Witch-hunt: Encyclopedia II - Witch-hunt - The Burning Times

Witch-hunt - The Burning Times

"The Burning Times" is an English term that was invented by Mary Daly and first used in her book, Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-Ethics of Radical Feminism" which was published in 1978. This new Crone-logical term referred to the persecution of women by patriarchy to include both the European Witchhunts as well as the "entire patriarchal rule." The use of the "Burning Times" to refer to the Witchhunts by Neo-Pagans occurred when Starhawk subsequently introduced the term into her book, "The Spiral Dance" in 1979.

The term was adopted by various American feminist historians and popularised in the 1970s for all historical persecution of witches and pagans, often citing a figure of nine million casualties, drawn from nineteenth century campaigner for women's rights, Matilda Joslyn Gage. They also referred to it as the Women's Holocaust (see Hutton chapter 18 for his exploration of their ideas). Modern historians have shown that the victims of the witchhunt were not always female (in Iceland, for example, 80% of those accused were men), though they were in the majority and misogyny was an important part of the forces behind it. Generally accepted figures amongst historians today range from Levack at around 60,000 to Hutton at around 40,000.

The term was used in popular Neo-Pagan culture to refer to the time of the Great European Witchhunts (1450-1750). Gerald Gardner is retroactively attributed to using the term by such authors as Ronald Hutton (344). Gardner is claimed to have used the phrase in reference to his claim that Wicca was an ancient persecuted religion, relying in turn heavily on the work of Margaret Murray. Gardner believed Wiccans should remember their forebears who were burned by the Church. In fact, witches in England were never burnt, but were hanged; burning of heretics and witches was practiced on the European continent (additionally, many aspects of Wicca are of modern origin and were not part of the historical Pagan practices). Modern historians agree the witchhunts had nothing to do with persecuting a pagan cult, but is the result of an interplay of a series of complex historical and societal factors. The actual religion of those killed in the witchhunts, if they had any, was Christianity. [Keith Thomas 514-7, Hutton passim]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Burning Times", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki