Persecution: Ancient And Modern by Julia Phillips - Traveling within the World2024-03-28T09:05:10Zhttps://travelingwithintheworld.ning.com/forum/topics/persecution-ancient-and-modern-by?groupUrl=salemwitchtrials&commentId=2185477%3AComment%3A169628&x=1&feed=yes&xn_auth=noWe could look too at McCarthy…tag:travelingwithintheworld.ning.com,2012-03-18:2185477:Comment:1696282012-03-18T19:09:24.349ZDept of PMM Artists & thingshttps://travelingwithintheworld.ning.com/profile/Artistsandthings
<p>We could look too at McCarthy, whose fame for persecution was such that his name is now used to describe "the use of unsupported accusations for any purpose". It is no accident that his activities were referred to as a "witch hunt", nor that Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials, "The Crucible", was more a comment about McCarthyism than a comment about 17th century American life.…</p>
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<p>We could look too at McCarthy, whose fame for persecution was such that his name is now used to describe "the use of unsupported accusations for any purpose". It is no accident that his activities were referred to as a "witch hunt", nor that Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials, "The Crucible", was more a comment about McCarthyism than a comment about 17th century American life.</p>
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<dd><div class="description" id="desc_3809961Comment265372"><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>In 20th century Australia we are heirs to a European history, which maintains that witches are servants of the devil, and should be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity. In some States these laws actually remain upon the Statute Books; in others, the legal machinery has been removed, but often public opinion hovers around the middle ages, believing that the only good witch is a dead witch.</p>
<p>Our latter-day inquisitors play upon these fears, in much the same way as Matthew Hopkins played upon the fears of the people during the Civil War. Christian Fundamentalists have no hesitation in using every dirty trick in the book to ensure that public opinion remains opposed to witchcraft. If this means that some of them have to stand up and say: "Yes, I was a witch: I sacrificed my babies to the devil, and copulated with a goat; I took part in drunken orgies, and drank the blood of the sacrifice"; but then I found Jesus, and was born again, and now I'm a really nice person; well so be it. Some of them are so psychiatrically unbalanced they may even believe it themselves.</p>
<p>Listen to a sample of the claims made by Audrey Harper, who achieved notoriety in Britain as an ex-HPS of a Witches' Coven. This extract is from an article by Aries, which appeared in Web of Wyrd #5:</p>
<p>Sent to a Dr. Barnado's home by her mother, she grew up with deprivation and social stigma. In time she becomes a WRAF, falls in love, gets pregnant, boyfriend dies, she turns to booze, gives up her baby and becomes homeless. Wandering to Piccadilly Circus she meets some Flower Children with the killer weed, and her descent into Hell is assured. By day she gets stoned and eats junk food; by night she sleeps in squats and doorways. Along comes Molly; the whore with a heart of gold who teaches Audrey the art of street walking. She flirts with shoplifting, gets into pills, and then gets talent spotted and invited to a Chelsea party, where wealth, power and tasteful decor are dangled as bait. At the next party she is hooked by the "group", which meets "every month in Virginia Water". She agrees to go to the next meeting which is to be held at Hallowe'en.</p>
<p>Inside the dark Temple lit by black candles and full of "A heady, sickly sweet smell from burning incense", she is "initiated" by the "warlock", whose "face was deathly pale and skeletal...his eyes...were dark and sunken" and whose "breath and body seemed to exude a strange smell, a little like stale alcohol." She signs herself over to Satan with her own blood on a parchment scroll, whereupon a baby is produced, its throat cut, and the blood drank. Following this she gets dumped on the "altar" and screwed as the "sacrifice of the White Virgin". The meeting finishes with a little ritual cursing and she's left to wander "home" in the dark.</p>
<p>Her life falls into a steady routine of meetings in Virginia Water, getting screwed by the "warlock", drug abuse, petty crime, and recruiting runaways for parties, where the drinks are spiked -"probably with LSD" - and candles injected with heroin release "stupefying fumes into the air"; the object being sex kicks and pornography. She falls pregnant again, gets committed to a psychiatric hospital, has the baby, and gives it away convinced that the "warlock" would sacrifice it. Things then become a confusion of Church desecration, drug addiction, ritual abuse, psychiatric hospital, and falling in with Christian folk who try vainly to save her soul. For rather vague reasons the "coven" decide to drop her from the team, and she dedicates herself to a true junkie's lifestyle with a steady round of overdosing, jaundice, and detoxification units. The "warlock" drops by to threaten her, and she makes her way north via some psychiatric hospitals to a Christian Rehabilitation farm. She gets married, has a child which she keeps, and becomes a regular churchgoer. But beneath the surface are recurring nightmares, insane anger and murderous feelings towards her brethren. At the Emanuel Pentecostal Church in Stourport she asks the Minister, Roy Davies, for help. He prays, and God tells him that she was involved with witchcraft. An exorcism has her born again, cleansed of her sin. She gets baptized and has no more nightmares, becoming a generally nicer person. She becomes the "occult expert" of the Reachout Trust and Evangelical Alliance, and makes a career out of telling an edited version of her tale.</p>
<p>Geoffrey Dickens MP persuades her to tell all on live TV; "Audrey, to your knowledge is child sacrifice still going on?" To this she replies, "To my knowledge, yes." After this the whole thing rambles into an untidy conclusion of self-congratulation, self-promotion, and self-justification; and for a grand finale pulls out a list of horrendous child abuse, which is shamelessly exploited in typically journalistic fashion, and by the usual fallacious arguments which links it to anything "occult"; help-lines, astro predictions in newspapers, and even New Age festivals.</p>
<p>And so we are left with a horrifying vision of hordes of Satanists swarming the country, buggering kids, sacrificing babies, and feeding their own feces to the flock."</p>
<p>Whilst all this seems incredible to any rational person, unfortunately, in the age old tradition, it confirms the worst fears of the man and woman in the street, and so they swallow it whole. After all, it was on telly, so it MUST be true!</p>
<p>As a direct result of people like Audrey Harper publicizing their lies and fantasy, children in England and Scotland were forcibly removed from their homes, and subjected to the type of questioning that we had previously believed had died out at the end of the Middle Ages.</p>
<p>A consultant clinical psychologist scrutinized the interview transcripts and audio records of the recent Orkney child abuse case, and in her summing up said: "[the Social Workers] told the children they knew things had happened to them and were generally leading all the way. When the children denied things, the questions were continually put until the children got hungry and gave them the answers they wanted."</p>
<p>Who says that torture is no longer legal in the British Isles?</p>
<p>The father of four of the children who were taken into care said: "At first I thought the allegations were laughable, but I found out how serious the police were...". Just to remind you of the words of Gilles de Rais some 500 years ago: [the accusations] are frivolous and lack credit...".</p>
<p>One 11 year-old described being asked to draw a circle of ritualistic dancers. He said: "They got me to draw by saying, 'I am not a drawer. Can you draw that?' It was meant to be a ring with children around and a minister in the middle wearing a black robe and a crook to pull children in."</p>
<p>The boy said he had been promised treats such as a lesson on how a helicopter worked if he cooperated, and was told that he could go if he gave one name. How remarkably similar to medieval witch trials, where the victims were always pressed to name their accomplices - for is it not said, "thou canst not be a witch alone?"!</p>
<p>In 1990, journalist Rosie Waterhouse commenting upon the Manchester child abuse case said: "After three months of questioning by the NSPCC, strange stories began to come out and other children were named. The way the children began telling "Satanic" tales in this case is remarkably similar to the way such stories first surfaced in Nottingham. As "The Independent on Sunday" revealed last week (23/9/90), the Nottingham children began talking about witches, monsters, babies and blood only after they had been encouraged, by an NSPCC social worker, to play with toys which included witches' costumes, monsters, toy babies, and a syringe for extracting blood."</p>
<p>Believe it or not, the parents of these children had no access to them whatsoever. Why? Because our modern, scientifically trained, 20th century social workers believed that, "[the parents] would try to silence the children, using secret Satanic symbols or trigger words".</p>
<p>By March 1991, senior Police spokesmen were publicly claiming that "police have no evidence of ritual or satanic abuse inflicted on children anywhere in England or Wales". Scotland has a different legal system, which is why it was not included in the statement - not because the police have evidence there, for they do not.</p>
<p>When the Rochdale case finally came to court, after the children had been in care (sic!) for about 16 months, the judge delivered a damning indictment upon those who were responsible for it, and said: "the way the children had been removed from their parents was particularly upsetting." He saw a video of the removal of one girl from her home during a dawn raid, and commented that, "It is obvious from the video tape that the girl is not merely frightened but greatly distressed at being removed from home. The sobbing and distraught girl can be seen. It is one of my most abiding memories of this case."</p>
<p>Let us return briefly to Salem, where, in 1710, William Good petitioned for damages in respect of the trial and execution of his wife Sarah, and the imprisonment of his daughter, Dorothy, "a child of four or five years old, [who] being chained in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrified that she hath ever since been very chargeable, having little or no reason to govern herself.".</p>
<p>Today's Christian Fundamentalist, like his vicious and self-righteous predecessors, will use anything in his or her power-including innocent children - to destroy the evils of Paganism and the occult. Sometimes I wonder if we are becoming paranoid, or the subjects of a persecution complex, but in writing this lecture it was brought home to me more strongly than ever before: the witch trials of the Middle Ages are not a bloody stain on the history of Christianity; they are the source from where today's fundamentalists draw their power, and are just as terrifying today as they were hundreds of years ago. Bigotry and persecution have changed in only one respect: 20th century mankind has far more efficient and effective means of spreading lies and propaganda than was available to our ancestors.</p>
<p>Appendix A</p>
<p>The subject of the European Witch Trials has been written about ad infinitum (and nauseam!), and there are a great many useful books which the student will find of interest. There follows a short bibliography of those to which I referred when writing this lecture.</p>
<p>Select Bibliography</p>
<p>Bradford, Sarah Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times (1981)<br/> Cohn, Norman Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (1975)<br/> Ginzburg, Carlo Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (1990)<br/> Hole, Christina Witchcraft in England (1977)<br/> Howard, Michael The Occult Conspiracy: Secret Societies--Their Influence and Power in World History (1989)<br/> Kieckheffer, Richard European Witch Trials (1976)<br/> Larner, Christina Enemies of God: The Witch Hunt in Scotland (1981)<br/> Larner, Christina Witchcraft and Religion (1985)<br/> Maple, Eric The Complete Book of Witchcraft and Demonology (1966)<br/> Radford, Kenneth Fire Burn (1989)<br/> Ravensdale & Morgan The Psychology of Witchcraft (1974)<br/> Robbins, Rossell Hope The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1984)<br/> Russell, Jeffrey A History of Witchcraft (1980)<br/> Scarre, Geoffrey Witchcraft and Magic in 16th and 17th century Europe (1987)<br/> Stenton, Sir Frank Anglo-Saxon England (1971)<br/> Summers, Montague (Trans) Malleus Maleficarum (1986)<br/> Thomas, Keith Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)<br/> Trevor-Roper, H R The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (1988)<br/> Walsh, Michael Roots of Christianity (1986)<br/> Worden, Blair (Ed) Stuart England (1986)<br/> Encyclopedia Britannica (1969 edition)<br/> Collins Dictionary of the English Language (1980)<br/> Newspapers: The Times, The Guardian, The Independent (Britain)</p>
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