The Burning Times
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The Burning Times is a 1990 USA feminist documentary about witchcraft, and the witchcraft trials that swept Europe in the 15th-17th centuries.[1] The movies makes an estimate of a total of 9 million witches burned, admitting that this is a "high" estimate but quoting no alternative numbers.[1] Scholarly "high" estimates range around 100,000, with estimates around 60,000 more common.[2]
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[edit] Criticism
The movie is inaccurate in other respects, placing Trier in France instead of Germany, dating a stone cross there that is recorded to have been erected in 958 AD to 1132 AD without further explanation, calling it a "symbol of a new religious cult that was sweeping across Europe" while the first bishop of Trier, Saint Agritius, died in 333, and Athanasius in 335 praised how well-established the Christian faith had become in the Trier bishopric under Agritius.[1] Thus, the movie presents a hypothesis of an organized pagan counter-culture opposing Christianity, the very conspiracy theory forwarded by the Early Modern witch-hunters themselves. Until Christianity came along, women were the keepers of traditional spiritual wisdom, midwives and organizers of fertility festivals.[1]
Robert Eady, a member of the Catholic Civil Rights League in Canada, has cited the film in a complaint to broadcast regulators, quoting "it took the Church two hundred years of terror and death to transform the image of paganism into devil worship, and folk culture into heresy." [1] Eady describes the documentary as propaganda intended to represent the Christian Church as "a wicked, patriarchal, misogynist institution" (Eady's words.)[1]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f Toronto Globe and Mail, June 12, 1991 "Religion" by Jack Kapica, "Review of The Burning Times" transcribed at http://www.debunker.com/texts/burning_times.html retrieved on August 24, 2006
- ^ See witchcraft trials: extrapolating from 12,000 attested executions, Brian Levac in The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe estimates 60,000 deaths, Anne Lewellyn Barstow in Witchcrazehas 100,000 and Ronald Hutton in an unpublished essay "Counting the Witch Hunt" estimates 40,000 total executions
[edit] External links
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