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.
Comment: I've written a lot of scathing posts about these mobs of so-called pagans who swarm all over Stonehenge for the equinoxes and solstices, but I'm too apathetic this year to crank out another long screed mocking them for their improvised rituals, costumes, drum circles, and all the other New Age anachronisms they indulge themselves in during these gatherings. What the hell. I guess they're not doing any harm as long as they don't completely trash out the site like they've done in the past. (More here.) After all, Stonehenge may have been, among other things, an ancient cemetery.
These winter-solstice events should include feasts, however. According to English Heritage, "[t]he winter solstice may have been more important than the summer solstice for the people who built and used Stonehenge. Excavations at Durrington Walls suggest that people held huge feasts around this time of year."
The events should probably include sacrifices as well, both animal and human, though the evidence for sacrificial rituals at Stonehenge is apparently still kind of sketchy. According to The Daily Mail (2015), "animal sacrifice, feasting, dancing, and religious rituals" were conducted on the Salisbury Plain around the monument, and National Geographic reported in 2009 that "evidence that Druids possibly committed cannibalism and ritual human sacrifice—perhaps on a massive scale—add weight to ancient Roman accounts of Druidic savagery."
According to Caesar, "the Gauls are extremely superstitious; and so persons suffering from serious diseases, as well as those who are exposed to the perils of battle, offer, or vow to offer, human sacrifices, for the performance of which they employ Druids. They believe that the only way of saving a man's life is to propitiate the god's wrath by rendering another life in its place, and they have regular state sacrifices of the same kind." -- Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul [VI.16].
Modern neopagans are too civilized for that kind of thing, however, which is the main reason they can never be real pagans. I have a feeling that most of the people in these gatherings would run away screaming if they ever found themselves in the presence of the ancient gods of Stonehenge.
Both Julius Caesar and Strabo recorded instances of human sacrifice conducted by the Celts and Druids.
According to Strabo, "the Romans put a stop [to the customs] connected with sacrifice and divination, as they were in conflict with our own ways: for example, they [the Celts] would strike a man who had been consecrated for sacrifice in the back with a sword, and make prophecies based on his death-spasms; and they would not sacrifice without the presence of the Druids. Other kinds of human sacrifices have been reported as well: some men they would shoot dead with arrows and impale in the temples; or they would construct a huge figure of straw and wood, and having thrown cattle and all manner of wild animals and humans into it, they would make a burnt offering of the whole thing..." Source: Celtic Studies Resources.
Caesar reported that "those [the Gauls] who are greatly affected by diseases and in the dangers of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow to do so using the Druids as administrators to these sacrifices, since it is judged that unless for a man’s life a man’s life is given back, the will of the immortal gods cannot be placated." (Ibid) Caesar also described how the Celts would burn human sacrifices in giant wicker effigies, the apparent origin of the Wicker Man legend. Whether this actually happened or not is a matter of debate. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he main evidence for this practice is one sentence in Julius Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic war, which modern scholarship has linked to an earlier writer, Poseidonius."
Christmas is a classic example of how the early church Christianized the pagan West by taking over its traditions.
"The Christian ecclesiastical calendar contains many remnants of pre-Christian festivals. Christmas includes elements of the Roman feast of the Saturnalia and the birthday of Mithra. The Chronography of 354 AD contains early evidence of the celebration on December 25 of a Christian liturgical feast of the birth of Jesus. This was in Rome, while in Eastern Christianity the birth of Jesus was already celebrated in connection with the Epiphany on January 6." Source: Wikipedia.
Christmas traditions have deep roots in the ancient pagan world. Take the Christmas tree, for instance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the Devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmastime. It survived further in the custom, also observed in Germany, of placing a Yule (1) tree at an entrance or inside the house during the midwinter holidays."
(1) "... the word Yule has several suggested origins from the Old English word, geõla, the Old Norse word jõl, a pagan festival celebrated at the winter solstice, or the Anglo-Saxon word for the festival of the Winter Solstice, 'Iul' meaning 'wheel'. In old almanacs Yule was represented by the symbol of a wheel, conveying the idea of the year turning like a wheel, The Great Wheel of the Zodiac, The Wheel of Life. The spokes of the wheel, were the old festivals of the year, the solstices and equinoxes. " Source: The White Goddess
In Rome, the period of the winter solstice brought the seven days of the Saturnalia. "Saturn’s great festival, the Saturnalia, became the most popular of Roman festivals, and its influence is still felt in the celebration of Christmas and the Western world’s New Year." (Encyclopedia Britannica).
"The Saturnalia was the most popular holiday of the Roman year," according to the University of Chicago. Catullus describes it as 'the best of days' ... and Seneca complains that the 'whole mob has let itself go in pleasures" ... Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated ... It was an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts, particularly wax candles ... perhaps to signify the returning light after the solstice, and sigillaria."
Everything in Rome came to a stop during the Saturnalia, a festival of licentiousness and role reversals, among other things. According to History Extra, "We say that during Christmas today the whole world shuts down – the same thing happened during the Saturnalia. There were sometimes plots to overthrow the government, because people were distracted – the famous conspirator Cataline had planned to murder the Senate and set the city on fire during the holiday, but his plan was uncovered and stopped by Cicero in 63 BC."
Some Christians see the Saturnalia (and, by extension, Christmas itself) as satanic, which isn't too surprising since Christianity demonized all of the old pagan gods while simultaneously hijacking many of their traditions for their own purposes. In one case, that of Mithra (Mithras) -- the early church's main competitor -- the Christians may have appropriated a pagan god so completely that some have argued that Christ is Mithra in another form.
The identification of Mithra's birthday with Christmas is sketchy. While many sources claim that the god was born on Dec. 25, other sources say that this isn't true and the story seems to be a much later invention. For instance, according to Wikipedia, "It is often stated that Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25. But Beck states that this is not the case. In fact he calls this assertion 'that hoariest of 'facts'. He continues: 'In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in the Calendar of Philocalus. Invictus is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian's sun god. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too.'"
Mithra was said to have been born from a rock (in one version of the story) According to The Mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont (p 131), "the tradition ran that the 'Generative Rock,' of which a standing image was worshiped in the temples, had given birth to Mithra on the banks of a river, under the shade of a sacred tree, and that shepherds alone, ensconced in a neighboring mountain, had witnessed the miracle of his entrance into the world." Like the story of Jesus's birth, the presence of shepherds in the fields suggests that Mithra was born in the spring or summer, not in the dead of winter. Whatever the case, however, the Jesus/Mithra connection is persistent in popular culture:
One interesting fact about Mithraism is that it appeared (in the Roman empire) around the same time that Christianity appeared and seems to have dropped out of sight around the same time that Nicene Christianity became the official state religion of Rome. "The Roman deity Mithras appears in the historical record in the late 1st century A.D., and disappears from it in the late 4th century A.D.," according to The Tertullian Project. It's tempting to see this as circumstantial evidence that Christianity evolved out of Mithraism, but the truth is that all forms of pagan religion began to fade out after the church consolidated its power in the 4th century. Besides, very little is actually known about the teachings of Mithraism, an "organization of cells," according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), whose beliefs have to be reconstructed mostly from inscriptions.
None of this really matters, though. Mithras probably wasn't born on Dec. 25, but then neither was Jesus so what difference does it make? The connections between Christmas, ancient Yuletide celebrations and the Roman Saturnalia are clear, so if you're a pagan you might as well go ahead and celebrate Mithra's birthday today as well. Of course, this assumes that you see Christmas as a religious holiday in the first place. A lot of people don't:
"Most Americans celebrate Christmas, but its importance to people as a religious event continues to wane, according to a new survey by Pew Research." (News & Observer, 2017).
"The poll found that while 90 percent of Americans celebrate Christmas, only 55 percent regard it as a religious holiday. Further, the survey found, a decreasing majority of Americans believe in the main elements of the Christmas story as told in the Bible: that Jesus was born of a virgin mother; that three magi came to visit, bearing gifts; that an angel announced the baby’s birth; and that the infant was cradled in a manger."
Christmas has become secularized and increasingly commercial, to say the least. The holiday has degenerated into a month-long orgy of rabid consumerism and mass insanity, a typical example of the decline of the modern world. (Video from 2018)
Personally I have mixed feelings about Christmas. I'm not a Christian, for one thing, and I can't stand what the holiday has become, but traditions are important, especially now that all of our western traditions are under relentless attack by the Cultural Marxists.
So Merry Christmas and if that offends you I couldn't care less.
"Witchcraft is thriving in the US, with an estimated 1.5 million Americans now identifying as witches - more than the total number of Presbyterians. As Christianity declines across the country, paganism [1] has swung to the mainstream, with witchcraft paraphernalia for sale on every high street and practises normalised across popular culture. In the past two years, it has also become darkly politicised." Source: The Telegraph.
[1] Modern witchcraft isn't real paganism, of course. It doesn't even come close. That's obvious when you look at who these witches are.
"...Witchcraft is powerful," according to Dakota Bracciale, a "29-year-old transgender/queer witch," because of the 'intersectionality of feminism, sexuality, gender, the fight for freedom, eschewing the patriarchy and having sort of a vitriolic response towards it'". I'm not quite sure what that means or what it has to do with witchcraft, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from somebody who recently tried to put a hex on Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
We've come a long way from the days of the witch Circe, who changed Odysseus's men into wild animals, and the river hag Jenny Greenteeth, who "would pull children or the elderly into the water and drown them," just for the fun of it, apparently. The ancient and medieval worlds had all sorts of fantastic witches, proper witches with dark powers, witches you could actually be scared of. All we have is Dakota Bracciale and a bunch of LARPing SJW types who prattle on about heterosexism and positive healing energies. That's a symptom of social decay right there.
Comment: The narrator was talking too quickly for me to catch the name of this particular Balkan vampire. Whoever he was, he definitely isn't the "earliest recorded vampire," unless the narrator meant that he's the earliest named vampire or the earliest vampire in the modern sense of the word, which could be true for all I know. Vampires have been around for thousands of years, but the picture of the vampire we have today is only a few centuries old and apparently originated in eastern Europe:
"The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia. Cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe." Source: Wikipedia.
The modern concept of the vampire appears to be based on very ancient legends which first appeared in the Near East thousands of years ago. I don't have any evidence for this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the legends could be traced all the way back to the Paleolithic.
"Among the elaborate and extensive demonology of Babylonia and Assyria the Vampire had a very prominent place. From the very earliest times Eastern races have always held that belief in the existence of dark and malignant powers, evil spirits and ghosts which is, we cannot doubt it, naturally implanted in the heart of man and which it remains for the ignorance and agnosticism of a later day to deny. The first inhabitants of Babylonia, the Sumerians, recognized three distinct classes of evil spirits, any one of whom was always ready to attack those who by any accident or negligence laid themselves open to these invasions." Source: The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, by Montague Summers, Chapter 4: "The Vampire In Assyria, the East and Some Ancient Countries."
"The most famous vampire is, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula, but those looking for a historical 'real' Dracula often cite Romanian prince Vlad Tepes (1431-1476). Stoker may have modeled some aspects of his Dracula character on Vlad, but he probably just borrowed the name (Vlad Dracula). The characterization of Tepes as a vampire, however, is a distinctly Western one; in Romania, he is viewed not as a blood-drinking sadist but as a national hero who defended his empire from the Ottoman Turks." Source: Live Science (2014).
The legend of the vampire seems to have originated in the very ancient and widespread belief that "blood is life." It's no accident that blood sacrifice was also an integral part of ancient pagan rituals. According to Montague Summers (who believed that vampires are real), many cultures saw blood as a medicine. Several African tribes, for instance, treated the sick and dying by giving them human blood to drink. Blood has always been thought to have rejuvenating powers that could bring the shades of the dead back to a semblance of life. In the Odyssey, for example, when Odysseus enters Hades to learn how to get home, he makes a blood offering to the dead. The spirits have to drink the blood of his sacrifice before they can become substantial enough to talk to him.
Vampires, the Undead, are essentially dead bodies which require regular infusions of blood to maintain their strange existence and keep from decaying. They are physical manifestations of the occult power of blood to restore youth and vitality. The transformation of these bloodsucking corpses into sex symbols in the modern world is truly bizarre, but it obviously has something to do with the fact that the victims in vampire movies (and the female vampires) tend to be voluptuous women and the vampire attacks are usually presented as a kind of seduction.
Dracula does the job on Mina in stylish fashion.
The figure of the vampire is so fascinating that an entire Goth-style subculture of "real-life vampires" has emerged. These people claim to be actual vampires and the most extreme of them have gone so far as to have fangs surgically implanted. Technically, I guess, this makes them part of the larger body-modification culture. Basically they're LARPING in a group fantasy world and most of them don't make very convincing vampires.
Many people still believe that vampires are real. For instance, the following news report (2012?) describes how a Serb village was living in fear of a local vampire, Sava Savanovic, believed to be loose in the countryside after the collapse of his ancestral home.
"'People are very worried. Everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else and possibly other victims is terrifying people,' Miodrag Vujetic, local municipal assembly member, told ABC News. 'We are all frightened.'" -- ABC News (2012). For more information, see The Bloody Truth About Serbia's Vampire.
It would be easy to make fun of these people and call them superstitious peasants, but that would be kind of hypocritical considering how superstitious Americans are. This is also a pretty religious country. Millions of Americans believe in the supernatural in one form or another. For instance, many Christians believe in demons and angels and spirits. They believe that Jesus raised the dead and came back from the dead himself, but they'd probably laugh at the idea of vampires or call them demons, which is pretty close to the definition in many ancient cultures. One way or another, if you believe in the supernatural that opens the door to all sorts of things, including vampires.
Note: It has been scientifically proven that Christopher Lee was the greatest Dracula of all time.
Finally, despite all the vampire novels that have been written since his time, Bram Stoker's Dracula is still the best. Written in 1897, this is Stoker's Gothic masterpiece, a fantastic product of the Victorian imagination. No modern novel even comes close.
Stonehenge "maintains its less explored, darker aspects, not least of which are the enigmatic burials scattered in and around this famous Neolithic monument. What can these burials, both cremation and inhumation, tell us about the rituals and activities that went on at Stonehenge more than four millennia ago?" Source: "The Stonehenge Burials," Ancient History Encyclopedia.
"...During the 20th century CE nearly 60 cremation burials were uncovered at Stonehenge, with perhaps a couple of hundred more remaining in unexcavated areas of the monument. Interestingly, the latest of these cremations has been radiocarbon dated to c. 2300 BCE, which illustrates that cremation was still being practiced at Stonehenge long after the bluestones and sarsens had been erected."
"In Stonehenge's early years, ancient people used it as a cemetery. In fact, excavations from 1919 to 1926 revealed the cremated remains of up to 58 people, 'making Stonehenge one of the largest Late Neolithic burial sites known in Britain..." Source: Live Science (2018).
"These cremated remains were discovered in the Aubrey Holes, a series of 56 pits at Stonehenge that were named in honor of the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey, who first wrote about them. All of the human remains were moved into Aubrey Hole 7, which was then re-excavated in 2008."
Comment: How accurate is this description of the origins of Halloween? It's hard to say. "The three main sources for Celtic religion are Romano-Celtic epigraphy and iconography, the comments of classical authors, and insular Celtic tradition as represented by recorded Irish and Welsh literature." Source: The Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD), 3rd ed, revised.
From what I can tell, most of what we know about Celtic mythology was written down during the medieval period. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he Celtic peoples who maintained either their political or linguistic identities (such as the Gaels in Ireland, and the Brittonic tribes of Great Britain) left vestigial remnants of their ancestral mythologies, put into written form during the Middle Ages." (Emphasis added)
The Roman conquest and the gradual conversion of the Celts to Christianity created a kind of syncretic muddle that makes it difficult to separate the facts of Celtic religious practices from the myths that grew up around them. The problem is "one of reconciling [the] very different modalites and frames of reference [of the different sources], and of matching insular myth to Romano-Celtic image." (OCD)
The picture we have of the Celts is also complicated by Roman war propaganda, the most famous example of which is Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. Caesar, for instance, described the practice of human sacrifice by the Druids, though he probably never witnessed such a sacrifice himself. Apparently, there's still some question about whether these sacrifices actually occurred and, if they did, who was responsible for carrying them out:
"How widespread human sacrifice was among the cultures that the druids served is another mystery," according to Live Science (2014). "It’s important to note that much of the writing that survives comes from Roman writers who could be hostile toward the druids and the cultures they served." Historical distortions, if not outright fabrications, could have easily crept into the descriptions of the Celts recorded by Christians hostile to pagan practices in general.
The bottom line, I guess, is that we don't really know if our standard history of the origin of Halloween is accurate or a mixture of truth and legend complicated by distortions introduced by later writers. The only thing certain is that the rituals practiced by modern "neopagans" probably don't have much to do with real pagan rituals and beliefs.
"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 you'd be hard pressed to find any modern equivalents of Wizard Whateley in The Dunwich Horror or the evil sorceress Queen Taramis in Conan the Destroyer. 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. pedaresty and Cultural Marxism, 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 little 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. (Firefox is giving me an Untrusted Certificate warning about this site, but it's probably OK.)
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 witches, 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.
"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)
Is It Possible To Live An Iron Age Life In The Modern World?
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.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Commentary, Medieval, Paganism, Prehistory, Videos | Permalink