Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100
A compelling exploration of language, archaeology, and literature that illuminates hidden cultural heritages: women’s ceremonies for the Fates; old ethnic names for ‘witch’ as wisewoman; the women who go by night with Diana or Holda. From forgotten heathen strands, the book reweaves the ripped webs of women’s culture. Annotated; 140 illustrations. $24.99 + shipping.
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In this compelling exploration of language, archaeology, and early medieval literature, Max Dashu illuminates hidden cultural heritages. She shows that the old ethnic names for “witch” signify ‘wisewoman,’ ‘prophetess,’ ‘diviner,’ ‘chanter,’ ‘herbalist,’ and ‘healer.’ She fleshes out the oracular ceremonies of the Norse völur (“staff-women”), their incantations and “sitting-out” on the land seeking vision. Archaeological finds of their ritual staffs show that many symbolize the distaff, a spinner’s wand that connects with wider European themes of goddesses, fates, witches, and female power. They include Berthe Pédauque, also known as the “Swan-footed Queen,” whose spinning began at the proverbial beginning of time. Veneration of the Fates persisted under many titles, as the Norns, sudice, fatas and fées, Wyrd or the Three Weird Sisters.
Witches and Pagans looks at women’s sacraments in early medieval Europe, a subject that has been buried deep for centuries. Women set out offering tables for the Three Sisters or the “good women,” chanted over herbs, and healed children by passing them through ‘elf-bores.’ Spinning and weaving were ceremonial acts with divinatory or protective power, as bishops’ scoldings reveal. Churchmen also railed against the Women Who Go by Night with Diana or Holda or Herodias, in shamanic light on spirit animals. This was the foundational witch-legend that demonologists seized upon in later centuries. But witch persecution was already underway, as a chapter on the sexual politics of early medieval witch burnings documents.
A thousand years ago, an Old English scribe condemned people who “bring their offerings to earth-fast stone and also to trees and to wellsprings, swa wiccan taeca∂—as the witches teach.” This indicates that people still regarded witches as spiritual teachers, and that they performed ceremonies of reverence to Earth. Many aspects of ethnic spiritual culture survived the state conversions to Christianity: ancestor veneration, crystal balls, amulets—and witches’ wands. Artists depicted
Mother Earth giving her breast to serpents, animals, and children. Stories of ancestral women—the Cailleach and the Scandinavian dísir —were handed down over countless generations. Gathering together forgotten strands from heathen European heritages, Witches and Pagans reweaves the ripped webs of women’s culture.
Vol. VII in the series Secret History of the Witches
====Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100 (7) Paperback – 27 June 2017
by Max Dashu (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 91 ratings
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In this compelling exploration of language, archaeology, and early medieval literature, Max Dashu illuminates hidden cultural heritages. She shows that the old ethnic names for “witch” signify ‘wisewoman,’ ‘prophetess,’ ‘diviner,’ ‘chanter,’ ‘herbalist,’ and ‘healer.’ She fleshes out the oracular ceremonies of the Norse völur (“staff-women”), their incantations and “sitting-out” on the land seeking vision. Archaeological finds of their ritual staffs show that many symbolize the distaff, a spinner’s wand that connects with wider European themes of goddesses, fates, witches, and female power. They include Berthe Pédauque, also known as the “Swan-footed Queen,” whose spinning began at the proverbial beginning of time. Veneration of the Fates persisted under many titles, as the Norns, sudice, fatas and fées, Wyrd or the Three Weird Sisters.
Witches and Pagans looks at women’s sacraments in early medieval Europe, a subject that has been buried deep for centuries. Women set out offering tables for the Three Sisters or the “good women,” chanted over herbs, and healed children by passing them through ‘elf-bores.’ Spinning and weaving were ceremonial acts with divinatory or protective power, as bishops’ scoldings reveal. Churchmen also railed against the Women Who Go by Night with Diana or Holda or Herodias, in shamanic flight on spirit animals. This was the foundational witch-legend that demonologists seized upon in later centuries. But witch persecution was already underway, as a chapter on the sexual politics of early medieval witch burnings documents.
A thousand years ago, an Old English scribe condemned people who “bring their offerings to earth-fast stone and also to trees and to wellsprings, swa wiccan taeca∂—as the witches teach.” This indicates that people still regarded witches as spiritual teachers, and that they performed ceremonies of reverence to Earth. Many aspects of ethnic spiritual culture survived the state conversions to Christianity: ancestor veneration, crystal balls, amulets—and witches’ wands. Artists depicted Mother Earth giving her breast to serpents, animals, and children. Stories of ancestral women—the Cailleach and the Scandinavian dísir —were handed down over countless generations.
Gathering together forgotten strands from heathen European heritages, Witches and Pagans reweaves the ripped webs of women’s culture.
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"A monumental moment in women's history, as well as Pagan history, is upon us, with the release of Max Dashu's new book Witches and Pagans. Over 40 years; worth of research and effort created this book, and its companion volumes to follow. It's a landmark work, easily the most important new Pagan title of the year, if not the decade." --Yeshe Matthews, Mothers of New Time
"Max Dashú writes with lucidity and a compelling awareness of the silencing of women in male-centered cultures--especially women's silencing in patriarchal religion. Max has spent decades excavating the exceptionally rich materials--linguistic, archaeological, mythological--found in this book, and uncovering clues to the spiritual spheres of pre-patriarchal women. A true tour de force!" -- Miriam Robbins Dexter, UCLA professor of Indo-European studies and author of Whence the Goddesses: a Source Book
"Reading this book is like opening a box filled with jewels left to you by ancestors you never knew you had. Women preserved ancient mysteries that celebrated female powers of creativity as they went about the tasks of their daily lives. It was not so easy to stamp these practices out, because women understood their songs and rituals to be essential for the continued flourishing of life... Brilliant work. May it change the way we see the world!" --Carol Christ, author of Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology
"Dashu has done her homework, and has unearthed,
uncovered and rediscovered a remarkable
amount of information pertaining to women's roles in folk religion, magic, witchcraft, healing and seership during the medieval era. ... ... This book is unlike any book by a Neopagan author on these particular topics that
I have seen (other
than perhaps Ronald Hutton), in its scope, the breadth of materials presented, and in providing access to
an incredible amount of unusual sources of historical materials that would be of great interest to modern pagans, witches, seers and herbwives. ... I have rarely, if ever, seen a book on these topics that went so far into the traditions, explored them so widely and deeply, and provided a truly unique window into our spiritual past with such care and intelligence. Well-written, and a one-of-a-kind resource... a treasure trove... highly recommended." --Sharon Paice MacLeod, Sagewomen Journal
"The book is amazing; I am so impressed with the amount of scholarship you have sloughed through, and how hard it must have been to put all this together. All kudos to you, Max for the gifts of research and knowledge and vision." Gloria Orenstein, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, University of Southern California
"Such a beautiful and academic read. Margin note taking and really absorbing the ethnohistorical references. Max Dashu, brava! Cannot wait for the next volume!!!" --Mercedes Draffin
"It's such a beautiful book, a work of art, so well done. An immense contribution." --Gilby Farnsworth
"I've been looking forward to the release of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion by Max Dashu; this promises to be an important addition to the field, as it reweaves women's roles back into history". --Jhenah Telyndru August 2, 2016
"I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for your work. Witches and Pagans is a treasure-trove of of suppressed and lost information, lost no more thanks to you! -- Mary Mackey, author of The Year the Horses Came and the Earthsong Trilogy
About the Author
Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research and document global women's history, across the full spectrum of the world's peoples. She has built a collection of 40,000 slides and digital images, from which she has created 130 slideshows on female cultural heritages, including Indigenous traditions and with attention to the patterns of conquest. Dashu has been presenting her visual talks for 44 years, at universities, conferences, museums, community centers, bookstores, galleries, libraries and schools, in North America, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Bulgaria, Australia, Mexico and Guatemala. Her legendary slideshows bring to light female realities usually hidden from view, from ancient female figurines to women leaders, priestesses, clan mothers, philosophers, warriors and rebels. Her use of images to teach, scanning the cultural record-archaeology, history, art, orature, linguistics, and spiritual philosophies-makes this knowledge more accessible and bridges the gap between academia and grassroots education. Her daily posts on the Suppressed Histories Facebook page are followed by over 156,000 people, and some 40,000 more have viewed her articles on Academia.edu. She also teaches via webcasts and online courses. Dashu is internationally known for her expertise on ancient female iconography and female spheres of power; matricultures and patriarchal systems, medicine women, shamans and witches, and witch hunting. Her visual talks include titles such as The Cosmic Weaver; Dangerous Women: They Fight Back; Mother-Right; Rebel Shamans: Women Confront Empire; Ancient Treasures of African Women; Magna Mater and Isis of 10,000 Names: Syncretism under the Roman Empire; Deasophy; The Distaff: Goddess, Fates, and Women's Power; Racism, History and Lies; Taming the Female Body; Amazons and Women Warriors; Grandmother Stones of Megalithic Europe; Medicine Women of the Americas, and The Wu: female shamans of ancient China. Max Dashu has keynoted at many conferences: Feminism in London (2015); Women's Voices for a Change at Skidmore, NY (2013); Association for the Study of Women and Mythology conference, Bangor PA (2010); the Pagan Studies Conference at Claremont Graduate University, CA (2008); Coalition for Battered Women conference at Rutgers NJ (2005); and the Institute of Archaeomythology conference in Rila, Bulgaria (2004), among others. She has presented at the Women's Centers of Northwestern University, Stanford, Princeton, University of California at Berkeley and many others, and at Trinity College in Dublin, the Museo de San Miguel de Allende, the Frauenmuseum (Wiesbaden), and the State Library of Queensland.
Product details
Publisher : Veleda Press; Annotated edition (27 June 2017)
Language : English
Paperback : 408 pages
ISBN-10 : 0692740287
ISBN-13 : 978-0692740286
Dimensions : 16.99 x 2.13 x 24.41 cm
Best Sellers Rank: 362,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
90 in History of Ethnic & Tribal Religions
363 in Tribal, Indigenous & Folk Practices
487 in Gender & Sexuality in Religion
Customer Reviews: 4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 91 ratings
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Sasha McInnes
5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book by the wonderful Max Dashu - thanks ...
Reviewed in Canada on 9 June 2018
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I love this book by the wonderful Max Dashu - thanks to her for bringing so much history to life for women!! Buy it; you will never regret it.
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pyat
5.0 out of 5 stars The crux of it
Reviewed in the United States on 15 March 2023
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As soon as you buy this book, which you must, put it in a book cover. I've been reading it so much that it's falling apart! It's one of those books that, five years hence, you'll be like, "Now where did I read about blah-blah before? Oh, yeah, Max Dashu covered it!" It's labyrinthine and monumental; on every page you'll find something you'll want to do a deep-dive into. If you're serious about learning the history of women (specifically in Europe for this volume), this book is pivotal to your journey.
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TheBlaqkWiddow
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for women
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 November 2017
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Excellent informative deep dive into women and the origins of the witch.
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Puffi
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 September 2019
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Excellent
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Audrey Pangallo
5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely worth your time!
Reviewed in the United States on 23 August 2018
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This book is very well researched and very, very well written. It's useful on its own, as a historical narrative about women. You could read it just for that. For me, I have been on the hunt for YEARS for a book about pagan and witch practices that were specific to women. And I found it! It's super useful in that regard. It definitely helps sort out what neopagan practices have an actual historical backing. It's also a relief to read as a pagan, because so many grimoires and spell books you pick up are so heavily influenced by men... you read them and think "where are the women?" Well, this book tells you where the women were.
As a feminist book, and as a pagan history book, this is a super good read and I highly recommend it!
13 people found this helpful
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libbye
5.0 out of 5 stars An in-depth look at women healers over 400 years.
Reviewed in the United States on 12 June 2018
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A very consise history of women as folk healers between 700 and 1100. This is a world- wide study of the earliest recorded references to women eventually tortured and killed as " witches". My only complaint is Ms. Dashu has only drawings of archaeological findings, not photos. An excellent , well written study.
10 people found this helpful
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Modernmystic
5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favorites!
Reviewed in the United States on 14 June 2019
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A must have for your witchy woman library. A very thorough section on volvas as well!
3 people found this helpful
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Courtney S.
5.0 out of 5 stars Good stuff
Reviewed in the United States on 21 November 2020
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Very informative, would definitely recommend
One person found this helpful
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Sharon Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars If you want to know the TRUE history of witches ...
Reviewed in the United States on 16 November 2017
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If you want to know the TRUE history of witches and pagans, read this book! Full of scholarly information!
9 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars I wish Max Dashu had all the books in this ...
Reviewed in the United States on 10 November 2017
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I wish Max Dashu had all the books in this series done. I would buy them all. In depth information.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 14 reviews
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Pegi Eyers
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February 20, 2018
In recent years artists, feminists and scholars in Matriarchal Studies, Women's History and Goddess Spirituality have produced a monumental body of work, and one of these towering and influential figures is Max Dashu, who has spent 48 years excavating the western canon for evidence of women of power in Old Europe, early medieval history and indigenous societies. She founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970, and her ongoing research engages Herstory worldwide, placing women at the forefront where we belong. Women who were repressed, banned, hidden and obscured - the priestesses, clan mothers, healers, shamans, water-witches, oracles, myth-makers, philosophers, warriors and rebels from our ancestral motherlines - have come to life through Max’s relentless dedication to "restoring women to cultural memory." As author, activist and artist, she continues to offer a rich collection of visual presentations, exhibits, courses, workshops, webcasts, and keynote talks that highlight women's resistance to patriarchal oppression, challenge stereotypes of race and class, and interrogate the structures of Empire.
Over the years, Max has slowly worked toward publishing this monumental body of work, and “Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion 700-1100” is the first installment in the highly-anticipated series entitled Secret History of the Witches from Veleda Press.
From my own perspective as a writer and educator on ancestral empowerment, the most beautiful aspect of Witches and Pagans is how it gives modern women permission to recover, restore, and rejuvenate pre-colonial traditions in our lives today. We are witnessing the failure of the patriarchy in the late-stage capitalism, massive change and climate disaster that surrounds us, and alternatives for creating a new sustainable society can be sourced from our own roots - in women’s work, women’s power, women's knowledge, and women's ceremony. The renaissance is underway, and Max's work affirms the innate capacity of the feminine to embody the ideals of reciprocity and care, and to mentor others in justice and earth remediation.
And yet uncovering these treasures has not been easy. History and myth is incomplete, with many gaps and missing pieces. For centuries, women's wisdom and mysteries were systematically demonized by the leaders of the Christian hierarchy in Europe. Most of the written records that survive had one sole purpose - to obstruct folk religion, and reinterpret European paganism according to a patriarchal worldview. Scholars who worked with this material historically (and in our time) have also been patriarchal, which has continued to marginalize women, earth-based spirituality and the sacred.
In the face of this erasure we are indebted to Max Dashu's particular talent, which peels back the layers of rhetoric and propaganda, and uncovers the empowered female realities hidden deep within. It takes an astute scholar to decolonize the western canon, someone who knows exactly how the patriarchy operates, and yet can delve beneath the damaging layers of religious pressure and patriarchal oppression to find authentic narrative and meaning.
Her ethnohistorical approach to integrating myth, folk religion, philosophy and the archaeological record provides a truly unique portal into our spiritual past. Throughout the long grim years of Christian domination, empire-building and witch hunts, the wide-ranging narratives in Witches and Pagans recover and reinstate ancient memories, symbols, mythic folkways and essential lore that continued on in Europe, and that can still nourish us today. For all those practicing cultural recovery work and nature-centered spiritualities, this brilliant series will heal our separation from each other, European ancestry, and Earth Community. In my own work, my heart soars knowing that the divine otherworld female has been retained and expressed in our Celtic consciousness and tradition. Thank you Max Dashu, for this incredible gift to the world!
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Diletta
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April 10, 2022
Studio ricchissimo sulle streghe, ovvero donne sciamane sagge guaritrici. Sembra complesso ma invece molto accessibile a chiunque a mio parere quindi volendo ottimo per iniziare.
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Louise Hewett
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August 30, 2020
Review of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100 by Max Dashú
By Louise M Hewett
Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100 is the seventh and approximately middle volume in the inspired series, Secret History of the Witches by Max Dashú. In nine chapters of gathering, sorting, carding, spinning, and weaving (to use the analogy of the spinster’s craft so relevant an historic, if suppressed, symbol of women’s power – and so pervasive throughout the book), Dashú takes us on a journey through a time during the ‘early Middle Ages, when the war on heathen culture was in full cry.’(1) With a contemporary ethnohistorical approach, we encounter a part of her forty year search for women’s presence and cultural meaning in the context of progressively more Christianised and Romanised European society and culture during the period 700-1100. In addition to the excavation of scant written material, the increasingly preferred masculine convention of the language of that record has been wrestled with, and a pattern of the devaluing and sometimes outright demonisation of mythic and ordinary women revealed. One such example is the figure of a vital Mother Earth suckling snakes who is, over time, reclassified as the sexualised ‘Luxuria,’ meaning sensuality and lust.
On the one hand I have asked myself, how did the women of my own matriline survive throughout the period discussed in this book? Were my foremothers silent, obedient, devout Christian women with the luck of “good” marriages? Was it chance, or silence, that ensured the continuation of my own line? What am I to imagine of those women? There are no stories available to me, not even through oral transmission. We have been wrapped in a collective amnesia. And yet it is obvious that my own existence means that my foremothers did survive, that a line of daughters avoided death (but not trauma and indoctrination), so that I might be breathing – and grieving – today. On the other hand, what were the folk practices of my foremothers? What were their songs and invocations, their daily or seasonal rituals tied to Pagan roots but veiled in Christian reference? This book gives a glimpse into possibility. Reading in ‘Early Witch Burnings’ of the sorts of brutal persecutions of women which occurred in medieval societies for the crimes of magic (pagan rites) or sexuality, has stirred grief and nightmares. Aristocratic women might escape the pyre, but a peasant woman? ‘The calls to witch burning that French and English kings issued in the ninth and tenth centuries were never withdrawn or countermanded. They stood unchallenged for centuries, underpinning local persecutions by feudal lords –who kept no legal records.’(2)
Over the years of my adult life has come an awareness that restoring women of European ancestry to what knowledge is available to us of ancestral stories, symbols, and perceptions of social and personal power, can form a vital part of the journey of personal and cultural transformation so crucial in our times. Knowing that there are remnants of the lineages of wisdom, of oracular, medicinal, and creative systems of social influence and value available for women of various European ethnicities who have become disconnected from our ancestral heritage, can surely help us in the process of unravelling colonialist biases, and the tendencies to co-opt the symbols and knowledge systems of indigenous societies not our own. With such a volume as Witches and Pagans as resource, we are given help, direction, and reassurance. We can begin, perhaps, to better understand ourselves.
The list of contents are webs of words, in themselves webs of wyrd which open the ways to the well of memory and ignite the imagination: weirding women and weirding peas, waking the well, raven auguries, peace-weavers, midwifery belts, the distaff, healing and divining; herb-chants, wolf-witches, night-farers, wyccecrӕft, and names of the witch; Völur, Seiðr, galdr, gyður; rune magic and ancestor-mysteries...and on. The chapter regarding Cailleachan, Disir and Hags returns us to a bedrock of giant-proportioned and female-centric wisdom, and challenges the narrative about Valkyries as warriors to reveal connections to their origin as ‘nature spirits, spinners and fates.’(3) The final chapter of the book, Voluspá, shows us that although ‘strained through the masculine filter of the skálds’(4) the woman’s prophetic voice remains the foundation of the text. Witches and Pagans uncovers and illuminates, adding to our store of knowledge, and of possibility. For to be reunited with a record, however threadbare, of women’s voices and socially significant roles, can act as a catalyst to begin, or to continue on in journeys of return to those parts of ourselves long hidden from knowledge and relationship. I savoured the reading of this volume, deeply moved by Dashú’s depth of commitment to this task. I will certainly be returning to Witches and Pagans often, as both inspiration and resource, and look forward to further volumes in this series.
(1) - 'Witches and Pagans' p. 1
(2) - p. 284
(3) - Contents
(4) - p. 327
Louise M Hewett
Author of the Pictish Spirit novel series, Mist, Wind, Flowers, and Storm
29 August, 2020
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Muriel (The Purple Book Wyrm)
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May 3, 2023
More accurate rating: 8-8.5/10.
Max Dashu's Witches and Pagans is exactly the kind of book I wanted to read regarding the pagan and folkloric origins of the witch figure, and the survival of pagan – and female-centric – spirituality in European culture. This overview of the topic is multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary, in a way, though it was still only written by one author and… independent researcher is what I’ll call Ms Dashu. That, in and of itself, is really impressive given the scope and depth of scholarship displayed in this book!
Now this volume is the first entry in a projected series dedicated to female-centric history, sociology and religion or spiritual tradition, and centres on female spheres of spiritual power in the early European Middle Ages. Ms Dashu draws on linguistic evidence, the written historical record, but also oral folk tradition, mythological texts, canonical law, and archaeological evidence to flesh out her analysis. And takes a close look, specifically, at the importance of spinning and divining as symbols and practices of female spiritual power; folkloric goddess-like figures such as Herodias, Frau Holle or the Lady of the Night (as Ronald Hutton does in his Queens of the Wild, which I read in January); or evidence from the Germanic, Norse and Gallo-Celtic worlds.
I was particularly impressed by the linguistic analysis she presented in the book, and found it absolutely fascinating, not to mention immensely stimulating for my mild etymology nerd… and pattern-making self. Yes, I have, at long last, found a book that tackles this topic, one I consider a special interest, from different but linked angles, and which relies on drawing patterns of meaning from different sources of evidence! This book was fascinating, and not at all "soapboxy": the author offers up her own interpretation and analysis of the topic, of course, but she follows the evidence – from what I could tell at any rate – and sources everything as well.
To temper my enthusiasm a tiny bit, however, I also have to point out I found the book a little dense at times, because there’s just so much information here, and structured a little disjointedly. This may actually be by design though, since I believe Max Dashu holds a specific fondness for the concept of webs and matrices of knowledge, which I can honestly respect and even mildly vibe with... but I guess I ultimately do prefer something a bit more linear when it comes to published non-fiction.
Still, this was a rock solid 8 to a soft 8.5/10. I would highly recommend it, especially paired with Ronald Hutton’s work, honestly, though as I stated in my review of the latter’s The Witch, this stuff is for nerds, in the best way possible, but do keep that in mind. Now I really want to read the other volumes in this projected series, but I sadly have absolutely no idea if any of them are even close to being published.
30-feminism
32-theomythology
39-art-history
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Dawn Albright
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March 11, 2018
This book is a treasure. As I read it, I kept being reminded of when I saw her speak in person -- it was like a blizzard of facts, jumping from continent to continent and century to century in a way that was both impressive and difficult. This book is more contained and organized, but it maintained that blizzard quality. I don't know how one person can know so much about so many different cultures. It's almost hallucinogenic to follow her work because it starts melting together in my brain in a weird way.
Sometimes it feels like she is extrapolating beyond her data. I don't know enough linguistics to be able to judge arguments based on words in different languages sounding alike -- I know enough to have some skepticism about those kinds of conclusions. She will show a picture of a stick figure from some ancient artifact and say that it is clearly a woman holding a spindle. I wish the pictures in this book reproduced better; some of them are fuzzy and look like poor photocopies. However, I had the same reservations when I saw her talk in person with clearer pictures. But these two criticisms pale compared to everything you will find in this book.
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Laura
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October 3, 2016
From one of the most brilliant minds in the field of women's history comes an incredibly detailed book that is richly sourced for academic scholars, and yet accessible for laypeople like myself. Dashú traces with exquisite clarity how language, myth and folk culture reveal the hidden spheres of women exercising power in the early middle ages. Especially powerful and respected in the fields of spirituality and healing, wise women in Europe were systematically demonized by the leaders of the Christian hierarchy, the surviving records of which are one of the best sources for knowledge of these women's power today. This book will be referred to again and again, with something new discovered each time.
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William Bies
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November 26, 2022
What stands behind the New Age recrudescence of paganism? In a bleak post-Reformation world stripped of sacrament and mystery, it is after all understandable that some distraught but sensitive souls would rebel against the shibboleth of the technological mindset and its ever-expanding control over natural forces and seek to restore an apprehension of the primal wonder of creation such as the antique pagans once possessed. Set aside the question of whether or to what extent contemporary would-be pagans genuinely recover a pre-modern mentality (any more than Protestants allegedly return to the early church) – most probably they do not as reference to the transcendent goes missing; for instance, Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, however piquant it may be as a literary exploration of women’s experience of the Trojan war, cannot be said to be truly mythological for the properly religious aura with which the Olympian pantheon was imbued (albeit contradictorily and refracted through a dark glass) seems to be entirely absent in her work. Yet one cannot appreciate the opening lines of Homer’s Iliad, if one does not perceive the gravity of Agamemnon’s violation of the justice of the god Apollo, whom the priest Chryses represents on behalf of his daughter (as only a religious man could) – and enter merely into an historical investigation of medieval Europe around the time of its Christianization.
The present review will focus on Max Dashu’s Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100 (Veleda Press, 2016, volume seven in a projected eleven-volume Secret History of the Witches). Dashu’s method is primarily philological and etymological, supported by archaeological evidence. Let us single out for the sake of review a couple themes that pique this recensionist’s intellectual interest. Speaking of of the cosmic tree yggrasil in Norse mythology, Dashu has this to note:
Three primeval Maidens live under this holy Tree, says the Völuspá, the oldest poem in the Icelandic Edda. They lay down the laws of Nature and shape the destiny of all beings, carving runes into the Tree. These are the deepest Mysteries. The Maidens are named from the Norse verb verða, ‘to turn, to become’, They are Urð, which means ‘Became’; Verðandi, ‘becoming’; and Skuld, ‘Shall be’, ‘Must be’ or ‘Will-happen’. Skuld is related to English ‘shall’, and carries the same sense of intention, propulsion or necessity. Some translators highlight its connotation of necessity of ‘Inevitability’. Rather than progressing in a straight line, the Norns spiral through revolutions of Time. What ‘was’ must lead to what ‘shall be’, which inexorably turns into ‘what was’. In this philosophy, time as well as space curves, turns, spirals: ‘Völupsá seems to show traces of a cyclic arrangement of time’...In fact, the Norns’ names have very deep Indo-European roots. They go back to a distant proto-Indo-European root *Wert (*Uert, *Uerth) meaning ‘to turn, revolve, spin, move in a circle’. In some European daughter languages, this taproot concept evolved into a verb of being and becoming:
Latin: Verto to turn, revolve
Old Norse: Verða to be
Saxon: Weorthan to be
German: Werden to be, become
This complex of meanings gave rise in turn to Germanic names for a Fate goddess who personified causation, change and movement through time. The Norse knew her as Urðr, the Germans as Wurt, and the Old Saxons called her Wurð. In Old English her name was Wyrd or Werd, giving rise to the medieval word for destiny: weird. All these fate-names derive from the ancient verb of turning, in its completed form. The shaper of destiny is herself the sum of fates fulfilled, and in turn brings new things into being. The Norns ‘shape’ destiny, or ‘lay’ fate, lay down natural law. Poems and sagas speak of their fate-shaping (sköpum norna). [pp. 1-2]
For weaving is a prototypically feminine activity:
Some Old English gnomic sayings conceive of Wyrd as a weaver: ‘what Wyrd wove for me’ (me thæt Wyrd gewaf). Another phrase is ‘woven by the decrees of fate’….The Anglo-Saxon word wyrdstæf was a name for what Fate ordains. The term resonates with the Norse rūnstæf, which were divinatory wooden lots. The only surviving use of wyrdstæf combines it with the word ‘woven’: ‘when comes that season woven by fate’s decrees’. This same line is also translated as ‘the time woven on Wyrd’s loom’ (thrāg...wefen wyrdstafum, taking wyrdstæf as ‘loom’). [pp. 18-20]
As we see, ancient peoples did not parcel out life into a profane and a holy sphere. Rather, everything interpenetrates everything, rendering the whole charged with symbolic significances. Women would chant incantations while weaving, thus closing the connection in this circle of ideas:
One English name for the witch was ‘weirding woman’. The Scots called her ‘weird-woman’ or ‘weird-wife’, or sometimes, under Norse influence, ‘spaeing woman’ (after spákona, ‘prophetic woman’). She cast lots, scanned the signs and advised of currents on their way. Weirding encompassed foreknowing and prophecy and all the shamanic arts. A Scottish reference to ‘weirding peas’ harks back to the divinatory way of casting lots. [p. 23]
All of this reveals a characteristically pagan mindset, to conceive of time itself in circular terms. Many readers will be familiar with Mircea Eliade’s treatment of this fundamental theme in his influential study, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1954). Right now would not be the occasion to reprise Eliade’s compelling thesis that contrasts the ancient cyclical view with the modern linear view of time owing to the intervention of Judeo-Christianity. Rather, inspired by the above we wish speculate: is it after all true that modern mathematical physics since Galileo knows only a strictly linear time? Yes, if one look overly naïvely at Newton’s equations of motion. But the question appears in another light if one turn to ergodic theory. There, as covered by A.B. Katok and A.M. Stepin [Approximations in ergodic theory, Russian Mathematical Surveys 22, 77-102 (1967)], a series of deep results show that a metric automorphism of a measure space can be well approximated by periodic transformations and its ergodic, mixing and spectral properties can be investigated by means of its periodic approximates. The motion in the vicinity of a periodic orbit embodies a concept of cyclical time. So we see that linear time reduces to an arrangement of cycles of varying periodicity, and the representation thus obtained becomes exact in the limit as cycles with arbitrarily long period are included.
The second stimulating subject evoked by Dashu’s work is that of runes:
Runa means Mystery. The concept was sacred in the old Germanic languages. An Eddic poem describes the runes as reginkunnon, ‘of divine origin’, literally ‘kin to the powers’. The word runa was first written down in bishop Wufila’s Gothic translation of the Christian scriptures, sixteen centuries ago. It was the closest Germanic approximation to the Greek mysterión in Mark 4:11: ‘The mystery of the kingdom of God’….The Anglo-Saxon cleric Caedmon defined rūn as both sacred Mystery and as magical symbol. In the Old Saxon Heliand, the biblical passage ‘Lord, teach us to pray’ is translated as ‘reveal to us the runes’ (gerihti us that geruni). The Anglo-Saxon word rūn meant ‘mystery, secret, counsel, consultation, runic character’. Sometimes the characters are described as rūnstæf, showing their roots in divinatory wooden lots. [p. 159]
Needless to say, in ancient saga runecraft was naturally the province of women [cf. p. 162]:
Weirding women sought to perceive how Wyrd was spinning out lives and interweaving them in her webs. People came to seers looking for illumination of their problems, for solutions and counsel to choose the right course. The impulse to divine the powers at work rested on a petition to the Fates….Runes were an alphabet if powers and meanings, forming constellations in shifting relationships to each other. Divination with runes spelled out fate, and offered a chance to shape it. [pp. 157-158]
Must we suppose all of this to have been delusory? It all depends on how prepared one is when going into a session of divination. The lots, when cast, offer a clue but have to be interpreted – and it stands to reason that a practiced woman would have been attentive to what was going on in the world around her, both natural and social, and thus would have had a base of knowledge by which to guide her interpretation. A similar phenomenon crops up in the New Testament, that of the interpretation of tongues – in debased modern practice, speaking in tongues is treated as a spiritual gift apart from its prophetic interpretation, thus clearly departing from the norm of the early church, in which speaking in tongues was regarded as a gift only when accompanied by a prophetic interpretation. Thus, we may infer that it would be problematic if a witch entrusted herself solely to fortune when casting lots but it does not seem in principle that no knowledge could be conveyed via such divination, if she brings an awareness of the context to bear upon its proper interpretation. A reason of this kind must account for the track record at the oracle of Apollo in Delphi, namely, of the Pythian sibyl’s having been right more often than she was wrong – for prophetic inspiration does not consist in guessing in the dark!
Another major theme Dashu is concerned to hone is that old-style witchcraft has far more to do with knowledge and prophecy than with consorting with Satan and casting harmful spells – the latter ideas seem to be late medieval or early modern inventions. For by common acknowledgment prophecy belonged to the woman’s sphere and, as evidenced in many of the sagas, was deemed unmanly for a man to engage in (almost as bad as homosexual conduct). In her own concluding words:
In spite of everything that we have been taught about the profoundly secondary status of the female, what women did in the spiritual realm mattered. The wisewomen has oracular authority and healing wisdom and ceremonial leadership, even after being stripped of any institutional base. But these female spheres of power faced intense challenges from church, state and from within the patriarchal family, Sexual politics was closely bound up with witchcraft, with the gendering of seiðr, the cries of ‘witch and whore’ in England, and why the Spanish treated burning at the stake as a female punishment. At the center of the furnace of cultural transformation was the development of diabolism – a Christian projection of ‘the devil’ onto all ethnic deities. It has had a lasting impact. The namecalling of ‘devil worship’ formed the template for repressing goddess veneration and, later, indigenous religions on other continents. It still influences scholarly and popular interpretations of witches, witchcraft and heathen spiritual traditions. [pp. 330-331]
The last part of the present work is devoted to the tragedy of the meeting of cultures. Too often, Christianity was not established by consent (as happened in Iceland) but imposed through force of arms, as in Charlemagne’s protracted campaigns against the Saxons or with the Teutonic knights’ genocidal suppression of heathenism in Prussia and Lithuania. But more than this, even where the new religion met with success, the historical evidence Dashu marshals suggests a failure of enculturation. An illiterate and largely non-urban population like those of northern Europe must find a scriptural religion hard to assimilate – compare with the relative ease with which Christianity spread throughout urban centers in the Mediterranean world and in the Roman empire. By the time it began to gain headway, in the fourth century, generations of apologists such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius and so forth had long since found a way to make the strange religion presentable to those who possessed an education in Greek and Latin letters. Is there anything of the kind that might have facilitated the conversion of the northern barbarians? It seems not so much. True, missionaries such as Augustine of Canterbury and Boniface indeed proclaimed the gospel to the Germanic tribes but do not seem to have left behind any literary compositions that sought to reach out to them in terms of their own culture. The precious testimonies we do possess, such as the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (composed circa 1220) date to an era when Christianity already had long been accepted, and take a retrospective view of the pagan culture, seen as belonging to glorious but by-gone times. What this all means for Dashu’s project: the tenacity with which pagan beliefs and practices held fast for centuries, even after the official adoption of Christianity, appears little surprising. Yet there remain a few anomalies not apparently consistent with Dashu’s account of the history, for instance, the way in which Christian religion seems to have appealed to the Celtic sensibility and to have been enthusiastically incorporated into Irish culture, bringing about the golden age of the seventh century. Indeed, Irish monks crossed the English channel in the other direction and were instrumental to the re-Christianization of large parts of northern France and Germany during the Carolingian renaissance. Thus, the relations between Christianity and paganism during the early middle ages could not have been as simplistic as Dashu implies in her occasionally angry retelling – or how else could an integrally Christian civilization have arisen by the time of the high middle ages? One wishes for more dispassionate scholarship on this key issue.
A disturbing aspect, nonetheless, would be the sporadic early medieval witch trials on the record of which Dashu reports. For many longstanding pagan practices entered the obloquy of condemnation upon the adoption of Christianity – such as incantation, divination, soothsaying and sorcery. In what is a typical contrast throughout history, ecclesiastical leaders favored comparatively mild sanctions such as fasting and penance while the secular authorities preferred the draconian measures of banishment, torture and execution (centuries later, during the inquisition, those who were accused would actively seek to be tried in an ecclesiastical court, known to be far more lenient than the corresponding secular courts). The Erastian political tenets popular with Protestants, which adulate the temporal power and want to subordinate the spiritual power to it, are well known – one may consult in this connection the programmatic essay by Lord Acton entitled, ‘The Protestant theory of persecution’ (1862). It has been after all very characteristic of modern men to eliminate the ecclesiastical jurisdiction presumably because it was felt to be too merciful.
For perspective on the whole phenomenon of the persecution of witches during the early middle ages, compare with the witch hunting craze of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and with the French revolution. As David Bentley Hart adduces in his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009):
The rather disorienting truth about the early modern fascination with witchcraft and the great witch hunts is that they were not the final, desperate expressions of an intellectual and religious tradition slowly fading into obsolescence before the advance of scientific and social ‘enlightenment’; they were, instead, something quite novel, modern phenomena, which had at best a weak foreshadowing in certain new historical trends in the late Middle Ages, and which, far from occurring in tension with the birth of secular modernity, were in a sense extreme manifestations of it. In many cases, it was those who were most hostile to the power of the church to intervene in secular affairs who were also the most avid to see the power of the state express itself in the merciless destruction of those most perfidious of dissidents, witches. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), for instance, the greatest modern theorist of complete state sovereignty, thought all religious doctrine basically mendacious and did not really believe in magic; but still he thought witches should continue to be punished for the good of society. The author of De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), perhaps the most influential and (quite literally) inflammatory of all the witch-hunting manifestos of its time, was Jean Bodin (c. 1530-1596), who believed witches should be burned at the stake, that nations that did not seek them out and exterminate them would suffer famine, plague and war, that interrogation by tortue should be used when sorcery was so much as suspected, and that no one accused of witchcraft should be acquitted unless the accuser’s falsity be as shiningly apparent as the sun. But Bodin was also the first great theorist of that most modern of political ideas, the absolute sovereignty of the secular state, and he was certainly not an orthodox Catholic but and adherent of his own version of ‘natural’ religion. British laws making sorcery a capital offense were passed only in 1542 and 1563, well after Crown and state had been made supreme over the English church, and the later act was not repealed until 1736. In 1542, the Concordat of Liège, promulgated under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), placed the prosecution of sorcery entirely in the hands of secular tribunals. This was also, perhaps not coincidentally, precisely the time at which the great witch hunt began in earnest. [pp. 80-81]
All around one may estimate that, on a per capita and per unit time basis, the witch hunters of the early modern period – to say nothing of the French revolutionaries – must have been somewhere between two hundred and a thousand times more lethal than were the early medieval persecutors of witches – a dramatic testament to the effect of the passage from medieval decentralized government to the centralized monolithic modern secular state!
Thus, the heartfelt sense of injury that animates Dashu’s writing in this last part of her work is surely misplaced, in part. Her target ought, in justice, to be the secular state much more than the church. Be that as it may, we can agree that the history of the persecution of witches is discreditable to all those in power – and ultimately rooted in the failure, mooted above, of the Christian missionaries to speak to the hearts and minds of the early medieval pagans whom they aimed to convert.
Five stars: an invaluable aid by which imaginatively to reconstruct a lost world!
medieval-and-modern-history
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