"Priapos was the rustic god of the bounty of the vegetable garden. He was also honoured as the protector of sheep, goats, bees, the vine and of all garden produce." Source: Theoi Greek Mythology.
Notes: Priapus was the John Holmes of ancient Greek deities. "He was represented in a caricature of the human form, grotesquely misshapen, with an enormous phallus," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. "The ass was sacrificed in his honour, probably because the ass symbolized lecherousness and was associated with the god’s sexual potency. In Greek mythology his father was Dionysus, the wine god; his mother was either a local nymph or Aphrodite, the goddess of love."
The Roman god Mutunus Tuturus was a phallic marriage deity closely associated with Priapus. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), Priapus was "an ithyphallic god most familiar from the sportively obscene short poems called Priape; in these he typically threatens to punish by penetration any male or female intruder into the garden of which he is guardian."
Though I be wooden Priapus (as thou see'st), With wooden sickle and a prickle of wood, Yet will I seize thee, girl! and hold thee seized And This, however gross, withouten fraud Stiffer than lyre-string or than twisted rope I'll thrust and bury to thy seventh rib.
Offerings were made to statues of Priapus, which were usually set up in gardens. "A minor and disreputable god," he preferred the "lustful ass" as a sacrificial victim, but would also accept "animal sacrifice of the more normal type or, very commonly, offerings of fruit, flowers, vegetables (and fish)." (OCD)
"Pan was the god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music. He wandered the hills and mountains of Arkadia playing his pan-pipes and chasing Nymphs. His unseen presence aroused feelings of panic in men passing through the remote, lonely places of the wilds." Source: Theoi Greek Mythology.
Pan's original home was Arcadia. He was a pastoral god who lived in the mountain wilderness. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed. revised, "[m]ountains as such were not worshiped in classical Greece or Italy, but they were places of special cult, to the point that Mt. Maenalus in Arcadia was considered sacred to Pan in its entirety."
Pan's name means "guardian of the flocks" and his appearance -- half man and half goat -- is a classic example of divine theriomorphism, a religious belief common to the region. "His usual attributes of syrinx and lagobolon (a device for catching hares) mark him out as a shepherd." (OCD)
Pan's syrinx was a pan flute, an ancient wind instrument which is still used in syrupy "indigenous world music" and even in some jazz and godawful quasi-classical music. According to the myths, Pan lusted after a nymph named Syrinx and chased her through the woods, but she begged the river nymphs for help and they turned her into a patch of reeds. Pan gathered up some of the reeds and used them to make his pipes.
Half human, half animal, Pan is a primordial figure who dates back to the shamanistic landscape of prehistoric Greece. Shepherds sacrificed to him and he was a hunting god "concerned with small animals such as hares, partridges and small birds..." (OCD)
According to the OCD, "...after an unsuccessful hunt, young men would beat Pan's statue with squills. In this way they would stimulate Pan's powers of fertility and direct it towards the animal domain." He was a protector of shepherds and of soldiers patrolling the mountains and he could "exercise a type of savage and violent possession."
The god could cause panic, a word derived from his name."The Greeks believed that he often wandered peacefully through the woods, playing a pipe, but when accidentally awakened from his noontime nap he could give a great shout that would cause flocks to stampede. From this aspect of Pan's nature Greek authors derived the word panikon, 'sudden fear..,'" according to Wikipedia.
This sudden fear was connected to ancient hunting techniques. "Prehistoric humans used mass panic as a technique when hunting animals, especially ruminants. Herds reacting to unusually strong sounds or unfamiliar visual effects were directed towards cliffs, where they eventually jumped to their deaths when cornered." (Ibid) I'm not sure if this particular hunting method was ever used in ancient Greece, however.
According to the OCD, the Greeks "liked to worship Pan, together with Hermes and the nymphs, in sacred caves, recalling the figure of the Arcadian goatherd. But in his homeland of Arcadia, though he is fond of mountains, well away from human habitation, Pan does not live in caves, and he is not absent from cities. Little is known of his public cult. In Athens, it involved the sacrifice of a castrated goat."
Pan was also associated with the ancient Greek word for all. "From this, word-play leads to the association which made Pan in the Roman period into a universal god, the All." (OCD)
"Researchers at the University of Dundee have recreated the face of an 18th-century 'witch' who died in jail before she could be burned for her 'crimes'." Source: Archaeology News Network (2017).
"Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, died in 1704 while held in prison for her 'confessed' crimes of being a witch and having sex with the devil."
Comment: This isn't ancient or medieval history, but I can't resist posting stories involving sex with the devil. If this reconstruction is accurate, Lilias Adie looks like she was a sweet old grandma, which just makes the wicked old trollop's behavior all the more shocking. But never mind that. Reading her tragic story made me think, in my usual roundabout way, that it's about time to bring back the medieval witch hunts.
Witchcraft, at least in a watered-down, New Age, politically-correct and feminazified form, is alive and well in the modern world. Witchcraft is now a brand, according to Buzzfeed (2017) in an article about how "entrepreneurs [have blended] a passion for the occult with an understanding of e-commerce to capture a share of the new economic activity surrounding witchcraft." Magic, it seems, is a hot market these days:
"The owner of one such business, Goddess Provisions, said her customer base has grown from 300 subscribers to almost 6,000 in the last year and a half."
The goddess who runs this online store sells everything from crystals to aromatherapy, superfood snacks and spiritual growth tools, and her customers are undoubtedly a pack of rabid Third-Wave feminists who see themselves as being oppressed by the non-existent patriarchy. I have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine that the majority of them are -- among other things -- suffering from extreme forms of Post Trump Stress Disorder.
May the Great Cthulhu save us all from this plague of modern witches and neopagans in general.
It's amazing that in the 313 years since Lilias Adie died in a Scottish prison after her confession -- three centuries that saw the rise of modern science and technology -- witchcraft has become a widespread, public, relentlessly left-wing and completely legal subculture with a thriving market for witchy products like mouse bones and pentagram pins. These feminist witches and white-magic practitioners are kind of boring, though. Maybe some of them dabble in curse spells and the like, but I find it hard to believe that most of them take this stuff seriously. As far as I can tell, modern witchcraft is more of a pose and a fashion statement than anything else.
Back in Lilias Adie's time, people took witchcraft seriously. Guilty or not, that's why she was in prison. The modern witchcraft brand, if nothing else, shows how much Christianity has degenerated over the centuries. Many modern Christians still believe that witches are real, but they're not inclined to do anything concrete about it. These days, even the most fundamentalist congregations have succumbed to creeping liberalism. For instance, they would never even think of actually going out and burning one of their local goddesses at the stake. That's too bad, if you ask me. Granted, it's hard to take these modern witches very seriously, but considering how obnoxious they are a revival of the medieval witch hunts would not only be a positive benefit to society, but highly entertaining.
What we need is a New Inquisition. The Catholic Church has become a squalid viper's nest of corruption and liberalism, so the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of fundamentalist congregations around the world. Modern witches aren't hard to locate; most of them have Facebook and Twitter pages and so on. Once the Inquisition Intelligence Service identifies them, the IIS could send out howling mobs with torches to burn down every upscale witchcraft boutique they could find and round up all the Goddesses and Pop-Culture Heroines they could get their hands on. Teenage girls with a pack of Tarot cards, Goth chicks wearing pentagram necklaces, shady characters like this girl -- no one would be immune (except for Elvira). They would all have to stand trial, preferably by ordeal:
The guilty could then be disposed of humanely, just like they were in the Middle Ages:
"In England and New England Witches were hanged; elsewhere the most common form of execution was burning. Burning, by the way, didn't mean being burned alive. If you recanted (admitted you'd made a mistake and were sorry), you were killed beforehand, and then your body was consigned to the flames. Nobles were beheaded, commoners were hanged -- being burned alive was an extreme and unusual punishment except in Spain and Italy where the Inquisition did regularly burn people alive." Source: Summerlands
Witches weren't always executed. Sometimes they were banished, imprisoned or forced to do penance. When they occurred, the executions were usually public because they were thought to be valuable "teaching tools," which I'm sure they were. The religious courts handed the condemned over to the secular authorities in order to keep the church's hands clean, but in the modern world I suppose the New Inquisition would have to do the dirty work itself. I imagine a lot of people out there would object to this, but look at it this way: The executions would not only rid us of all these LARPING New Age feminists, but they would be good for the tourist economy wherever they took place:
"Executions were popular events. The largest had thousands of attendees, who often traveled many miles to see the deaths. Crowds were so large that the Inquisition would sometimes erect bleachers, so that everyone could see and hear." (Summerland)
Bring back the medieval witch hunts. It's just a suggestion.
According to Wikipedia, the kingdom of Northumbria "was originally two kingdoms divided approximately around the River Tees: Bernicia was to the north of the river and Deira to the south. It is possible that both regions originated as native [Celtic British] Kingdoms which the Germanic settlers later conquered, although there is very little information about the infrastructure and culture of the British kingdoms themselves. Much of the evidence for them comes from regional names that are British rather than Anglo-Saxon in origin."
"The cultural life and the political unity of Northumbria were destroyed by the arrival of the Danes. The Danish 'great army' captured York in 866, and many of its members settled in that area. Early in the 10th century other Scandinavians entered and settled western Northumbria from the Irish Sea." (Encyclopedia Britannica)
"From around 800, there had been waves of Danish raids on the coastlines of the British Isles. These raids terrorized the populace, but exposure to Danish society brought new opportunities for wealth and trade. In 865, instead of raiding, the Danes landed a large army in East Anglia, and had conquered a territory known as the Danelaw, including Northumbria, by 867." (Wikipedia) This led to a gradual mingling of the Scandinavian and British cultures in the area. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he synthesis of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian and Christian and Pagan visual motifs within the Danelaw can be illustrated by an examination of stone sculpture."
"Once a long time ago when humans still communed with plants, the spirits of the dead, and the gods, the people learned of the Solanaceae [nightshades] genus of plants – of both their great powers and their dangers. Those who knew of the secrets of these plants, later branded as witches and poisoners, were greatly feared and cast out of society as the power of the Solanaceae could bring armies and kingdoms to their knees." Source: Sarah Anne Lawless.
Comment: Many groups including experimental archaeologists have tried to replicate the lifestyles of prehistoric and medieval cultures. Some of these groups, like the one in the 1978 BBC documentary, Living In The Past, have spent various lengths of time living under past conditions, but they always ended up returning to the modern world with its undeniable conveniences and labor-saving devices. And who can blame them? After all, these were just temporary experiments. But what if a group of modern "neopagans" actually tried to do this for real? What would happen?
Most people living in the modern West would die like flies if they were suddenly transported back to the Iron Age and couldn't return after a few weeks or months. Just staying alive back then was a full-time job in itself, at least for most of the population, and it must have been precarious, but despite all the hardships life couldn't have been too harsh, at least not all the time, or no one would have survived.
Let's say that a group of modern "pagans" decided to start living like this full-time. They could band together, form an agricultural co-op or something, buy some land and return to an Iron Age way of life, building their own shelters, making their own clothes and tools, growing and hunting their own food. To be truly authentic, their community should be based on solid archaeological evidence, which means, for one thing, that they would have to dispense with their idiotic and ahistorical New Age "religions."
Real pagans were agrarian and they practiced blood sacrifice. They didn't live in cities and drive out to Stonehenge a couple times a year to get loaded and dance around like Hollywood Apaches to the beat of drum circles while the cops kept an eye out for drunks and dope dealers. I've written several posts on this site mocking the "pagans, Druids and pantheists" who swarm over Stonehenge for every solstice and equinox, but I can understand their alienation from Christianity and the modern world.
Modern pagans have a serious problem. There's very little evidence about how people lived back then and what they believed, so the modern pagan has to make it all up and the result is usually ludicrous. This got me thinking about what an authentic neopagan movement would look like and two basic requirements came to mind. First of all, as I've already said, real neopagans should toss out everything that isn't backed by solid archaeological evidence. Second, they should drop out of the modern world and go back to living in the Iron Age like the people in this video did. Note: They couldn't recreate a Stone Age hunting and gathering existence for obvious reasons.
They would have to live like this all the time, though. There would be no going back. They would essentially have to live like Iron Age farmers and, given enough time, some of them might actually figure out how to survive as clans, living in many ways like the modern Amish. Even if they did, though, they would still be surrounded by the modern world and there would be no way to escape it entirely. They would have to pay taxes on their land, for instance, so they would need to set up small businesses or something.
And that's the catch. There's no way to escape the overpoliced total state in the modern world. Not completely. These neopagans would be anachronisms, psychologically modern humans living an Iron Age life in the center of a decaying, post-industrial civilization. Keeping their communities going at that point would probably be even harder than learning how to feed themselves and stay warm in the winter.
It could be done, but the first generations would be in for a shock and a lot of them would drop out very quickly. Living without electricity is one thing, raising your own food another, but to be truly authentic, they couldn't use modern medicines or hospitals and the women would have to give birth naturally out there in the woods. There would be sickness, malnutrition, deaths. Their children couldn't go to modern schools. The dead would have to be buried right there on the land--something that could be done here in the States as recently as the the middle of the 20th Century, but which is probably illegal now. The list of problems goes on and on, but this biggest problem is this:
The modern state would never allow people to live like this. An authentic Iron Age life is impossible in the modern world because we have lost too much freedom.
Note: The rest of this documentary can be found here.
The myth of Hell can be traced all the way back to the first civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, but I'm guessing that the concept of an "underworld of the dead" had its origins in the earliest funerary religions of the Stone Age. The dead were buried under the earth, so the land of the dead was also seen as being somewhere underground.
Hell wasn't called Hell in Mesopotamia and it wasn't a place of punishment for sinners. That's a much more modern idea. Originally, the place we call Hell was just a grim vision of the afterlife waiting for everyone. In other words, back around 3,000 BC or so, everybody went to "Hell" so I guess you could say that Hell was the original Heaven:
"The Sumerian afterlife was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue 'a shadowy version of life on earth'. This bleak domain was known as Kur, and was believed to be ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal [see next video]. All souls went to the same afterlife, and a person's actions during life had no effect on how the person would be treated in the world to come." Source: Wikipedia.
Note: The Old Testament Sheol is basically identical to the Mesopotamian Kur. According to Wikipedia, "Sheol is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God."
The concept of an underworld where sinners are punished after death seems to have evolved in ancient Egypt and Greece, but several different versions of the myth were floating around the Near East and Mediterranean world back then.
The Greeks, for instance, had a concept of the underworld (Hades) as a "deep, gloomy place" where everyone went after death, but the element of judgment was also present in their mythology. " In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BC) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus," a pit or cave in Hades that was used as a dungeon. (Wikipedia) "Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans."
The next clip is from the great 1997 miniseries, The Odyssey, with Armand Assante (highly recommended). It starts off with the scene where Odysseus travels to Hades to ask the blind prophet Tiresias how to get home. The Hades in this scene is more of an underworld of shades than a place of divine punishment.
Hades was not only a place, but the name of the god of the underworld. Originally, he appears to have been one of many anonymous chthonic deities and it was dangerous to mention his actual name:
"...Hades lacked a proper name; as in the case of other nameless chthonians, his anonymity was a precaution. He was referred to by descriptive circumlocations as 'chthonian Zeus' ... 'the chthonian god,' 'king of those below,' 'Zeus of the departed' ... 'the other Zeus,' 'the god below,' or simply 'lord.' As the Lord of the Dead, he was dark and sinister, a god to be feared and kept at a distance." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised).
The history of Hell and its demons is too long and complex to describe in detail here, but our modern concept of Hell apparently originated with the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity. From what I've read, Judaism sees Hell as a state of shame and atonement rather than a physical place. The full-blown description of Hell as a literal pit of fire and brimstone and eternal torment seems to be an invention of the medieval Christian church.
Interestingly enough, "[t]he Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew word Gehinnom (1)." So the Hell of the New Testament has clear roots in the underworld of the dead as described by the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians.
(1) The word Gehinnom derives from Gehenna, a reference to the "Valley of Hinnom," a garbage dump outside of Jersualem where people burned their garbage. According to Wikipedia, "[b]odies of those deemed to have died in sin without hope of salvation (such as people who committed suicide) were thrown there to be destroyed. Gehenna is used in the New Testament as a metaphor for the final place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection."
These days, a majority of Americans still believe in Hell and a 2007 Harris poll revealed that more Americans believe in a literal Hell and Devil than they do in Darwin. Some Christian denominations reject the concept of Hell altogether, while others still embrace the literal version of Hell famously described by Jonathan Edwards in his notorious 1741 sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
Pope Francis recently created a storm of controversy when he supposedly said that Hell doesn't exist and that condemned souls just disappear, though it's possible that his actual words were misreported. If Francis doesn't believe in Hell, he apparently still believes in demons, however, because the Vatican recently announced that it will hold a "training course for priests in exorcism next month amid claims that demands for deliverance from demonic possession have greatly increased across the world."
The audio in this video is pretty bad and the background music is irritating at best, but it's one of the more neutral (if not necessarily the most accurate) descriptions of the pagan influences on Easter I could find. There are higher-quality videos available, but most of them were produced by various Christian or "neopagan" groups or by atheists attacking Christian traditions. When it comes to anything even remotely related to the origins of Christianity, objective sources are few and far between.
The theory that Easter was originally a pagan festival begins with its name. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word Easter comes from the "Old English Easterdæg, from Eastre (Northumbrian Eostre), from Proto-Germanic austron-, 'dawn,' also the name of a goddess of fertility and spring [Eostre], perhaps originally of sunrise, whose feast was celebrated at the spring equinox, from aust- 'east, toward the sunrise' ..."
Eastre, the goddess of Spring, seems to be a favorite among Wiccans and other New Age types.
As it turns out, the connection between Easter and the ancient fertility goddess Eostre can be traced back to one medieval writer. According to Wikipedia, "the most widely accepted theory of the origin of the term is that it is derived from the name of a goddess mentioned by the 7th to 8th-century English monk Bede, who wrote that Ēosturmōnaþ (Old English 'Month of Ēostre', translated in Bede's time as 'Paschal month') was an English month, corresponding to April, which he says 'was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month.'"
Note: Paschal is the Hebrew name for Passover, another ancient spring festival.
So what's the truth here? There's enough evidence, I think, to say that Easter was originally a pagan festival hijacked (like Christmas) by the medieval Christian church. Familiar Easter symbols like the Easter bunny and colored eggs didn't become popular until the 19th century in Europe, but they definitely have pagan Germanic roots and the story of Eostre can probably be traced back to Bronze Age Greece and the Near East.
Eostre, I believe, is another name for the very ancient goddess Eos, "the personified goddess of the dawn, daughter of Theia and the sun-god Hyperion," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised). Eos is described as "rosy-fingered" by Homer and rides a chariot pulled by two horses named "Shiner" and "Blazer." Easter is a resurrection festival associated with the rising sun, but Eos was originally a symbol of death and a "predatory lover," according to the OCD.
Eos is depicted with wings in art dating back to the 6th century BC. Cursed with an insatiable sexual appetite, she preys on "handsome hunters ... in the morning twilight ... [seizing] the Trojan prince Tithonius to be her heavenly gigolo ..." (OCD) Many of the lovers she absconded with came to bad ends. "The explanation of these stories, in which a goddess's love is used as a metaphor for death, is to be found in the Greek practice of conducting funerals at night, with the soul departing at daybreak." Image from Paleothea.com.
If I'm right about the association between Eostre and Eos, then the central myth of Easter is a classical example of the way religious symbolism can be hijacked by an alien religion and transformed into the opposite of its original meaning. In the case of Eos, a festival dedicated to a predatory goddess and symbol of death has been transformed into a celebration of life and resurrection, just as the ancient pagan gods -- symbols of knowledge, life and natural forces -- were transformed into demons by the Christian church.
"The Temple of Isis is a Roman temple dedicated to the Egyptian goddess Isis. This small and almost intact temple was among one of the first discoveries during the excavation of Pompeii in 1764." (Wikipedia)
"... The preserved Pompeian temple is actually the second structure; the original building built during the reign of Augustus was damaged in an earlier earthquake of 62 AD. Seventeen years later with the massive volcanic eruption, the Iseum [Isis temple] alone was the sole temple to be completely rebuilt—ahead even of the Capitolium."
Next video shows the standing ruins of the temple as they appeared in 2009. All of its wall paintings and statues were apparently moved to the Archaeological Museum at Naples (Italian only? The English version of the site doesn't seem to exist.)
"The worship of Isis was [originally] treated with suspicion in official circles because of its associations with Ptolemaic Egypt," according to Pompeii: The Last Day by Paul Wilkinson (p.47). "After the annexation of Egypt by Augustus in 30 BC, however, attitudes relaxed and by AD 38 Rome itself had a Temple of Isis. The cult of Isis had its own full-time priests, whereas the more official Roman religions did not."
More views of the temple (including the entrance to an underground ritual purification chamber) can be seen in the next video. Turn up the volume.
According to Pompeii: The Last Day (pp. 176-177), "The sanctuary around the Temple of Isis is enclosed by walls on its east and north sides. It adjoins the Samnite Gymnasium [1] to the west and the theaters to the south. Very little is left of the original temple because it had been almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of AD 62. It was completely rebuilt in interesting circumstances by Numerius Popidius Celsinus. He was a six-year-old child who was admitted into the ruling body of Pompeii, the collegium decurionum, as a reward for his generosity (his fatherhaving actually provided the finances)."[2]
[1] "In the 5th century BC, the Samnites conquered [Pompeii] (and all the other towns of Campania); the new rulers imposed their architecture and enlarged the town. After the Samnite Wars (4th century BC), Pompeii was forced to accept the status of socium of Rome, maintaining, however, linguistic and administrative autonomy. In the 4th century BC, it was fortified. Pompeii remained faithful to Rome during the Second Punic War." (Wikipedia)
[2] According to Wilkinson, Numerius Popidius Celsinus was the name of the six-year-old child, but other sources give this as the father's name. It's possible that they both had the same name, however. One of the temple inscriptions reads "'Numerius Popidius Celsinus, son of Numerius, rebuilt at his own expense from its foundations, the Temple of Isis, which had collapsed in an earthquake; because of his generosity, although he was only six years old, the town councilors nominated him into their number free of charge.'" Source: The Post Hole. The Latin and an English translation of the inscription can be found here.
Note: The video above is part of a longer lecture series on a variety of ancient history topics.
Isis was an important deity in Pompeii, probably because of the goddess's association with water:
"Because this temple served the Isis cult and was not a public civil space, the Temple of Isis, or Iseum, and Isis herself must have held special meaning and value for the city of Pompeii. Pompeii’s seafaring economy and the rise of personal religion in the Roman world may explain this high value. Since Pompeii relied on commercial seafaring to support its economy, Isis’s emphasis on stable and life-giving water defeating the often treacherous, unpredictable, and sometimes-deadly water of the sea, strengthened the local cult. The confluence of architecture, art, and rituals implies why the Pompeiians so highly valued a cult sanctuary – gentle Isis, offering resurrection and regulated water, provided a comforting counterbalance to unpredictable Neptune." Source: The Post Hole.
"The Eleusinian Mysteries, held each year at Eleusis, Greece, fourteen miles northwest of Athens, were so important to the Greeks that, until the arrival of the Romans, The Sacred Way (the road from Athens to Eleusis) was the only road, not a goat path, in all of central Greece. The mysteries celebrated the story of Demeter and Persephone but, as the initiated were sworn to secrecy on pain of death as to the details of the ritual, we do not know what form this celebration took. We do know, though, that those who participated in the mysteries were forever changed for the better and that they no longer feared death." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.
"There was an important theater of Dionysus [at Eleusis], and the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore [Persephone] was the site of many festivals of local or national importance ... but the fame of Eleusis was due primarily to the annual festival of the Mysteries, which attracted initiates from the entire Greek-speaking world." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed., revised).
The Eleusian Mysteries have attracted a lot of attention from "psychonauts" like Terrance McKenna and ethnomycologists like Robert Gordon Wasson who believed that initiates may have been given some kind of psychedelic plant as part of their celebrations. Their theory is that the initiates were given an ergot-based hallucinogen, perhaps in liquid form:
Note: I'm not endorsing either Wasson or McKenna, a couple of slippery characters with a lot of suspicious connections, but the idea that hallucinogenic plants of some kind were used in the Eluesian rites isn't all that outlandish.
The Romans helped to preserve and protect Eleusis over the centuries. "Destroyed by the Costobocs in AD 170, [the sanctuary] was rebuilt under Marcus Aurelius, who also brought to completion the splendid propylaea, a copy of the Propylaea on the Athenian Acropolis. In this he followed the initiative of Hadrian, who was primarily responsible for the physical renewal of the sanctuary in the 2nd cent. The sanctuary evidently ceased to exist after AD 395." (OCD) Note: This was about 15 years after the Edict of Thessalonica made Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire.
Bring Back The Medieval Witch Hunts
"Researchers at the University of Dundee have recreated the face of an 18th-century 'witch' who died in jail before she could be burned for her 'crimes'." Source: Archaeology News Network (2017).
"Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, died in 1704 while held in prison for her 'confessed' crimes of being a witch and having sex with the devil."
Comment: This isn't ancient or medieval history, but I can't resist posting stories involving sex with the devil. If this reconstruction is accurate, Lilias Adie looks like she was a sweet old grandma, which just makes the wicked old trollop's behavior all the more shocking. But never mind that. Reading her tragic story made me think, in my usual roundabout way, that it's about time to bring back the medieval witch hunts.
Witchcraft, at least in a watered-down, New Age, politically-correct and feminazified form, is alive and well in the modern world. Witchcraft is now a brand, according to Buzzfeed (2017) in an article about how "entrepreneurs [have blended] a passion for the occult with an understanding of e-commerce to capture a share of the new economic activity surrounding witchcraft." Magic, it seems, is a hot market these days:
"The owner of one such business, Goddess Provisions, said her customer base has grown from 300 subscribers to almost 6,000 in the last year and a half."
The goddess who runs this online store sells everything from crystals to aromatherapy, superfood snacks and spiritual growth tools, and her customers are undoubtedly a pack of rabid Third-Wave feminists who see themselves as being oppressed by the non-existent patriarchy. I have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine that the majority of them are -- among other things -- suffering from extreme forms of Post Trump Stress Disorder.
Related: Witches Cast Spell Over Trump To Fail, Leave Office
"'Witches are everywhere these days,' says the introduction to 'Basic Witches,' a cheeky how-to book about witchcraft published in August. At Catland [an occult boutique in Brooklyn], along with candles, pheasant feet and little jars of mouse bones, you can buy the beautifully produced feminist witchcraft magazine Sabat, whose covers feature black-and-white photos of gorgeous girls looking like pensive pop stars. There are a surprising number of magical paraphernalia subscription boxes. 'Why the Witch Is the Pop-Culture Heroine We Need Right Now,' said the headline of a recent piece on New York Magazine’s Vulture site, part of its Witch Week Halloween series." Source: New York Times (2017).
May the Great Cthulhu save us all from this plague of modern witches and neopagans in general.
It's amazing that in the 313 years since Lilias Adie died in a Scottish prison after her confession -- three centuries that saw the rise of modern science and technology -- witchcraft has become a widespread, public, relentlessly left-wing and completely legal subculture with a thriving market for witchy products like mouse bones and pentagram pins. These feminist witches and white-magic practitioners are kind of boring, though. Maybe some of them dabble in curse spells and the like, but I find it hard to believe that most of them take this stuff seriously. As far as I can tell, modern witchcraft is more of a pose and a fashion statement than anything else.
Back in Lilias Adie's time, people took witchcraft seriously. Guilty or not, that's why she was in prison. The modern witchcraft brand, if nothing else, shows how much Christianity has degenerated over the centuries. Many modern Christians still believe that witches are real, but they're not inclined to do anything concrete about it. These days, even the most fundamentalist congregations have succumbed to creeping liberalism. For instance, they would never even think of actually going out and burning one of their local goddesses at the stake. That's too bad, if you ask me. Granted, it's hard to take these modern witches very seriously, but considering how obnoxious they are a revival of the medieval witch hunts would not only be a positive benefit to society, but highly entertaining.
What we need is a New Inquisition. The Catholic Church has become a squalid viper's nest of corruption and liberalism, so the responsibility would fall on the shoulders of fundamentalist congregations around the world. Modern witches aren't hard to locate; most of them have Facebook and Twitter pages and so on. Once the Inquisition Intelligence Service identifies them, the IIS could send out howling mobs with torches to burn down every upscale witchcraft boutique they could find and round up all the Goddesses and Pop-Culture Heroines they could get their hands on. Teenage girls with a pack of Tarot cards, Goth chicks wearing pentagram necklaces, shady characters like this girl -- no one would be immune (except for Elvira). They would all have to stand trial, preferably by ordeal:
The guilty could then be disposed of humanely, just like they were in the Middle Ages:
"In England and New England Witches were hanged; elsewhere the most common form of execution was burning. Burning, by the way, didn't mean being burned alive. If you recanted (admitted you'd made a mistake and were sorry), you were killed beforehand, and then your body was consigned to the flames. Nobles were beheaded, commoners were hanged -- being burned alive was an extreme and unusual punishment except in Spain and Italy where the Inquisition did regularly burn people alive." Source: Summerlands
Witches weren't always executed. Sometimes they were banished, imprisoned or forced to do penance. When they occurred, the executions were usually public because they were thought to be valuable "teaching tools," which I'm sure they were. The religious courts handed the condemned over to the secular authorities in order to keep the church's hands clean, but in the modern world I suppose the New Inquisition would have to do the dirty work itself. I imagine a lot of people out there would object to this, but look at it this way: The executions would not only rid us of all these LARPING New Age feminists, but they would be good for the tourist economy wherever they took place:
"Executions were popular events. The largest had thousands of attendees, who often traveled many miles to see the deaths. Crowds were so large that the Inquisition would sometimes erect bleachers, so that everyone could see and hear." (Summerland)
Bring back the medieval witch hunts. It's just a suggestion.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Archeology News, Christianity, Commentary, Culture, Current Affairs, Medieval, Paganism, Religion, Videos | Permalink