Merry meet!
You probably all know a bit what Wicca is, I guess, because otherwise you wouldn't be intressed in taking these lessons right?:)
For those who have no idea what wicca is.. Well Wicca is the short term of Modern Witchcraft.
I will give a better explanation of it in one of the following lessons. But before we go and see what wicca is today, we'll first see which history it had.
Blessed be,
Raven
Lesson 1:
Wicca Classroom: Lesson One: The history of Wicca.
For the history of Wicca, we’ll have to go back to the Palaeolithic: 25.000 years ago.
In those times people we’re dependent of hunting to survive. If there weren’t any animals to hunt for, the people didn’t have anything to eat, no clothes etc. Out of respect for nature they created a God of everything : the wind, the water, the lightning...
And of course the most important thing, they gave a spirit to the yacht, so there was the God of Yacht. But if there were animals to hunt for, they thought there also had to be the fertility of these animals, and this was the task they gave to a Goddess.
In these first times it began to become a religion. The year was now separated into two pieces. In the summer they could cultivate food, then the Goddess overruled. But in the winter they had to switch over to yacht, so then the God overruled.
In these times the people did on sympathetic magic, ex: If they made a clay model of a bison, who was attacked and killed after that, then a real yacht on a bison would end the same way.
The people spread over Europe and took the Gods with them, so the God and the Goddess got a lot of different names. Ex: In the South of England it was Cernunnos, in the North it was Cerne and in another area it was Herne.
With the arrival of the Christianity there wasn’t those big converting of people as they said; only the rulers had accept the new religion. The Old Religion stayed in the first 1000 years of the Christianity. The first one who tried to make a converting was Gregorius, he thought if he built Christian churches on places where the people were used to meet to pray, they should convert themselves.
He gave the bishops the task to destroy all ‘idols’ and to bless the temples again, for a part he had success..
But the people weren’t so stupid as he thought they were and when the first churches were built, the masons and adaptors (which Gregorius could only find between the pagans, because the biggest part of the people were still pagans, not Christians) added very smartly figures of their own gods in it. This way they could still honour their own gods.
After a while, the Christianity increased in strength and the Old Religion formed one of its enemies. The God of the Old Religion was the ‘Horned God’. And the devil of the Christians wore horns, so the Church thought, the idolaters were worshippers of the devil!
This is ridiculous! The Devil is just made up by the Christians. It’s important to notice that the whole concept of evil, with Satan, is to blame on a mistake by translating the word. The original Hebrew word ha-satan of the Old Testament and the Greece Diabolism for the New Testament just means ‘opponent’ or ‘adversary’.
In 1484 Pope Inniocentius VIII edit his diploma against witches. Two years later 2 German monks, Heinrich Institoris Kramer and Jakob Sprenger edit the: Malleus Maleficarum (the Witch hammer). In this book stood the instructions given for the prosecuting of witches. The professors of Keulen did not agree with the book, but Kramer and Sprenger continued and by a counterfeit they said that the whole faculty had accepted their work officially; a swindle that just became discovered in 1898. During more than 300 years there were prosecutes…
Questions:
* The year was separated into two pieces, what does that mean? Explane.
* What is sympathetic magic?
* Who was the first one who tried to make people convert themselfs? and how did he tried to do that?
* Are witches worshippers of the devil? Explane.
* What is the 'Witch Hammer' and who made it?
Stumble!