Sunday, May 05, 2013

WHY YOUR PARENTS hate YOU

Do our parents and grandparents hate Pagans because Hitler loved them??

You bet, says historian Malcolm Gaskill:  

"…the Nazis … endorsed Pagan ideals to highlight the church’s oppression of authentic volkish [folk] culture.”

All of which, says Malcolm, soured the postwar generation on all things Pagan -- including the notion that witches might have been benign people smacked with a smear campaign.

The idea that witches might have been cool dudettes and dudes was actually popular in the 19th century.  For example, the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874)  “repackaged” witches “as protorevolutionary heroines battling feudal oppression.”

However, warns Gaskill, scholars who think everyone tried for witchcraft was innocent of wrongdoing, are currently way out of style.


(from Witchcraft:  A Short Introduction.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Gaskill, Malcolm.  2010, pp. 101; 116).
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This radically fab image was done by Susan Sedon Boulet.  Bless you for all you've done for us, Susan.