Winkin City, the Bridge of Tears

"She sees the monolithic buildings of the Night Mare’s Winkin City, glowing blue and breathing, looming like asthmatic giants set to hunt her."

I was Brock Turnered.

image credit: http://usslave.blogspot.com/2012/05/fabrice-monteiros-amazing-images-of.html


(How many stories like this are there?  too many. I couldn't figure out why I was so angry about this whole scenario, until my own memories welled up. To Brock Turner's victim, I'm with you.)

I was 14, home from boarding school for the Easter break. It was the first time my mother hadn’t hired someone to take care of me. I’d begged her not to. I had a friend home from school with me, someone I wanted to impress. She was a southern belle, a year older, and much more worldly.

My brother was home then too. He’d been recently released from jail. I couldn’t tell you which time or for which crime. He was 17, he could pass for white, he was a sociopath. My friend liked him.

By 10am on that April weekday in 1970 my brother was bored. He made a few phone calls and an old cellmate of his arrived soon after. He was white, stringy blonde hair, tall and bean pole skinny, with legs that bowed as if he’d ridden there on a horse. I don’t remember his name.

It wasn’t long before the three of them were ordering Southern Comfort to be delivered. It was my friend’s choice. My brother's friend had an i.d. Maybe he was 21, possibly older.

My gut was churning.  None of this was supposed to be happening. My friend was supposed to be my ally and not theirs. Don’t be uncool. Come on it’ll be fun! I wanted to call my mother, tell her that I needed a babysitter. I wanted to run from the house and race up the wash to find my sister at her school. I wanted not to be there, but I stayed.

I’d had beer and wine before, sips on gin and tonics, but this sugary alcohol went down easy and way too fast, especially in rounds of drinking games. Soon everything was spinning.

What I remember:

I fell into the pool fully dressed, to laughter and cheering. I dragged myself out of the water and sloshed into my room. I was changing into dry clothes when my brother’s friend spoke to me. I don’t know when he came in.  I don’t know what he said. I couldn’t get my leg into the baggy sailor trousers, salvaged from some surplus supply store. I stumbled. I fell down. I passed out. 

I woke up with vomit in my mouth and the friend pumping away on top of me. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I passed out again. When I opened my eyes next it was to my friend and my brother frantic beside me, both apologizing to me, naked, sprawled on the wall to wall carpet, vomit on both sides of my head and in my hair.

I never told my parents. I took a shower and went to a play rehearsal, where I was the only female in the cast at an all boy’s school. I’d liked it, being the only girl, till that day.

The few girls I confided in suggested it was my fault. It was a time when we were considered spoiled for having sex before wedlock. We were so steeped in rape culture that we worried more about ourselves as products to be selected fresh and unsealed off the market shelves, and not about the violence done to us when we have no say.

My brother’s friend came to see me, months after, when my brother was no longer around. He asked me out on a date. My mother and father were as surprised as he was when I shrieked at him to,

 “GET OUT!”

I shouted him all the way to the door,

"GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT!" Like a mantra, a protective chant.

I slammed the door on his wide eyed face, and locked it after him, my parents staring open mouthed.

    “I don’t want to talk about it.” Is what I said, and walked past them.
   
    Now, suddenly, I want to talk about it!

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"Being the weird girl is never easy, but in a dystopian future where women are breeding stock and domestic pets, it's a nightmare. A magical foundling born inside a willow tree, Mina is raised by canny off-gridders who teach her to value herself and feign compliance. But talent will out, and her transformative gifts threaten the ruling Night Mare and her copper-skinned son. Quinn's feminist hallucination weaves gorgeous imagery and dimensional characters with glints of dark humor." Chronogram Magazine  

Another Point of View

Witches

The moon was on the wane when they were discovered. In the fens Up-left. Bodies, whole and perfectly preserved. An army of witches floated up to the surface of the bog water. They’d been dead for hundreds of thousands of cycles, perfectly embalmed in the peat moss. No one knows why they floated up that way, but we take it as a sign. The planet’s on the move. She sent us the remains of the War of the Witches, and she also sent us Born of Tree.

 

http://www.jafdesign.net/

Malleus Maleficarum

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Malleus%20Maleficarum

A witch-hunter's guidebook, written in 1486 by German Dominican monks Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, and arguably one of the mostblood-soaked and hateful books in history.

The main purpose of the "Malleus Maleficarum", or "The Hammer Against Witches", was to refute all arguments that witchcraft did not exist, refute those who were skeptical about its reality, to prove that witches were more often women than men, and to educate magistrates on the how to find witches and convict them.

This book reflects that Sprenger and Kramer not only severely lacked a sense of humor and were obsessed with sex, but also that they had majorissues with women; the book singles women out as the weaker sex, weaker in faith, lustful andeasy by nature, and thus easy prey for Satan's coaxing. The men even went so far as to state the etymology of "femina" (Latin for "woman") as "fe" ("faith") + "minus" ("less"), which it is not.

Indeed, the book uses the exclusively feminine "malefica" rather than the masculine (and more inclusive) "maleficus" to denote witches, a strong implication that only women were witches in their eyes. Also, Sprenger and Kramer stated that old women and Jews were most likely witches and should never be trusted.

The Malleus Maleficarum accuses witches ofcannibalistic infanticide, casting evil spells to harm their enemies, and holding the power to steal men’s penises (even make them come to life). It goes on to give accounts of witches committing these crimes.

The Malleus also delves deeply into the Bible, astrology, and philosophy, as this book was published during the Renaissance.

This whole book is one long tirade not just against women, but also heretics, independent thinkers, romantic lovers, the sensitive passions, human sexuality, and compassion.
The reasoning and logic used are bewilderinglyoutlandish... as horrible as the the images and reasoning are, they are also so ridiculous that it would be funny if the subject matter were not so grim.

Amazingly, in its day, this book of intolerance and persecution was second most popular after the Bible.
Thousands of innocents were killed because of Sprenger and Kramer, because of the hysteria and paranoia that they sparked, eventually leading to the Burning Times.

"What else is a woman but a foe to friendship-! They are evil, lecherous, vain, and lustful. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable."
-The Malleus Maleficarum

That sums up the tone of the book. Here's more:

"When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil."

“For though the devil tempted Eve to sin, yet Eve seduced Adam. And as the sin of Eve would not have brought death to our soul and body unless the sin had afterwards passed on to Adam, to which he was tempted by Eve, not by the devil, therefore she is more bitter than death.” (Kramer, Question 6)

"She is a liar by nature."

"...they have slippery tongues... they are intellectually like children... she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnalabominations."

And on and on; it's basically the work of two sexually repressed, frustrated monks who were so alienated towards women that the only way that they could deal with women was to slander them. They basically claimed that women were frivolous,stupid, dirty, weak, emotionally unstable, faithless trollops who were up to no good.

Because of the Malleus Maleficarum, women could be accused to witchcraft because a few men had an erotic dream about her or because she made a correct prediction about the weather or some other mundane thing that could be logically explained.

by Loreleili February 20, 2009http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Malleus%20Maleficarum

Who burned the witches?

http://www.salon.com/2005/02/01/witch_craze/

For years, feminist scholars have argued that witch hunts were inspired by a reactionary, misogynistic church. But new scholarship, like Lyndal Roper's "Witch Craze," reveals that the real villains were the neighbors.

It’s hard to imagine a more nightmarish experience than being at the center of a classic witch trial: accused of obscure misdeeds by your neighbors, defending yourself against the looking-glass-world logic of the authorities, suffering an escalating course of torture designed to “loosen your tongue” — and at the end of it all, the gallows, the block or the stake. Witch hunts lie at the dark heart of Western culture, so much so that they’ve become synonymous with any kind of vicious, dogged and irrational persecution, from McCarthyism to the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s.

No wonder the history of the original European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become politicized. By the early 1900s, they were seen as outbreaks of hysteria fostered by a sinister and oppressive Catholic Church. Then, about 30 years ago, revisionist historians began to claim that the trials constituted a more systematic campaign by the patriarchal church to extinguish the remnants of goddess-worshiping pre-Christian religions by wiping out the people who preserved them: women, specifically folk healers and midwives.

Both views are wrong, but as far as popular conception goes, the second has triumphed. For a summary of this now-widespread misperception of the “Burning Times,” we need look no further than a passage from the best-selling novel “The Da Vinci Code”: “The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ — or ‘The Witches’ Hammer’ — indoctrinated the world to ‘the dangers of freethinking women’ and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them. Those deemed ‘witches’ by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women ‘suspiciously attuned to the natural world.’ Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth — a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During 300 years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women” [internal quotations original, source unidentified, but definitely not "Malleus Maleficarum"].

This is an impressively erroneous passage, incorrect almost from beginning to end, but it iscontaminated by one morsel of fact: The “Malleus Maleficarum” is indeed a spectacularly misogynistic and twisted book, compiled by the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published in 1486 and an essential guidebook and inspiration for witch hunters throughout Europe.

For many years, such volumes of demonology (“findings” on the behavior of demons, witches and their master, the devil) were the main sources for historians of Europe’s witch hunts, including such revisionist feminist historians as Margaret Murray and Anne Llewellyn Barstow. The trouble is, demonology texts like “Malleus Maleficarum” — alarmist calls to arms in a society where many people were skeptical about the threat posed by witches — amount to advertisements and arguments for the profession of witch hunting. When it comes to what actually happened in the real world, they’re about as trustworthy as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In the past two or three decades, however, many historians have turned their attention to more reliable source materials on the witch hunts — the local records of trials and executions stashed away in hundreds of small towns across Europe and Great Britain. As the historian Jenny Gibbons has pointed out in her admirably lucid 1998 essay “Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt,” this is hard work, sifting through vast amounts of dull documents written in archaic and often frustratingly obtuse language, but it’s the sort of thing real historians do. And it’s given us a radically new picture of what Europe’s witch hunts were like.

Lyndal Roper’s “Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany” isn’t the first such book to explore this new front of witch hunt scholarship, although it is one of the most recent. But it is representative, and as such it doesn’t offer a version of history that features a big, clear, satisfying story with an obvious villain. Like other studies — Robin Briggs’ “Witches and Neighbors” and Brian Levack’s “The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe” are two of the best known — it is crammed with little stories: squabbles among neighbors, resentments within families, disagreeable local characters, the machinations of small-time politicians and the creepy psychosexual fixations of magistrates and clerics.

The mass of detail can be numbing, but what it reveals is important: not a sweeping, coordinated effort to exert control by a major historical player, but something more like what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil.” Witch hunts were a collaboration between lower-level authorities and commonfolk succumbing to garden-variety pettiness, vindictiveness, superstition and hysteria. Seen that way, it’s a pattern that recurs over and over again in various forms throughout human history, whether or not an evil international church or a ruthless patriarchy is involved, in places as different as Seattle and Rwanda.

As a professor of early modern history at Oxford, Roper takes for granted several historical facts that may nevertheless be unfamiliar or surprising to the average reader. One concerns the diversity of the persecuted people. Some 20 percent of the Europeans tried for witchcraft were men. (This varied from nation to nation; in Iceland, 90 percent of the accused were men.) In some cases, including one that Roper covers in depth, the accused were children.

The peak of the craze occurred not in the Middle Ages, when witchcraft was dealt with rather leniently, but a couple hundred years later. The practice had effectively died out by the late 1700s, but Roper also describes a particularly brutal trial that happened in 1745. The total number of Europeans killed is generally thought to be 40,000 to 100,000. (It’s not clear where Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code,” got the figure of 5 million, since 9 million is the incorrect number more commonly bandied about.)

There’s more. The Inquisition was not greatly involved in witch burnings; it had its hands full with Protestants and other heretics, whom the church shrewdly perceived to be a far more serious threat to its power. In fact, while the justification for condemning witches was religious, and some religious figures joined in witch hunting campaigns, the trials were not run by churches of any denomination. They were largely held in civil courts and prosecuted by local authorities (some of whom were also religious leaders) as criminal cases.

The old-school take on Europe’s witch hunts attributed them to excesses of Catholic fanaticism, but as Roper, who focuses on witch crazes in small German towns, points out, Protestants of many denominations could be just as fervent and murderous in their campaigns. (The need to eradicate witches was one of the few doctrinal things Catholic and Protestant crusaders agreed on.) A witch panic, she writes, was less the act of a ruthless authority stamping out all dissenters than a sign of a power vacuum: “The very fragmentation of political and legal authority in Germany made it possible for panics to get out of hand, while the intensity of religious struggle, with the forces of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation confronting each other directly, nourished a kind of moral fundamentalism that saw the Devil’s hand at work in all opponents.”

Roper, who has previously studied the witch hunts from a psychoanalytic perspective, is especially interested in what she calls the “fantasy” aspects to the accusations. The stories are remarkably similar and, she writes, “had a great deal to do with local conditions.” (She feels you can learn a lot about regional customs such as courtship practices by observing how they are mirrored in witches’ confessions.) Here’s a typical accusation, summarized by Roper:

“Madalena Mincker of Nvrdlingen described how her child was harmed ‘while it was in swaddling bands.’ An old woman, Margretha Knorz, had come to visit her while she was in childbed without being invited, and had stayed until she had bore the child. She had brought her wine, apples and milk, but they had a disagreement about money, and Knorz told the young mother she would rue this. Just three weeks of her lying-in had passed when the child sickened, eventually becoming ‘quite lame and crippled of hands and feet.’”

Most of the complaints concerned pregnant women, infants, young children and lactating mothers who suffered from unexplained and sometimes fatal maladies. Such misfortunes were commonplace at a time when only half of all babies made it past their first birthday. If the mother or her family felt inclined to blame this on supernatural forces, the most likely culprit to single out would be an elderly woman who had some encounter — even a seemingly benevolent one — with mother or child.

According to Roper, Germany in the late 16th century was a place where marriage and children were difficult to attain. Laws prevented people from marrying unless they could demonstrate their ability to support a family, and illegitimate pregnancies were harshly punished. To be a wife and mother was to have scored a privileged station in life — and to be the object of much envy. Witches, especially elderly women, people believed, were motivated by jealousy and spite, seeking terrible revenge for minor slights and begrudging young and fertile women the blessings they could no longer enjoy themselves.

It’s important to note here that the belief that envy toward the more fortunate could be transformed into a curse — basically, the evil eye — can be found in tribal cultures all over the world. A woman whose child dies or who mysteriously finds herself unable to produce milk, can deflect the (unreasonable) blame that might be attached to herself by fingering a person who’s low in the village pecking order. The evil eye is not a particularly Christian idea, and early on the church actually discouraged members from clinging to old folk beliefs in magic and evil sorcerers because they were inconsistent with church doctrine.

Current popular history holds that the witch hunts were concerted campaigns by a male-dominated church that felt its sway diminished by stubborn pagan and folk traditions that gave too much respect to wise old women. The persecution, the story goes, was designed to stamp out those beliefs. However, when you look at actual cases, the picture is quite the opposite. “In 1627,” writes Roper, “in the town of Ochsenfurt, rumors about witchcraft had involved the allegation that a child had been eaten … Later that same year, 150 citizens gathered in force to complain about ‘the enemies of their livelihood, and vermin and witchcraft,’” and to demand action. Against the bishop’s express orders, the mayor and council arrested and tortured several suspects, causing the death of one.

Of course, many times the local church authorities participated enthusiastically in the persecution, but in most cases, the community itself started it. The church used trials and demonology texts that detailed and classified diabolical behavior to impose order on the chaotic paranoia of villagers looking for scapegoats for their own misfortunes. Most of us have heard that Christianity incorporated such pagan and folk traditions as the winter solstice festival (Christmas) and the spring festival (Easter) into the Christian calendar. There’s every reason to believe that — far from seeking to eradicate folk beliefs in black magic — Christian churches took advantage of ancient superstitions by stepping in to offer themselves as a solution to the mischief done by evil sorcerers. No wonder the witch hunts got bloodier when Catholics and Protestants were competing for followers.

And if the victims of witch hunts were disproportionately older women, their chief accusers, and the initiating force behind many of the trials Roper details, were often women, too. Young mothers, overwhelmed by the demands of newborn infants and raised in a world where everyone believed that angry or negative thoughts could cause serious physical harm, cast about for someone to blame when something went wrong. In an old woman they saw someone with cause to resent their good fortune as well as a reminder that their youth and fecundity, too, would someday be gone. In some cases, a midwife was simply the old woman most likely to have had contact with a new mother and her child, and therefore a prime target.

None of this excuses the Catholic and Protestant churches for the many atrocities they’ve perpetrated over the centuries, against “witches” or anyone else who earned their disfavor. But it’s also a caution against idealizing a pagan past about which we know next to nothing. The pagan cultures that have left records have proven themselves every bit as capable of misogyny and of senselessly brutalizing outsiders and misfits. As human beings, pagans were just as capable of barbarity as monotheists; and as human beings, women can be just as wicked as men, given half a chance.

The history of the witch hunts also offers a caution against reflexively glorifying the “community” offered by small towns and villages when the bonds of such communities are too often cemented by tormenting their marginal members. This perhaps is the most chilling thing about the stories Roper has gleaned from the antique documents she has unearthed in so many small German towns: their ordinariness. However grotesque the tortures and executions to which the victims were subjected, however bizarre their coached confessions of flying on the backs of goats to witches’ Sabbaths to eat roasted babies on silver platters, the origins of most of the accusations are pretty mundane.

A gift of baked goods that comes with a barbed remark about the recipient’s own culinary skills, a quarrel over the price of apples, irritation at someone who doesn’t come promptly to dinner when called — these are the sorts of incidents that precipitated the hideous cruelty of Europe’s witch hunts. “It is difficult to comprehend the sheer viciousness of the way villagers and townsfolk attacked those they held to be witches,” Roper writes. Then again, if you’ve ever lived in a small community, is it really that difficult to see how they got started in that direction, if not how they managed to get so far? It may take a village to raise a child, but history also keeps telling us that it takes a village to burn a witch.

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site,magiciansbook.com.