History
Pre-History and Early Christianity
By: Keitha (FireWind)
Posted: Aug.18th/99

Think back...think way, way back. About 30,000 years ago, people lived in small hunter-gatherer groups. People hadn't begun to settle into agriculture, yet. Although both men and women were able to hunt, women were sometimes tied down with childbearing. It was the women who were chiefly in charge of gathering plants for food. It was usually, though perhaps not always, the women who developed healing medicines from these same plants. Today, we are still looking to the natural world for medicines. For example, the chemical in Aspirin is the same one found in willowbark.

The origins of magick may have been sympathetic. It perhaps was believed that if you 'killed' an animal ceremoniously, you would have a better chance when it actually came to the hunt.

Fertility of the plants and animals was important to the continuation of people. If there were no animals, and no plants, the people would starve. However, the fertility of the people was just as important. No children meant the people would not continue. In a time when it was not understood how women got pregnant, it is no wonder there seemed to be an emphasis on the divine Feminine. The Venus of Willendorf, and other Goddess figures' seem to suggest this. These figures show women with exaggerated hips, thighs, genitals, and frequently they appear to be pregnant. The face and arms are rarely defined, and sometimes the legs are pointed, as if they were to be placed in the ground.

Women were a source of mystery. Sex was probably not linked to pregnancy, since a woman did not get pregnant every time she had sex. A woman magickally became pregnant, and produced a child. She bled every moon cycle. Frequently, even today, menstrual cycles harmonize and many women cycle together. There are many cultures that demand menstruating women to be separated from others by going to a specific place, or sometimes a special hut. It is easy to imagine that this activity must have mystified the men even more since, well, what did they do in there?

As the source of life, women were also the source of the divine. Earth Mother provided for Her children and the Earth. Usually, the women were the healers, the mothers, the midwives, the nurturers. The woman was close to the Earth because she could be a mother. But it was also this motherhood which restrained her. A woman with five or six living children would certainly have had her hands full. And pregnancy certainly slows a woman down when she's trying to chase a mammoth, a boar, or a horse. It would be only reasonable that if she had a mate, he would do the hunting for the family while she was caring for her unborn child. Of course, this respite could have provided the needed time for learning healing and spiritual knowledge.

Later, people began to split into different cultures as the world settled into agriculture. It is not clear why this happened. Agriculture actually takes more work and more time than hunting and gathering. The need to settle in one place for agriculture meant less intermixing between different peoples, and gradually, different cultures began to emerge. In time, Patriarchy began to develop, at around the same time as written history. The last of the major Matriarchies was the Celtic peoples, as recorded by the Romans. Although Matriarchies tended to be slightly less war-like than their counterparts, the world was growing more violent. In time, it was put up or shut up, and Matriarchies either dissolved, or learned to fight for themselves.

THE ROMANS AND EARLY CHRISTIANS

Rome was actually a very tolerant place. It was a melting pot of religious ideas, with temples to many different Gods. Even the Jewish faith, which has been mistreated horribly over the centuries, was tolerated. There were charges made against them, but they did not stay in hiding, and so were not seen as dangerous; generally, they were given at least some respect.

Roman officials were disturbed by the small, but determined religious sect known as 'Christians'. This Jesus guy had riled up the people, worked apparent miracles, challenged the established order, and said that rich people were selfish. When they finally managed to off him, people started saying he had risen from the dead. How dare he? And to make matters worse, his followers stayed in hiding, and rumours abounded about their lecherous rituals. (This isn't being flippant; how would you feel if some apparent cult leader showed up doing the same things today? Pretty unnerving).

This is what one Pagan at the time believed about Christians: "I am told that, moved by some foolish urge, they consecrate and worship the head of a donkey, that most abject of all animals. This is a cult worthy of the customs from which it sprang! Others say that they reverence the genitals of the presiding priest himself, and adore them as though they were their father's...As for the initiation of new members, the details are as disgusting as they are well known. A child, covered in dough to deceive the unwary, is set before the would-be novice. The novice stabs the child to death with invisible blows; indeed he himself, deceived by the coating dough, thinks his stabs harmless. Then - it's horrible! - they hungrily drink the child's blood, and compete with one another as they divide his limbs. Through this victim they are bound together; and the fact that they all share the knowledge of the crime pledges them all to silence. Such holy rites are more disgraceful than sacrilege. It is well known, too, what happens at their feasts... On the feast-day they foregather with all their children, sisters, mothers, people of either sex and all ages. When the company is all aglow from feasting, and impure lust has been set afire by drunkenness, pieces of meat are thrown to a dog fastened to a lamp. The dog springs forward, beyond the length of its chain. The light, which would have been a betraying witness, is overturned and goes out. Now, in the dark, so favourable to shameless behaviour, they twine the bonds of unnameable passion, as chance decides. And so all alike are incestuous, if not always in deed at least by complicity; for everything that is performed by one of them corresponds to the wishes of them all...Precisely the secrecy of this evil religion proves that all these things, or practically all, are true."* (Italics added by Keitha).

A lot of the problem was the secretive nature of Christianity. After the Roman emperors began to deify themselves, the Christians had an added problem. Their God was the ruler of the universe, and demanded reverence for that. But the Roman emperors demanded the same thing. Thus, they had to stay in hiding. And in hiding, rumours spread, and they were seen as 'evil conspirators' who wanted to destroy the state. The idea of the feasting on the 'body and blood of the Son of Man' was easily misunderstood as children.

Christians being thrown to the lions: this began in the 2nd century C.E. Usually, the rich paid for gladiators to fight, but this was expensive. When a law was passed allowing criminals to be used instead, well, it's not hard to figure out. Christians were often arrested for religious reasons, because they were seen as conspirators. The persecution of Christians, it must be noted, only lasted for about one century.

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE FALL OF THE DIVINE FEMININE

By about the third century C.E. Christianity was becoming a major religion. With the conversion of Emperor Constantine, it gained the final, solid foothold. At first, the religion had no problem with magick. Priests, Abbots, even some Popes practiced magick. There were laws against burning Witches. But eventually, as the religion gained ground, it began to change this policy. Men could do magick by the will of God, women did it by the will of the devil.

During the Renaissance era, there was a vast literary and philosophical debate called the querelle des femmes. In this debate, men, and a few women, debated the nature of womankind. Were they evil for having tempted Adam in the Garden? Were they evil by nature? Did they have a soul? Were they human? Gradually women lost all their rights, and were seen as property: sexually insatiable creatures who must be controlled at all costs. Man was light, woman was darkness; darkness was evil. Anything feminine was dirty, evil, and temptation in disguise. It was woman who made man sin, and so she must be punished.

Women were still the healers, however. It was they who delivered babies with the most success. It was they who understood the healing power of plants. It was they who understood the innate energies of life. This brings up the doctors. At the time, midwives had a better chance of healing a patient than a doctor who had studied at a university. At the time, doctors were cutting people open and letting them bleed out all the 'bad blood'. As you can imagine, mortality rates were high. However, somebody, a doctor, invented the forceps. These greatly increased the chances of a live birth. They would hide the forceps from the delivering mother, and the easier birth would be attributed to the skill of the doctor. This did not help the case of the midwives. Midwives were a threat to the medical profession, and the doctors worked hard to discredit and eliminate them. To a somewhat limited degree, they succeeded. This may have been one of the causal factors of the burning times.

Paganism still survived. There were isolated pockets of the Old Religion scattered around. Where Christianity now dominated, the old Gods became the 'Little People'. Where Churches were built on sacred Pagan places, the Pagan artisans and stonecutters carved their Gods into the walls. Isolated families held to the old beliefs. When the Church annexed the Pagan holidays, the old customs continued to flourish. Customs that once had religious meaning were still carried out, albeit robbed of their mystical significance. Today, Christmas is still Yule, Easter is still the Spring Equinox, and May Day is still Beltaine. People still bob for apples in some places on Samhain, children still dance around maypoles, and people still kiss under the mistletoe. Paganism is still an important part of today's culture.

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Sources

*This passage from Norman Cohn's "Europe's Inner Demons", Pimlico, 1975. I don't believe that the passage itself is under copyright.

Cabot, Laurie. "Power of the Witch". Delacorte Press, New York, 1989.

Renaissance English 224, Professor Harvey, UWO.

Cultural Anthropology 020, UWO.