Season of the Witch

wow !

Very well offered post to enjoy the topic raring and daring best accord !!!

This is fascinating. Oddly enough I've been reading "The History of Christianity" and came across some of the points you made.

Thanks for the links interesting history and the video

finds picked for sharing well as info exclusive !!!

Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn, and cauldron bubble .

Something is now very right in the state of Denmark, Bent. A very enjoyable essay and series of videos.

Wonderfully told history.
Gratitude*:

This is a wonderful addition to our group The Best Original Photos, Art and Writing for 2008 click here

Hi! Thanks for posting to Image Points! Have a great day! :)

A fascinating read. The history of misogyny attached is certainly disturbing.

I find myself wondering what possible cultural benefits are garnered or taught to individuals as regards the continuing of this tradition. My mind wants to compare this to the Burning Man - Wicker Man ritual; which many practitioners claim provides a purging and energizing experience to the mind, soul and body.

In the bloodier history of the Wicker Man tradition, it was male criminals who were reportedly stuffed inside the wicker construct; which leaves me wondering why there seem to have been two, gender different methods established for public burnings.

Very Odd.

Thanks for this interesting read, Bent.

Bent, sir >

I'm here but my wireless Internet signal is weak right now so I am unable to view the wonderful compendium of videos. I'll get to them later.

Of course, I can readily see that your writing and documentation are sublime. However, that is to be expected from a pro.

Hat's off, sir.

What really impresses me is the series of html embeds of You Tube videos. I was about to try this posting format myself but you beat me to it ... and I would never have matched your journalistic acumen.

Hat's still off, sir.

One suggestion, perhaps: You Tube offers the option of color coding an attractive halo around each embedded player. You'll find that option directly to the right of the embed code.

It seems to be that the visual appeal of your presentation might have been enhanced with this technique. I don't know, maybe you have too many videos for that approach. Gotta try it and see.

Later, dude.

~ Ken

This reminds of the fable of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. Anything to get rid of the old Pagan power and wisdom!

My devoutly Roman Catholic mother cherishes St. Patrick's tale and was once terrified by snakes. After I suggested that the snakes are a metaphor for pagan spirituality, she became somewhat less frightened (consciously at least). The power of myth continues to amaze me.

Striking videos, Bent. Emotional contagion scares me. It's the worst imaginable form of groupthink.

Scratch the surface of any country's history and you will find nasty, dark secrets.

I am so naive and such a victim of propaganda that I had alsolutely NO idea this was going on or that this frame of mind still existed. Thanks for the eye opener. Very informative article

Here in America we hung our witches. I guess that's why we love to hang efiggies of witches from trees around Halloween.

Of course if you refused to confess we'd crush you with stones till you did... or died.

The only way this would be disturbing to me would be of they started actually burning people.

Hell will burn away your sins, fire will extinguish the spark of truth inside you.

Being a true feminist I have read countless volumes about the European eradication of matriarchal systems. The persecution of the village wise women and crones when the patriarchal systems were dividing the land for the monarchies and of professionalizing of medical treatment by the wondrous practices of bleedings, leeches, etc. Of course these services could only be provided by men who knew so much more.

The Catholic church's history is one of the most disgusting in the history of personkind.

Thanks for the article Bent, I skimmed it only because it breaks my heart to see these things and I'm bookmarking it for a later date when I have to fortitude to deal with it.

Oh this is too close to me my Bent - you know I was there burning and you know how easy it is for me to absorb the pain of others even now - thanks for this indepth article Bent...I pray this practice never returns...the comments were very interesting esp the Burning Man - I've often wondered where that stemmed from. Until later, Salud

I find that I am speechless, and don't wish to comment on such old time customs and ways of thinking.

Awesome. Very well done my friend.

You know, in reading some of the all very good comments here, I realize that my initial angst in even having written this article was right. It truly does evoke a huge well of old pain for a great many, especially among women who feel themselves embraced within nature.

But I've always felt that it is better to make conscious what sits just beneath the surface than to allow it to continue staying there.

Some have asked how this can still be justified. What Danish parents tell their children when they witness the phenomenon is that the fire releases the witch to fly to a place in Germany. They say she is happy for that.

Some might suggest it is a part of the attempt to Christianize aboriginal Scandinavian pagan practices around the Summer Solstice (much like the Christmas tree celebration is based on Christianizing ancient Pagan customs not a being used in its derogatory sense here at all). St. Hans is John the Baptist, Denmark's patron saint, and it is guessed, or reinterpreted into myth, that he was born around the Summer Solstice.

Denmark became politically Catholic around the year 900, and to transform old aboriginal customs around the Summer Solstice, St. John the Baptist was replaced, but not without some way of integrating old customs into the new, hence a way to accept the ancient celebration around a huge bonfire.

The very original idea for this Summer Solstice celebration had to do with the notion that now *life* in nature and harvest and all that had reached its zenith (whereas its winter reciprocal would be the deepest valley of Nature's and harvest's sleep, almost death, but a dance around a beautiful, evergreen with tiny flames around it, reminded everyone that the annual promise of life lay just beneath the cold surface of the snow. Both sides of the coin were joyous occasions, families and clans reinforced their bonds and cooperation. It's found all over the world among the most long-lasting and successful societies, even among the ancient Israelites. The equinoxes also were celebrations, often of harvest or planting. We color eggs on Easter as part of a Pagan practice around birth in nature, where the birthing has a flow of rich red blood as life is resurrected (the Christianizing).

Well, the sanitizing of Denmark's (it angers me to think about it) very brutal pogrom against women who might still have expressed an affinity for the beauty of nature would have people believe that burning the figurative witch is likened to warding off evil spirits, perhaps to that place in Germany. In the past 200 years, the celebration has been assimilated into a nationalistic movement, with songs and dance to reinforce that.

With the Lutheran reformation in the middle of the 15th century, there were efforts to ban anything residually paganistic. And then came the witch burnings (I'm so sorry to even say this, but truth cannot hurt in the end... taking it out of shadows helps stop it from ever repeating, and to heal old wounds still echoing in today's hugely patriarchal western society.)

There's been a lot of efforts in Scandinavia (well, in this case, mostly Denmark) over the past few hundred years to sanitize the facts from this horrific, truly evil epoch in our history. Some compare it to Nazi pogroms of destroying the culture of a race of people.

Ken, I'll have to try that later. I didn't know that function existed over at Yourtube. Thanks, my friend.

Kathryn-->Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
There's something very right in the State of Massachusetts... Thank you.

Interesting thoughts, Bill's Spirit. I've been meaning for a long time to look more into the Burning Man ritual out in the desert.

Sharon, my dearest sister... I know this breaks your heart, and I'm so sorry on behalf of Denmark. Europe has pretty much lost its ancient tribes, which thankfully didn't completely happen in America. Thank god for the Navajo. They suffered for centuries without ever being conquered like that, and not until the US Civil War, with the invention of new war machines and strategies, did the US Army do their dastardly pogrom, and yet, they emerged. I love Cher's rendition of Cherokee People!

Mariana, you could go anywhere in the universe, and sit around a tribal fire, and become instantly a part of the clan. It's like you have a forever free-pass to anywhere where the deeper spirit is celebrated.

Devin, I studied the Salem witch trials. Though relatively mild compared to the European version, Massachusetts has a huge debt. But then, perhaps due to the influence of the folks who gave us a new harvest ritual, Thanksgiving, Massachusetts has come a long way.

We see the same nonsense today, live from Baghdad, both sides of various religions doing it to one another, but now with guided missiles or suicide bombers and the like. We see it all over the world now, Hindus against Christians and Muslims, all three often at each other's throats. Africa. My god, the Congo now again. The violence against women there is beyond comprehension, yet who's really trying to solve that one now?

The big difference, though (if such a distinction even deserves to be spoken) is that here it is an effort to eradicate a principally feminine feature not just relevant to a particular culture, but against an entire gender.

I read a dissertation by some researcher, who suggested a theory that the people in Salem had eaten stale rye bread, and hence might have been hallucinating or freaking out. The paper also suggested that may have been one of the vectors of madness around the French Revolution.

Ann, yeah,St. Patrick.

The general theory for why there are no natural snakes on Ireland has more to do with evolutionary forces, and the fact that the cold waters around the island would not support the swimming of snakes, much like other islands. But that bothers me, since flotilla is also generally a way for a species to island hop, and there's not much water between Europe and Ireland, never mind England. But I guess the theory there has to do with an inability for the few snakes to have occasionally made a land-bridge connection to Ireland at oceanic surface lows or to have arrived on flotilla, to then have survived the ice ages. Reptiles are blood-challenged (smile), so they've been wiped out time and again in the northern hemispheres, much like there aren't any snakes left in Antarctica, where they first evolved.

Snakes are relatively new, about 100 million years old, with fossil records showing them to be very vulnerable creatures that evolved in the southern hemisphere on a supercontinent that included Antarctica, from where they migrated and radiated. Ireland was underwater periodically through all that adaptive radiation and migrations of the species. There's a few other big islands that don't have any snakes, like Iceland and New Zealand

Very good article. I can't stress enough how the witch burnings and the Spanish Inquisition were aimed mostly at the more intelligent people of the times.

It's hard to believe this "celebration" is still going on today. You were right, Bent: it is disturbing!

All of this, the "organized" religion VERSUS the natural pagans ... the Pope VERSUS any opposition, the Strong Hawkish Men conservatively VERSUS the weaker dovish Women who were liberal ...

Survival of the Fittest ??? Cleanse the weak and sick from the stock (Hitler in Germany) etc etc ... God(ly) VERSUS Satan(ic) ... all by "proclamation" in "naming" the side of winners (those "deserving" to be so) by the "strong" ... with the desire to eliminate the "others" ...

We have really not advanced all that far over so many years it seems ... that all being a part of our "western" supported "duality" of (+/-) ... winner over loser and lots and lots of VERSUS ... supposedly just "friendly" competition. Like mankind subduing wild (fearful) nature ... ???


BTW, in the ancient determinations between the "good" guys and the "bad" guys ... were the Hapsburgs maybe more related to the nature types (I doubt it) or just some of the like minded "cut throat" competition to the Pope ?


I realize that there are accusations by certain institutions against others related to say the Masons being Evil ... then the old "blue blood" European families of long standing wealth being now behind the "New World Order" and the like ... I would be interested on your view on all of that Bent ???

Very interesting set of comments, Jerry.

Perhaps one way of understanding this crap from European history is see how close it came to happening around the aboriginal tribes in the Americas.

Can you imagine the social schizophrenia in Europe, as various forces tried stripping away the deep nature of cultural glue, in order to exploit and capitalize local resources.

It's one of the reasons, I believe, that Denmark is so paranoid over loosing a more recently attained nationalistic self-identity. Danes ought to realize that blending ethnic groups makes one far stronger both genetically and culturally to survive all sorts of challenges.

We're all each others brothers and sisters, if we look at the mDNA, no matter how distinct the ethnic features might appear. It's just that some of our long-lost sibling have migrated a bit, and had unique adaptive features evolved within their bodies to perhaps have survived unique features in far-away (in time and geography) locations.

Sickle cell anemia can be a crippling disease for some, but it also can help one survive certain horrific tropical diseases, like malaria, so it is theorized that the mutation became adaptive and incorporated into natural selection. People were far more likely to survive the periodic pain of the hemoglobin mutation of blood cells having a form that can cause periodic vascular constriction than the malaria protozoa that makes mosquitoes the most dangerous animal next to man in destroying humanity.

I wish I had the time to give this the comment it deserves, Bent, but for now, I'll have to settle for: Thank you for posting to this group whose only purpose is to thank you for posting to this group.

Dame Ruth, thank you. I imagine I'll again be getting a slew of hate mails from Danes now, and perhaps even some of those who made the video's that I embedded here will really be upset, but I could give a horse's behind.

I have to rethink, maybe, embedding so many videos into one article. I notice that my memory meter goes beyond a zone like no other page I've opened, when I open this one and begin playing the videos.

If others encounter this to a point where the page causes any problem, please let me know, and maybe I'll remove some of the videos.

interesting article

very interesting

great videos

Great barbaric customs. Their meanings have probably been lost to antiquity ans bonfire night in Britain. Guy Fawkes is a rhyme with little reason to today's youth I fear!

Holy Mother of God these are some SICK effing people.
The rye bread theory makes lots of sense. Ergot is a fungus that produces a toxin called ergotamine which is extremely similar chemically to Lysergic Acid (LSD).
It's my opinion that John of Patmos, author of Revelations AKA The Book of the Seven Seals had munched some moldy rye bread and was totally freaking out when he hallucinated all the crap he wrote down regarding the Last Days.
Thanks for a truly horrifying look at one of humanity's darkest hours and the shocking revelation of its echo in "modern" Denmark. I am appalled at the legacy of the Holy Roman Church, which I view as the most ancient and successful Criminal Conspiracy to ever sully our planet.

Another wonderful article about something new to me, Bent.

Thanks.

Thank you my dear Bent - you've lifted my spirits tremendously as fires burn all around the Santa Barbara hills and creeping downtown - I had to evacuate - it was mandatory but I came back and now waiting to see what's going on. The winds will pick up again later. much love, light, laughter and butterflies always, Salud

You be careful, Mariana.

All my life, fire and I have been friends, but fire and and a Santa Anna wind, with the dry, oily brush of the scrub desert where you are, that can't be controlled except by nature, and can do some very unexpected things on a moments notice. In 1973, I was offered a job as a fire jumper in Oregon.

An interesting article Bent, but I must say that I have always thought of the Danes as among the civilized people on Earth. Aside from their heroic record during the second world war, the Danes have long been supportive of minority groups and oppressed peoples. While living in Europe, I treasured my visits to Copenhagen, Aarhus and Southern Sweden (which has some Danish influence).

The evil you point out, and the celebration of the burning might be disturbing, but another way to look at it is to see the immense progress that all Europeans have made since that period. Certainly one cannot point to any place on Earth that was "better" or more enlightened than Denmark. Which had already made tremendous strides toward civilization and morality after the horrors of the Viking years.

My own theory of European History is that while the Catholic Church tends to get blamed for everything, the real villain was the single European royal family, whose branches, literally owned all of the land and who behaved exaclty like rival Mafia clans. Sometimes they fought each other, sometimes they married and allied. But it was never about nations. The thiry years war is a great example of this. It, like most of the wars, was simply about different branches of the royal family trying to gain more power, land and wealth from the others.

The Church had its own agenda, but at various times also particpated in the gang warfare that was Europe until the French Revolution.

Sy,

While I certainly respect your POV, I must inform you, as a Dane, that you are seriously mistaken in most of what you've stated here. There was a time when I might have echoed some of your sentiment, and I did in several articles while working as a journalist in the DC area. The perspective of European history, unfortunately, also is deeply faulted.

I don't want to spend too much time here, denigrating my beloved Denmark. But I will share with you that in 2006 the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) published a report (actually the third such report against Denmark) quite critical of our racist treatment of ethnic and religious minorities at home. A similar one has been published by the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism.

There is a fairy tale veneer in Denmark, extremely hard for most Americans to penetrate, unless one fully immerses herself into our culture for many years. As someone pointed out above, one always finds some sordid historical issue beneath the surface of any nation. But Denmark, the oldest kingdom in Europe, is especially saturated with these issues. HC Andersen, who like his contemporaneous peer in England, Dickens, wrote volumes on this sordid social subject - drawing contrasts from far away places like China. Until very recently, few would dare be overtly critical of the problem, instead doing like Andersen, and writing about it via the metaphors of fairy tales. That's changed now, with the Danish uniquely unequivocal support of the Bush invasion if Iraq, and the consequence of millions of homeless and shell-shocked Iraqis seeking asylum, a few hundred coming to Denmark, and being re-traumatized by our system of laws. Danish law lacks any sense of habeas corpus, or any feature that resembles common law. Discrimination based on any number of rationales is legal by Danish law, but most Danes hardly ever feel it. Part of that is based on a several hundred year old urgent legacy of protecting Danish culture, and more recently, nationalism.

I wrote a fairy tale myself in that vein a few years ago. It caught the attention of several politicians, but one of our more brave politicians wrote, among other things: This fairy tale… exquisitely engages some very serious problems in our [Danish] society
--Jørgen Poulsen, General-secretary, then Denmark’s Red Cross

I translated my story to English, and you can read it here:
http://denmark.gq.nu/CrownPrince.html: The Crown Prince and the Princess who Starved

When I was a teacher in America, one of my students proudly showed me a paper on the bravery of Denmark during WWII to help Jews over to Sweden. Though many Danes bravely sailed their fellow Danes with Jewish names to Sweden, Denmark as a whole behaved very grossly during the war. The more I look into that, the sadder it makes me, since it also reflects on my own immediate and extended family. I am friends with many Jews from that time. It's a very heavy subject, but it's time now for that festering infection to get some good medical attention before it bursts through a surface getting thinner all the time, due largely to this Iraqi issue that has come to our doorstep, and through no fault of the Muslims desperate to salvage whatever is left of their families and sanity.

I am very sorry for sharing this with you... and I have only barely revealed the tip of that dark iceberg.

Hello Bent Lorentzen,

I just wanted to say I am finally going through what is now under 6,400 pieces of gather new mail that is in my inbox on here. So with that in mind I have finally come to a piece of mail that was addressed to me in regards this article submission you have created to share with the gather community. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your piece with us here at gather. :o)

This comment is to let you know that this content has reached at least ten comments, and as such has been removed from Comment Speedway! Congratulations!

awesome article

Bent

The issue of the Muslims in Denmark is an interesting one. At the time of the famous cartoon incident, I happened to be in a car with two Danish colleagues driving from Turin to Milan. I brought up the incident (being a foolish American who never knows when to shut up) as an example of what I had always thought of as the hypocritical and quite reactionary attitude of Muslims in Europe, who tolerate absolutely no criticism of their religion or culture, but refuse to admit that they are taking tremendous advantage of their European hosts. I was surprised to hear that my friends were (much like you) very sympathetic to the Muslim cause and joined in an attack on the cartoonist and on the dissemination of the cartoon.

So, as you see, my own attitude is quite different from yours as related to Denmark (and Holland and France and other European cultures) attitude toward their Muslim "guests". I know it is very illiberal and politically incorrect, but I find it astonishing that so many Europeans have become blinded to the often expressed goals of Islam to conquer many parts of Europe (starting with Spain, which is of course part of the Islamic homeland, according to them). This includes a refusal to submit to European cultural values, such as respect for women, freedom of religion and worship, and other not so endearing aspects of Islamic culture. The French demand that Muslim girls not wear their head coverings in school was met with outrage from liberals throughout the world, including of all people PResident Bush (not my definition of a liberal). I, on the other hand was in total agreement with the French. And when the Dutch government insisted that new Islamic arrivals in Holland view a film that included scenes of homosexuals, Muslims protested that this was a terrible thing. The Dutch were correct in my view, trying to inform new Islamic immigrants, that part of Dutch culture includes tolerance of sexual identification, and if you want to join the culture, you better be aware of it.

I know that many Americans who have not spent much time in Europe will have no idea what I am talking about. This is because Muslims in America do not do this. There is no agenda to dominate American culture. But in Europe, many people are starting to fight back. They have finally understood that this is not a case of minority rights, but a war for the ownership of the European soul. Many European cities (Brussels, Turin, parts of Lyon) have become Islamic in all but law.

So I applaud those Danes who bravely stood up to the bombast of the Islamo fascists (I know this a despised term, but I will argue that it is correct with anyone who wants to defend Islamic culture) who prefer to spread their poison throughout Europe than to keep it in their own, backward, despotic and miserable countries.

Sy,

I can see you've again misrepresented or misinterpreted some significant issues. But I value the civil and intelligent way you formulate this.

I am far far away from anything sympathetic to anything resembling the monolithic ideologies expressed in Islam, or any of its other corespondents, like the Evangelical movements and other fundamentalist ideologies driving many politics in Europe but mostly in America for 8 years.

My basis for the opinion I hold comes from a very long academic study of society, and my more recent work as a PTSD therapist in Denmark, where I come face to face with the effects of the US-led pogrom in Iraq, and elsewhere. Now, that's changing...

I've had a great many professional conversations with Danish Muslim youth, and except for a rare few, all of them echo exactly the values held by the general population of most Danes. And they are as angry with reactionary terrorism as any Dane.

But let me give you a slightly different perspective, which I will pull from a conversation I've had elsewhere, since I am in the middle of some serious crisis intervention at this very moment, in my work... but can't allow your comment to go unanswered for too long.

One can take the Bible, New Testament included, and behave like Hitler with righteousness. He actually did. One can equally do that with the Koran.

Or one can chose to take these books, and find clues to peace.

In Denmark (and much of the western system of exploitative capitalism, purposely mislabeled as *free market,*(the big question of our recent election- yes, I have the right to vote in the US election)... As with so many political movements within the US trying to free America from what both Eisenhower and JFK warned in no uncertain terms as the greatest threat to humanity-the US military industrial complex (and its allied fossil fuel industry)-so too are there Muslim movements to free themselves from what may trap their societies. F.x: The Free Muslims Coalition. The Muslim world is as far from being monolithic in ideology as America is monolithic in the violent ideology of Bush / McCain-Palin et al.

Iraq, a place where the Coptic Christianity of Apostle Mark had its seat, and where it was practiced freely in a Muslim nation until Bush's invasion there, Christianity cannot be openly practiced for fear of repercussions.

What this proves is that most such issues between cultures originate from a militarily stronger nation's externally-driven xenophobic aggression, and the weaker nation's reactive internal policies to match that aggression.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohXsdbF-7jc&NR=1

Unfortunately, due to Denmark's decision to go unilateral with the Bush invasion of Iraq, Denmark has actively participated in making over 4 million Iraqis homeless/orphans... and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent peoples, destroyed its social and physical infrastructures, and made Iraq far too dangerous to send back refugees. The refugee issue in Denmark & elsewhere is a simple dynamics in "cause and effect." Denmark unfortunately has a huge responsibility to these refugees.


According to the international organization, Women for Women, Iraq now has become a far more dangerous and abusive place to live for women and teenage girls since Bush's invasion than at any time under Saddam. 2/3 of all women interviewed in Iraq state that violence against women & girls has dramatically risen since the US led invasion, because now there is a reinforced attitude that women can be seen as possessions.

It has been five years since the American invasion of Iraq and while the mistakes made there continue to accumulate still no-one has stopped to listen to what this critical mass of the population, women, have to say about solving the problems.
--Zainab Salbi, CEO for Women for Women.

Then there is the underlying *current events* issue for why we have waged the war...

Every 5 seconds in this world, a child under 10 dies of hunger. According to the UN, the world produces enough food to support 12 billion people (in a world of 6.7 billion). Danish PM Fogh Rasmussen has participated in pogrom wars with Danish taxes for Bush, so AP Møller Mærsk can get even wealthier. So please first give half of everything you buy at any supermarket to them, which essentially was stolen from the mouths of starving children far away via Mærsk. Religion is often a way to control resources.

Mærsk is the Danish super-multinational container ship firm that also owns Danske Supermarked, which controls the food etc. bought by Danes. Møller Mærsk, w/controlling stocks in Kerr McGee, also supplies the war machines in the world (incl for USA), and disseminates poison products (eg: China) everywhere. War and racism makes a few Danes incredibly wealthy, and this angers many. We need to better understand the roots of global stress.

We need to get that 4X4 mote out of our own eyes, before ever trying to take a mote out of another's eyes.

There are issues that go far deeper than the Muslim one, which it has inherited in places, which anyways is mainly a distraction from the real problems. Persia', Middle East's and Africa's geopolitical map was cast mostly by remnants of European empire building, after WW II, and especially since the 1960's- and those boundaries never accounted for the natural ebb and flow of ancient tribal migrations, much like the Sioux who followed the buffalo.

Cultures that evolved out of desert environments (to wit, also Christianity) have a unique flavor, due to clashing over limited resources, which mentality the West went through a dark age (as described in my article above) to begin to come out of, but much of it has sunk, in the West, into an unconscious place for most, but which is eminently exploited by various multinational concerns and global economic policy-making.

It takes tremendous personal discipline to get out of our own delusions of righteousness, to then understand what the underlying issues are, which actually goes back to when any form for a patriarchal society became enforced as a means to capitalize on resources not belonging to the capitalizing exploiter or conqueror (same difference).

Denmark is rated towards the bottom in Europe for gender equality in all regards including women's health, and is rated as the world's most paranoid nation about Muslims. This is NOT written to demean my beloved Denmark, but to now help this extremely modern nation out of a Middle Ages old boys network mentality.

Let me give you a US reference point, from a few hundred years ago, and from a group who helped inspire the opening sequence to the US Constitution's framing, since I also studied US Constitutional Law at the graduate level... (Iroquois Confederacy, which is based on a similar vision as the Christian Christ, ie: Hiawatha)

MATRILINEAL-

1. The mother was the head of Iroquoian families and family descent was traced through her.
2. When daughters reached puberty and married, they would bring their new husbands to live in the house of their mothers.
3. When sons reached puberty and married, they would go to live in the households of their new wives.
4. Many generations of a family lived together (sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents) and became an "extended family."
5. Each extended family lived in a "long house" (a house made of wood and bark, in the shape of a long rectangle).
6. Each extended family was grouped together with other extended families to form a "clan."
7. A village was made up of a dozen or more clans.
8. The women of each clan elected a "matron" to represent them in village affairs.
9. Matrons organized agricultural labor and household management.
10. Each matron selected a man to represent the clan at village councils. The matron stood behind her selected man as he sat in a circle at village council meetings; she watched how the selected man spoke and voted and removed him from this position if he strayed too far from her wishes.
11. Matrons of the village got together to select the man from their village to represent them at tribal council meetings. (Each tribe consisted of many villages.)
12. Matrons had the power to impeach the men they had selected to represent them at the tribal council level, if they were not pleased with their performance.
13. Women tended the crops; land was owned and worked in common.
14. Men hunted and fished; catch was divided equally among the members of the village and was controlled by the women once it was brought back to the long house.
15. Women were in control of food, both agricultural and hunted, once it was within the long house.
16. When a woman wanted a divorce from her husband, she set her husband's things outside the door of the long house.
17. Women arranged their children's marriages and kept the children in the case of divorce.
18. Houses and land were considered common property. The idea of private property was foreign to the Iroquois. A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650s wrote "No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers. . . . Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common."

That last bit - in bold - is courtesy of Teacher Vision, a widely used resource for high school teachers.

Sy, finally, exactly almost as with genetic diversity, global human society is made far stronger through cultural diversity. Nationalism and its allied patriotic ideals handicaps this in ways for which I could write a thousand pages of pure, empirically derived science.

This is how the social behaviors that weaken humanity's capacity to survive are naturally diluted (on all sides of a globalizing contention), and those characteristics of the various clashing cultures that enable human survival get naturally selected to be stronger, since each culture-driven behavioral characteristic tends to be based on what helped particular groups uniquely survive unique features to a unique geographies and local group interactions.

Bent

Thanks for the thorough response to my rant. I agree with all of what you said. I am actually quite pleased to see your comments about the attitudes of young Muslims living in Europe. I believe that this shift in attitude makes sense, and I think this is exactly what the Imams are afraid of. I also think that the emphasis on the treatment of women in your original article is very important, since cultures that treat women badly are to me, simply evil. And that when women are exposed to an alternative lifestyle, such as in modern Western Europe, they refuse to accept the old ways, unless severely beaten and even killed (as you know has been too common among some of the Islamic immigrant communities in Europe)

I also completely agree with your analysis of the effects of the Iraq invasion, which I believe will go down in history as the stupidest and most pointless military adventure in American history.

You know much more about the history of Denmark and its neighbors than I do, and I must defer to your knowledge. But I will say this. I have traveled a bit in my life. I have seen cultures that I would simply define as evil (I do not believe there are any evil people, but I do believe that there evil cultures). I found the sexism in Japan, for example (and off topic) to be outrageous, and unexpected. I found the middle East to be a place I didnt want to stay in for more than I had to. I even had some problems in Italy. But Denmark, at least to a casual visitor, along with Holland, seemed like paradise to me. I know this is a naive statment, and a tourist never sees behind the veneer. But you gotta admit it. The Danish veneer is pretty nice.

Thanks for posting to ImagePoints group! Have a nice day! :)

O K
ya got me back to my first love Historical reasurch yet you have done the work I LIKE THAT
have book marked this for later and often to visit Jules
Pat it forward

Sy:

You writeI believe that this shift in attitude makes sense, and I think this is exactly what the Imams are afraid of.

That's a very astute observation, and very accurate. For me, it resembles the way many US Catholic bishops and Mormon elders are now attempting to control same sex marriage in America.

From what I have observed, a great many Imams encourage a radicalizing of the Muslim faith only so they can continue controlling, and here, Denmark has every right to protect itself against such efforts.

I've been in the hospital recently for kidney disease, and have had the time to watch a Danish version of C-Span, where the daily arguments of our parliament can be viewed. This has also given me deeper insight into why certain political factions in Denmark are so paranoid about the influx of the Islamic culture in Danish society. But they are making a mortal mistake by arguing against a dialog even with the more radicalized Muslim factions. Dialog does not mean agreement with any particular POV, even if radical. But what it can do is yank these issues away from the radical Imams' efforts at holding people of a certain faith hostage in the darkness of religious monolithism.

By closing off channels of communications, Denmark reinforces the *dark powers.* By opening the dialog, Denmark enables the integration of Muslims coming to Denmark, and disempowers the radical fronts from afar gain any foothold in Denmark. It's also helpful to the good police intelligence attempting honestly only to cut off radical activity that can lead to acts of terror.

Dialog also helps Denmark better understand some of the deeper social issues of bad foreign policy, to wit, going unilateral with Bush - and allied multinational interests, f.ex. the Mærsk vector, as I describe above in my comments to you, all of which often can lead people to act in suicidal and other desperate activities.

Imagine what would happen to me were I a resident of a country like Iran, and exposing its monumental patriarchal political ideology?

Just one line of revealing history for what it is, as I've done about Denmark, would result in a quick death sentence. And believe me, were I a resident of a nation like Iran, for every issue that I find about Denmark, I'd likely find 100 there. And with my personality, the more anyone tells me to shut up, the more I will open my mouth.

But I don't live in Iran. I am Danish-born, and my genes are very Scandinavian, so my efforts really are only to help the society in which I find myself. I can't personally do anything about Iran, for example. But I certainly can in my own neighborhood.

Well, I hope I am speaking intelligently here. I am under the influence of morphine for now, and that's a rare state for me.

First I want to say I'm sorry that it took me so long to get to this, but if you check my last couple of posts, you will know that I have had some problems that have kept me from it, but I did save it to return to.
Bent, this was an incredible essay. I have read, watched, and read more, and I have so much churning in me at this moment, that I do not feel I could put it into words here, that would make sense. I have studied much of this for quite some time now, and I began this journey because my first husband is a Dane, and I have personal knowledge and contact with the pagan rituals. I was born a Catholic, and even as a young girl, fealt that it was oppresive to women. Odd as this may sound, I one time found myself a part of the Mormon faith. That ended as well when I found how controlling and male dominant that was, in many instances more so than the Catholic church. One constant for me through all of it has been the male dominated control all these religions have wielded, in an effort to destroy the earth based, nature loving pagans. To know that this sort of thing continues in this manner today is very unnerving, and to see these people teaching it to their children is very frightening.
Thank you for sharing this, I would love to discuss it further at some time when I feel less worked up, and more capable of intelligent conversation.

Anne, thank you for your heartfelt and intelligent comment.

Whenever you wish to discuss it with me, please feel free. I'd be very interested in learning what you have to share on the subject. I'm in the middle of a documentary on a parallel problem in Denmark, now a current events issue.

I think very few in this world even realize that much of the world is still trying to come out of a dark age..

It is so close, in our technological era, that it is like trying to see the forest for the trees.

But now the very systems of Nature herself are at play, and we'd better either start analytically understanding what the people closest to an intuitive understanding of nature have understood for a incredibly long period of time... prehistorically - often women, due to the fact that a woman's brain is slightly more wired to understand patterns of behavior that protect the possibilities of the future (motherhood).

OMG.  This is fascinating, info I might never have been exposed to if it weren't for your presence here, Bent.  Given my ancestry (Danish, Norwegian, English, German) with the most recent immigrants being from Denmark and Norway around the turn of the century (1900s) or later (my great-grandparents were teenagers when they immigrated here from Denmark and Norway) and the family lore that, on the German side of the family, a great-grandmother was a "witch", I have much to contemplate with this introduction to Danish history...thanks!

P.S. Like Ann, much is churning within me, as well...in light of this information and in light of the place I am at in my own personal journey...

Also, Bent - interesting that the planet Pluto, while officially demoted as a planet, is in significant play in the world right now.  I believe we are facing (whether we wish to or not) that very darkness of which you speak...it is being brought to the light of day.