CRM 1301 Midterm uOttawa Carolyn Gordon Essay

Also known as, the Four Powers of the Witches’ Temple, the Witch’s Pyramid, is the basis for all magickal work, symbolizes the belief that is required to create magick and the traits to be accepted by all witches. It is the learning tool for pupils of the Craft. There are four declarations that epitomize The Witch’s Pyramid: To Know, To Will, To Dare, and To Keep Silent. Each one of the influences is linked with a direction as well as an element. each of these powers can be applied as a way of seeing a method to study. In order for a Witch to have a perfect understanding of anything, all these powers should be present.

Witches have been around for centuries and everyone has either seen them or even dressed up as them for Halloween. It is a common thought that witches are bad and that they are the stereotypical look with the pointy black hat, broomstick, or the horrid looking face. Yet it is not common to know that it is believed that witches are tightly tied with the Devil and that was one reason that they would be executed. It is now a normal idea that all witches are women but why is that? Is it because women have always been subjugated to be worse than men or is it just another way that women were being controlled? To demonize something or another group it allows some to show them as a threat and this was an easy way for those who held the power to not let anyone rise above or to have the entire community go against one singular group or person. When someone was demonized between the 14th century to the 18th century it was common to call them a witch or state that they were associated with the Devil. During this set of time religion had most control over people so stating that they were associated with the Devil instantly set that they were evil and needed to be killed.

Even in ancient Biblical times, there have been people who follow the devil and oppose Believers. Witches are people who are under the influence of the devil or demonic spirits.

Prior to 1400 CE, during the middle ages, there was a popular belief that “Satan-worshiping Witches” existed, who devoted their entire lives to harming others by using dark magic. At this time the Christian church stated that there were no Witches (Robinson, 2002).

The idea of Witch Trials first came about around 560 BC in the Bible. The lines “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and, “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them,” appeared in the

During the renaissance period people feared, ostracized, and killed what they thought were witches; but most of all they misunderstood what true witches were. Witchcraft is one of the oldest religions in the world, and was practiced by wise people who followed nature and were in tune with its forces. A bible verse and the fear of the unknown changed the whole perspective of witches. Witchcraft is one of the oldest religions in the world, it predates thousand of years before christianity and dates back 40,000 years to the paleolithic period. “The witches prayed to the higher powers or the spirits for help and guidance in resolving the problem by performing certain rituals and the whole process was called witchcraft.”

In this article by the BBC, the origin of witch culture is explained and questioned. The questions of, “Why did witchcraft become so popular?” and, “What made these women so appealing to artists are writers?” were mainly addressed. While the article does say that the earliest example of witchcraft is cited in the Bible, it claims that our modern idea of witches wasn't fully created until the early Renaissance by German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer. He created art that shows witches as young, beautiful creatures that could lure men to their deaths, as well as depicting them being old and ugly sitting on top of goats. In one of these paintings where the witches are shown as nasty, there is even one clutching a broom, creating the beginning

A witch is a woman that is thought to have magical powers that differ depending on the time and place, like the weird sisters in Macbeth, who practice sorcery. In fourteenth century Scotland, there were trials being held for treason. There were large numbers of people being accused of meeting with the devil to perform

Woman in relation to asceticism were seen as the opposite than how we would like everyone to view them today. Women were seen as weaker than men, and responsible for the way that they make men feel (Cark, 34). The majority of women in early Christian asceticism were seen as a pathway to temptation and were depicted as tempting the most strong willed of followers of Jesus’ teachings.

Witches have numerous supernatural powers, which leads to influences of the actions and decisions of everyone. Witches were originally discovered in the winter of 1692. “ A

Professor of religious studies Karen Armstrong finds in the early Christian Church examples of hostility toward women and fear of their sexual power, which she contends led to the eventual exclusion of women from full participation in a male-dominated church.

The people in the Medieval and Renaissance times understood and related so well because they believed witches were evil and used their powers for foul things. “The kinds of misfortune for which witchcraft was

People believed witches could control the weather, cast bad spells, had the power of flights, had contact with the devil, could vanish into thin air, had the ability to make people go mad, were able to change their physical

The witches of folklore were often told as stories by villagers were based on old traditions and sometimes pagan beliefs. These witches lived in remote regions and (like other beliefs in witches) were female; but not necessary human as fairies or some other fantastical creature were often involved. They shared some common features with other witches but also committed more imaginative maleficent deeds such as the kidnapping and eating of children, shape-shifting and magical travel. Bentley goes on to suggest that among the intellectual elite witchcraft became an ‘absurdity’ due to the achievements of the royal society and the new philosophy

In the book Women and Spiritual Equality in Christian Tradition, by Patricia Ranft, a new and innovative look at the role of women in the sphere of Christianity is examined. In a total of twelve chapters, the Central Michigan University professor discusses the role that women played in the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity and she disputes the contention that the church was traditionally misogynistic. She writes in her introduction, “that within Christianity there exists a strong and enduring tradition that maintains the spiritual equality of women," (xi) and she takes this idea a step further to support her thesis by writing that there is no foundation to the argument that “Christianity was largely responsible for western misogynism,” (ix). Instead, she tries to show that these misogynistic tendencies stemmed not from Christianity, but from the surrounding secular cultures. Throughout the text, Ranft will be attempting to show the reader that women maintained more spiritual equality with men before the modern era. However, it is the author’s intention in the book "merely to document the presence of a tradition of women 's spiritual equality throughout the centuries," (xii) not to provide analysis of this presence.