The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

Ooh, I got to watch that one again.

For another supernatural question, what is it with witches and lineage?

What do you mean?

In modern fiction at least, a lot of witches make a big deal about how their magic and traditions have been passed down through generations and centuries, especially the matrilineal ones.

Something like this?

Apparently there are any number of websites that promise to help you find out if you have "witch ancestors" (ancestors formally accused of witchcraft).

Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 27th 2024 at 2:40:33 PM

It's because the herbalist types (like, the actual people from history who were called witches sometimes) had to take apprentices to teach their craft to because no one was teaching it in an institutional way. It wasn't really a defined lineage thing, that's more of a modern invention. You'd just get a string of women (and yes, sometimes men) living in a particular cottage and taking care of the health of the locals over a long period of time.

I think it's just the general idea that you having a lineage gives you more legitimacy

I find it a little bit gross since to an extent it's legitimising the propaganda of the day. The witches hunters never caught any witches. They rounded up loners, people from outside the community, people with mental illnesses people with greivances against them etc, tortured out false confessions and then killed a lot of innocent people. The witches of Belvoir shown in the above website were probably accused so a Duke could secure an inheritance I don't know they'd appreciate still being called witches 400 years later

Its the stereotype but its debatable how often folk healers were accused of witchcraft of the 4000 accused in Scotland between 1563 and 1736 only 142 are identified as healers/midwives (though witch panics were very regional in their targets may have been more of a thing in other places)

Yeah a ton of witchcraft accusations wern’t about healers being misunderstood or a town panic, they were the same bullshit village politics that leads to people setting fire to the farmer’s barn or putting nails in a tree someone is planning to chainsaw down.

European witch trials peaked in Germany during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and especially around the time of the Thirty Years' War. The biggest rounds of mass executions were not carried out by villagers, but by regional governments — basically a form of organised crackdown against suspected Protestants/Catholics that also exploited them as scapegoats them for crop failures and all the other disasters that you'd find during the biggest war in the continent.

Did Germany use a charge of witchcraft for such people? In the U.K. they were just charged with heresy.

Edited by Silasw on Feb 27th 2024 at 11:50:20 AM

We have the weather to thank for that one.

I briefly mentioned this issue in the Complete Monster cleanup thread, but it got lost in the shuffle & I thought I'd consult this thread so I can hopefully make a more detailed effort post.

From Mythology & Religion:

Aren't his motives a case of Depending on the Writer, which are handled differently?

Speaking of stuff in the Bible, is Mammon an actual demonic entity or an idea?

It is a word in the Bible, but when the relevant bit was written (the Sermon on the Mount), it's just talking about wealth in general. The idea that it was a specific entity came a lot later.

I think that the word Mammon just means wealth or money, but got mistaken for a demon's name.

The name comes from the Bible (Matthew 6:24):

The sentence makes more sense if you change Mammon to wealth.

.......................

Paradise Lost introduced Mammon as a fallen angel and one of Satan's captains.

Edited by jawal on Feb 28th 2024 at 7:33:39 PM

Do we think that Ragnorok was always a part of Nordic mythos, or was it something carried over from older Germanic paganism just like the Aesir were?

I think it is possible that it was instead the result of Christinization. Esp considering the similarities Baldr had to Jesus.

I don't think it can be attributed entirely to Chrstianization. One of the big themes of Ragnarok is the repeating of events and humanity starting over. Christian apocalypticism is more straight up End Times and what follows after will be the Kingdom of God, with all the faithful, past and present, getting their reward.

True, but it's framed in a very Edenic sort of way, with Lif and Askr emerging into something of a paradise ruled over by the resurrected all-loving god of light. Given how late everything was written down, it's hard to pick apart what came before and what was added to fit in with Christianization, especially since by then the region had been Christianized for centuries.

At least according to the The Other Wiki regarding the attestations of Ragnorok in the Voluspa, we're pretty certain that some versions of the poem were definitely written after Christianity came into the region:

That definitely sounds like Yahweh to me, although it's interesting that rather than denounce the Aesir and Vanir as false gods, it almost comes off as Yahweh coming in to take over their duties. Like a supervisor personally stepping in for an absent employee, if that makes any sense.

Either way, it seems more likely to me that the myth of Ragnorok predates the Christianization of the Nordic countries (and again according to The Other Wiki, it seems to share similarities with other apocalypses found in other Proto-Indo-European religion-descended beliefs).

Edited by Angelspawndragon on Mar 6th 2024 at 12:22:45 PM

IIRC, I think the consensus is that both the poetic and prose Eddas have Christian influence mixed in, but the writer of the Prose Edda was way worse at making it mesh and flow properly. The Poetic Edda tends to frame stuff like "and so after all the gods are dead, another one will show up to take over" which is like, yeah, sure. The Prose Edda will just stop dead to be like "AND THERE'S A SUPER-ASGARD ABOVE ASGARD THAT WILL SLOT INTO PLACE AFTER RAGNAROK AND IT'S WHERE THE ANGELS LIVE" out of absolutely fucking nowhere and it does this a bunch of times.

It's part of the reason the Prose Edda is considered to be significantly less reliable because it's full of really obvious and random edits that frequently have absolutely nothing to do with the surrounding material. If the same story is in both? It's probably Norse. If it's just in the Poetic Edda? There's a pretty even chance it's really Norse with some possible embellishments. If it's just in the Prose Edda? Chances are it's not legitimate and it's either something mixed in from a different culture or it's someone very poorly trying to make Christian stuff sound Norse.

Edited by Zendervai on Mar 6th 2024 at 8:35:17 AM

All this talk about outside influences made me remember something from the book my dad gave me.

There was this stone frieze that showed Odin and his army of the forces of good getting ready for the final battle. It was crafted in imitation of ancient Greek art, and it looked very cool.

That’s actually a good way of looking at it, especially from a research/academic point of view.

I’m kind of surprised at myself for forgetting the simple fact that in academia the most sure fire way to get the definitive truth, or at least the closest to our understanding of it, is essentially redundancy.

I.e, tests yielding the same results, historical sources talking about the same event, etc.

"Not legitimate" is a funny way to say it. The Prose Edda is a product of the medieval Norse period and a legitimate attempt at codifying Skaldic poetry. While Snorri certainly made embellishments that favored his time period, that doesn't make them any less legitimate, just representative of a different period in the development of these stories.

If any attempts to create stories out of a fusion of a pre-Christian or faux-pagan narrative tradition with a post-Christian narrative tradition is inherently illegitimate then we can throw out the entire Irish and Welsh literary corpus, including the early Arthuriana.

It's also not that simple. The Poetic Edda's early stories predate the formal Christianization of Scandinavia, but not contact with Christian missionaries or Christian people. We know elf stories in Iceland changed in part due to an influx of Irish slaves who told Aos Síde stories, and the Irish literary corpus borrowed a few motifs from the Norse too.

People tell stories and the stories change in the telling. That doesn't make them legitimate or illegitimate, it means they mattered differently to different people at different times.

The Prose Edda's basically about as legit a take on Norse folklore and religion as the King Jame's Bible is a legit take on Christianity.

Neither the Poetic nor the Prose Edda have anything to do with religion. Mythology? Maybe the Poetic Edda. Religion? No.