#witch burnings

[balkanradfem]

Okay, I'm about to step on some toes, but hear me out; I need to do it. Okay? Good.

There's a lot of funny 'Girl what were you doing at devil's sacrament' jokes and memes, and isolated from context, it's very funny, I know it's funny, it's 'telling on yourself haha' because you had to be participating in a 'bad activity' in order to catch someone else who was also there.

However I know the original context, and it's less funny if you do. Why would a woman say she saw another woman at the Devil's Sacrament, incriminating both herself and another woman, who would both then get burned alive? I know why.

I'm going to take you back to my childhood, where I was reading every book I could get my little hands on, and one of these books was called 'Grička Vještica', or 'Grič's Witch'. These were fictional books set in the age of witch burnings, and the main character gets accused of being a witch. Even if the characters are fictional, the historical places, events and laws were real. The main characters ends up locked in a tower with the other accused 'witches', and there she finds women who were horrifically, unspeakably tortured. I won't go into what happened to them, but their limbs were ripped, their bodies shutting down from pain, they were begging for death. What happened to their bodies was described in detail, and to the child me, it was traumatic to hear about it, it created a heavy fear in my heart, that something like that could even happen, to any human being.

The books gave some insight of what was happening during the torture, and the torturers were leading these women to not only confess to their own 'witchraft' under torture, but to incriminate other women. And if they wouldn't, the torture would get worse and worse. And human beings break after a certain point of torture. They'll do and say anything. They had already confessed to being witches under torture, and now they were facing more torture + death by burning, or just to die in fire without further mutilation, if they talk.

Torturers usually already had their minds set on a certain woman they wanted to incriminate; women with medical skills, money, estate, land, women who wronged them, rejected them, who had rejected or angered their friends, whose houses or land they wanted to claim, widows, unmarried women, anyone they wanted to eject from society, whose assets they wanted to harvest. All they needed to do was brutally torture (and often, sexually torture) the women in front of them, until they were willing to say 'Yes, okay, I saw her at the devil's sacrament' and they could have whatever they wanted.

It was done under the worst agony the human being could experience.

So whenever I read one of the memes, that's what I remember, because I know how it happened. For it to be used in feminist jokes... we could find another funny instance to use? What were you doing at the furry convention? Or something like that, that doesn't reference women being tortured. We could reference something silly and non-consequential. I mean, I hope we would want to.

I'm sorry to ruin your jokes! I feel like the women from the past wouldn't love us using that either, and they're not around, so I have to speak up for them.

[anonymousdandelion]

The Second-to-Last Witch Burning in England

400 words

The woman had not been a witch, but the Army had found her anyway. They had been quite thorough, evidently, in the ways that only an enraged mob could be thorough, and their efforts had been successful… although even if they had failed at eliciting a coerced confession, she doubted it would have made any difference to the woman’s fate in the end.

It was time, Agnes thought with a grit-teeth grimness usually reserved for her darkest prognostications, someone put a stop to all this.

Read here!

[geezerwench]

A friendly reminder of what happens when politics are controlled by religion.

[spite-and-waffles]

Joss Whedon is a prick, but this one story from Tales of The Slayers (2002) has been haunting me since I first read it years ago.

Tw: witch-burning, religious extremism, misogynistic violence

(Image descriptions included in alt text)

(Contd in reblog)

[the-lichemaster]

Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir (1974)

[prussiansuggestions]

Experiencing general discomfort? Your cattle has fallen ill? Blame your evil-eyed female neighbour

[balkanradfem]

a man with magical powers? wow he must be just and fair we shall name him god and worship him. woman with magic powers? must be evil. good excuse to torture and burn her. 

[balkanradfem]

(this is a post about witch trials, tw for mentions of torture of women)

I wanted to make a recommendation for Nancy Drew games, there’s a new game which just came out and it’s happening in Salem, and related to the witch trials! I was looking forward to it for years, because I adore witches and Nancy Drew both, and every game in the series contains a lot of historical info, and I was eager to have a game, made specifically for women, to give me extra info, since I already knew a lot about witch trials.

However this game ...sucked.  It was a shock that they changed everything from the old Nancy Drew games, which were all high quality games, and made a game that is too frustrating to go thru. I did go and look around the game for the information of the witch trials, but it’s all wrong. I don’t mean factually wrong, but the way information is presented is insulting. They’re talking of “hysteria” and presenting it as it was the masses of people responsible for this, as if it was the fear of magic, fear of witches that overcame people and they were helpless to do anything but burn women. That is not true. Nobody goes and tortures and burns women out of fear. Nobody believed these women were in any way powerful, or evil. If they did, they would never put their hand on them, never put themselves in danger of becoming the next victim. The witch trials were conducted with the intention and conscious desire to torture and kill women. And it’s men who did it, not people. Men were turning in women who as much as refused to sleep with them, they were accusing their wives when they wanted to have a relationship with a lover, even their daughters who were a “burden”. 

I don’t understand why the witch trials aren’t remembered as a great atrocity and mass murder, and instead are talked about as if it was “oops mass hysteria guess you can’t blame anyone for what happened”. Witch trials should be remembered as massive sin against womankind. When I was a kid there was a series of popular novels based on the witch trials in my country, with the main character being a girl accused of witchcraft, and it goes almost in details about what happened to her. I was there at 8 years old, reading about women whose bones were all broken, whose bodies were mutilated and tortured to the point where they were begging to be burned, as it would be a relief from living in tortured body they had. Even thinking about it makes me sick and overwhelmed. Men did this to women who have done nothing wrong.

Anyway, I hoped for better from the Nancy Drew games because, in the past games, they’ve been very defending of historical women, there’s a game about Marie Antoinette where they ended all the lies about her and shown her in a positive light, and entire mystery was about her. I thought maybe, they would take a step from male-written historical nonsense and actually represent female point of view. I’m disappointed with the new game, even though all older games are absolutely lovely and charming and I adore each and every one.