This is an old notion, goes back the work of a scholar whose name I forget, Mary Something, wrote back in the teens and twenties of the last century, who thought that the witch hunt was an attempt to stamp an an actual surviving religion. I'm not an expert on the witch hunt, but at one point I read a lot about it, and most scholars reject this idea. It got a second wind because certain feminists in the 70s and 80s latched on the ideas that the massacre of hundreds of thousands of mostly women wasn't patriarchal enough, there had to be an attempt to wipe out a supposedly matriarchal Goddess-worshiping religion.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
=== message truncated ===
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