History of Abortion & Contraception (part 3) -Witchcraft: The Burning issue.

Part 3 of the Series A Short History of Abortion and Contraception.
Read earlier parts first: Part 1 Cavewomen and Contraception Part 2 Bronze Age Birth Control

Readers who prefer LARGER TEXT when reading long documents onscreen can find a more "eye friendly" copy of this at Greenteeh Multi Media Publishing HoBC Part3

We covered in Part 2 the spread of attitudes from the Patriarchal religions to Northern Europe and eventually through colonisation to sub - Saharan Africa, The Americas and Australia. Tribal cultures were viciously suppressed and Judaeo-Christian or Islamic culture imposed.

So where did this put birth control?

Under the proto-fascist regimes of the patriarchalism, while technology advanced rapidly driven by the needs of constant war the healing arts which were the speciality of women were driven underground by the new priestly elites who jealously guarded their privileged place in the hierarchies. Who cared if princelings died, when a King might have several wives and many slaves at his disposal there was always another child coming along.

In Greece, Rome and Northern Europe had been different. The women still had powerful Goddesses to protect them and were more feisty as a result. Not that the nobility actually believed in the gods and goddesses, but plenty of assassins and poisoners could be found who for a modest fee would give divine retribution a helping human hand.

The most effective of the early contraceptives, Silphion had quickly become extinct through over cultivation and over harvesting of the wild crop but another plant of the same family, asafoetida was found to be almost equally effective and easier to manage as a commercial crop.

While Silphion grew only in a small area around the city of Cyrene (in modern Lybia) asafoetida could find ideal growing conditions in many areas around the Mediterranean Sea and could be cultivated successfully.

Other plants of the same family were also used for their contraceptive effects and it is a ubiquitous genre, species being found from Scandinavia and similar latitudes to the tropics. Modern scientific research has proved the anti-fertility properties of this family of plants in controlled tests.

As previously reported, one common vegetable that regularly finds its way onto modern dinner plates belongs to the same group as Silphion and Asafoetida. Other plants of the genus are widely used in food flavourings and condiments. To be effective these plants have to be prepared in a certain way and given in controlled dosages at the right time in the female cycle. But the Roman, Greek and Middle Eastern women knew that and so did the wise women of the North European Tribes.

Throughout the centuries The Roman Empire ruled most of the western world, secular concerns were paramount. Trade, law and order, tax collection and power were the concerns of the Empire. Religion was not suppressed as The New Testament would have us believe; The Romans tolerated any form of worship so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state. This was unfortunate in a way because Rome had many chances to eradicate totally the ideas of certain crackpot sects whose followers believed that prayer was the only cure acceptable to their God for any ailment, that the rigours of childbirth were a punishment meted out on women by their God, for the sin of being women. (remind yourself in the footnotes to part 2 of this series how God had created the first woman from the filth and scum left over after he had finished the rest of creation and you get a picture of how loony this sect were.)

These fanatics also believed that all babies were a gift from God, to attempt to control the process was an abomination and to give medicine to ease pain was an insult to God. And like all fanatics there was no reasoning with them.

Truly human nature does not change a lot over the millennia.

Fortunately the might of the Empire had stood between the fanatics of the Middle Eastern religions and the comparatively civilised pagans of Northern and Western Europe where things remained unchanged until the spread of Christianity.

One thing the Christian faiths have always excelled at to their discredit, is the rewriting of history. Read the conventional versions of history and it is easy to get the impression that immediately after the death of Jesus, Christianity spread out from Palestine and in a few decades the whole world, except for a few awkward tribes of pagans and the barbaric heathens of Africa and Asia had become believers. The reality was not like that. A form of Christianity was being practised in Ethiopia and the Nile Valley before the date given for the birth of Jesus and two early Christian chroniclers in Britain (Columbanus and Gildas Britannicus) along with others who lived in France and Spain, tell us that Christianity was already established in Europe before the first missionaries arrived.

When the Roman version of Christianity did arrive, apart from a few outbreaks of fanaticism prompted by power struggles within the Church of Rome, it had no trouble living with the tribal lore of the various lands. In fact throughout the period known as The Dark Ages, a period during which The Vatican tried to suppress all forms of science and any art that was not directly concerned with the glorification of God, one of the lifelines that helped us rebuild civilisation was the monastic society of Western England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The monasteries kept their distance from the political machine run by The Pope and his Cardinals and Bishops.

The monks took a very different view to the secular church of what actually constituted worship. Their meditative and creative activities and simplistic, communal lifestyle owed much more to the pagans of the Celtic Fringe than to the diktat of Rome.

One of the skill sets the monastic orders took on from the Druidic culture was the healing arts.

As the learning of the Druids survived in the monasteries of the Benedictines, Dominicans and Cistercians the sciences and arts of the other early cultures was preserved in the Arab world where early Islam revered knowledge and science and provided a much less hostile environment

for the those with an enquiring mindset that was driven to challenge the status quo.

Islamic physicians and Christian monks continued their researches then and must have been willing to trade knowledge with the witches and wise women and guarantee their secrets would be kept. That was the only way to gain information from an oral tradition, the women did not reveal the secrets even under torture. Often however, aware the promises of freedom in exchange for confession were false, they gave their oppressors false information knowing they were going to be killed anyway. The monotheists idea of freeing a witch was to release her from her sinful life.

We lose touch with the Islamic world at the time of the crusades but know through documented accounts that the knowledge of contraceptive herbs survived in folklore through both the outbreak of Catholic fanaticism that led Pope Innocent III to instigate the Inquisition, that assault on human rights, justice and sanity that was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people over the centuries; and the Protestant reformation which was even harder on the great mass of ordinary people that the excesses of Rome had ever been.

While The Vatican and the Bishops had condemned herbalists, birth control and many other folk traditions such as dancing around the Maypole, Welldressing and Halloween celebrations as witchcraft and devil worship the country priests in their parishes were happy enough to turn a blind eye and the poor people, practised in keeping secrets from exploitative rulers such as the Romans understood that what the priest did not know would not hurt him.

Such burnings as there were tended to occur in urban areas and the victims were women who had in some way offended a church or state official. Accusing a woman of witchcraft was much the simplest way of eliminating her.

The protestants changed all that. Protestants were a breed apart, pious, self-righteous pokenoses who thought the best way of getting to heaven was by sending other to hell.

In the era of Witch hunting, which stretched from the inauguration of The Inquisition to the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment in the mid eighteenth century a huge number of women were killed because they were suspected of being witches. Estimates of five million are probably exaggerated but no more so than the underestimates of apologists for Christianity. These people use pseudo-scientific claims to suggest there were only around fifty thousand documented executions of women convicted of witchcraft.

That of course is a typical Christian distortion, a lie by misrepresentation. It is perfectly true not very many women were convicted of witchcraft; most of those accused were acquitted. But that actually makes the case against the witch hunters worse.

There were many ways of trying a witch, none involved presenting a judge with evidence and lawyers for defence and prosecution contesting the case the case. One of the most popular was ducking.

Trial by ducking involved the accused either being tied to a weighted chair and lowered into water until it covered her head, then held there for up to ten minutes or having a girdle of stones tied around her middle and then being thrown into a pond or river.

In these cases if the witch came up alive or floated on top of the water it was because Satan looks after his own and she was "proved" guilty and executed.

If however she died, she was not free to go about her normal business without a stain on her character because the witch hunters knew Satan as a treacherous swine who would betray even those who had served him loyally. So they took the dead body of the acquitted witch and hung it just to be on the safe side.

Another way of trying a witch was to throw her off a church tower. If she was a witch Satan would bear her gently to the ground and she would then be proved guilty and killed. If the fall finished her off, well we have already seen that the justices were wise to Satan's tricks so they examined the evidence for proof (and "the word of a Gentleman" was proof enough, and they took her and killed her again, by hanging. Witches you see were not officially dead until they had been hanged no matter how actually dead they were. Satan was such a trickster that just because someone had not been found guilty of being a witch it did not prove she was not, nor had she ever been in league with The Dark Lord.

Some people might be thinking "hang on, weren't witched burned? Well yes but not as punishment, only to find out if they were guilty or not. If The Devil protected them from the fire they were guilty. In this case though there was no hanging, the witch who died was innocent and left the flames without a stain on her character, though there were probably quite a few on the ground where she had been burned. There is another example of warped logic here. Satan would surely protect his servant from fire as it is his own element so obviously the alleged witch who burned could not be guilty. It was nothing to do with there not being much left to hang of course.

One way for a witch to earn a quick and merciful death was through confession and repentance and a great source of free public entertainment was the public torture of witches. Many held out against the most agonising tortures though, refusing to save their immortal souls according the chroniclers. That is not so strange when we know that once the confession was obtained, once the accused woman had branded herself a witch, her children, siblings, parents and friends would be forever tainted by association or very possibly arrested, tortured and killed simply because you can't be too careful with stuff as dangerous as witchcraft.

The Witch hunting and burning era drew to a close gradually but by the end of the seventeenth century the worst was over. The Renaissance had begun in the fourteenth century, not in Italy as is usually claimed because the Christian world had picked up the Roman penchant for spinning history to put the establishment in a good light, but in Northern Europe. Forget the rubbish about Francisco Petrarch single handedly starting the movement, in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland we had never forgotten how to write great literature and create great art. We have the works of people like Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram of Eschenbach, Gwion of Ceredigion, the anonymous creators of epic poems such as Beowulf and the works of Irish monks who from the 6^th to the 12^th century retold the Irish folk legends in fine verse with a thin veneer of Christianity to keep the Bishops happy.

The renaissance was nothing to do with the mawkish, self pitying and excruciatingly sentimental sonnets of Petrarch, it was a rebirth of learning as societies began to wiggle out from under the dead hand of patriarchal hierarchies.

Man's most important invention was the wheel, but in second place we must surely rank the printing press. Although it did not become apparent for over two centuries the printed word would be the main weapon in winning back for the mass of people freedom of thought and control of our lives and the right to think for ourselves and make our own choices. For women the battle was far from over, those freedoms have taken longer because of entrenched male attitudes.

Further reading and websites for ancient history:<BR>

www.perseus.tufts.edu online archive of ancient texts.

http://classics.mit.edu/ Home of the largest online archive of classical literature

http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/index.htm Internet Sacred Texts Archive</A>, sacred texts from all over the ancient world

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/vedicsection/vedaindex.asp Hinduism Website
The Ayurveda, Bhagavad Gita, Ayur Veda, Rig Veda, Maharabharata and more

http://www.orgonelab.org/contracep.htm
Oregon Biophysical Research Lab

http://www.sisterzeus.com/Silphio.htm  Sister Zeus website - Silphion page

European Witch Hunts

Witch hunting with Wikipedia

Scottish Witch Hunts

Salem Witch Trials

The Pendle Witches 

History Books and Research Papers:

A History of Britain vol 1 & 2 - Simon Schama
The Myth of Eternal Return: Mircea Eliade (trans Willard Trask) Princeton 1994
Illustrated World Religions: Huston Smith
1) The Way Of Aminal Powers
2) Myths of the Primitive Hunter Gatherers
The intellectual Adventure of Early Man: H & H.A. Frankfort, Chicago 1947
The Epic of Gilgamesh (traditional - search for Gilgamesh)
The Zend Avesta (traditionl - search for Avesta)
The Golden Bough: Sir James Frazer
The White Goddess : Robert Graves
The Mythology and Rites of British Druids: Edward Davies
The Republic: Plato
The Virtues of Women: Plutarch
The Heritage of Persia: R.N. Frye.
other books too numerous to list have been referred to in preparing this article.