“

The medieval
Church did not believe that cleanliness was next
to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations
of the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt,
lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and
to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,
it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those
diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place
— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine
and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted
by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive
epidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions, and plague decimated the population o-f Europe regularly.
The Black Death is thought to have killed 25
percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds
to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some
towns every living person died; in London it is estimated
that one person in ten survived:
“

So this is wrong because: The church was not hostile to the practice of medicine (actually establishing hospitals and doing most of the medicining, and yes they did encourage prayer but they did other stuff too, and were the ones maintaining the store of classical knowledge cause they were the only classical institution fucking left), and bathing was actually common up UNTIL the plague struck and many baths had to be closed (Communal baths were a great place for a disease to spread) and one of the reasons the plague swept through was the fact that Europe was going through a mini ice age resulting in people immunocompromised from cold and hunger.

“

Hunger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,
may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and
hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic
possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections,
outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism)
with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church
had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd
was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly
set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation
which were vivid in the Christian imagination were
modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.
The Christian notion of the nature of the Devil
underwent as many transformations as the snake has
skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining
role as the Church bred into its conception those
deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic
theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one
religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church,
intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas,

vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened
Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the
15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic
and their pantheons were scarcely conservative
in number. The Church had a slew of deities to
dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the
old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old
practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified.
Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent
some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to
hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the
local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed
to continue their traditional vocations of healing the
sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often
transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be
embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became
St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan
gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts —
shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated
with a cross.
But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare
as well. The peoples of northern Europe were temperamentally
and culturally quite different from the Latin
Christians, and their religions centered around animal
totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered
to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy
of the Church), which was manifest in spirits
who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic
hunting stage, they were concerned with magical
control of animals. In the later neolithic agricultural
stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply
predominated.
“

  Also no there was no witch cult, witches were not pagan survivals, and why second wavers love valorizing pre-Christian religions I DO NOT KNOW, Roman women?  Not treated that well.  Read the Rape Of Lucretia, look at some goddamn history.

“

T o deal with the increasing tide o f witchcraft and
in conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger and
Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. “

Also the Church condemned the Malleus Maleficarum, most of the persecution was committed via mass hysteria and landed gentry.

Also do not get on me with that goddess crap

“

Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation
o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a
horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently
dancing.

That figure is to be found in a cavern in Arriege.
Early religions actively worshiped animals, and
in particular animals which symbolized male fertility—the
bull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts,
sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal)
were parts o f the rites. The magician-priest-shaman
became the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal and
apparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal
(even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attached
to his girdle)

“

WRONG  WRONGITY WRONG WRONG WRONG.

“

The nobility, when
not out butchering, enforced that most curious of
customs, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rape
of newly wed peasant women.
“

Nope  

“It is hard to arrive at a figure
for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles,
but the most responsible estimate would seem to be
9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have
been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when
one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at
the end of the 13th century computed the number of
the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative,
Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated
the number to be only 7,409,127

“

Not that many people were killed, given the population of Europe at the time that would have been impossible

“

It was especially as midwives that these learned
women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and
Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic
Faith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortion
centered specifically on the biblical curse which
made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not
have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus.
It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor
pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her
husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and
intention both
“

Nope, they weren’t after midwives

“The ratio of women to
men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1
and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.

“

And although most women were targeted witch hysteria was not exclusively used against women and that ratio is wrong as fuck.

Nor was it simply an expression of misogyny