One woman told us she cried as she watched us dance. Another was taken by the connection between us, she could see it she said. Jon told me he saw many people crying and got teary himself.
Dance as ritual. Dance with purpose.
Humans have used dance to appease the gods. We dance for rain and healthy crops and a successful hunt. We dance to when we get married and to attract a mate. We dance for so many different reasons.
We dance because it feels good to dance.
Yesterday, I danced with Julz, Kathleen and Emily in remembrance of the people throughout history, and Margaret Krieger specifically, who have been wrongly accused of being a witch and persecuted for it.
First we walked on the bridge over the river where Margaret Krieger was thrown in to determine if she was a witch. A hole was cut into the ice and when she sunk (which proved she wasn’t a witch) one of the people who accused her, rescued her.
In the past she would have been left to drown, but by 1785, when this trial took place in what is now Pownal, Vermont there were new rules that stated a person had to be rescued if they didn’t float as a”real” witch would.
Our dance was the anthesis of what witch trials were all about.
It was a dance of collaboration, inclusion, self-expression, connection and caring. That is its power. And it is this power that has caused men throughout history, and still causes men, to fear and condemn women.
I feel like whenever something like this happens, when people gather for good, a bit of healing happens.
Gathering for good healing on so many levels, Does happen
Yes!:)
The idea that “witches float, non-witches sink” struck me as a particularly odd bit of lunacy, so I wondered where it came from. It seems to have originated in England, where as far as anybody knows it first appeared in print in the Laws of Aethelstan from around 930CE.It was called a “judicial dei,” or judgement of God, on the supposition that the ordeal in some way provoked God to intervene directly. It was supposed to be conducted only by clergy, and included magic words (which they called liturgical formulae) as well as the celebration of Mass. Centuries later, in 1597, King James IV of Scotland, who was somewhat obsessed with the occult, published something called the “Daemonologie” that had a lot to say about witches (or at least what James imagined them to be). In 1603, when he became King James I of England, he created the “Witchcraft Act.” Although the Act didn’t specifically refer to the ordeal, it provided a “legal” basis for persecuting accused witches. By the way, they called the ordeal the “swimming test,” thus showing that marketing and political speech existed even back then.
The Puritans initially didn’t buy it, and published a pamphlet in 1608 claiming the test was nonsense, because it was based on the idea that water was used for baptisms and would “reject a witch.” Not so, claimed the pamphlet, because not all water is the holy water used in baptisms. Another Puritan, Richard Bernard, published a book in 1627 that such a test was both illegal and impious because it was “demanding a miracle from God. But at the time, the Puritans were regarded as cult members and everybody in England was glad to see them leave for North America. Where, oddly enough, they apparently brought the ordeal back for some reason.
By 1735, at least in England, things had changed, and there was another Witchcraft Act that reversed the whole idea so that what was illegal was accusing someone of witchcraft. A man named Thomas Colley accused Ruth Osborne of witchcraft in 1751, performed the ordeal, and drowned her — and Colley was hanged for murder.
The colonists living in North America were pretty likely to still be religious fanatics, but they weren’t quite the same as the original Puritans (and some were very different), so their approach to theology and related areas was pretty much made up out of whole cloth and out of the mainstream even for the Puritans. The old test got resurrected (as well as other nonsense that had long been rejected by thinking people everywhere) and that’s why it was used back in those days in North America.
You can find more in “Witchfinders: a seventeenth-century English tragedy” by Malcolm Gaskill: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Wow Pete, this is a wonderful amount of information and speaks directly to Margaret Kreiger’s trial. Thanks so much of it The book looks really interesting. Thank you!