Witchcraft-and-the-Gay-Counterculture-1

THE MASS MURDER OFWOMEN AND GAY PEOPLE“Don’t think I’ve come to bring peace on earth. I’ve come, not tobring peace, but a sword.”– Jesus the Nazarene (Matt., 10:34)Christianity and the old religion, with its heretical offshoots,could not co-exist in peace. Members of the Christian rulingclass were convinced that theirs was the one true religion and that allother religions served the devil. They remembered the words of Jesusthe Nazarene: “Go out into the highways and along the hedgerowsand force them to come in. I want my house to be full” (Luke, 14:23,New American Bible). Taking up the sword, Christian rulers tried toannihilate those they could not convince.The situation became critical in the late twelfth century. By1150, the Cathars had their own culture, dialect, religion, and traditionof self government in Languedoc (southern France) (Wakefield,62). Cathars opposed Catholicism and were tolerant toward Gaypeople, Jews, and pagans. Many Cathar leaders were women, andthe arts flourished free of censorship. Church leaders were alarmed atthe spread of Catharism and started issuing condemnations of theirpractices and teachings. In 1150, Geoffrey of Auxerre published SuperApocalypsim, accusing the Cathars of advocating free sex (Russell,128). In 1157, the Synod of Rheims met and formally denouncedCatharism. The Synod charged that Cathars engaged in orgies andthat itinerant Catharist weavers were condemning marriage and encouragingpromiscuity (Runciman, 121; Russell, 128; Loos, 117;Cohn, Millennium, 153).Catharist beliefs spread rapidly in the rest of Europe, becomingstrong in Lombardy and in the Rhineland. Other heresiesappeared. In 1173, Peter Waldo (or Waldes), a rich merchant fromLyon, France, attacked the wealth of the church and gave away all ofhis possessions to found the Waldensians. In 1184 Pope Lucius IIIcondemned the Waldensians and authorized the use of the inquisition(without torture) to uncover them (Wakefield, 44 & 133).In 1208, Pope Innocent III summoned the Albigensian Crusadeto wipe out the Cathars of Languedoc, who were also knownas Albigensians, after the city of Albi. From 1209 to 1229, Catholictroops, led by Simon de Montfort, invaded Languedoc, threwthe country into a bloody civil war, and conducted a campaign ofextermination. The people of Languedoc resisted with equal determinationand violence, and were nearly victorious until the Kingof France, who had been uncommitted, joined the Catholic forces.98do the women say they regard themselves as Christians? What theysaid is that they didn’t regard the things they did as sinful. And whaton earth does Kieckhefer mean by “the reservations that churchmenevidently held?” He makes it sound like their inquisitors had somepolite second thoughts in a dinner-table discussion of theology. Wearen’t dealing with mere reservations here. These women were accusedof heresy!Despite the prejudices of historians like these, evidenceabounds for the continuation of pagan religion right into the 15thcentury. Around 1421, Gobelinus Persona told of the popular beliefof his time that Domina Hera flew through the night betweenChristmas and Epiphany and brought an abundance of good thingsto people (Lea, v.I, 176-177). In 1428, the earliest Swiss witch huntsby inquisitorial methods began. In these trials, people were torturedinto confessing that they worshipped “the Devil” instead of Diana orHerodias (Cohn, Demons, 225-226). In 1435, the inquisitor JohannNider reported that peasant women imagined themselves to fly withDiana after rubbing their bodies with an ointment (Cohn, Demons,219-220). Similar tales were later recounted by Bartolommeo Spinaand Johann Weyer, a physician. In 1439, Thomas Ebendorfer in hisbook De decem praeceptis condemned the popular practice of leavingfood and drink out at night for Perchta or Habundie (Ginzburg,51). In 1487, Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain,declared, “Diana is the Devil” (Russell, 235, note).We can clearly see the transition from Diana-worship toDevil-worship in the witchcraft trials of the 16th century. In 1525, awoman named Wypat Musin from Burseberg in the Tyrol was triedfor “superstition.” She confessed that two years before, on the nightof one of the four quarterly feasts of the year, she had seen a multitudeof dead souls being led by Frau Selga, the sister of Frau Venus(Ginzburg, 58). In 1532, Domenica Barbarelli confessed to travelingand dancing with Diana, whom she called “Mistress of Play” [DominaLudi] (Ginzburg, 36, n. 3). In 1573, a Swiss woman with thesignificant nickname Seelenmutter (“Mother of Souls”) was arrested.She was tried by a secular court for “non-Christian fancifulness” andburned as a witch (Ginzburg, 59).The best documented case of how the Inquisition turned thefollowers of the Great Mother into witches occurred in Friuli, Italy,in the 1570s. At that time a group of people were uncovered calledthe Benandanti (that is, the wanderers). They admitted, without coercionor torture, that at certain times of the year (the beginning daysof the four seasons), they went into trances. In this state, they hadthe experience of leaving their bodies and doing things that reveal acurious mix of Christian and pagan beliefs. When they were in theout-of-the-body state, they traveled in company with animals andcarried fennel stalks, which they used as weapons against anothergroup of spirits, who were evil and who carried stalks of sorghum75