HERNE:

Today's topic is history

Red Deer:

two days in the woods with 77 Brownies, what can I say Ag Shadow 1: (G) Red Deer

Nestor:

Blessed Be Lady Elenya

NightOwlet:

mm lady Elenya

Elenya:

Brightest Blessings Nestor

Elenya:

MM Nightowlet

Elenya:

What did I come in the middle of?

Nestor:

the real question is Herne --what effect do the ancient pagan traditions have on the modern Christian churches -- bet that would drive the fundies crazy

LdyAthena:

Please Herne!!! I would enjoy it immensely...

HERNE:

Nestor, very little I would say

DCLXVI:

modern xtian churches- no product, no service, no taxes, the perfect franchise. send for your free information kit today

HERNE:

Nestor, would you like to see my class?

HERNE:

lol

Nestor:

no I think from the placement of Christmas to the celebration of Easter there is still quite an effect --yes I would really like to hear you class

DCLXVI:

Xmas-saturnalia?

HERNE:

OK, here or in a room ?

DCLXVI:

lupercalia?

DCLXVI:

genitalia?

Elenya:

Go for it Herne

Nestor:

and Xmas the birthday of Mithra

DCLXVI:

happy birthday dear Persian sun god, happy birth day to you

HERNE:

"Horse and hattock, horse and go, horse and pellatis, ho, ho" This class is dedicated to Isabel Gowdie and to the tens of thousands of women like her who were raped, tortured and murdered in the name of the Christian God.

but in a nice way

In June, 1951 the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was at last repealed. Those that had lived their lives in hiding, whose parents, grandparents and countless generations beyond, who had lived with fear of the rack, the thumbscrew, the gibbet and the stake could come out finally into the sun. To light again the bonfires on the hills on the holy Sabbats, plant again the sacred groves to replace those hewn down, set aright the ancient altars and call again the old gods, the bright .

Lady of the Moon and the Lord of the forests and the fields, father earth. To bring back into the world that which had been so cruelly taken out of it.

Its immanence. To bring to the world again the realization that "Only Life is Sacred."and to help restore to men and women what is theirs by right, the love of the Gods given freely and without condition save one; "And it harm none..." But the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in Britain did not mean that we were freed from

LdyAthena:

DC.. please.

HERNE:

the chains placed upon us. Oh no, we wear them still. But only that we had again the opportunity to become free. Like a hacksaw blade smuggled in with

DCLXVI:

serves little purpose for the cause

NightOwlet:

DC...please

HERNE:

a cake. Still we must ourselves make the effort to cut away that which prisons us still. Our chains are sometimes invisible, yet they fetter us all our lives,

LdyAthena:

(-temp exclude on DC till Herne finished

HERNE:

restricting us in so many ways. To cut away the bonds they must be visible to us. This my first class on the history of the Craft will aide you

LdyAthena:

Merry Meet RageWolf

HERNE:

in making them visible to yourself that you may more easily hack them away. Future classes will continue along these lines until each and every one of you are free. So Mote It Be!

Nestor:

So Mote It Be

NightOwlet:

So Mote it Be

Elenya:

So Mote It Be

LdyAthena:

So Mote It Be

NightOwlet:

Thank you Herne.....

HERNE:

There have always been persecutions, carried out and or sponsored by the Christian churches. Against the heretic, against the Jew, and against the Witches. The witch persecutions were unique in that they were not directed at a particular schism or an alien ethnic religious group, but in that they were directed primarily against women. Throughout the late Middle Ages, sporadic Witch-hunts occurred, as the Renaissance unfolded in the late fifteenth century they became widespread. Persecutions increased in ferocity to reach their greatest extent and savagery in the early seventeenth century. Estimates of the actual of the actual number of witches executed range from 100,000, to 9,000,000. A holocaust, but one you hear very little about, nor have the sponsors of it been consumed by their own flames, nor to my knowledge ever even apologized, or promised that they wouldn't do it again. Indeed the office of the Inquisition is still in existence, though it has changed its name and remains for the most part dormant. Dormant, sleeping, not dead but only sleeping. The witch-fires have not been extinguished merely banked up, hot and waiting. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Western society was undergoing widespread and extensive changes.

The Witch-hunts were an expression both of the traditional restraints, the results of the economic principle of use being supplanted by that of gain and also an increase in new pressures. The changes occurring in society benefited the rising moneyed professional classes and made possible the ruthless exploitation of women and the working class and of nature. As part of that change, the persecution of Witches was linked to three interwoven processes: the expropriation of the land and common resources; the expropriation of knowledge; and the war against the consciousness of immanence, embodied in women, sexuality and magic. Today's class will address only one part of the third process, the war against the consciousness of immanence in the form of women The witch persecutions were primarily and above all, attacks on women. The propaganda that supported the Witch-hunts stressed women's inferiority and defined women as evil. Women bring life into this world, their bodies provide us with our first warmth and comfort, of a deep sensual pleasure untainted by restrictions. But they are also the source of the first will that dares to oppose our own, that denies as well as receives, and as she is the source of our lives she may also be seen as the source of our mortality, of the vulnerability of the flesh to disease, pain and death. The doctrine of the Christians offered

LdyAthena:

the "evil" of women comes mainly from the Christian myth of Eve making Adam sin.. etc.

HERNE:

a way to escape ultimate oblivion, all that was needed was to turn away from the deep sensual pleasures of the body to the substitute pleasure of work. The Protestant work ethic raised the realm of work and enterprise to the status of transcendent endeavor, women, who embody immanence and who carry with them the taint of mortality, had to be excluded. Immanence is attacked through women's bodies: the immortality of spirit estranged from flesh is exalted through the torture and destruction of women's flesh. Men revenge themselves on the mother who failed to satisfy completely by destroying mother kind. They repair the childhood humiliation of bowing to the mothers will by destroying women's wills. But the blame for women's destruction must fall not on the conflicts inherent in mothering but on the religious and economic systems that deepen those conflicts, that encourage men to act them out by victimizing women.

JacquieC:

This was the patriarchization of religion and the proofs they used

HERNE:

When a woman is excluded from productive labor, she is forced into the role of object. Both lower-class and upper class women are relegated to the realm of reproduction, intensifying both men's and women's tendencies to identify all women with mother - someone more than human

JacquieC:

Reading list to follow Herne's words

HERNE:

and less than human, but never simply human. A lower class woman reproduces the labor force of her man. Her work is unpaid, but necessary. It is she who takes the commodities earned by the worker and transforms them so that they can be used; she cooks the food, washes the clothes, cleans the house, etc., etc., etc.,

Read Paradise Lost and Byron's Cain

lineatus:

well spoken Herne

HERNE:

The cold abstract, money, is transformed again in her hands, restored into the realm of what has value in and of itself, what can be used and enjoyed. But because her work is unpaid she cant partake of the new value now accorded to gain and profit. She cannot profit from it, cannot bargain for higher wages or attempt to gain from it more than she puts into it. hers gradually comes to be considered less than a man's work, and the woman herself becomes unreal, a two-dimensional screen upon whom a man projects his fantasies.

Working women are relegated to the least attractive jobs, and excluded from those occupations offering hints of transcendence or the nobility of a calling. Lower class women a

lineatus:

look at other social animals!

HERNE:

expendable working force, cheaper to hire than men, and easier to fire in a slow season since they are not considered real workers. Upper class women become commodities, exchanged in marriages as tokens of men's power, status and success. The upper class woman learns to package and market herself. She too is an object, not a subject; the other, not the self, of culture. As the others, the objects, women have been made screens upon which men's latent fear and hatred are projected. The Witch-hunts inflamed and legitimized that hatred, aiding the economic forces that attacked her physical and existential self. In women, the persecutions reinforced self-hatred and suspicion of other members of their own sex. To both sexes, the role of victim was made to seem the woman's natural and deserved role. Hatred of women extends to hatred of all flesh, all sensual life. I hope that now you see some of your chains more clearly. These are by no means all of them, but you see that even we of today, so free in appearances are also victims of the Witch-hunters, their malevolent works live beyond them and their cold hands still reach up from the grave to torture, to rape and to kill us. See where they lurk, both within and without and recognize their works. And see too that they are by no means dead, that they live in their descendants who continue their works. The Christian right is by no means our only enemies, recognize what the church is and has always been, a tool in the hands of the powers of the world. It is by no means their only one. Changes in consciousness take time, both for the individual and for the societies that we are parts of. Make the changes within and you will more effectively be able to effect the changes without. This is indeed the dawning of a new age, a birth. But when has their ever been a birth without struggle, without pain, without blood? The Old Age is dying, but it will not die a peaceful death, its death throes will yet drench the world in blood.

Thats the end of toady's material, thanks to Dorreen and Starhawk and all of you for your patience

LdyAthena:

You know Herne, I have noticed that as of late the ideas of the Craft have become more accepted with the environmentalist movement, without anyone else realizing it...

HERNE:

Well Lady, the ideas are natural

JacquieC:

Public, it started when Pluto went into Scorpio over two years ago...the house cleaning began.

LdyAthena:

I know Herne.. but it is good that people are starting to accept our Ideas, and then eventually us.

Elenya:

LOL

JacquieC:

and as such special

LdyAthena:

I appreciate it

JacquieC:

Then men began to fear them as bringers of life and to exclude them

fanchon:

i am Targe's wife and our beliefs are different which i just learned awhile back. so i have been trying to understand but

JacquieC:

Did you understand what I said, fanchon???

JacquieC:

It wasn't just the Christians who did the changes

Nestor:

Herne - I think there is much truth in what you have said but I would tend to disagree on your economic basis for the status of woman -rather it is based on the dysfunctional nature of the trinity

JacquieC:

It started with the Aryans who came out of Anatollia several centuries ago, fanchon

Nestor:

once the Christian church remove the female aspect of the Holy Spirit they were on the road to conflict with women

JacquieC:

Nestor, think about the patriarchization of religions all around the world

HERNE:

How so Nestor?

PublicImage:

Hell, look at modern-day japan -- the women have taken Ametarasu as their persona saviors! {grin}

Nestor:

it is a religious blindness by only having an all male trinity rather than an economic drive

SnoMonkey:

amen, Nestor!

JacquieC:

Nestor, men were afraid of what women could do in nature, so they changed the rules

PublicImage:

THAT, and without a female divinity, it sets women up as "second-class" -- As in, You Don't Have a Goddess, nyah nyah!

HERNE:

Yes Nestor, that is interesting, will think on it and explore it for next class

Nestor:

any economic issue are i think outside the pagan/wiccan religious differences with the Christian -- if we start looking at the problem that way we will end in class warfare

fanchon:

hasn't politics been the main driving force against women, i am, in a professional career and i do compete against men daily i a business group i belong to there are only three women

fanchon:

out of twenty.

JacquieC:

Nestor, economy goes hand in hand with being accepted

SnoMonkey:

study the Law of reciprocity..."what goes around comes around"

HERNE:

Nestor, I found I had the Protestant work ethic some years back, surprised the heck out of me, was never indoctrinated into any Xtian sect

Nestor:

Jacquie -- I think most pagan are of the mind-set that financial and economic success are against the principles of our faith --I believe directly the opposite BlackBeard: Men and Women are meant to COMPLIMENT each other not compete against one another...We are two facets of a wonderful ,natural energy.

HERNE:

Yes Nestor, to many are escapists

Nestor:

the work ethic was exemplified by the merchants of Greece and Rome.

Lionflower:

True, BlackBeard. I work in a predominantly male career field, and they highlight my strengths and utilize them instead of focusing on my weaknesses. I'm thankful.

Nestor:

I think we need to stress the 'work ethic' in everything pagans do -- whether it is on the job or in their religious studies