I, apparently, suck.

[xp_daytripper]

Just got a batch of links from my mate Charlie. Seems the Burning Times is another one of those myths, like that Pope Joan. Yes, witches [1] were tried and burned and tortured, but it wasn't a wholescale genocide sort of thing. At least, not during the times courts kept records. Of course, that only goes back to the age of the printing press and doesn't cover what happened to the Druids when Britain was invaded by the Romans, but then again, unless I work out how to summon the ghost of Magic Users Past, that's probably just another myth too.

So, you're all right, I'm wrong (again) and I'm going to stop attempting to be clever and go play with Meggan.

Edit: The links, since you lot obviously don't understand the words "I got it wrong":

http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html
http://www.wiccaweb.com/suck_misconceptions.php
http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_burn.htm
http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_burn1.htm


There.

Edit 2: [1] or perfectly non-magically adept people who for whatever reason were called witches.

Comments

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's how I felt about the Spanish Inquisition. 'Common knowledge' history ain't. Propaganda can do so much to change what we know is "real" history, can't it?

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, that's not what I meant. "Real" history is just as questionable as "popular" history, when you get right down to it. At least when you go beyond the last few centuries and the source material gets sketchier and sketchier.

It is possible, in some cases - not all - to know what happened with a reasonable degree of certainty. It's next to impossible to know for sure why something happened. It's also possible to overcompensate, and just because history is inaccurate doesn't mean it's not influential on a present course of events. The ethnographers who looked into the question of race in the early medieval period and explored precisely what they thought it meant to be 'Germanic' certainly weren't expecting nationalist theorists (and later, the Nazis) to pick it up and run with it to new and scary places.

...good God, I'm lecturing. Someone stop me.

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

I don't think we disagree. I'm saying the facts are what most people know and you're saying the facts aren't what's really important.

Like Homer or the Bible.

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

I suppose it was the idea of 'real' history that I was reacting to. There is a past, where the waveform collapsed and settled into a single particle - I'm sorry, I have Askani retrocognitives yammering in my head - but we can never see more than a blurred reflection of it.

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

I think I understand that. Think. Maybe.

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

Well, try this on for size. (And let's see if my attempts to translate into English make any sense.)

The past exists, in a set pattern. It's what the Askani call the past-that-stands, and even if you meddle with it, like they're currently doing with theirs, it's still already happened. What is, is.

But there's also the past-that-flows. Okay. Bad translation. The past that's perceived, I suppose that's a better way to put it. It's constantly open to amendment, and has no set pattern. Its most significant characteristic is that it is in flux.

The two pasts coexist. There are places they intersect, and places they don't, and you can't have one without the other. What's more, they both have unique yet complementary influences on the developing future. What actually happened shapes events, but what we think happened shapes them just as profoundly. More so, at times.

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

Okay that I totally understood.

Like I said, Homer and the Bible. It's not word for word fact and the king who slaughtered four hundred men probably didn't really but the point is he was a great warrior and king.

And again, the Spanish Inquisition. Not actually an orgy of blood and torture but a hundred years later when the English told everyone it has been then that's what it became and now they're to blame for that scene in history of the world part one.

Yes?

And speaking of history...

[x-empath.livejournal.com]

the de la Rocha has several first-hand accounts of the Inquisitions in the family archives.

They're probably gone now, disappeared into some academic's to-do list somewhere. If not used to heat the old family home.

Manuel

Re: And speaking of history...

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

Must be nice to come from someplace with actual history. In America it always feels like we're scrapping for interesting things to say about our country.

Or maybe that's just me.

Mine was a very, very old family.

[x-empath.livejournal.com]

We have records - admittedly spotty ones - that go back to Rome Herself during her heyday.

Thousands of years of de la Rochas - our lives, our experiences, or hates and loves and passions and dealings.

That's probably all gone now. I don't know what came of the archives when Alphonso was assassinated.

Probably snatched by some university somewhere, if not actually just burned as rubbish.

Manuel