger began to spread. It spread like a fire flashing up suddenly in
unexpected places; spreading quickly across the whole of Europe. For
nearly three hundred years the fires of the persecution raged,
Humankind had gone mad. The inhabitants of entire villages where one
or two Witches were suspected of living, were put to death with the
cry: "Destroy them all...the Lord will know his
own!". In 1586 the Archbishop of Treves decided that
the local Witches had caused the recent severe winter. By dint of
frequent torture a "confession" was obtained and one hundred twenty
men and women were burned to death on his charge that they had
interfered with the elements.
Since fertility was of great importance -
fertility of crops and beasts - there were certain sexual rites enacted
by the Wicca, as followers of the nature religion. These sexual rites
seen to have been given unnecessary prominence by the Christian judges,
who seemed to delight in prying into the most minute of details
concerning them. The rites of the Craft were joyous in essence. It was
an extremely happy religion and so was, in many ways, totally
incomprehensible to the gloomy Inquisitors and Reformers who sought
to suppress it.
A rough estimate of the total number or
people burned, hung or tortured to death on the charge of Witchcraft,
is nine million. Obviously not all of these were followers of the Old
Religion. This had been a wonderful opportunity for some to get rid of
anyone against whom they bore a grudge! An excellent example of the way
in which the hysteria developed and spread is found in the case of the
so-called Witches of Salem, Massachusetts. It is doubtful if any of
the victims hung* there were really followers of the Old Religion.
Just probably Bridget Bishop and Sara Good were, but the others were
nearly all pillars of the local church up until the time the hysterical
children "cried out" on them.
* In New England the law was in in England: Witches
were hung. It was in Scotland and Continental Europe that they were
burned at the stake.
(TAKEN FROM BUCKLANDS COMPLETE BOOK OF WITCHCRAFT)
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