#Witch hunting

[cirilee]

teaser trailer for @neoncl0ckwork 's and my new cinematic universe about people in the wider germany/czech republic area during the witch hunt times. its mostly about the eternal witch hunter vs (supposed) witch struggle. and then the ACTUAL witches who are just having a grand time being gremlins in the woods while the humans they curse are living through body horrors while learning valuable life lessons <3

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price as Mathew Hopkins

Witchfinder General aka The Conqueror Worm (1968)

[dreamy-pill]

Yeah, I wanted to post this Steven Universe and The Owl House fanart earlier today…

But, you know, sometimes it’s just one of those days. I don’t feel bad, I just wished today didn’t happen, is all.

I pushed past that anyway and this is probably the one thing I drew today that didn’t make me feel anxious. I feel satisfied with the final product, actually. 😊😊😊

This is Steven and Luz in the demon realm. Luz just betrayed Steven: she’s turned on him to hunt down witches.

If you probably noticed, I do wish I added more texture to the background also. Like the one I did to the previous drawing.

[haggishlyhagging]

To such an extent was this persecution carried even in Protestant Scotland that accused women sometimes admitted their guilt that they might die and thus escape from a world where, even if cleared, they would ever after be looked upon with suspicion. Sir George Mackenzie, visiting some women who had confessed, [was] told by one of them "under secrecie" that:

She had not confessed because she was guilty. But being a poor creature who wrought for her meat and being defined for a witch, she knew she would starve—for no person thereafter would give her either meat or lodging—and that all men would beat her and [set] hound dogs at her. And therefore she desired to be out of the world. Whereupon she wept bitterly and upon her knees called upon God to witness what she said.

Even under all the evidence of the persecution and cruel tortures that innocent women endured during the witchcraft period, no effort of the imagination can portray the sufferings of an accused woman. The death this poor woman chose, in voluntarily admitting a crime of which she was innocent rather than to accept a chance of life with the name of "witch" clinging to her, was one of the most painful of which we can conceive. Although in the diversity of torture inflicted upon the witch, it is scarcely possible to say which one was the least agonizing.

In no country has the devil ever been more fully regarded as a real personage, ever on the watch for souls, than in Christian Scotland. Sir George says: "Another told me she was afraid the devil would challenge a right to her soul, as the minister said when he desired her to confess, and therefore she desired to die."

-Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State

[asherisawkward]

So Philip has all the glyph scars that are believed to be the cause of his curse. Either that or doing Palismen like cocaine. But all of the circles are perfect. No human should be able to make circles that perfect. Therefore, one suspects he has some method of assuring this perfection. It just gives me the mental image of Philip doing his glyph scars with cookie cutters.

[murkystarlight]

I don't know about you but I just learned that,

'Torch her' and 'torture' sounds the same

I was just saying random words

[sapphistoryteling]

[Based on This prompt here]

The flames licked at her feet and white robes, crawling on the wood surrounding her, but she was not afraid. The chanting of the mob beholding the blaze held itself louder than the roar of the fire, but she was not afraid.

She breathed in and out, urging the flames hotter like a bellows for a forge. The men and women, judges and juries, the fools who lit the fire backed away with wicked grins thinking their god was aiding in the burning of the witch. The single soul who knew of the Witch's might and power was drowned by those he was attempting to warn. There was no reason within the maddened people, their irrationality had stollen their hearing.

The irons that held her fast to the stake began glowing red hot, then melting, but not a single mark on her skin came from the molten metal as it cascaded down to her feet. She climbed to the top of the stake, hidden by the fire, now burning far higher than any had seen before.

With a sudden snap of her fingers the fire flew to form a massive inferno above her head, casting a warm light upon her figure. The fools' grins had quickly turned to mouths agape in horror. Had they listened, perhaps they wouldn't be so afraid.

"I am Pyrea of the Gentle Flame! I am she who frees souls of their earthly bindings so they may go and know peace! I am she who healed your sick and sent off your dead!" She declared. "Yet at the arrival of these fools, you closed your heart to me, lost sight of my good deeds, and forgot the times I was there when you were most in need!"

"HERETIC!" the priest screamed.

"Those of foreign power and judgement have no right to tell me of heresy. Nor do you have the right to demolish memories of the good and bad. For the attempted murder of an innocent soul, I curse you to never remember the good deeds done to you, nor will you be able to do any good to others. This shall be, until one of you can perform a good deed to someone else, even if it may take lifetimes after you."

As she proclaimed her judgement, the fire scattered into the crowd singing a cursed brand upon their skin. She disappeared into the night, now not a single soul could remember her name or who she was.

[eraepoch]

The algorithms today on social media are exactly like the first wave of publishers in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the 16th century they also ran after ‘user engagement,’ and they discovered that if you produce a book by Copernicus with all these mathematical calculations about the movement of the planets, nobody buys it; it’s boring. But if you publish a witch hunting manual that tells you that there is a worldwide conspiracy of witches led by Satan, and they have orgies and cannibalism and child sacrifice, and they try to take over the world, and some of your neighbours in the village—they are part of this conspiracy, and these are a few signs [for] how you can identify these witches in your town or city or village and kill them—these are the best sellers.

Yuval Noah Harari on information, truth, and AI

[anglerflsh]

earth is sky and sky is ground did we finally leave our town?

[a-person-on-the-internet]

after watching the new 4 hour hbomberguy video essay I saw some people complaining that he's just targeting people and causing drama, but I think that he should keep doing these hit pieces forever. I think every plagiarist and credit-thief should tremble in fear lest they attract the wrath of this one youtuber.

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price and Robert Russell

Witchfinder General/The Conqueror Worm (1968) dir. Michael Reeves

[artoflevity]

witch hunt

[haggishlyhagging]

Here is the true conventionality at the heart of de Sade's "rebellion." These descriptions of his acts in every way remind us of the trials of the witches that the church fathers themselves carried out in the name of traditional doctrine in the preceding centuries, against the bodies and souls of women. His sexual fantasies and acts resemble these inquisitions in every facet. Only, in his inquisitions, he plays all the roles, becoming at one moment the inquisitor, and at another the witch; he creates and espouses an anti-Christian doctrine, and then forces a woman to act as the professor of this doctrine. Interchangeably, he plays the torturer and the tortured.

But is even this confusion between himself and his victim not, in fact, typical of the inquisitors of history? The monks who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum as the doctrinal justification for witch-burning clearly created their descriptions of the ideas and acts of witches out of their own psyches, and afterward attributed these fantasies to their victims. In their minds, they as freely moved from victim to torturer as did de Sade in his rituals of cruelty. We read that the witch-burners believed themselves to be the victims of the women they accused; we discover in their own accounts that they felt they were in mortal danger from the power of witches. Just as Rose Keller, or Jeanne Testarde, never existed as themselves in the mind of de Sade, but only as actresses who performed the roles he created for them, so the "witch" never existed as the church saw her; rather, the Christian idea of the "witch" was a shadow side of that religious mind.

Yet finally, that which above all gives us the key to the traditional shape of de Sade's rebellion is that he chose the same victim for his rage as had the church fathers through centuries of tradition. For the body of a woman is culture's time-honored and conventional victim. So in the end, we see this rebel is the most loyal of sons. Like his fathers before him, he reduces a woman to an object. Like his fathers, he imagines she is more evil than men. Like the church fathers of the inquisition, he punishes her. And like these same fathers, he imagines himself as her victim.

But now we see that the rebellious sons, and their fathers, not only share an ideology which conceives of women as the vessel of evil, but share a condition of the mind. For these two minds, loyal to one another in their shadow lives, move by the same mechanisms. And these are the mechanisms of projection and denial.

Denial is not mysterious to us. It is simply that means by which the mind forgets a part of itself. So we have the words "conscious" and "unconscious," and by these words we know that the mind has a knowledge of its own being which it will at times make inaccessible to itself. The mind will choose not to know what indeed it does know. But projection is born from denial. For this forgotten knowledge has a way of insisting on life. Even through the very effort we make to push this knowledge of ourselves away from us, it reappears. Thus, in Totem and Taboo, Freud tells us that the knowledge we wish not to know is "ejected from internal perception into the external world." We deny a part of ourselves, and deny knowledge of this part, but just as we deny this, we see this knowledge outside us as part of the world. What we detach from ourselves is, in Freud's language, "pushed onto someone else."

Both the church and pornography have chosen the same victim on which to push this denied knowledge. In these twin cultures, a woman is a blank screen. The nature of her real being is erased, as if her cultural image had been carefully prepared for a clear projection of an image, and she comes to stand for all that man would deny in himself. But she herself, as we shall later see, is no accidental victim. A woman's body evokes the self-knowledge a man tries to forget. And thus he dreads this body. But he does not understand this dread as belonging to himself, and a fear of what the female body calls up in him. Rather, he pretends to himself that she is evil. His conscious mind believes she is evil. As Karen Horney says, "everywhere, the man strives to rid himself of his dread of women by objectifying it." Pornography offers us a clear example of this "objectification" in the words of de Sade, who tells us that woman is “a miserable creature, always inferior, less handsome than he is, less ingenious, less wise, disgustingly shaped, the opposite of what should please a man or delight him . . . a tyrant . . . always nasty, always dangerous. . . .”

The pornographer, like the church father, hates and denies a part of himself. He rejects his knowledge of the physical world and of his own materiality. He rejects knowledge of his own body. This is a part of his mind he would forget. But he cannot reject this knowledge entirely. It comes back to him through his own body: through desire. Just as he pushes away a part of himself, he desires it. What he hates and fears, what he would loathe, he desires. He is in a terrible conflict with himself. And instead he comes to imagine that he struggles with a woman. Onto her body he projects his fear and his desire. So the female body, like the whore of Babylon in church iconography, simultaneously lures the pornographer and incites his rage.

-Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature

[asherisawkward]

On the whole Caleb leaving Philip behind thing, images of the memory paintings without Caleb’s eyes crossed out were released. In them, it appears that Caleb was the one who was the most interested in hunting witches. Philip just wanted to be like Caleb while Caleb was smirking aggressively a lot.

So had Philip gone with Caleb, Philip probably would’ve abandoned his witch prejudice since Caleb was the one egging him on.

Philip definitely took an active interest in witch hunting, but Caleb clearly supported that as well, creating a positive feedback loop for him. The people in town supported it, and his brother supported it, so obviously it had to be good, right? (Intentionally using the Appeal to People logical fallacy to demonstrate Philip’s thinking.)

But Philip could be unconditioned. It would have taken home some major time to get rid of those biases that have been taught to him, but it would be much easier to undo as a child with his older brother to reinforce and teach him than as an adult who think witches kidnapped his brother, spent years alone in a hostile environment, and had much more time for those biases to become engrained in him.

[creature-wizard]

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

They talk about a shadowy group of people supposedly manipulating everything behind the scenes. They might refer to them by terms such as globalists, bankers, international bankers, secret rulers of the world, the elite, the cabal, Kabbalists, Talmudists, satanists, satanic pedophiles, pedophiles, generational satanists, satanic bloodlines, the Illuminati, the Babylonian Brotherhood, lizard people, Reptilians, Orions, regressives, regressive entities, Khazarians, Marxists, cultural Marxists, or leftists. Sometimes, very rarely, they'll just come right out and say "Jews."

They claim that the conspiracy has been working to conceal historical and spiritual truths from humanity.

They claim that the conspiracy uses stuff like food, entertainment, and medicine to control the masses. For example, "additives in food suppress our psychic abilities" or "Hollywood films contain subliminal messages" or "COVID vaccines were actually created to alter your DNA to make you more docile."

Also, claims that the conspiracy controls people via spiritual or technological implants, 5G, or alter programming, with or without explicit mention of Project Monarch (a conspiracy theory promoted by far right cranks such as Mark Philips and Fritz Springmeier, who used hypnosis to respectively convince Cathy O'Brien and Cisco Wheeler that they'd been put under mind control by a global satanic conspiracy).

They claim that this conspiracy is controlling the media, has fingers in every institution they disagree with, and is generally behind everything they disagree with. (EG, the conspiracy created the Catholic Church; that other New Ager they disagree with is actually controlled opposition, etc.)

They claim that the conspiracy is trying to keep people in fear.

They claim that the conspiracy harvests something from people. Blood and adrenochrome are common ones. Loosh is somewhat less common. Expect to see something else pop up eventually.

They claim that the conspiracy practices genetic engineering; EG, creating animal/human hybrids, using vaccines to genetically sever people's connection to God, etc.

They claim that true spiritual wisdom can be traced back to places like Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu.

They claim that world governments have secretly been in contact with extraterrestrials for years.

They appeal to known frauds and cranks, including but not limited to Erich Von Daniken, Zechariah Sitchin, David Icke, David Wilcock, Graham Hancock, Jaime Maussan, Bob Lazar, Steven Greer, Richard C. Hoagland, Fritz Springmeier, and Drunvalo Melchizedek.

Appeals to forged documents, including but not limited to the alleged diary of Admiral Richard Byrd, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Urantia Book.

Appeals to channeled information, such as that provided by Edgar Cayce, Carla Rueckert, or George Van Tassel.

"But all of this has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?"

Oh, it all comes from somewhere, all right, but the where isn't what most people imagine.

A lot of the stuff above is just a modern spin on the content of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Russian Jews. The Protocols itself was plagiarized from a political satire and incorporated a lot of the post-French Revolution conspiracy theories about Freemasons and Jews being behind the French Revolution. I wrote a summary of the conspiracy tropes found in The Protocols over here.

The stuff about Satanic sacrifices and the consumption of blood, adrenochrome, loosh, or whatever are simply just variations on blood libel, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews practice ritual cannibalism. Blood libel can be traced back to ancient Greece. (With the Greek version, I really can't help but notice the similarity to modern urban legends of gangsters kidnapping random people for initiation rituals.)

Many of these tropes can also be linked back to the early modern witch hunts. It was believed that witches sacrificed babies to Satan, practiced cannibalism, and put people under mind control by way of diabolical magic. It was also believed that some witches didn't even know they were witches; they'd go off to attend the Devil's Sabbath at night and come back in the morning without remembering a thing. In the late 20th century, this witch hunter's canard would be reinvented as the alter programming conspiracy theory when media such as the 1973 book Sibyl and its 1976 television adaptation put DID (note: the woman who inspired Sibyl did not have DID) into the public consciousness. For a more complete list of witch panic and blood libel tropes, I wrote a list over here.

Lemuria was a hypothetical landmass proposed to explain the presence of lemur fossils in Madagascar and India while being absent in continental Africa and the rest of Asia, because if lemurs evolved naturally, they wouldn't be in two separate places with no connection to each other. The discovery that India and Madagascar were once connected not only made the hypothesis obsolete, it precludes the existence of Lemuria.

The whole notion of Mu began with a horrendous mistranslation of the Troano manuscript. A man named Augustus Le Plongeon would link the mistranslation with the story of Atlantis, and use it to claim that Atlantis actually existed in the Americas. (For Plongeon, Mu and Atlantis were one and the same.) And then other people (like James Churchward) got their hands on the whole Mu thing, and put their own spins on it, and the rest is history.

Le Plongeon's ideas influence modern Atlantis mythology today; EG, the idea that it was in the Americas. Another guy who helped shape the modern Atlantis myth was Ignatius L. Donnelly, an American politician. Dude claimed that Atlanteans spread their oh-so-superior culture far and wide. He also claimed that Atlantis was the home of the Aryan people, because of course he did.

The idea that all of the world's wisdom can be traced back to Thoth/Hermes goes back to Hermeticism, a product of Greco-Egyptian syncretism. Hermeticism produced a fascinating body of mythology and an interesting way to consider the divine and its role in shaping human history, but that doesn't mean it was right. And the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a modern text that has fuck-all to do with ancient Hermeticism and more to do with HP Lovecraft.

This idea that the conspiracy uses pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for evil also has roots in Nazi Germany. The Nazi government, wanting to reserve real medicine for their soldiers, told the general populace that said medicine was the product of evil Jewish science and prescribed alternative healing modalities instead. (Said alternative healing modalities did not particularly work.) It also echoes the old conspiracy theories about Jews spreading the Black Death by poisoning wells.

The idea that the conspiracy uses genetic manipulation to create subhuman beings or sever humanity from the divine is a permutation of the Nazi conspiracy theory that Jews are trying to destroy the white race through race mixing. The idea of evil reptilian DNA goes back to the ancient serpent seed doctrine, which is indeed old, but no less pure hateful nonsense for it.

"But there's got to be somebody up to something rotten out there!"

Oh sure. But these people aren't skulking around in the shadows. They're acting pretty openly.

The Heritage Foundation has been working to push this country into Christofascism since the early 1970's. They're the ones responsible for the rise of the Moral Majority and the election of Ronald Reagan. They're also the ones behind Project 2025, which intends to bring us deeper into Christofascism. (Among many other horrible things, they intend to outlaw trans people as "pornographic.")

The Seven Mountains Mandate is another movement pushing for Christofascism. They intend to seize the "seven spheres" of society, which include education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and media.

There's also the ghoulish American Evangelicals who support Israel because they think that current events are going to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus and cement the formation of a global Christofascist empire. Don't let their apparent support of Jews fool you - they believe that the good Jews will become Christians and the bad ones will go to hell.

All of these people are working toward monstrously horrific goals, but none of them are part of an ancient megaconspiracy. In fact, these are the kinds of people pushing the myth of the ancient megaconspiracy. From the witch hunts to Nazi Germany to the American Evangelical movement, if history has taught us anything, the people pushing the conspiracy theories are always the bad guys.

[dr-awkkward]

Slay the Princess text posts, part 3

[part 1] [part 2] [part 4]