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Witches (General; Compendium)

Yithian said:
It has been questioned whether this article should be taken as referring to immigrant communities.

Given the locations, cases and names cited, I'm afraid it is.

It's poorly written as that is not made explicit.
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The name cited in the cases are a biggish clue.
 
Bad Bungle said:
...surely doctors can read their own handwriting ? So maybe they'd be better at this kind of task than their receptionists.
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Not necessarily.
I've met plenty of people who can't read their own handwriting.
 
I can't rad my own handwriting. Makes it very easy to dodge responsibility. :sneaky2:
 
I'll bite. While the people accused of witchcraft could be of either sex, the modern witch stereotype is female. We think of witches as women.

When I was a child in the 1960s there was no commonly used name for a male witch. He was a wizard, a warlock or sorcerer, none of which stereotypes seemed vulnerable to ducking or pricking etc.

Apart from all this wordplay, the reason for the persecution of witches that I was taught at university some years ago was that when the provision of aid to the destitute became more expensive and the Poor Laws came in, there was an incentive to exclude certain claimants on the grounds of ineligibility.
So if it could be said that a person was homeless because they'd lost their job through drinking or they'd become disabled after committing blasphemy and incurring God's wrath, they might be denied aid and would have to beg. Homeless people who arrived in a parish from other areas were not entitled to aid and would be peremptorily escorted to the boundary.

Another sound reason for withholding help might be that the person was irreligious or, yes, a witch. This worked well with elderly people who were apt to wander around in dementia muttering, and crucially unable to work to support themselves. It was a short step to designating them as witches and actively persecuting them.
 
The Witches That Terrified Me as a Kid Are Actually Feminist Heroes

In South Asian folklore, the witch-like churail with her backward feet is actually based on women who died at the hands of their husbands and came back to haunt them.

Source: vice.com
Date: 3 February, 2020

I’m the biggest scaredy cat I know—and that includes my 10-year-old niece. I don’t watch horror movies. I don’t tell ghost stories. And I’m definitely not into creepy podcasts. That’s because by the age of 10, I watched The Amityville Horror, Cujo, Buried Alive, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre at big sleepovers hosted by my older cousins. But even more haunting than a killer dog or chainsaw-wielding psycho were the stories they’d tell about supernatural creatures from “back home.”

Most terrifying was the churail, a witch-like creature that at first glance was seemingly benign: an elderly, hunched over woman often with no real marker of danger other than her backward feet. The churail’s footprints on a lonely, dusty road is exactly what would lead you to her, not away from her.

Like most Pakistani folklore, stories about churails were passed down via oral tradition, but as someone who spent the majority of her life in Canada, I only heard about half-baked encounters—my aunt telling me a childhood tale about a woman with backward feet who suddenly appeared laughing maniacally in an empty field, or the third-hand story about a distant uncle who swore he saw a witch swoop down from a tree and sit beside him as he used an open-air squatting toilet, leaving him running bare-ass while trying to pull up his pajamas.

The current Western obsession with witches, covens, and black cats inspired me to get over my childhood fear and explore the provenance of brown witches. I discovered the lore behind who became a churail was not only fascinating, it is also pretty feminist.

https://www-vice-com.cdn.ampproject...fied-me-as-a-kid-are-actually-feminist-heroes
 
Cast out: the women of Ghana’s ‘witch’ village – in pictures

Source: The Guardian
Date: 5 February, 2020

As women age in rural Ghana, signs of dementia, mental health issues or even menopausal symptoms can result in them being declared ‘witches’ and pushed out of their community. Around 80 women live in such exile in Kukuo ‘witch village’.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-...the-women-of-ghanas-witch-village-in-pictures
 
Happened across this extremely interesting publication.

The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft

Welcome to the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. This is an electronic resource for the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting in Scotland. It is in two parts: an interactive database, and supporting web pages.

The database contains all people known to have been accused of witchcraft in early modern Scotland—nearly 4,000 of them. There is information on where and when they were accused, how they were tried, what their fate was, and on a wide range of themes relating to social and cultural history. You can use the database to conduct all sorts of searches. For instance, you can find all known cases involving neighbourhood quarrels, or demonic possession, or fairies. You can find all the male or female witches. You can create graphs or maps showing how witchcraft cases were distributed; this is important because prosecutions tended to come in short bursts in particular localities.

There is also supporting material. An 'Introduction to Scottish witchcraft' explains some of the findings from the database and puts them in context. The 'Further Reading' section is also important; the database won't tell you everything on its own. However, it will tell you some things that you could find out in no other way. We hope you find it a useful tool. All this should help you think about the history of witchcraft and what it means to us today.

https://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches/
 
After receiving backlash for her religion, one student reclaims her identity as a witch

Source: mustangnews.net
Date: 4 February, 2020

For the first time in her life, journalism junior Helyn Oshrin said she claims herself as a witch — but growing up “Jewiccan,” as she put it, was not easy.

Oshrin is culturally Jewish and was raised Wiccan. She said she lost friends who claimed to be afraid of her mother’s Wiccan religious practices. Classmates accused her of worshiping the devil and made violent threats against her.

Despite recounting painful memories, she said, she tried to see through their eyes with empathy.

“All they’ve had is, ‘Oh, pagans are evil,’” Oshrin said. “And then they run into one. They don’t have a concept of what other things are quite yet.”

https://mustangnews.net/after-recei...one-student-reclaims-her-identity-as-a-witch/
 
Comfortably Numb said:
After receiving backlash for her religion, one student reclaims her identity as a witch

Source: mustangnews.net
Date: 4 February, 2020

For the first time in her life, journalism junior Helyn Oshrin said she claims herself as a witch — but growing up “Jewiccan,” as she put it, was not easy.

Oshrin is culturally Jewish and was raised Wiccan. She said she lost friends who claimed to be afraid of her mother’s Wiccan religious practices. Classmates accused her of worshiping the devil and made violent threats against her.

Despite recounting painful memories, she said, she tried to see through their eyes with empathy.

“All they’ve had is, ‘Oh, pagans are evil,’” Oshrin said. “And then they run into one. They don’t have a concept of what other things are quite yet.”

https://mustangnews.net/after-recei...one-student-reclaims-her-identity-as-a-witch/
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Wonder if she's explored Kabbalah?

Nothing wrong with being a Jewish Wiccan.
Unless your girlfriend gets killed and you go all murdery.

DmNeJztU4AIjIAm.jpg
 
Although there are a number of related, historical articles online, thought maybe this one stood out and worth a mention.

Women as witches: past, present and future

Source: Dr Charlotte-Rose Millar / The University of Queensland

If you ask someone what they think of when they hear the word ‘witch’ most people will come up with a similar image: old, haggard, ugly, bent-nosed, broomstick-laden and, above all, female.

But how accurate is this stereotype?

Witchcraft was a crime in Europe during what is generally referred to as the early modern period: that is, the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Different countries enacted different laws to deal with witches but, for the most part, by the mid-16th century witchcraft was a secular crime, one that could be punished by imprisonment, pillory or execution. During this period, approximately 90,000 people were formally accused of witchcraft and about half of this number were executed. That’s 45,000 deaths.

A pillory – a wooden device that trapped the victim by the head and hands so they could be subjected to public abuse.

So where do women come in? Well, it depends on what country you were in but, on the whole, women made up the vast majority of those accused and executed. In England, we estimate that women made up approximately 90 per cent of the accused; in the largely German-speaking Holy Roman Empire, this number was 76 per cent; in Hungary, 90 per cent; in Switzerland, over 95 per cent; and in parts of France, 76 per cent. There are exceptions to this trend. In Iceland, women made up only eight per cent of the accused and low figures can also be seen in Russia (32 per cent) and Estonia (40 per cent). But, for the most part, and especially in Western Europe, women were far more likely to be accused of witchcraft than men.

Witches were generally defined as people who made a pact with the Devil in exchange for magical power to commit evil acts.

They were believed to join with the Devil, meet with him at night-time sabbaths, pledge homage, engage in lurid sex, kill children and maim pregnant women. They were also believed to make men impotent – in some cases by actually stealing their genitals.

https://shorthand.uq.edu.au/small-change/women-as-witches/
 
WeeScottishLassie said:
Oh wow!! They're so lucky!! I'd love to have found that!!
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What would you do with those things? The owner did well to return them IMO.

There's a very cool opening for a book of occult tales about the origins of each item, it's source of power and the dreadful consequences of releasing their latent energies. Hoowee! I'm on it.
 
skinny said:
What would you do with those things? The owner did well to return them IMO.

There's a very cool opening for a book of occult tales about the origins of each item, it's source of power and the dreadful consequences of releasing their latent energies. Hoowee! I'm on it.
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Good question!! On the one hand I'd love to get it out and pour all over it with interest and excitement. But on the other hand that would be fairly disrespectful as it would be there for a reason. So probably I'd put it back very quickly and then do a cleansing of the site.
 
Lobeydosser said:
Thought this might fit here - Witches in Scotland to be pardoned -

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/19/executed-witches-scotland-pardons-witchcraft-act
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Interesting comment in article regarding witchcraft and the associations made to alewives:

The Witches of Scotland website notes that signs associated with witchcraft – broomsticks, cauldrons, black cats and black pointed hats – were also associated with “alewives”, the name for women who brewed weak beer to combat poor water quality. The broomstick sign was to let people know beer was on sale, the cauldron to brew it, the cat to keep mice down, and the hat to distinguish them at market. Women were ousted from brewing and replaced by men once it became a profitable industry.
 
brownmane said:
... The Witches of Scotland website notes that signs associated with witchcraft – broomsticks, cauldrons, black cats and black pointed hats – were also associated with “alewives”, the name for women who brewed weak beer to combat poor water quality. ...
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For more on the alewife connection ...

This March 2021 Smithsonian Magazine cover of a piece from The Conversation argues for a different source for certain witch iconography such as the tall and / or pointed hat, the broomstick and the cauldron - the history of brewing and the suppression of alewives ...

Up through the Middle Ages brewing was one of the few ways single women could make a living. The common accoutrements of the alewife were transplanted onto the images of witches as the traditional dominance of the trade by women was undermined, propagandized as evil, and suppressed.
Women Dominated Beer Brewing Until They Were Accused of Being Witches
By Laken Brooks, The Conversation

Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women’s work—that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches. Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, emerged from their connection to female brewers. ...
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FULL STORY:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/

See Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alewife_(trade)
 
EnolaGaia said:
For more on the alewife connection ...

This March 2021 Smithsonian Magazine cover of a piece from The Conversation argues for a different source for certain witch iconography such as the tall and / or pointed hat, the broomstick and the cauldron - the history of brewing and the suppression of alewives ...

Up through the Middle Ages brewing was one of the few ways single women could make a living. The common accoutrements of the alewife were transplanted onto the images of witches as the traditional dominance of the trade by women was undermined, propagandized as evil, and suppressed.


FULL STORY:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/

See Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alewife_(trade)
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The women pictured in that article don't look as though they are wearing 'traditional alewives garb', aren't they wearing traditional Welsh costume?
And I wonder if some of the 'she's a WITCH!' accusations came from men who'd overdone the ale, didn't want to admit to being lightweights, so brought out the 'she must have put a spell on the beer to make me ill!'
 
catseye said:
The women pictured in that article don't look as though they are wearing 'traditional alewives garb', aren't they wearing traditional Welsh costume?
And I wonder if some of the 'she's a WITCH!' accusations came from men who'd overdone the ale, didn't want to admit to being lightweights, so brought out the 'she must have put a spell on the beer to make me ill!'
Click to expand...
From different snippets of witchcraft history, my understanding is that it has usually been men who wanted women to "stay in their place". Lots of widows and single women had trouble supporting themselves because of this patriarchal view.
 
I love Justin Sledge's content on ESOTERICA. Digging deep I found this scholarly online lecture on witches. The historical imagery is great. He has researched occult to PhD level and teaches Philosophy at mainstream unis in the US.

Enjoy.
 
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