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October 22, 2005
Truth, what is truth?
The NY Times considers a feminist mythology (that the church executed millions of 'witches', including midwives) and finds that the truth is rather different.
In a search for historical roots and moral legitimacy, some feminists and many adherents of neopagan or goddess-centered religious movements like Wicca have elaborated a founding mythology in which witches and witch hunts have a central role. Witches, they claim, were folk healers, spiritual guides and the underground survivors of a pre-Christian matriarchal cult. By the hundreds of thousands, even the millions, they were the victims of a ruthless campaign that church authorities waged throughout the Middle Ages and early modern centuries to stamp out this rival, pagan religion.
Professor Behringer traced the estimate of nine million victims back to wild projections made by an 18th-century anticlerical from 20 files of witch trials. The figure worked its way into 19th-century texts, was taken up by Protestant polemicists during the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Germany, then adopted by the early 20th-century German neopagan movement and, eventually, by anti-Christian Nazi propagandists. In the United States, the nine million figure appeared in the 1978 book "Gyn/Ecology" by the influential feminist theoretician Mary Daly, who picked it up from a 19th-century American feminist, Matilda Gage.
Posted by alicia at October 22, 2005 10:43 AM
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Comments
Pretty funny to see Peter Steinfels exspoing myths against the Church.
Posted by: Jeff Miller at October 22, 2005 1:59 PM
Yeah, I had to double-check he was the author! LOL
Posted by: LadyHatton at October 22, 2005 10:19 PM
many things to discuss… But anyway I’m not going to discuss such a personal topic. Reading it is ok, but discussing it makes you look like a chatter –box and a rumor-spreader.
Posted by: Nicky5H at April 6, 2008 12:09 PM