Witch persecution: Jealousy and the rip-off.

3 Conversations

Religion as a battle of opposing claims

Male AND Female

Historically speaking, the origins of religion and culture involved groups of people growing up together and believing essentially the same things. This could have been a village, a region, an ethnic group, or an entire geographic area. With very few exceptions, though there may have been a guiding philosophy, the males and females of a culture would have their own separate methods of worship and practice. This was, in the main, because they had different needs and worries.


In some of the more metropolitan areas, where trade and slaveholding and diplomacy involved mixed cultures, a sort of smoothing and melding process occurred, where everybody essentially agreed that the city and/or the government had a favorite or patron deity and as long as one didn't mess with the Big Momma or Daddy, one can have one's little temples and shrines to subservient deities or spirits.


The men had temples and the women had household shrines, often to male and female aspects of the same deity or at the very least, from the same pantheon. The male form of worship seemed to be strongly in favor of concubines as a method of "connection with the great beyond" and a temple was more conducive to family relations than, say, "take-out" or "delivery". The females apparently were happy to have old-what's-his-face out of the house doing his thing at some established concern instead of catting around the neighborhood or messing up the guest room.


The household deities seemed to be of the more practical sort, dealing with such things as childbirth, productivity, health and ground-in dirt. When old-what's-his-face did manage to find the house, he found himself confronted with the spousal unit's little shrine and knew he'd better be on his best behavior as he had no idea what deals might have been made while he was gone.

Numero Uno

Now, all this seems to have gone on for quite awhile before someone decided to mess up the odds a bit. Somebody, and I'm not pointing any fingers, introduced the concept of, wait for it, Monotheism. One deity. One. Not two or four or eighteen. One. Uno. No more. While this concept has shown franchise possibilities over the years, it has developed a kind of nasty monopolistic bent.


"MY GOD says all your gods are phonies and frauds and bad for you. Worship my god and you'll have fresher breath and whiter teeth and healthier camels. Continue to worship your gods after hearing this stunning and life-changing revelation and MY GOD (and I) will make your life difficult. In fact, hang on, I'm getting this off the wire, MY GOD has developed a place for people like you if you refuse to obey HIM (and me...oh, shut up, Grace, I'll deal with you later)!"


Well! That led to some interesting times for the nostalgic. Buncha priests and prophets sprang up (Hey! I know you. Didn't you used to work down at the camel wash?), bringing with them some armed buddies to put the recalcitrant straight, got the ear of the local rulers...and wham, war. Burning things, defaced temples, golden calves, diverted rivers, sieges, rapings, pillagings and kidnappings.
And that was on a good day.


Oddly enough, the prevailing new GOD seemed to favor a male view of things. While the household deities seemed to hang on (saw one the other day, in fact), the female role in things was pushed back into the shadows of the house and their deities and spirits were frowned upon by the bright lights of the big religion. In fact, nobody was allowed to mention the old or female deity's names because it might summon them or it might summon the agents of the GOD, avenging angels of the heavenly or earthy sort, who just might not show any mercy.


BOOGA!

In the old religions, you had channels for the spirits or the deities. The Shamans and/or healers, known to the ignorant and scriptwriters as "Witch Doctors", were male and female and sometimes a third, um, persuasion, that could be interpreted as a mixture of both or neither. As was said above, the two sexes (we won't get into the third) had their separate needs and worries and, let's face it, a male shaman is going to be a bit more sympathetic about a sore testicle and a female shaman is going to be a bit more sympathetic about a sore...


In the new religion, where the concubines were still allowed, well, that's what females were good for. In the instances where concubines were frowned upon, the females found themselves in a similar position, only with less official status. Usually the priests and their sycophants were male. This meant that the remaining female shamans were either verboten and killed, or they were just not mentioned in public and they were reduced to skulking from place to place performing their sacred duties but not in sight of the males.


As the era of the ONLY GOD continued and generations were born who had known nothing else, the traditions of the female shamans were passed on to fewer acolytes and the real deal was rarely seen or even mentioned. The females held onto as much as they could of the old religions and the old deities, but unfortunately, some of the less intellectually fortunate of their sex had a nasty habit of getting involved in the whole only god thing to the extent of narking on their sisters and shining up to the prominent males in the dominant faith. If the dominant religion believed that healing only came in a certain way, then all other ways were either frowned upon or banned.


So while the representatives of the OFFICIAL GOD were in evidence on a daily basis (and probably in your face), the remaining adherents of the old ways became legend.

Jealousy raises its ugly head...

The Priests had an answer for everything. OUR GOD wants it this way. OUR GOD sees everything, knows everything, in fact, planned everything on the third day after he rested from creation, between his shower and the second cup of coffee... Destiny and prophecy guided everything, according to the interpretations of the priests and the "scholars" of the sacred texts. Unfortunately, this often led to a doctrine that said if you were bad or had problems, this was because OUR GOD planned it that way as a lesson to the faithful to behave, which then led to the oft asked but poorly answered question,"If OUR GOD knows what's going to happen so well that in OUR GOD'S MIND it has already happened, then why are we being put through all this?"


An odd phenomenon or pattern sprang up. Everything that was true was written by OUR GOD-possessed writers who wrote what OUR GOD intended. Everything that was wrong was written by UNGOD-possessed writers who wrote what was against everything OUR GOD intended. With a flip of the sacred coin, a letter, an article, or a book could become the bestseller among true believers or the most burned thing of the year.


Since truth and OUR GOD's will was such a nebulous thing, depending upon the inspiration (or inebriation) of the writer or the promulgator, the people at the bottom of the religious heirarchy, whose only jobs were to tithe and obey, understandably wished for a simpler way of thinking and had no problem finding a bit of comfort in legends and tales and nostalgic thoughts about the old ways.


The believers and enforcers of OUR GOD had thought they had dealt with the old ways when they moved into the neighborhood. They banned what they could and absorbed what they wanted to keep, turning everything into a triumph of OUR GOD, even though some of the tales took place before he was even heard of in those parts. But what to do about the practioners of the old ways? The one's they couldn't intimidate or turn or convert or buy?


AND BITES!

There were limitations to the sacred texts. Because they had been written by adult males (regardless of actual mental age) for adult males (no IQ test required there, either), there were things that were mentioned that weren't explained and there were things that weren't mentioned that needed explaining. It is kind of hard to interpret things that aren't there and the priests kinda had an "Everything you really need to know is in the sacred texts. Just because you can't find it doesn't mean it isn't there. You're just not inspired or blessed enough to see it." attitude...publicly.


Privately, they had a problem. Looking around at what remained of the texts from the old ways (the one's they hadn't burned. They occasionally had enough sense to realize that it is hard to know your enemy if you destroy everything written about him.), they became jealous. OUR GOD had left them hanging in a few areas. Like dealing with nature and crops and herbs. Like healing specific illnesses. Taking a bath to cleanse oneself every month or so was a good idea in any case, but it didn't deal with things like leukemia.


They were jealous also because of a thing called "succession". Their theologists taught that there was a special quality to people who had touched people who had touched people who had touched the earliest representatives of OUR GOD'S HOLY REVELATION, as opposed to the other fellows who were ok in their way, but hadn't quite gotten it right. This meant that thought and experience and knowledge and inspiration were not enough against the superior power and blessing of those who just happened to be touched by the right people.


These jealous folks looked to the hidden practitioners of the old ways and they lashed out because the old ways did not demand succession. The old ways allowed for thought and experience and knowledge and, even, accomplishment. Oddly enough, most of the people they were jealous of happened to be females. That was another problem. Because their sacred texts were written by adult males, whatever useful ideas or knowledge the females had in those ancient days of OUR GOD'S REVELATION were lost because the females didn't get to write their own sacred texts or if they did, they weren't allowed into the official collection.


Everything about females in the texts was written from an adult male (with the above caveats) perspective, which, even today, is admittedly a little on the narrow side. Since some of these old boys were famously celibate, hoping to avoid contamination during the holy contemplation of OUR GOD'S NAVEL (and doing us all a favor by not reproducing), their knowledge and care about females was even more reduced and the common donkey gets more allegory and attention in their work than the human female does. Often, the last woman they had any use for was their mother, yet, when they wrote, do they write to their mothers? They do not. They wrote for posterity...and when did posterity ever change a diaper?


THE RIP-OFF

An interesting concept that popped up when the big religion began to be taught in universities attached to seminaries and abbeys was the one of "Our holy ignorance is better than your pagan knowledge."
That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? End of this paragraph.


Outside of a few token blessed females in the sacred texts and a few token blessed females attached as a sidecar to the sacred faith,
females pretty much got a raw deal. Their pain in childbirth was due to a traitorous early member of their sex and the presence of demons and bad spirits in the world was due to another traitorous early member of their sex. They couldn't win.


Unless they agreed with the representatives of OUR GOD that they were trash from birth and promised they would do anything to repent the fact that they were born the wrong sex (including pumping out two units a year for the proliferation of the faith, mortification, being quiet in services, abstention, wearing badly designed clothing, self-imposed isolation or celibacy), they were doomed to a life of self-indulgent selfishness sponsored by the UNGOD before they died and went down to where the UNGOD ruled and OUR GOD would never think of them again.


The result of all this mess was that any female who used her OUR GOD-given brain and learned a few skills to medically help her sisters and an occasional brother was a shameless hussy who liked to look at naked men and a witch who wanted to hex faithful women into a sexual relationship with the UNGOD. OUR GOD's boys had Doctors who speedily killed or cured and had legions of colleagues who formed clubs with fancy names. The Doctor's existence in society was supported by "ideas" (usually plagiarized from Aristotle) about the usefulness of the human body and the various parts of it.


These Doctors didn't want anybody messing with their cash cow. Just this side of blasphemy, their "ideas" formed a sub-religion called Medicine. And it was a force like a plow. It probed, it pierced, it purged it pulled, it broke, it peeled, it tore and sawed and cut and sliced and killed with impunity and enthusiasm. The old ways? Pshaw? What could you do with a few bits of grass and some mud? That's not MEDICINE! It doesn't hurt! Healing hurts! Life hurts! OUR GOD says so!


Never mind that the mixture of theology and Medicine was a bit self-tail-consuming because destiny precludes healing those whom OUR GOD wants to suffer. The Doctors fixed that with their own "succession" with an ancient fellow named Hippocrates who was not previously known to have any association with OUR GOD'S REVELATION, but that doesn't seem to have bothered anyone, particularly since the holy representatives of OUR GOD had never previously shown any compunction about subsuming someone else's ancient traditions, as long as it served their purposes. If the Doctors wanted to join in on this revered game, the more, the merrier.


The midwives, shamans and "just plain good with people" persons of the female sex were now hemmed in from all sides.
They were bad:

1. Because they were female.

2. Because they didn't kiss the ring.

3. Because they had knowledge that was better than the Doctor's.

4. Because they had knowledge that the sacred texts of OUR GOD had left out.

There is no polite way to put this.
Open season.


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