Showing posts with label paganism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paganism. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Worth Reprinting

April 30 is Walpurgis Nacht; Night of the Witches which corresponds to Samhain; Halloween, October 31 as both days herald a major year changing festival.

Walpurgis heralds May Day, Samhain heralds All Saints Day.

They are opposite ends of the season. One is spring planting and the other is fall harvest.

And of course April 30 is the time the devil asks for his due; (from my blog post last year.)

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht


SEE

Paganism


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Thursday, February 14, 2008

Valentines Day Hour Of The Wolf

The ancient Roman orgiastic festival of Lupercalia, was transformed into St. Valentine by Christianity and then into Valentines Day by the English finally to become dominated by commercial American Greeting Card and Confectionery interests in the 19th Century.


The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility.
http://www.jonfoster.com/illustration%20images/illustration%20images1%20copy/lupercalia.gif

LUPERCAŹ¹LIA, one of the most ancient Roman festivals, which was celebrated every year in honour of Lupercus, the god of fertility. All the ceremonies with which it was held, and all we know of its history, shows that it was originally a shepherd-festival (Plut. Caes. 61). Hence its introduction at Rome was connected with the names of Romulus and Remus, the kings of shepherds. Greek writers and their followers among the Romans represent it as a festival of Pan, and ascribe its introduction to the Arcadian Evander. This misrepresentation arose partly from the desire of these writers to identify the Roman divinities with those of Greece, and partly from its rude and almost savage ceremonies, which certainly are a proof that the festival must have originated in the remotest antiquity. The festival was held every year, on the 15th of February,a in the Lupercal, where Romulus and Remus were said to have been nurtured by the she-wolf; the place contained an altar and a grove sacred to the god Lupercus (Aurel. Vict. de Orig. Gent. Rom. 22; Ovid. Fast. II.267). Here the Luperci assembled on the day of the Lupercalia, and sacrificed to the god goats and young dogs, which animals are remarkable for their strong sexual instinct, and thus were appropriate sacrifices to the god of fertility (Plut. Rom. 21; Servius ad Aen. VIII.343).b Two youths of noble birth were then led to the Luperci, and one of the latter touched their foreheads with a sword dipped in the blood of the victims; other Luperci immediately after wiped off the bloody spots with wool dipped in milk. Hereupon the two youths were obliged to break out into a shout of laughter. This ceremony was probably a symbolical purification of the shepherds. After the sacrifice was over, the Luperci partook of a meal, at which they were plentifully supplied with wine (Val. Max. II.2.9). They then cut the skins of the goats which they had sacrificed, into pieces; with some of which they covered parts of their body in imitation of the god Lupercus, who was represented half naked and half covered with goat-skin. The other pieces of the skins they cut into thongs, and holding them in their hands they ran through the streets of the city, touching or striking with them all persons whom they met in their way, and especially women, who even used to come forward voluntarily for the purpose, since they believed that this ceremony rendered them fruitful, and procured them an easy delivery in childbearing. This act of running about with thongs of goat-skin was a symbolic purification of the land, and that of touching persons a purification of men, for the words by which this act is designated are februare and lustrare (Ovid. Fast. II.31; Fest. s.v. Februarius). The goat-skin itself was called februum, the festive day dies februata, the month in which it occurred Februarius, and the god himself Februus.

http://www.greeklandscapes.com/images/athens_museum/DSC00839.jpg
Robert Esiner in his provocative study; Man into Wolf associates the Lupercalia leather eros and public S&M rituals with the modern phenomena of lycanthropy;werewolfism and vampirism. Which was brilliantly portrayed in the movie the Howling, one of the most under-valued cult werewolf films of the eighties.

MAN INTO WOLF 

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

OF SADISM, MASOCHISM, AND LYCANTHROPY

In analysing the basic factors leading to sadism and maso-
chism Dr. Eisler draws attention to what he describes as 'a feeble
sympathetic resonance', the lack of emotional response, the
insanity affecting altruistic feeling which forms so large a part
of the constitution some of us describe as the psychopathic per-
sonality. This, however, according to Eisler, is not simply a
throw-back to primeval savagery, for, as he shows, primitive
man in his primeval forest was not a killer but rather a peaceful
creature le bon sauvage. In confirmation of this fact the author
mentions numerous small tribes who have never as yet heard
of or encountered war. Killing and being killed has been a
developmental process whereby the carnivorous, predatory
packs, the ancestors of the hunting and game-seeking tribes,
have preyed on the vegetarian, frugivorous, peace-loving herds.
Eisler elaborates his theme by utilizing Jung's conception of
archetypal race memories. Such memories may be not only
ancestral, but may occur even in the sub-human animal strata



So this valentines day let your inner wolf out.

http://www.jayfife.com/images/art/werewolf.jpg

SEE:

A Little Eros For Valentine's Day


Passover Song




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Saturday, February 02, 2008

Imbolic

Today is groundhog day, which of course is of pagan origin , a North American replacement for the earlier celebration of the coming of spring, the Celtic festival of Imbolic dedicated to the goddess Bridget. It is also known as Candlemas.

Well's and caves are sacred to her as are serpents and so the idea that a ground hog would arise out of a cave to predict the end of winter seems to fit well with Bridget.


Happy Imbolc

Tonight and tomorrow is when most modern Pagans celebrate the fire festival of Imbolc sacred to the goddess Brigid, patroness of poets, healers, and smiths. Today is also the feast day of Saint Brigid of Ireland patron saint of poets, dairymaids, blacksmiths, healers, cattle, fugitives, Irish nuns, midwives, and new-born babies.


Some things attributed to Bridget:

* Deposed the blue-faced goddess of winter every spring
* Known for her generosity, a character transferred to St Bridget
* She is invoked during childbirth
* Her feast day is February 1st, Imbolc
* Bridget means “exalted one”
* Has a connection to the beginning of lactation in ewes
* In Irish myth, she became the midwife to the Virgin Mary,

Imbolc, like many other Celtic festivals, was originally several days long. As a result, some people celebrate it on Feb. 2 or even 3rd

Imbolc Lore
(February 2nd)

Imbolc, (pronounced "IM-bulk" or "EM-bowlk"), also called Oimealg, ("IM-mol'g), by the Druids, is the festival of the lactating sheep. It is derived from the Gaelic word "oimelc" which means "ewes milk". Herd animals have either given birth to the first offspring of the year or their wombs are swollen and the milk of life is flowing into their teats and udders. It is the time of Blessing of the seeds and consecration of agricultural tools. It marks the center point of the dark half of the year. It is the festival of the Maiden, for from this day to March 21st, it is her season to prepare for growth and renewal. Brighid's snake emerges from the womb of the Earth Mother to test the weather, (the origin of Ground Hog Day), and in many places the first Crocus flowers began to spring forth from the frozen earth.

And since Canada has been hit by massive winter storm and Pennsylvania has not then there are two predictions for today.

Canada's cherished groundhog weather forecasters have emerged from their heated, custom-built homes and predicted an early spring, capping a week of snowstorms and bitter cold that kept Canadians burrowed inside their own warm dens.

Neither Ontario's Wiarton Willie nor Nova Scotia's Shubenacadie Sam saw their shadows when roused by their handlers this morning, paving the way for an early spring.

Sam was the first to weigh in, waddling into the rain at the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park, an hour north of Halifax, on Saturday morning at sunrise. Willie emerged with his handlers shortly after 8 a.m. ET, and after being held up to face fans' flashbulbs, declared that he agreed with Sam on the winter issue.

However, it seems the country's revered rodents did not confer with their counterpart across the border before making their predictions, as Pennsylvania's Punxsutawney Phil indicated to thousands gathered at Gobbler's Knob to hunker down for six more weeks of chilly temperatures.

"Here ye, hear ye, hear ye," exclaimed William Cooper, President of Punxsutawney's Inner Circle, one of many members of the local groundhog club waiting to greet their muse in black trench coats and top hats. "After casting a withered eye on his followers ... (Phil has declared) 'a bright sky I see and a shadow beside me, six more weeks of winter I see.'"



And there is a scientific basis for groundhog day and its link to prestidigitation

The groundhogs hibernating in Professor Greg Florant's lab at Colorado State University won't see their shadows today.

Unlike Punxsutawney Phil, they won't help predict when spring will arrive because the seven groundhogs will be snoozing

Instead, the groundhogs hibernating in a 5-degree cold room on CSU's campus might help provide information about climate change.

Florant, a biology professor, is working with Professor Stam Zervanos at Pennsylvania State University to determine whether animal hibernation patterns are genetic or can be manipulated by environmental temperatures.

Last year Florant and Zervanos studied groundhogs in their native habitats in Maine, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Now they want to see what the animals will do in a lab environment.

Typically groundhogs in South Carolina hibernate for about two months. In Pennsylvania, it's about five months; and in Maine, it can be as much as seven months.

Florant's trying to discover whether the animals from the warmer climates will sleep longer in the colder temperatures. "Will they adjust and hibernate longer and deeper? Or will their genetics keep them from doing that?"

Global warming could potentially change the hibernation patterns of animals. If temperatures become warm enough, the animals might change their patterns, and that could affect their ability to survive.



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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Yezedi In America

I came across this interesting article on the Yezedi, ethnic Kurdish 'Satanists', in Nebraska. Yes Virginia there are ethnic Satanists in America. But not the kind you think. They don't refer to themselves as Satanists. And in fact they are an earlier tradition of the Gnostic religions of the region.

The Yezedi of Lincoln, Nebraska

Avishay Artsy

When you come up to the north side of a grey duplex, it looks like any other home in this working-class Lincoln neighborhood.

But step inside, and you find men with beards and mustaches sitting cross-legged on pillows and smoking cigarettes. Kawil Hassan offers me a steaming cup of sweet Iraqi tea. He's the unofficial leader of the Yezidi community here, and right now they're all getting ready to celebrate their big holiday.

The Yezidis call their God Ezid, and this week's holiday is also called Ezid. Yezidis say it's to remember when Ezid appeared to them as a bright light in the sky, around 6,000 years ago. That places the founding of their religion well before the Judeo-Christian tradition. This year, Ezid starts at three a.m. on Tuesday with an early meal, followed by a short nap. Kawil's daughter Layla says they won't eat or drink again until sundown.

"We get up around seven a.m., before the sun comes out, and wash our face and pray, she explains, as her father recites the prayer in Kurdish.

Kawil recites the names of the seven angels and their leader, the Peacock Angel. For three days, the Yezidis will fast and pray, asking for forgiveness and for peace. They haven't seen much of the latter. The Yezidis are a religious minority in a rough part of the world, and they keep count of all the times they've been invaded throughout history. Things didn't get any better under Saddam Hussein. Around the time Layla was born, 19 years ago, her father and several other Yezidi men were rounded up by Iraqi police. They put Kawil Hassan in prison for 45 days. There, he says he was beaten, shocked with electrified cables and immersed headfirst in ice-cold water.

"They thought that we were too religious, too connected to our religion, and they would find any excuse to take us, Layla says.

When the first Gulf War broke out two years later, Saddam Hussein began forcing Yezidi men to join his army. Kawil decided to make a run for it. He and his family hid in caves until they could make it across the border into Syria. They lived there for seven years, in a United Nations refugee camp. Layla remembers it well.

"They brought us blankets and they would help us, but still, we didn't have a future… The bread that they brought us was full of bugs and stuff, she says.

They didn't forget their religion and traditions. They still fasted for three days on Ezid.
On the fourth day, Layla and the other children would sing, and dance, and collect candy from the other Yezidis.

"I would get up early in the morning, take one of the bags that we'd get from the store, and visit every camp that was in the village, and I would visit it and ask for candy, she recalls.

Layla's family made it to the U.S. in 1998. But their problems didn't go away. It's hard for them to explain their religious restrictions to people in Lincoln. They don't wear the color blue, because they believe it offends God. They don't eat lettuce. And on the rare occasion their religion makes the news, it's because of something horrible. On one day last August, suicide bombers killed about 300 Yezidis in northwest Iraq. Kawil Hassan watched the coverage on TV and says it was like reliving a nightmare.


Then I came across this comment in another post on the Yezedi. Which helps explain the popular misconception that they are 'Satanists'.
Mr. Beamish the Instablepundit said...

I was at my father's house surfing through his dead tree collection (his library) and I came across a book called Jadoo (1957) an autobiographical work by paranormal researcher John Keel (of Mothman Prophecies fame) and one chapter in that book is entitled "An invitation from the Devil" and is about time he spent among the Yezedi in Iraq.

According to Keel, the Yezedi are highly secretive and will not openly talk about their religion - devil worship - but from glimpses he gathered of it, it is primarily motivated by fear. The Yezedi do believe in God, but do not worship him, having the belief that God is supremely benevolent so no harm can come from not worshipping him. The Devil, on the other hand, being evil, must be kept sated or bad things will happen. They even forbid spitting on the ground to keep from offending Satan, who to them lives underground.

Strangely enough, Keel reported that the Yezedi he encountered all wanted him to stress to others that they were a peaceful people that just wanted to be left alone, that "Satan would take care of them."

It's a interesting read, I hope you can find the book in a library or online somewhere.


That and references by Anton LaVey to them in his Satanic Bible which may have been influenced by John Keel's book Jadoo. Much like tales of Zombies in Haiti were influenced by journalist and occultist William Seabrook's; Magic Island.

As a distant religious belief, many non-Yazidi people have written about them, and ascribed facts to their beliefs that have dubious historical validity. For example, horror writer H. P. Lovecraft made a reference to "... the Yezidi clan of devil-worshippers" in his short story "The Horror at Red Hook". The Yezidis have also been claimed as an influence on Aleister Crowley's Thelema. More notably, Anton Lavey drew upon the Yezidis for his own philosophy, LaVeyan Satanism, (e.g. The Law of the Trapezoid) in the "Satanic Bible" and "Satanic Rituals". In addition; The Order of the Peacock Angel, an obscure secret society based in the London suburb of Putney loosely based its rites on Yezidi beliefs as well.

in The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey refers to the Yazidi as "a sect of Devil worshippers", and interprets their beliefs as follows:

They believe that God is all-powerful, but also all-forgiving, and so accordingly feel that it is the Devil whom they must please, as he is the one who rules their lives while here on earth.




Keel was apparently followed in the footsteps of P.B. Randolph who also got a mysterious invitation from the Sheik Baba, of the Yezedi to learn of their ways. Unlike Randolph who was an accomplished magickian and occultist, Keel was an accomplished stage magician and skeptic who from his experiences became a believer in the paranormal.


The Yezedi's creation mythos sounds strikingly familiar perhaps because their deity Malek Taus has been mistaken for the Fallen Angel of Judaeo-Christian-Isalmic mythology.

No one knows exactly how many Yezedis are left in the world though it’s estimated that 100,000 live here in northwestern Iraq, along the Sinjar Mountains.

The Yezedis are an insular people who have their own customs. They never wear the color blue or eat lettuce.

They have kept their religion alive through oral history and have falsely come to be known as devil worshippers because they are followers of the fallen angel, Lucifer.

The Yezedis, however, believe Lucifer was forgiven by God and returned to heaven. They call him Malek Taus (the peacock king) and pray to him. They do not ever use the word “Satan.”



Yezidi Creation Legend

The Yezidi (Yazidi) cosmology and religion is non-dual. They thus acknowledge an inactive, static and transcendental God who created, or "became", Seven Great Angels, the leader of which was Tawsi Melek, the Peacock "King" or Peacock "Angel".

Leading up to the creation of the cosmos, many Yezidis believe that the Supreme God was originally "over the seas", a notion reminiscent of the Biblical passage: "And the Spirit of God (as seven Elohim) moved upon the face of the waters." While playing with a white pearl, state the Yezidis, their Supreme God cast it into this cosmic sea. The pearl was broken and served as the substance from which the Earth and other planets and stars came into being.

The Supreme God then created or manifested a vehicle for completing the creation of the universe. This was the first and greatest angel, Tawsi Melek, the Peacock Angel. Since Tawsi Melek embodied the power and wisdom of the Supreme God he was easily able to know and carry out His bidding. Six more Great Angels were then created to assist Tawsi Melek in his work.

Soon after the Earth was created it began to shake violently. Tawsi Melek was then dispatched to Earth to stop the planet's quaking, as well as to endow it with beauty and abundance. When Tawsi Melek descended to Earth, he assumed the form of a glorious peacock - a bird full of the seven primary and secondary colors. Landing in a place now known as Lalish, Tawsi Melek transferred his peacock colors to the Earth and endowed it with a rich flora and fauna.

Tawsi Melek then traveled to the Garden of Eden to meet Adam. The first human had been created without a soul, so Tawsi Melek blew the breath of life into him. He then turned Adam towards the Sun, symbol of the Supreme Creator, while stating that there was something greater than a human being and it should be worshipped regularly. Tawsi Melek then chanted a prayer for all humanity to daily repeat to the Creator, and he did so in the 72 languages that were going to be eventually spoken by the 72 countries and races that were destined to cover the Earth.

Then Eve was created. But according to the Yezidis before copulating the primal couple enrolled in a kind of competition to see if either of either of them could bring forth progeny independent of the other. They both stored their seed in a sealed jar and then after an incubation period opened them. Eve's jar was opened and found to be full of insects and vermin, while inside Adam's jar was a beautiful boy-child. This lovely child, known as Shehid bin Jer, “Son of Jar,” grew quickly, married, and had offspring. His descendants are the Yezidis. Thus, the Yezidis regard themselves descendants of Adam but not Eve.

Shehid bin Jer inherited the divine wisdom that Tawsi Melek had taught his father Adam and then passed it down to his offspring, the earliest Yezidis. It is this wisdom that has become the foundation of the Yezidi religion.

And they are getting more recognition because of articles like this.


Armenia’s Yezidis in Geographical

yezidi 0001

Yezidis, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998

My feature article and photographs for Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, were meant to be published in the January 2008 edition, but now it looks like it’s already been published in the December issue. Unfortunately, the full text of the article is not available online yet, but when it is I’ll post another link and an excerpt. Until then, this is what Geographical has for now.

A people divided

Armenia’s Yezidi people practise one of the purest versions of Kurdish culture, but, as Onnik Krikorian discovers, outside forces have riven the small community.

My last published article on Yezidis in Armenia was for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and can be read online here, and many of the transcripts of the interviews I’ve done since 1998 are here. Also, until the full Geographical article can be read online, there’s plenty of posts and links to previous articles on Yezidis in Armenia and Georgia under the relevant category.


Because of America's invasion of Iraq the world now hears more about the plight of the Kurds and the Yezedi in particular not only in Iraq but in Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Iran, etc. Unfortunately for them they are not only a persecuted ethnic minority, but a persecuted religious minority and a politically persecuted one as well as many Yezedi villages support the PKK. Which are now under attack by Turkish forces.


"The syncretic volatility of the region has only been enhanced (as
has our knowledge of these groups) by the ethnic, political and
military tensions that have waxed and waned after the "Great Game"
and most especially since the Gulf War, which brought far more
contact with the Yezidi as a result of Saddam Hussein's Kurdish
purges. Furthermore, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) has
garnered both support and antagonism from various sectors of the
Yezidi community, and many Yezidi Kurds fled the Turkish - Iraqi
border to Germany where they have their own online and print
magazine [12] - as well as a World Conference [13] to discuss the
intricacies of their metaphysics and social structure. As more
details emerge about their religious history, we may find that
cross-pollination will occur back into the western Hermetic
tradition and its own angelick cultus."
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id1340/pg1/

also
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id1340/pg1/
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id985/pg1/


SEE:

The Yezedi

Satan Made Him Do It

Bulgarian Women Abused

My Favorite Muslim

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani

Antinominalist Anarchism

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

Heresy

Gnosis

Gnostic

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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Merry (Ukrainian) Christmas

Well it is actually Orthodox Christmas according to the old Julian calendar. But across Canada we know it as Ukrainian Christmas. And don't be confused today is Christmas. Last night was Christmas Eve, which is why we Ukrainians celebrated with a twelve course vegetarian meal. Today we celebrate with pepto bismal.


Yuriy Davydovo, a visitor from Ukraine and a guest of Portage la Prairie’s Achtemichuk family, lights a candle before a supper among family and friends that includes a 12-course meal that is a holiday tradition. The Achtemichuks hosted two families from Ukraine at their home in Portage and sang carols yesterday on the Ukrainian Christmas Eve, which falls on Jan. 6, according to the Julian calendar.




SEE

UKRAINITZKI RIZDVO

Merry Ukrainian Christmas


Yes Colby Cosh there is such a thing as Ukrainian Christmas


Christmas


Pagan

Ukraine


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Friday, December 21, 2007

Fiat Lux


Let There Be Light

The winter solstice — what many refer to as the shortest day of the year — arrives on Friday at 11:08 p.m. Of course, the day still has the same amount of time but the amount of daylight is at its least. Sunrise on the solstice is at 8:10 a.m. and the sun sets at 4:36

It is the longest night of the year but it has been celebrated by humans since the beginning as the rebirth of the sun. It fills this season with that most ancient human aspiration; hope.

SEE

Happy Solstice

Tannenbaum

Keeping the 'X' in X-MAS

The Monument Builders

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Sunday, December 02, 2007

Gay Old Communists

I found this terrific graphic at one of my anarchist pal's blogs; Kehlkopfmikrofon . It visually reveals the sinister link between the Gay Agenda and the Communist Agenda to undermine faith, family and the American way. Say it ain't so.

Russians in love.

"Thank you comrade for rescuing me from Nazism."





















And don't forget them commies were once America's friends during WWII.



















Which of course was an embarrassment at the end of the war so they created a witch hunt to purge commies from America.

After all as we all know in Uncle Joe's Russia then and still today, just like in Bonapartist Iran, there are no gays just happy peasants and the Glorious Soldiers of the Red Army.

Just like there were no Gay men or women in America until they were discovered after WWII.


Before
Joseph McCarthy began his witch hunt began against commies in the U.S. State department he began with a witch hunt on homosexuals.

And of course homosexuals did not exist in America before they were publicly outed post WWII by McCarthy's HUAC. Because his witch hunt began before Kinsey published his studies on American Sexuality.

In fact thanks to HUAC's witch hunts the commies were some of the folks who then were active in creating the first Male Homosexual Society to fight for their rights; The Mattachine Society.

Like dear departed Harry Hay. Who was not only a communist but a Wobbly and a Pagan.

You can't hardly separate homosexuals from subversives ... A man of low morality is a menace to the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together. —Senator Wherry in New York Post, 1950 It may come as a surprise that the gay movement not only began in the 1950s, but that its founders were former communists and radicals. Harry Hay, who wrote the first call for a gay movement in 1948, had been a party member for 20 years, active in labor organizing and cultural work. The fact that these organizers had already spent most of their lives outside the mainstream no doubt prepared them for the risks involved in forming a gay organization. The modern gay movement in America began in Los Angeles, a city that symbolized the mobile, affluent lifestyle of Americans after the War. The Mattachine Foundation (to be distinguished from the post-1953 Mattachine Society) was formed in the winter of 1950 by a group of seven gay men gathered together by Hay. The name refers to the medieval Mattachines, troupes of men who traveled from village to village, taking up the cause of social justice in their ballads and dramas. By sharing and analyzing their personal experience as gay men, the Mattachine founders radically redefined the meaning of being gay and devised a comprehensive program for cultural and political liberation.

In 1951, Mattachine began sponsoring discussion groups. Years before women's “consciousness-raising groups,” Mattachine provided lesbians and gay men a similar opportunity to share openly, for the first time, their feelings and experiences.



So in effect the so called 'Gay Agenda' would never had come about if it weren't for Americas Uncle Joe, and his rabid anti-commie aide, Roy Cohn who was gay. Proving again that homophobia is created by self hate and denial. The Right Wing created the modern gay movement thanks to their need to repress freedom. Ironic eh?

Cohn confers with Senator McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

Cohn confers with Senator McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

In 1952 Joseph McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn as the chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. Cohn had been recommended by Edgar Hoover, who had been impressed by his involvement in the prosecution of the Rosenburgs. Soon after Cohn was appointed, he recruited his best friend, David Schine, to become his chief consultant.

For some time opponents of McCarthy had been accumulating evidence concerning his homosexual relationships. Rumours began to circulate that Cohn and David Schine were having a sexual relationship. Although well-known by political journalists, it did not become public until Hank Greenspun published an article in the Las Vagas Sun in 25th October, 1952.



And of course these folks who fought for Gay Rights in those dark days coincidentally came from the Left Coast, home to the Beats and the rising Youth Culture that would create a new American 'Counter Culture' in the Sixties. Influenced as they were by Kinsey and the rediscovery of earlier American Radicalism that the post war social amnesia of the Witch Hunts had failed to suppress.

The Daughters of Bilitis /bÉŖ’li:tis/ (DOB), considered to be the first lesbian rights organization in the United States, was formed in San Francisco, California in 1955. The group was conceived as a social alternative to lesbian bars, which were considered illegal and thus subject to raids and police harassment. It lasted for fourteen years and became a tool of education for lesbians, gay men, researchers, and mental health professionals.

As the DOB gained members, their focus shifted to providing support to women who were afraid to come out, by educating them about their rights and their history. Historian Lillian Faderman declared, "Its very establishment in the midst of witch-hunts and police harassment was an act of courage, since members always had to fear that they were under attack, not because of what they did, but merely because of who they were."

Daughters of Bilitis (D.O.B.) was founded in San Francisco, California in 1955. The name of the group comes from the book Song of Bilitis by French author Pierre Louy, which contains love poems between women. In 1955, the group only had eight members. In the years to come, the group grew considerably. D.O.B. provided a place for lesbians to meet outside the bars, documented their lives, and promoted civil rights. One of their most significant achievements was a national newsletter for lesbians, titled The Ladder. They soon started other U.S. chapters, and even one in Australia. D.O.B. held their first national convention in San Francisco in 1960.

For a time, Daughters of Bilitis and The Mattachine Society joined together in "Common Cause". Some women even wrote for Mattachine's ONE Magazine. As the women's movement began to grow in the U.S., it became apparent that the men of Mattachine showed little desire to champion women's issues. At the same time, the women's movement was not particularly welcoming. The National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) was afraid that lesbian involvement would only bring further hostility from the media and a male dominated world. They called lesbians "the lavender menace" and sought to eject them from the movement.



Revisionist history continues today in America in Tom Brokaw's new book on the Sixties that overlooks the importance of the Mattachine Society and the Lesbian; Daughters of Bilitis Society and the rise of the Gay Rights Movement. .

BOOM! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today shares Brokaw's perspectives and personal accounts of 1960s issues including Vietnam and the civil rights movement.

One glaring Boomer-era omission, however, was the gay rights movement. Brokaw, on a recent CNN appearance, says that the gay rights movement "came later," and he didn't intend to slight the movement by not including it.

While the impact of the movement was marked notably in the late 1960s by the Stonewall riots, its momentum and progress were due in no small part to the work of Dr. Frank Kameny, who has written a letter to Brokaw and representatives of Random House Publishing Group.

"I write with no little indignation at the total absence of any slightest allusion to the gay movement for civil equality in your book 'Boom! Voices of the Sixties'. Your book simply deletes the momentous events of that decade which led to the vastly altered and improved status of gays in our culture today."

Ralph, a man approaching his eighties and one of my regulars at the CafĆ©, had a good chuckle when I told him about my research for this story. He said "I can answer that easily. The way we met in the old days was the three B’s: Balconies, Bushes and Baths; those are all gone now." Ralph stumbled into the gay scene in the ’50s by accident; he loved watching movies, especially John Wayne westerns. He was surprised by the number of people that would congregate in the dark balconies of the theaters. Then, when someone sat right next to him in an empty row he caught on. After that, Ralph became an avid moviegoer since that was the easiest way for him to meet other men.

Camille, in his 80s, spoke about the baths in New York City. He has a fondness for that era in the mid-’60s because "it provided a sanctuary where we could truly be ourselves. It was more than a place for sex, it was our entire social outlet. We could talk openly there but we couldn’t associate with one another in the real world. It was also a pure time, before AIDS entered the gay scene and changed everything."

Some men, especially those who grew up in rural areas, also spoke about "the bushes." Tom, a colleague in the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, described growing up queer in Ohio in the early sixties as "not fun and very lonely." He heard rumors about the city park and that became the only means he could connect with other gay men. He said it was very dangerous and he was assaulted there once.

Clearly not all men met through sexual encounters back then. Some, like Jim, 74, sought out a socio-political gathering of gay men known as the Mattachine Society. He felt that finding the courage to attend that meeting was the only way to meet other men like himself.

The next generation of men I spoke with, the men who came out in the ’70s and ’80s, had new means available: personal ads and the bars. Although gay bars have been in existence for ages, people felt safer to venture out and frequent them, given the end of police raids thanks to Stonewall and the emerging gay rights movement.
Even today America hides the truth about the history of the Gay Rights movement because it is not just the history of the counter culture but reveals that mass movements are the direct result of the Right Wing Political Agenda to suppress freedom. This is the dialectic in action. As Michael Focualt points out in his History of Sexuality; suppress human rights around sexuality and you create movements for human rights for sexual freedom.

Foucault argues that we generally read the history of sexuality
since the 18th century in terms of what Foucault calls the "repressive hypothesis." The repressive hypothesis supposes that since the rise of the bourgeoisie, any expenditure of energy on purely pleasurable activities has been frowned upon. As a result, sex has been treated as a private, practical affair that only properly takes place between a husband and a wife. Sex outside these confines is not simply prohibited, but repressed. That is, there is not simply an effort to prevent extra-marital sex, but also an effort to make it unspeakable and unthinkable. Discourse on sexuality is confined to marriage.
That repression is something the right wing in Canada, America, Israel, Russia and Iran share in common to this day. And the fight for freedom is always counter to that agenda. Which is why the fight for gay rights is the fight for human rights.


The history of the world is none other than
the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
-George Hegel, 1821




SEE

War On Satan the Sodomite

Out Of The Hogwarts Broom Closet

Ezra Says Gay Bashers Are Muslims

Outing BP

Procreation To Save The White Race

Marx on Bigamy

Polygamy is NOT Polyamoury

The Sanctity of Marriage Debate

Whose Family Values?



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Saturday, December 01, 2007

B-Day

I got a reminder notice today from the nice folks at Blog.ca.

Happy Birthday plawiuk,

today is your birthday and we wish you a day filled with your favourite things, with sunshine and laughter and lots of good cheer.

How about writing something about your birthday in your blog? Your friends and the blog.ca community will certainly be glad to hear about how you have experienced this special day.

Just log in http://www.blog.ca/login.php to write a post on your blog to your friends or to the whole blog.ca community .

We wish you all the best and are looking forward to seeing you again soon.

Your blog.ca-team

As if I would forget. And since they asked me to post about my birthday well shucks who could resist. Here is my post..... from last year; Today In History.

Modest ain't I.


And here are two versions of Beatles doing Happy Birthday. I like the second one best. Both are rockin'. The original Happy Birthday song was called Good Morning To You.


Happy Birthday - The Beatles






Birthday by the Beatles
From The White Album


,


Unfortunately these guys forgot about me;

December 1
Birthdays in History - December 1 Deaths - December 1 Events
And I didn't make the news like these folks.

Today in 1982 Michael Jackson released his autobiographical video;
" I am not like other guys' Narrated by the great Vincent Price. It created the culture of mass music videos.

And of course Birthdays are a pagan celebration.

Birthday

It is thought the large-scale celebration of birthdays in Europe began with the cult of Mithras, which originated in Persia but was spread by soldiers throughout the Roman Empire. Such celebrations were uncommon previously so practices from other contexts such as the Saturnalia were adapted for birthdays. Because many Roman soldiers took to Mithraism, it had a wide distribution and influence throughout the empire until it was supplanted by Christianity. The Jewish perspective on birthday celebrations is disputed by various rabbis.

Celebration of birthdays is not universal. Some people prefer name day celebrations, and Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate either, considering their origins to be pagan festivals along with Christmas and Easter

And I have that statue of Mithras at home...coincidence? I think not.

Also 'coincidentally' Mithras shares the same birthday as Jesus, as does Krishna and Horus. Since it is the Sun's Birthday.

They are after all Sun Gods.

The image “http://images.ctv.ca/archives/CTVNews/img2/20060815/160_AIDS_060815.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

And don't forget today is World AIDS Day. I noticed a lot of Harpocrites were not wearing their red ribbons this week neither in the house or while doing interviews on Mike Duffy.

Hmmm.....I guess for them it is still a Gay Disease,

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, chats with Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay as he makes a defence spending announcement onboard HMCS Halifax in Halifax on Thursday July 5, 2007. (CP PHOTO, Andrew Vaughan)

despite evidence to the contrary.

Harper also can focus more attention on AIDS in Canada, where more than 62,000 people are living with HIV/AIDS. New infections are often among young people, especially girls 15 to 19 years old.

But at least one Cabinet Minister was wearing his Red Ribbon...why am I not surprised?

Environment Minister John Baird


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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Witch of Edmonton

Happy Halloween. Tis Samhain and for this day of the dead, the Celtic New Year, I found this treat. The Witch of Edmonton a play from 1621.

Not Edmonton, Alberta nor Edmonton, Kentucky, but Edmonton, a suburb of London, England. But Edmonton none the less.

It is quite a popular post-Shakespearian play, which is still produced today, and no less than Sir Laurence Olivia produced a version starring Alec Guinness.

It is a drama about a real contemporaneous witch trial which had more to do with bigamy, murder and the shifting social and moral changes occurring in the transition from agrarian feudalism to the development of capitalism in England than it had to with witchcraft. A poor old woman was hung for the crime committed by another. And this play takes a sympathetic view of her plight, while exposing the real crime behind the charges of witchcraft. As a popular drama it told a story that revealed much about the social change occurring under the surface of English society of the day.


http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/edmonton2.gif


Some call me witch,

And being ignorant of my self, they go

About to teach me how to be one; urging,

That my bad tongue (by their bad language made so)

Forespeaks* their cattle, cloth bewitch their corn

Themselves, their servants, and their babes at nurse.

This they enforce upon me; and in part

Make me to credit it.

*makes prophesies or predictions against

'The Witch of Edmonton," a poem written in 1621



HTML etext of "The Witch of Edmonton" (1621, pub. 1658) by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, William Rowley, et al., was created in July 2006 by Anniina Jokinen of Luminarium. The text is unaltered. Source text:
Dekker, Thomas and John Ford. "The Witch of Edmonton."
Thomas Dekker. Ernest Rhys, Ed.
London: T. Fisher Unwin, nd c1900. 390-

The Witches in Macbeth: Their Social and Theatrical Context


Witchcraft was a live issue in the early reign of James I. Even before he ascended the throne, he believed he had been the subject of a plot by three Scottish witches to shipwreck him by stirring up storms, which was related in the sensational pamphlet News From Scotland, Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of Dr. Fian (1591) Witches appeared in pamphlets based on famous trials, rather like the modern tabloid press, which took a high moral tone of disgust at the depravity and sin which they were forced to relate in such lascivious detail.

Learned books were also published on the subject such as A Discourse of the Subtle Practices of Devils (1587) and King James’ own Demonology (1597). Though some of these works expressed scepticism as to the more lurid claims made about witches, like Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584, banned under the witch enthusiastic James I), they agreed that the spiritual world was a source of danger and the devil sought to do harm to ordinary people.

Witches on the stage, however, tended to be regarded less seriously. Jonson’s The Masque of Queens (1609) included a dance of witches as a prelude to the appearance of the queens, and a later comparison can be made with Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), whose singing witches seem to be mostly concerned with elaborate musical cackling. When William Davenant revived Macbeth in 1667, he used the witches as an opportunity for a mid-air song and dance sequence.

Of course, we cannot tell exactly how serious or comic these passages would have been in production, but (aside from The Witch of Edmonton, 1658) there don’t seem to be any witch characters in Renaissance drama with either the psychological complexity or demonic drive to be found in roles like Iago or Lady Macbeth. Their appearance in dances and masquing suggests that their role was more as symbols than characters. It is also worth bearing in mind that the witch scenes in Macbeth, particularly the parade of kings they summon up for Macbeth, may have been at least partially intended to please James I, who claimed to be descended from Banquo and was therefore a member of the glorious royal line the witches foretell.

Macbeth, King James and the Witches

Despite all the discussion of 'wierd - weyard sisters' these are simply standard English witches - 'old, lame, bleare-eied, fowle, and full of wrinkles... Lean and deformed', as Reginald Scot (Bk.I,iii) says; or consider the Mother Sawyer in The Witch of Edmonton who is described as poor, deform'd, and ignorant/ And like a bow buckl'd and bent etogether' [II.i.3-4]. By contrast the Scots witches described by the experienced King James could be 'rich and worldly-wise, some of them fatte or corpulent in their bodies',[20] no doubt thinking of Barbara Napier and Euphame McCalzeane, wives of Edinburgh burgesses.

While Holinshed leaves open the question of who or what the weird sisters are[5], Shakespeare brings them on stage with thunder and lightning. It was standard thinking that storms were associated with witchcraft, and conversely the entry of the witches provided an excuse for getting the play started with an attention-getting special effect.[6]. The status of the weird sisters is reinforced by:

FIRST WITCH: I come, Graymalkin
SECOND WITCH: Paddock calls [I.i.8-9]

– by which the audience would at once understand that these are witches, since the cat ('Graymalkin'[7] ) and the toad ('Paddock') were frequently to be found as familiars in witchtrials in England. These familiar spirits or 'imps', demons in the form of pet animals, were not of central importance in the witchcraft traditions of Scotland or the Continent at the beginning of the 17th century,[8] but they were almost the defining characteristic of English witches. As a reward for serving the witch, familiars were allowed to suck blood from a special nipple hidden somewhere on the witch's body, the 'devil's teat'. In the Witch of Edmonton Mother Sawyer has a familiar spirit in the form of a dog, to which she turns with:

SAWYER:: Comfort me: thou shalt have the teat anon.
DOG: Bow wow: I'll have it now.
SAWYER I am dried up / With cursing and with madness; and have yet
No blood to moisten these sweet lips of thine: [IV.i.151-4]




The Witch of Edmonton is an English Jacobean play, written by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford in 1621.

The play—"probably the most sophisticated treatment of domestic tragedy in the whole of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama"—is based on supposedly real-life events that took place in the village of Edmonton, outside London, earlier in the year. The play depicts Elizabeth Sawyer, an old woman shunned by her neighbours, who gets revenge by selling her soul to the Devil, who appears to her in the shape of a black dog called Tom. In addition, there are two subplots. One depicts a bigamist who murders his second wife at the devil's prompting, and the other depicts a clownish yokel who befriends the devil-dog.

The Witch of Edmonton

By William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford

The multi-authored text "The Witch of Edmonton" has received considerable attention recently both from scholars and critics interested in witchcraft practices and also from the directors in the theatre. The play, based on a sensational witchcraft trial of 1621, presents Mother Sawyer and her local community in the grip of a witch-mania reflecting popular belief and superstition of the time. This edition offers a thorough reconsideration of the text, comprehensive notes and glossary, together with a complete transcription of the original pamphlet by Henry Goodcole, "The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, A Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death (1621)," which the dramatists used as a source.

The Witch of Edmonton
New Mermaids
by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, William Rowley
Edited by Arthur F. Kinney

It is a historical phenomenon that while thousands of women were being burnt as witches in early modern Europe, the English — although there were a few celebrated trials and executions, one of which the play dramatises — were not widely infected by the witch-craze. The stage seems to have provided an outlet for anxieties about witchcraft, as well as an opportunity for public analysis. The Witch of Edmonton (1621) manifests this fundamentally reasonable attitude, with Dekker insisting on justice for the poor and oppressed, Ford providing psychological character studies, and Rowley the clowning. The village community of Edmonton feels threatened by two misfits, Old Mother Sawyer, who has turned to the devil to aid her against her unfeeling neighbours, and Frank, who refuses to marry the woman of his father’s choice and ends up murdering her. This edition shows how the play generates sympathy for both and how contemporaries would have responded to its presentation of village life and witchcraft.

Jacobean tragedians



John Ford
Because of his disdain of the orthodox moral code of his time and his sympathetic treatment of forbidden love, John Ford is often regarded as the most modern of Elizabethan and Stuart dramatists. He was baptized at Ilsington in Devonshire, April 17, 1586, was probably the John Ford who entered Exeter College, Oxford, in March, 1601, and was certainly the John Ford who was admitted to the Middle Temple in November 1602. He first appeared in print with Fame's Memorial (1606), a long elegy on the death of the Earl of Devonshire, and he published other occasional pieces before he finally commited himself to a dramatic career. His first venture in dramatic work may well have been in the writing or revising of A Bad Beginning Makes a Good Ending, which was acted by the King's Men at court in 1612 or 1613, and which was one of the four unprinted plays of Ford that were destroyed by Warburton's cook. His career as a playwright definitely begins, however, in 1621, when he joined with Thomas Dekker and William Rowley in the composition of The Witch of Edmonton. He collaborated with Dekker in several other plays and with Webster in at least one. After about 1624, however, he seems to have worked alone, and his reputation rests chiefly upon his three unaided tragedies of forbidden love, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, The Broken Heart, and Love's Sacrifice.

If Massinger, among the Elizabethan dramatists, be peculiarly the poet of moral dignity and tenderness, John Ford must be called the great painter of unhappy love. This passion, viewed under all its aspects, has furnished the almost exclusive subject matter of his plays. He was born in 1586, and died in 1639; and does not appear to have been a professional writer, but to have followed the employment of the law.

He began his dramatic career by joining with Dekker in the production of the touching tragedy of The Witch of Edmonton, in which popular superstitions are skilfully combined with a deeply-touching story of love and treachery; and the works attributed to him are not numerous. Besides the above piece he wrote the tragedies of The Brother and Sister, The Broken Heart (beyond all comparison his most powerful work, a graceful historical drama on the subject of Perkin Warbeck), and the following romantic or tragi-comic pieces: The Lover's Melancholy, Love's Sacrifice, The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, and The Lady's Trial.



Thomas Dekker

Thomas Dekker the dramatist--there are records of several contemporaries with this name--was born in London about 1570, but no details of his family relations or of his education are known. The first record of his work is a payment to him in January, 1598, as a member of Henslowe's group of dramatists. For the next six years he was actively engaged in playwriting, chiefly under Henslowe, first for the Admiral's men and later for Worcester's, and he continued to write plays sporadically during the remainder of a comparitively long life. From early in the seventeenth century, however, he devoted most of his time to the composition of prose pamphlets, which are among the best records of London life in his day. The most important are The Bellman of London (1608) and The Gull's Hornbook (1609). In spite of his prolific literary output, Dekker lived a life of hardship as a result of debt. He borrowed money of Henslowe in 1598 to secure his release from prison, and in 1619 he had been in prison some years. He may have been the Thomas Dekker who was buried in 1632; he was certainly dead by 1640 or 1641.

In spite of the poverty, imprisonment, and other embittering experiences he suffered (or, who knows, perhaps because of them), Dekker’s plays are noted for a sweetness of outlook and a sympathy of understanding that is difficult to match outside of Shakespeare’s happiest work. As Parrot and Ball say of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, “It would be hard to find another Elizabethan play where the background of contemporary life gives so strong a sense of atmosphere, an atmosphere of Old and Merry England at its jolliest” (A Short View of Elizabethan Drama [New York: Scribners, 1943], 109).

Even in that later, darker work, The Witch of Edmonton, Dekker’s compassion shines. The play was based on a contemporary trial, just as The Shoemaker’s Holiday drew material from recent Protestant wars; and Mother Sawyer, its title character, like some convicted witches, emerges as a rebel. As Jeffrey Burton Russel says, “Witchcraft was . . . the strongest possible religious expression of social discontent” (Witchcraft in the Middle Ages [Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1972], 266).

Significantly, many critics now judge one of Dekker's greatest strengths to be his versatile prose style, which, as demonstrated in his pamphlets as well as his plays, is capable of both dignified formality and lively colloquialism. Recent commentary has increasingly examined Dekker's drama in the context of his overall literary output, with many critics finding a consistent moral view expressed throughout his work. Other modern scholars have challenged the notion that Dekker's plays are poorly integrated, citing thematic patterns, unified plots, consistency of characterization, and other evidence of Dekker's craftsmanship. With such studies has come a heightened appreciation of Dekker as an artist who, as Larry S. Champion has asserted, “genuinely deserves a considerably higher place in the development and maturation of Elizabethan-Jacobean-Caroline drama than most previous critics have been willing to acknowledge.”

William Rowley

English actor and dramatist, collaborator with several of the dramatists of the Elizabethan period, especially with Thomas Middleton. He is not to be identified with "Master Rowley, once a rare scholar of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge", whom Francis Meres described in his Palladis Tamia as one of the "best for comedy." The only Rowley at Pembroke Hall at the period was Ralph Rowley, afterwards rector of Chelmsford. William Rowley is described as the chief comedian in the Prince of Wales's company, and it was doubtless during the two years' union (1614-16) of these players with the Lady Elizabeth's company that he was brought into contact with Middleton.



The Witch of Edmonton, Enter the Spirit Productions at the Southwark Playhouse, London, 7th November – 2nd December, 2000


The absence of a detailed context has important consequences for the play’s representation of witchcraft and devils. The play is appealing to modern audiences partly because of its sympathetic representation of Mother Sawyer, and its apparent understanding of the scapegoating phenomenon that modern social historians have observed in witchcraft accusations. But these materialist implications of the story are of course undermined when the Devil appears, and when Mother Sawyer becomes a real witch. Jacobean audiences may have seen no contradictions here, but in a modern production, played to an audience for whom devils are fictional, the entrance of the Dog risks trivialising the play’s serious issues and diminishing its power to disturb. One solution might be to present the Dog as purely symbolic, an emblem of the social and psychological evils at the root of the Edmonton community. Alternatively, Kyle’s production represented the Dog as a real, independent creature, but drew the audience into a solidly realised religious culture. Rituals, hymns, and suggestions of Puritanism created a powerful vision of a society in genuine fear of devils; and Miles Anderson’s frightening performance as the Dog enabled the audience to share the villagers’ beliefs, rather than dismiss them.

The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century ... - Google Books Result

Throughout history the figure of the witch has embodied both male nightmare and female fantasy. While early modern women used belief and ritual to express and manage powerful feelings, the symbols and images surrounding the witch in the New World largely distorted the European views of Native American religions. In our own era, groups as diverse as women writers, academic historians and radical feminists have found in the witch a figure who justifies and defines their own identities. And there are many in the 1990s who still call themselves witches. br br From colonial narratives to court records and from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, b /b b i The Witch in History /i /b b /b shows how the witch has acted and continues to embody the fears, desires and fantasies of women and men.


The Domestic Tragedy of Frank Thorney in The Witch of Edmonton
Leonora Leet Brodwin
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 7, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1967), pp. 311-328

Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship - Google Books

The Gentleman's Magazine, 1820-Google Books

The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations
by Diane Purkiss. 296 pgs.

8 The all-singing, all-dancing plays of the Jacobean witch-vogue: The Masque of Queens, Macbeth, The Witch
9 Testimony and truth: The Witch of Edmonton and The Witches of Lancashire


The Witch of Edmonton


Thomas Dekker
(1621 - 1658)

Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University

Domain: Literature. Genre: Play. Country: England, Britain, Europe.

The Witch of Edmonton, a collaborative piece by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley, was first acted in 1621 (there is a record of a performance at Court on 29 December of that year), though not published until 1658. When first acted, it was a topical play, for Elizabeth Sawyer, the real-life model of the eponymous witch, had been executed on 19 April 1621. The play draws heavily on a pamphlet by Henry Goodcole, The wonderful discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, Witch (1621), but takes a rather different attitude. Goodcole's witch is simply a bad woman, who has no particular need to seek magical aid since she has a husband to support her and a family. The Sawyer of the play, however, is a poor, lonely, and unfairly ostracised old woman, who does not turn to witchcraft until after she has already been unjustly accused of it, when she no longer has anything to lose. Her only friend is her familiar, the talking dog Tom (performed by a human actor). In any case she does not achieve very much, since so many of those around her are only too willing to sell their souls to the devil all by themselves.


The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Chapter VIII

FAMILIARS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

The witch of Edmonton, Elizabeth Sawyer, in 1621, said: 'It is eight yeares since our first acquaintance, and three times in the weeke, the Diuell would come and see mee; he would come sometimes in the morning, and sometimes in the evening. Alwayes in the shape of a dogge, and of two collars, sometimes of blacke and .sometimes of white. I gaue him leaue to sucke of my bloud, the which hee asked of me. When he came barking to mee he then had done the inischiefe that I did bid him to doe for me. I did call the Diuell by the name of Tom. I did stroake him on the backe, and then he would becke vnto me, and wagge his tayle as being therewith contented.' Margaret Johnson, another Lancashire witch in 1633, 'alsoe saith, yt when her devill did come to sucke her pappe, hee usually came to her, in ye liknes of a cat, sometymes of one colour, and sometymes on (sic) an other. And yt since this trouble befell her, her spirit hath left her, and shee never sawe him since.'

God of the Witches

There were other formulƦ to be used for healing or as prayer. The words were generally taught by the Devil himself to his disciples, as in the case of Elizabeth Sawyer, the witch of Edmonton, in 1621 "He, the Devil, taught me this prayer, Santibicetur nomen tuum". The Paternoster repeated in Latin was clearly regarded as a charm of great power, for we find Mother Waterhouse using it over her Familiar, "she said that when she would will him to do anything for her, she would say her Pater noster in Latin". In 1597 the name of the God was sometimes changed and the Christian Deity was invoked; Marion Grant, who was burnt for witchcraft cured sick cattle in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and she also charmed a sword by the same means. When crossing themselves the Basque witches in 1609 repeated a prayer, which greatly shocked the Inquisitor, who translates the words into French, "Au nom de Patrique Petrique d'Arragon, a cette heure, a cette heure, Valence, tout notre mal est passe", and "Au nom de Patrique Petrique d'Arragon, Janicot de Castille faites moi un baiser au derriere". De Lancre records that a man-witch at Rion "confessed that he had cured many persons of fever by merely saying these words Consummatum est, making the sign of the Cross, and making the patient say three times Pater noster and Ave Maria". Another man-witch who was sentenced to the galleys for life, said that he had such pity for the horses which the postilions galloped along the road, that he did something to prevent it, which was that he took vervain, and said over it the Paternoster five times and the Ave Maria five times, and then put it on the road, so that the horses should cease to run. Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne in 1662 gave the formula for transforming oneself into an animal. To become a hare, the witch said,

"I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,
And I shall go in the Divel's name,
Aye, till I come home again."

To revert to the human form, the witch repeated the words,

"Hare, hare, God send thee care.
I am in a hare's likeness just now,
But I shall be in a woman's likeness even now."

.
The Historiography of Witch-Hunting: Discipline of the Unruly on the Witch of Edmonton and Vinegar Tom by I-chun Wang. Tamkang Review: A Quarterly of Comparative Studies between the Chinese and Foreign Literatures, vol. 25 no. 3-4, Spring-Summer 1995, pp. 267-78.

Marks of a Witch

Many records of witch trials carried out in England, Scotland and New England are especially rich in their accounts of witch’s marks. Take an account from 1621 - Elizabeth Sawyer, the Witch of Edmonton was found to possess a “thing like a teat the bigness of the little finger, which was branched at the top like a teat, and seemed as though one had sucked it”. In another case Temperance Lloyd was hanged for witchcraft in 1682 at Exeter, she was searched by Ann Wakely who reported that: “Upon search of her said body, she, this informant, did find in her secret parts two teats hanging nigh together like unto a piece of flesh that a child had sucked. And that each of the said teats was about an inch in length (Howell, State Trails, 1816)”. In 1692 Bridget Bishop was examined during the Salem witches trials and: “a jury of women found a preternatural teat upon her body, but on a second search, within three or four hours, there was no such thing to be seen (Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693).

Journal for the Academic Study of Magic

JSM 3

Mary Hayes - Discovering the Witch’s Teat: Magical Practices, Medical Superstitions in The Witch of Edmonton


Montague Summers

Summers sincerely believed that witches deserved all the punishments they received, he also believed that the confessions of many witches tortured and persecuted, were not the products of hysteria and hallucinations as many would advocate, but to be in the main: "hideous and horrible fact”. He embraced every belief about the evils and vileness of witches, and in the introduction of his book “The History of Witchcraft and Demonology” he tells his readers:

“In the following pages I have endeavored to show the witch as she really was – an evil liver: a social pest and parasite: the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed: an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes: a member of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State: a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition: a charlatan and a quack sometimes: a bawd: an abortionist: the dark counselor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants: a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age".

Aside from writing about witchcraft, Summers also had a deal of knowledge and interest in the theatre, and the dramatists of his day. On one occasion in 1921, he combined his two interests and directed a revival of the seventeenth century play “The Witch of Edmonton”. It was staged at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith with the great Sybil Thorndike playing the part of the witch.



Early Modern Whale: The Early Modern Henry Root Letters

I must try to collect more examples of bewitched animals, for there is a rough sense of humour around these things: being supernaturally compelled to kiss your cow's backside appears in the pamphlets, and in 'The Witch of Edmonton'.





Wilson, Eric S.
(Honors: English, 1992)
  • Title: Weyward sisters: The Witch of Edmonton and the Rehearsals of witchcraft in early modern England
    Advisor: Coddon, Karin
Soiref, Etta (Ph.D.: English, 1953)
  • Title: The witch of Edmonton : a critical edition
    Advisor: Bradner, Leicester

Peter Elmer, ed. Challenges to Authority. The Renaissance in Europe, A Cultural Enquiry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xv + 418 pp. Illustrations, figures, maps, notes, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780300082203.

Challenges to Authority, begins in the sixteenth century and points toward the seventeenth. Three chapters examine the Reformation--chiefly the Protestant reformations. Anne Laurence treats the connection between Renaissance and Reformation in the first chapter and the spread of reform in the second. In the third, Laurence, Mateer, and Webb examine the representation of reform, focusing on ritual, iconoclasm, portraiture, and music. The fourth chapter, by Keith Whitlock, is a close reading of the picaresque tale Lazarillo de Tormes, examining it as humanist parody, social commentary, and anticlerical satire. In the fifth chapter, Elmer asks whether science had a Renaissance, drawing on recent social history of science for his answer. The sixth chapter, also by Elmer, turns to the "dark side," the occult sciences and witchcraft. This chapter provides the background for the seventh chapter, Brown's examination of The Witch of Edmonton, a tragicomic play about witchcraft. Lentin rounds out the volume, and the course, with a chapter on "Montaigne on Montaigne."

Renaissance Dualisms and Distinctions

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25-26 January 2008

Scott Stephen
“Tis all one / To be a witch as to be counted one”: genre, identity and the power of words in The Witch of Edmonton (1621).

The Witch of Edmonton by Dekker, Ford and Rowley (1621) provides two protagonists from different extremes of the social and gender hierarchy, within what Brodwin and Dawson have identified as its ‘Double-Plot’. In its close juxtaposition of two seemingly distinct dramatic forms, (the so-called ‘Domestic Tragedy’ of Frank Thorney and the ‘Witchcraft Drama’ of Elizabeth Sawyer) it interrogates generic classification alongside its portrayal of social injustice, and systems of societal and literary labelling are challenged concurrently. I demonstrate that, from the outset, the work examines the ways texts and words create and destroy the individual and their identity in a society which thrives on labelling ‘the other’ in relation to itself.

My argument is that the text undermines neat categorisation to such an extent that it actively highlights the question of its own identity as a generic type of drama, just as the witch Sawyer’s identity is constantly shifting and even fought over. Rather than simply opposing the two plots, (privileging the seemingly morally repentant Thorney over the resistant, defiant Sawyer) the play emphasises their similarity. Fusing the plots together performatively, it creates a grey area between these oppositions - particularly with regards to the treatment of the female body as governed by the power of imposed, performed words. In this play between difference and similarity, I argue that the work finds its equivocal and distinctively performative voice. In doing so, it offers a complex non-dualistic notion of identity made possible by the foregrounding of the marginalised voice. Accordingly, the work propounds a re-imagining of how dramatic literature in particular functions as a site of contestation and potentiality, in which performance facilitates the emergence of new forms of understanding and classification.

Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England

Foreign Bodies, reading a wide range of little-known literary and medical texts, and linking these through analogy to Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and others, acutely reads the metaphors by which early modern people lived and made meaning out of their world. According to Harris, new medical paradigms in the Renaissance figured disease as the consequence of external malignity, not of internal humoral imbalance. Analogous to Paracelsus Philippus Aureolus 1493-1541.
German-Swiss alchemist and physician who introduced the concept of disease to medicine. He held that illness was the result of external agents attacking the body rather than imbalances within the body and advocated the use of chemicals against disease-causing agents.
' notions of protomicrobiological conception or disease as a malign, invading enemy, a toxic substance whose antidote could include homeopathic poison or purgatives, are discourses of social pathology which frame the "foreign bodies" that gave early modern writers focus for their political worries: Catholics, Jews, and witches. Looking to explain social problems inherent to the realm, writers posited instead that the threat was "outside" thus mystifying the relations of power. Dekker's Whore of Babylon (ca. 1606) offers Babylon as a grotesque inversion of Fairyland through whic h treason and loyalty are made indistinct because of uncertainty about the ways the body politic acquired disease as well as the appropriate cure. In another chapter, Harris beautifully reads the multiple and contradictory images of Jews in writers from Stubbes to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and thinks hard about the logic of assigning bodily locations for Jewish "penetration" and "infiltration" in a cluster of metaphors of anality a·nal·i·ty (-nl-t. Harris makes sense of the contradictions without reducing them to a simple Jew-as-other hypothesis. Taking up the figure of the witch, and reading Dekker, Ford, and William Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton, the final chapter shows how the orifice of the mouth, and the fetishistic search for control over female speech, may be linked to problems in Reformation theology, where the witch-fears embody the Reforming rupture between carnal and spiritual. Critical to his reading of Renaissance materials, moreover, is a challenge to the "ferishization of social integration and cohesion that is the hallmark of functionalist organicism.

1. The theory that all disease is associated with structural alterations of organs.
2. The theory that the total organization of an organism, rather than the functioning of individual organs, is the principal or exclusive determinant of every life process.
" (5) which Harris discerns in critics including Pierre Bourdieu and Stephen Greenblatt. His book powerfully theorizes the limitations of such an integrative model of the social as the body politic.

ASPECTS OF THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF OLD AGE

Elizabeth Sawyer, the witch of Edmonton, who was the very type depicted by popular belief " with body crooked. and deformed, even bending together"


Cheese gives you nightmares: Old Hags and heartburn - Focus on "the Nightmare"

Anne Armstrong's piece of cheese was also a way of appealing to be believed, marking her innocence of witchcraft. Cheese had long had a destiny-deciding role in distinguishing guilt from innocence in the bread and cheese ordeal or "holy morsel" (Motif H 232; Thomas 1971, 218). Only the innocent could swallow it, while it choked the guilty. As a symbol of the body of Christ, bread's role makes sense in an ordeal appealing to divine judgement; but there was less scriptural justification for the use of cheese in that context. Apuleius, however, shows that cheese had the power to choke and decide men's fates before the full establishment of Christianity, and there are very early references to the bread and cheese ordeal to detect a thief (Eckstein 1927-42, 4:1033-4). Anglo-Saxon law made provision for it and, although it fell from judicial use after 1215, it lingered in popular custom into the early modern period (Kittredge 1928, 238). In 1618, Jane Bulkeley distributed pieces of cheese to an assembled group in order to discover a thief (Thomas 1971, 220). In William Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton (Act 4 scene 1), the witch exclaims: "Let 'em eat cheese and choke" of her false accusers. The fatal power of ordealic cheese has left a linguistic trace in the expression "hard cheese" meaning "bad luck," which is exactly what a dry, old piece of "choke-dog" cheese would be if one's life depended on swallowing it. Bread and cheese signified men and women; united, they symbolised the family and community that decided fates by binding the innocent to the place where they belonged and had a voice, while separating the guilty outsider whose words were untrustworthy. Anne Armstrong swallowed it. In so doing, she demonstrated that her words could be trusted and that she belonged to the community of the living, not to the witches' alien world of deception and theft.

Maids, Wives and Widows: Multiple Meaning and Marriage in The Witch of Edmonton
Parergon - Volume 23, Number 2, 2006, pp. 73-95

Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.)

Helen Vella Bonavita - Maids, Wives and Widows: Multiple Meaning and Marriage in The Witch of Edmonton - Parergon 23:2 Parergon 23.2 (2006) 73-95 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Maids, Wives and Widows: Multiple Meaning and Marriage in The Witch of Edmonton Helen Vella Bonavita Department of English University of Wales, Lampeter Abstract In considering the multiple authorship and divergent plotlines of The Witch of Edmonton two main issues emerge. One is the relationship between Elizabeth Sawyer and the other women of the play, particularly Winnifride, while another issue which provides thematic coherence despite its apparent diversity is the use of ambiguity and equivocation to challenge established meaning and social structures within the play. The society of Edmonton is shattered by demonic possession, murder, bigamy, and witchcraft, culminating in the double execution of the twice-married Frank Thorney and the solitary Elizabeth Sawyer who has been rejected by her own society and by the devil to whom she turned for help. The intertwining of these two stories together with the comic sub-plot of Cuddy Banks, who leads the morris dancers, loves above his station, and attempts to befriend and reform the dog-devil, has led to accusations of clumsiness or incoherence or a focus on one plotline more strongly than others.


Community and Intimacy in English Witchcraft Discourse

Dissertation Abstract–––Julia M. Garrett

Chapter 2: Sociological Drama and the Field of Deviance:
The Case of Elizabeth Sawyer

Chapter 2 analyzes Elizabeth Sawyer’s 1621 trial and execution and the dramatization of her case in The Witch of Edmonton, generally recognized as the most socially incisive of England’s witch plays. The chapter begins by proposing that this play belongs to a special literary genre, defined here as “sociological drama,” which crafts dramatic performance out of historical and judicial documents about a local scandal or episode of violence. By comparing this play with examples from contemporary culture, I argue that sociological drama strives to promote social justice by providing an alternative to journalistic discourses and critiquing the rigidity of judicial discourse in addressing social conflicts. The chapter also examines the one remaining pamphlet account of the case which was written by Sawyer’s jailer, a text which we can read as the manifest narrative of Sawyer’s trial. The play, by contrast, challenges that official history by exposing the social prejudices that lead to Sawyer’s criminalization. Her soliloquies, in fact, echo the insights provided by skeptical witch tracts in directing the audience’s attention to her poverty, physical deformities and old age as the latent reasons for the abuse she suffers at the hands of the community. Thus we could say that The Witch of Edmonton engages in a manifest/latent analysis of witch persecution by asserting that Sawyer’s marginalization as deviant results from social problems other than witchcraft. Chapter 2 also provides an overview of concepts from contemporary theories of deviance and criminology, which has surprisingly not been incorporated into current interdisciplinary scholarship on English or European witchcraft. Deviance theory is particularly apt for this study since sociologists of criminology also use the technique of examining latent social interactions to analyze deviance. A sociological perspective urges us to look at the entire field of deviant conduct represented in a given text and to analyze those forms of deviance differentially, to examine why only certain categories of deviance are aggressively singled out for punishment or prosecution. Thus I argue that the range of crimes and transgressions dramatized by the play’s multiple plots––bigamy, murder and slander, in addition to Sawyer’s witch crimes––establish a comprehensive field of deviance that calls into question the justice of her execution. Such a comparative perspective encourages the audience both to recognize how the community’s prejudices regarding age, class and gender have essentially laid the foundation for her identity as a witch, and to consider a more compassionate attitude towards her in spite of the crimes she has presumably committed.


The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England

In ballads and on the stage, physical appearances by the Devil could be used to
provide a tangible demonstration of his ability to conflate man’s natural corruption.
In A new Ballad, shewing the great misery sustained by a poore man in essex,
conversation with the Devil in human guise is sufficient to drive the pauper
into a violent rage without the subject of murder being openly mentioned.
In the play The Witch of Edmonton (1621) a single touch from
the Devil
in the shape of a dog drives a bigamous husband to murder.

Thus the concepts of an internal (invasive) and external Devil were in no
way mutually exclusive,within or outside Protestant culture. But the emphasis
on internal temptation was increasingly dominant. Devotional, literary and
even visual culture either presented the Devil as an entirely spiritual presence,
or blurred the dynamic of temptation when he was presented physically.
Only witchcraft narratives continued to maintain a purely physical conception
of diabolic temptation, and it must be recognised that this made them
increasingly unusual in early modern English demonism.

The language of 2 Corinthians 6: 14–15 – ‘What concord hath Christ
with Belial?’ – was widely used to denounce tolerance and compromise, be it
of crypto-Catholicism, or religious radicalism. The phrase in 2 Corinthians
11: 14 – ‘for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light’ – emphasised
the need for constant vigilance lest the Devil hide himself in the most
seemingly benign political and religious activities. The possibility of the
temptation of the body politic stressed the importance of identifying those
diabolic triggers that Satan had introduced into the nation to activate its
corrupt potential and seduce it into apostasy. Where those triggers might lie
was a heavily contested issue. It was defined by an individual sense of
tangibility rather than an allegiance to an abstract ideal. Thus conformists
and nonconformists, Puritans and Arminians, royalists and parliamentarians
employed the language of diabolic subversion in turn against each other.


Interrogating the devil: social and demonic pressure in The Witch of Edmonton.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 12/22/2004

Author: Nicol, David

Reading the play as a demonological study--that is, as a text that attempts to define the boundary between social and demonic causation--reveals the intellectual sophistication of The Witch of Edmonton while acknowledging its roots in the belief systems of early modern England.

My reading of the play is inspired by Stuart Clark's important study of demonology, Thinking with Demons, which argues that studies of early modern witchcraft belief have tended to construct a simplistic opposition between demonology and rationalism by assuming that any early modern writer who discusses the role of demons in the material world must be credulous and retrograde. (1) Clark finds that modern historians tend to overemphasize the importance of the few early modern writers who appear to pre-empt post-Enlightenment thought on magic and devils. He argues that when discussing a period in which almost every thinker believed in the existence of demons that could influence human thoughts and actions, demonological writings must be taken seriously and cannot be disregarded as intellectually unimportant. The problems Clark finds in modern historical scholarship are also discussed in John D. Cox's recent study of stage devils in medieval and early modern drama. Cox contests the influential argument of E. K. Chambers that the presence of devils on the stage marks the introduction of secular elements to the drama--in other words, that stage devils are symptoms of skepticism about the supernatural. Cox instead makes a powerful case for reading stage devils as dramatizations of sincerely held beliefs about the presence of spirits in the material world that are the enemies of positive values, such as charity and communality. (2)

Although his discussion of The Witch of Edmonton is brief, Cox's arguments are highly applicable to the play, which features a splendidly frightening and entertaining devil in the shape of a black dog. Despite the Dog's important role in the play's events, criticism of the play has tended to focus on those elements of it that seem skeptical about supernatural causation, while leaving comparatively unexamined those elements that emphasize the Dog's agency in bringing about the play's events. It is certainly true that the play's depiction of Elizabeth Sawyer, an old woman scapegoated as a witch by her neighbors, is one of the most sober and skeptical accounts of the witch craze in the drama of the period. (3) Similarly, the depiction of Frank Thorney's slide into bigamy and murder emphasizes its origin in his fear of poverty and social scandal. (4) Yet, as Jonathan Dollimore notes, while the play places " [an] emphasis upon identity as socially coerced" it also depicts Sawyer actually becoming a witch after making a pact with the Devil, (5) and the same Devil apparently provokes Frank's murder of his second wife. For modern readers, these interventions by the Dog may indicate a retreat into superstition, sensationalism, or even silliness, (6) and the importance of the Dog's power in the play's intellectual framework may be overlooked.

This essay argues that focusing on the social causes of crime at the expense of the demonic obscures the intellectual complexity of The Witch of Edmonton. The dramatists deliberately highlight the two forms of causation in order to stage a debate about the location of the boundary between them. In so doing, they draw on two demonological texts, adapting them to draw their own distinctive conclusions. Furthermore, they use the clown plot, which is usually dismissed as naive comedy, to deliver the play's conclusions clearly and inventively. The play is thus carefully constructed to draw a specific conclusion: it is not, as has sometimes been claimed, ideologically or structurally incoherent. (7) While its conclusions do not always agree with post-Enlightenment thought, The Witch of Edmonton remains the most serious and intelligent exploration of witchcraft and devils in the drama of the period.



NAMING AND SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION IN "THE WITCH OF EDMONTON"
by Richard W. Grinnell
Marist College

ESSAYS IN THEATRE
(Guelph, Canada)
May 1998, pp. 209-223


In 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton was brought to trial, tried, and executed for using witchcraft to kill her neighbor, Agnes Ratcliffe. Records show us that Sawyer was typical of those accused of witchcraft in Renaissance England: she was female, elderly, poor, willing to lash out at those she felt had wronged her, and Ratcliffe was a typical victim: of slightly higher social status, in conflict with Sawyer over economic issues.(1) Like many witchcraft victims before her, Ratcliffe died of a wasting sickness shortly after a memorable clash with the woman who had been defined as a witch.

Wallace Notestein notes the case briefly in his early A HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND FROM 1558-1718: "Agnes Ratcliffe was washing one day, when a sow belonging to Elizabeth licked up a bit of her washing soap. She struck it with a 'washing beetle.' Of course she fell sick, and on her deathbed accused Mistress Elizabeth Sawyer, who was afterwards hanged" [136]. What sets Sawyer's case off from other criminal prosecutions of witches during this period is the swiftness with which it was incorporated into popular and literary culture. First, Henry Goodcole, the minister who took Sawyer's confession and attended her in jail, wrote the popular pamphlet THE WONDERFUL DISCOVERIE OF ELIZABETH SAWYER, A WITCH. Goodcole was followed in the same year by

Thomasright arrow left arrowDekkerright arrow, William Rowley, and John Ford who popularized Sawyer's story further in their tragi-comedy THE WITCH OF EDMONTON. Both texts came out in 1621, the same year that Sawyer herself was tried and executed.

left arrowDekkerright arrow, Rowley, and Ford's quick capitalization on the witchcraft trial gives the play an immediacy and a sensationalism that has encouraged critics to see the play through the historical lens of witchcraft.(2) In addition to capitalizing on the sensationalism of the Elizabeth Sawyer trial and execution, however, the play enters a complex conversation about the nature of power and meaning. left arrowDekkerright arrow, Rowley, and Ford use the language of witchcraft to introduce us to a world in which the definitions used to place people within social categories are breaking down. The semantic breakdown apparent in THE WITCH OF EDMONTON is a part of the wider breakdown in the power of representation itself: a breakdown that leads ultimately to the English civil war and the execution of Charles I.(3)

THE WITCH OF EDMONTON opens with Frank Thorney and his financial and marital woes and asks us as readers and viewers to consider financial issues before we consider demonic. Indeed, as we are sunk deeper into the world of Edmonton and the Frank Thorney plot, we come to believe that financial, rather than demonic, forces drive the play. All decisions are made, and actions taken, in response to financial pressures, and money is the play's primary social currency.(4)

We learn at the beginning of the play, for example, that Frank Thorney's clandestine marriage to Sir Arthur Clarington's serving maid, Winnifride, is the result of Clarington's desire to make financial and social arrangement for Winnifride, who has been his mistress. Frank acknowledges the financial element of the marriage agreement when he parts from Clarington in the first scene of the play: "Sir, we shall every day have need to employ/The use of what you please to give" [1.1.108-09]. However, when Clarington finds out that Winnifride will no longer be his concubine when she is married, he withdraws his financial support from the couple with the telling line, "You may want money yet," precipitating them into dangerous financial waters [1.1.215]. Similarly, Frank keeps his marriage to Winnifride a secret precisely because of similar financial considerations. As he tells her when he leaves her at the beginning of the play:

Now the longest
Of our forbearing either's company
Is only but to gain a little time
For our continuing thrift, that so hereafter
The heir that shall be born may not have cause
To curse his hour of birth, which made him feel
The misery of beggary and want.[1.1.12-18]

The threat of poverty and financial insecurity continue to fuel the primary plot of THE WITCH OF EDMONTON as Thorney must convince his father that his marriage to Winnifride is acceptable so that his father, Old Thorney, will not cut off his inheritance. When Clarington retracts his support because Winnifride is no longer malleable to his desires, it becomes even more essential that Frank not alienate his father. As Frank tells Winnifride, we must remain secret until "th' inheritance/To which I am born heir shall be assur'd" [1.1.28-29].

Money remains at the forefront of the play even when the play shifts to the old men discussing a possible match between their children. When we first see Old Thorney and Old Carter, the conversation focuses primarily on the money involved in the liaison between their children, and who is paying what, and how.

CARTER. Double, treble, more or less, I tell you, Mr. Thorney, I'll give no security. Bonds and bills are but terriers to catch fools and keep lazy knaves busy; my security shall be present payment. And we here about Edmonton hold present payment as sure as an alderman's bond in London, Mr. Thorney.[1.2.13-17]

Significantly, in THE WITCH OF EDMONTON, financial language is intertwined with demonic language to create a metaphoric space that is slippery, unstable, and ultimately dangerous. In the course of the play we come to see the monetary language that characterizes the Frank Thorney plot and provides the social framework within which the play takes place as inherently demonic, and ultimately explained by the overt demonism of the Elizabeth Sawyer plot. The implicit connection that will exist in THE WITCH OF EDMONTON between economic marginalization and demonic alienation is stated explicitly in Frank Thorney's first scene when he tells Winnifride that "beggary and want [are]/Two devils that are occasions to enforce/A shameful end" [1.1.19-20]. In THE WITCH OF EDMONTON, Thorney's metaphor takes literal shape. Financial hardship ushers in real devils and causes the marginalization and destruction of all who fall into it.

left arrowDekkerright arrow, Rowley, and Ford reinforce this connection for us by associating moments of financial crisis with language that is explicitly demonic. In the confrontation between Frank Thorney and his father, for example, the demonic is directly connected to Frank's ability to come to his father's financial aid. Because Old Thorney has heard rumors that Frank has married Winnifride and will be unable to help him secure his financial situation by marrying a good dowry, when Frank agrees to help him, Old Thorney accuses Frank of being "a devil like a man," and says:

Darest thou persever yet, and pull down wrath
As hot as flames of Hell to strike thee quick
Into the grave of horror?[1.2.181-83]

Frank, meanwhile, defends himself in similarly charged terms, in language that acknowledges the connection between his potential crimes and damnation.

What do you take me for, an atheist?
...
Am I become so insensible of losing
The glory of creation's work, my soul?[1.2.172, 177-78]

Though the immediate sin that Frank defends himself against is bigamy, the bigamy that he is faced with is the result of financial pressures. Frank acknowledges, by pairing his crime with damnation, that he is sacrificing his soul for financial security; witches, according to contemporary demonology, did the same.(5)

In THE WITCH OF EDMONTON, economic pressure results in Frank Thorney's connection to the devil-dog Tommy (who appears to help him murder Susan Carter), and to the crimes he commits, including bigamy, murder, and falsely accusing innocent men of the murder he has committed. Thorney's metaphoric loss of soul at his marriage to Susan Carter connects him with the witchcraft that is the subplot of the play and with the contemporary demonology that attempts to describe that witchcraft in early seventeenth century English society. It binds him thematically with Elizabeth Sawyer herself who, even more dramatically than Frank Thorney, is forced into the demonic by social and economic pressures profoundly out of her control.

The Carters, the only characters whose integrity and legitimacy do not seem in question, are members of an emerging middle-class. With no authorizing blood, their power derives directly from the money that they control. Old Carter is a wealthy yeoman, equally proud of his money and his common blood. When addressed by Old Thorney as a gentleman (the rank to which his economic status would seem to entitle him), he rejects the name as undesirable: "No gentleman I, Mr Thorney. Spare the mastership; call me by my name, John Carter. 'Master' is a title my father nor his before him were acquainted with, honest hertfordshire yeomen. Such a one am I; my word and my deed shall be proved one at all times" [1.2.3-7]. The play insists on the simple integrity of Carter, and on the value of that integrity. The play's presentation of Carter further problematizes Edmonton's attempts to name and order the characters. In THE WITCH OF EDMONTON, all traditional classes are suspect. The wealthy yeoman class that seems to carry integrity does not fit effectively into the existing social framework, and those authorized by blood and property are disreputable and weak. As Molly Smith has written in THE DARKER WORLD WITHIN: EVIL IN THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE AND HIS SUCCESSORS, "Repeatedly, Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, even while they seem to support the hierarchical system, locate villainy among those who exercise power and thus, the plays posit a stark criticism of social morality" [12]. Interestingly though, whereas Smith sees Jacobean dramatists ultimately supporting the hierarchical system, one of the things that becomes apparent in THE WITCH OF EDMONTON is that that system can no longer even be accurately defined. The terms that should give meaning to the class system have broken down and can no longer be counted on. By the end of the play, Clarington has been fined and chastised, Frank Thorney has been hauled away to be executed, and Old Carter must come to the aid of the gentleman, Old Thorney: "Mr. Thorney, cheer up, man; whilst I can stand by you, you shall not want help to keep you from falling" [5.3.144-45].

But though the old class system is insufficient to contain the economic entities dramatized in this play, the play cannot be considered a critique of that system, and in that sense Smith is right. The play flirts with such a critique, but ultimately it refuses to clearly authorize a rewriting of the social hierarchy. Old Carter is blunt and simple, and is in many ways a comic figure in a play that Kathleen McLuskie has characterized as designed to "entertain an urbane audience with scenes from country life" [68]. Additionally, Somerton, Kate Carter's wooer, is very traditionally authorized by his "fine, convenient estate of land in West Ham, by Essex" [1.2.82-83], and Arthur Clarington, though chastised, remains the most powerful man in the play, despite his wrong-doing. THE WITCH OF EDMONTON struggles to come to terms with the breakdown of social relationships at the beginning of the seventeenth century but fails to consistently do so. It acknowledges the shifting economic conditions facing early seventeenth-century England by crediting and discrediting both the old and the new ways of authorizing power but is able to side with neither. Jean Howard has argued convincingly that such struggles are a common, and in fact essential, aspect of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. As she says: "Frequently composed by several hands and cobbling together a variety of discursive and narrative conventions, the drama often accommodated ideologically incompatible elements within a single text. Rather than as signs of aesthetic failure, these incompatibilities can be read as traces of ideological struggle, of differences within the sense-making machinery of culture" [7]. In such a struggle to define economic and social identity, demonology emerges as a useful and effective language. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonologists, witches are, as Elizabeth Sawyer implies, individuals who bring together all of the evils, the fears, and the threats, of a given culture. This is dramatically demonstrated in that attitude of the writer of the 1582 pamphlet, A TRUE AND JUST RECORDE, OF THE INFORMATION, EXAMINATION AND CONFESSIONS OF ALL THE WITCHES TAKEN AT S. OSES IN THE COUNTIE OF ESSEX. As the author, W.W., writes:

"If there hath been at any time...any means used to appease the wrath of God, to obtain his blessing, to terrify secret offenders by open transgressors' punishments, to withdraw honest natures from the corruption of evil company, to diminish the great multitude of wicked people, to increase the small number of virtuous persons, and to reform all the detestable abuses which the perverse wit and will of man doth daily devise--this doubtless is no less necessary than the best: that sorcerers, wizards..., witches, wise women (for so they will be named), are rigourously punished."[A3]

The language of witchcraft, then, is a particularly apt language with which to describe a world in which bigamy, murder, violence and dissimulation reign, and in which social and economic categories are unstable and breaking down. The destabilization of social and economic categories dramatized in the Frank Thorney plot and the witchcraft dramatized in the Elizabeth Sawyer plot combine to critique the assumptions that bind meaning to word, and name to named. This critique reflects in an interesting way the mood and the concerns of early seventeenth-century English culture.

THE WITCH OF EDMONTON represents the increased insecurity of the early seventeenth century and dramatizes it on the semantic level. The rapid rise of capitalism and the money economy becomes, in the language of the play, a demonic power that threatens the very basis of representational power itself. Because it already carries with it the idea of cultural violation, reversal, and inversion and because witchcraft had long been defined as an oppositional and destabilizing force out to destroy a world ordained by God, demonology becomes the language for Dekker, Rowley, and Ford to imagine the dangers inherent in a social system that was undergoing rapid and often unpredictable change. As we have seen, both the Thorney plot and the Sawyer plot echo one another and both describe an economic situation that is unstable and dangerous. Sawyer is outrightly demonized and she becomes a witch; Thorney's situation precisely parallels Sawyer's. He is demonized indirectly, yet just as surely. Both, then, represent states that are dangerous to the society within which they are found and both destabilize that society. The implicit demonization that the specter of poverty invests in Thorney begins to deconstruct social, economic, and moral categories leading to a social organization that increasingly mirrors the state of late Jacobean England. THE WITCH OF EDMONTON gives us a detailed look at the dangers, and the fear, inherent in a world that is increasingly indefinable, increasingly unstable, and increasingly unpredictable. THE WITCH OF EDMONTON shows us a world that is already firmly on the road to the social upheaval that will lead to the English civil war.



JUSTICE: Here's none now, Mother Sawyer, but this gentleman [Sir Arthur Clarington himself], myself, and you. Let us to some mild questions. Have you mild answers? Tell us honestly, … are you a witch or no?

SAWYER: I am none.

JUST: Be not so furious.

SAWY: I am none. None but base curs so bark at me. I am none. Or would I were: if every poor old woman be trod on thus by slaves, reviled, kicked, beaten, as I am daily, she to be revenged had need turn witch.

SIR ARTHUR: And you, to be revenged, have sold your soul to the Devil.

SAWY: Keep thine own from him.

JUST: You are too saucy and too bitter.

SAWY: Saucy? By what commission can he send my soul on the Devil's errand, more than I can his? Is he a landlord of my soul, to thrust it when he list out of doors?

JUST: Know whom you speak to.

SAWY: A man: perhaps no man. Men in gay clothes, whose backs are laden with titles and honors, are within far more crooked than I am and—if I be a witch—more witchlike.

SIR ART: Y'are a base Hell-hound. And now, sir, let me tell you, far and near she's bruited for a woman that maintains a spirit that sucks her.

SAWY: I defy thee.

SIR ART: Go, go. I can if need be bring a hundred voices e'en here in Edmonton that shall loud proclaim thee for a secret and pernicious witch.

SAWY: Ha, ha!

JUST: Do you laugh? Why laugh you?

SAWY: At my name, the brave name this knight gives me: witch.

JUST: Is the name of “witch” so pleasing to thine ear?

SIR ART: Pray, sir, give way, and let her tongue gallop on.

SAWY: A witch? Who is not?
Hold not that universal name in scorn, then.
What are your painted things in princes' courts,
Upon whose eyelids Lust sits blowing fires
To burn men's souls in sensual hot desires,
Upon whose naked paps a lecher's thought
Acts sin in fouler shapes than can be wrought?

JUST: But those work not as you do.

SAWY: No, but far worse:
These by enchantments can whole lordships change
To trunks of rich attire, turn plows and teams
To Flanders mares and coaches, and huge trains
Of servitors to a French butterfly.
Have you not seen City-witches who can turn
Their husbands' wares, whole standing shops of wares,
To sumptuous tables, gardens of stol'n sin,
In one year wasting what scarce twenty win?
Are not these witches?

JUST: Yes, yes, but the law
Casts not an eye on these.

SAWY: Why then on me,
Or any lean old beldame? Reverence once
Had wont to wait on age. Now an old woman,
Ill-favored grown with years, if she be poor,
Must be called “bawd” or “witch.” Such so abused
Are the coarse witches: t'other are the fine,
Spun for the Devil's own wearing.

SIR ART: And so is thine.

SAWY: She on whose tongue a whirlwind sits to blow
A man out of himself, from his soft pillow
To lean his head on rocks and fighting waves,
Is not that scold a witch? The man of law
Whose honeyed hopes the credulous client draws
(As bees by tinkling basins) to swarm to him
From his own hive to work the wax in his—
He is no witch, not he.

SIR ART: But these men-witches
Are not in trading with Hell's merchandise,
Like such as you are, that for a word, a look,
Denial of a coal of fire, kill men,
Children, and cattle.

SAWY: Tell them, sir, that do so:
Am I accused for such a one?

SIR ART: Yes, 'twill be sworn.

SAWY: Dare any swear I ever tempted maiden
With golden hooks flung at her chastity
To come and lose her honor? And being lost
To pay not a denier for't? Some slaves have done it.
Men-witches can, without the fangs of law
Drawing once one drop of blood, put counterfeit pieces
Away for true gold.


Source:

Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford.
The Witch of Edmonton.
Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, Eds.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.





See:

Aliens Invade United States

1666 The Creation Of The World

The Ethnic Cleansing of Satanists

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

The Origins and Traditions of May Day


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