The English witch hunt craze was a pogrom against people who believed in Celtic religion? I find this hard to believe. Also, Ireland was Christianized before the Middle Ages. Christianity was spread there by missionaries from the Roman Empire. St. Patrick was born in 385. I doubt there were a whole lot of pagans left in 1650.
Was this written by Clannad? ;)
--- bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
>
> i'm not sure if that's true. (see below) what do you
> hope to achieve by
> slamming the south? is there some insight we gain
> that will prevent lefties
> from making some terrible mistake or wrong move if
> we don't happen to
> always, always remember that All That's Horrid About
> Capitalism In the US
> Is The South?
>
> It seems like a distraction. anyway, I don't know
> how accurate this is, i'd
> like to be corrected by a musical historian on the
> list, but this is what
> Michael Ventura wrote in an essay years ago,
> pointing to some Irish (and
> I've since heard, possibly Scottish) influence on
> the rise of jazz and tap
> dancing. From the essay, "Hear That Long Snake
> Moan":
>
>
> I don't mean to get so academic, but remember, we're
> on the trail of the
> metaphysics of American music. It's a very winding
> trail, it goes through
> jungles, and there are places where it's completely
> overgrown. The major
> studies don't mention that Africans were not the
> only slaves in the West
> Indies; they were not even the only slaves who had a
> non-Christian --
> usually called, in unconsciously slanted language,
> "pre-Christian" --
> cosmology. In the l650s, after Oliver Cromwell had
> conquered Ireland in a
> series of massacres, he left his brother, Henry, as
> the island's governor.
> In the next decade Henry sold thousands of Irish
> people, mostly women and
> children, as slaves to the West Indies. Estimates
> range between 30,000 and
> 80,000. The higher number seems quite likely, in the
> light of a letter
> Henry Cromwell wrote to a slaver, saying "it is not
> in the least doubted
> you may have such number of them as you thinke
> fitt.. . I desire to express
> as much zeal in this design as you could wish." This
> Henry of the Uprighte
> Harte, as he called himself, said in another letter
> to a slaver who wanted
> only girls, "I think it might be of like advantage
> to your affaires there,
> and to ours heer, if you shoulde thinke fitt to
> sende 1500 or 2000 young
> boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age, to the
> place aforementioned.
> We could well spare them . . .."
>
> The Irish slaves, most of them women, were mated
> with the Africans. There
> is "a tradition" -- as historians sometimes call
> something which they have
> good reason to believe but can't prove -- that up to
> the early nineteenth
> century there were blacks on some of the islands who
> spoke Gaelic. In any
> case, the West Indian accent becomes much more
> comprehensible when the
> Irish slaves are taken into account. If you don't
> know anyone from there,
> listen to the language in a film like The Harder
> They Come. The Irish tinge
> is unmistakable.
>
> Why were these people sold into slavery? Henry gives
> us clues: "Concerning
> the young women, although we must use force takeinge
> them up, yet it beinge
> so much to their owne goode..." And in another
> letter, the one in which he
> suggests some men be taken too: "who knows but that
> it may be the meanes to
> make them Englishmen, I mean rather Christians." In
> other words, Henry was
> trying to sell off as many pagans as he could This
> was at the height of the
> English witch-craze, which was a pogrom against
> those who still adhered to
> the Celtic religions. Ireland was the stronghold for
> the old beliefs. This,
> better than anything else, explains the
> mercilessness of Cromwell's
> massacres there. How widespread could such beliefs
> have been? I know a
> woman whose Irish grandmother, in the 1950s, still
> referred to Christianism
> as "the new religion," and taught her granddaughter
> what she could remember
> of the Celtic rites. Jeanne Moreau's film
> L'Adolescente tells of a similar
> experience she had with her grandmother in rural
> France in the late 1930s.
> Such stories speak of traditions that had strength
> through the nineteenth
> century in Europe. In Cromwell's time "sabbats" are
> well documented
> throughout the continent, and in Ireland the old
> ways were more a way of
> life than anywhere else.
>
> And so we find, in West Indian Voodoo, a
> center-post, a gaily painted pole
> very like the maypole that survives in Europe from
> Celtic pagan
> celebration, at the center of every ceremony. You
> see it plainly in Maya
> Deren's 1949 footage, made into a documentary in the
> l950s, titled, as is
> her book, Divine Horsemen. The gods are said to
> enter through the
> centerpost, and the dances for most ceremonies
> revolve around the
> centerpost. We don't find this in the accounts from
> Africa. It speaks of a
> definite Irish-pagan influence. Virtually every
> account of Voodoo notes, at
> some point, how similar are its sorcery practices to
> the practices of
> European witchcraft, but no one has, to my
> knowledge, mentioned the
> connection with the Irish slaves.
>
> We will never have evidence, but nevertheless we
> have a good case:
> practicing pagans from Ireland infused their beliefs
> with the Africans,
> mingling in Voodoo two great streams of
> non-Christianist metaphysics. The
> snake, after all, was a holy symbol to both -- Saint
> Patrick driving the
> snakes out of Ireland, and the classic statue of the
> Virgin Mary with her
> bare foot crushing a snake, were political cartoons
> in the sense that they
> symbolized the Catholic dominion over Celtic
> paganism. In their beliefs and
> symbology the pagan Irish were closer to Africa than
> to Puritan England.
> This is part of our buried history, and as we bring
> it out into the light
> it will become more important.
>
> All of them -- the many, many Africans who created
> Voodoo and the, let's
> say, 40,000 Irish who gave to Voodoo some of their
> flourishes and sorcery
> -- would have their revenge. Jazz and rock'n'roll
> would evolve from Voodoo,
> carrying within them the metaphysical antidote that
> would aid many a
> twentieth-century Westerner from both the ravages of
> the mind-body split
> codified by Christianism, and the onslaught of
> technology. The twentieth
> century would dance as no other had, and, through
> that dance, secrets would
> be passed. First North America, and then the whole
> world, would -- like the
> old blues says -- "hear that long snake moan."
>
> The rest:
> http://members.aol.com/aarontstokes/Ventura1.html
>
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