The witchcraft bludgeon refers to the historical persecution and eradication of alleged witches, most notably occurring during the Early Modern period in Europe, particularly from the 15th to the 18th century. It was a time marked by suspicion, fear, and religious fervor, resulting in the belief that witchcraft was a real and potent danger to society. Accusations of witchcraft were often based on irrational superstitions and unfounded beliefs. Women, particularly those who were elderly, unmarried, or eccentric, were often targeted and labeled as witches. Many of these individuals were already marginalized in society, and witchcraft accusations further cemented their status as social outcasts. The fear surrounding witchcraft was fueled by religious teachings that portrayed witches as being in league with the devil and capable of using supernatural powers to harm others.
IF you plan on allowing body bludgeon to be used in conjunction with Limitless range than the "range" your character throws is effectively how many range increments until your character can only got 5ft square. (I'd say)
Also, if the intended weapon character has flight abilities, there should be some mention of avoidance, likely using a fly skill check to avoid damage similar to using acrobatics to land. How an elderly veiled abbess morphed into a naked woman on a broomstick is a story worth telling; an intrinsic part of it is Wealdburg s unnatural ability to read and write Latin.
The fear surrounding witchcraft was fueled by religious teachings that portrayed witches as being in league with the devil and capable of using supernatural powers to harm others. People believed that witches could cause illness, crop failures, and other misfortunes through the use of curses and spells. This fear was compounded by the belief that witches could also engage in acts of black magic, such as flying through the air on broomsticks or attending ritual gatherings known as witches' Sabbaths.
Germaine Greer: 21st century 'witches' offer a warning to us all
Wise women and witches have held us in thrall through history. This Hallowe’en, Germaine Greer explores their modern incarnation - and explains why their message spells chilling news for us all.
By Germaine Greer 31 October 2012 • 6:30am'Eco-feminism is probably the modern equivalent of witchcraft in its openness to the idea of a confederacy between humans and other animals'
In all the human societies ever studied there is to be found the figure of the witch. What is most interesting about this is not that the human race should have disliked and feared bad-tempered old women since the beginning of time, but that the old women themselves should have adopted the role of witches, and even confessed to being witches when the penalty was certain death. Death by bludgeon, by stoning, by drowning or by being burnt alive. The people who thought witches had occult powers were deluded; the witches who thought they had occult powers were equally deluded. Witches do not exist; so why have we found it necessary to invent them?
Why would the Aboriginal people of Numinbah Valley have told their children to stay away from the scarps of the Lamington Plateau because up there lived an old witch called Koonimbagowgunn who liked to roll huge rocks down on people below? The clue is in her name, which means widow. When seeking a supernatural agency to blame for unpredictable catastrophe, people hit upon the most troubling figure in their community, the woman who outlived her husband. In hunter-gatherer society there were probably never many such women. One version of the Hindu goddess Kali shows her as an old woman with black wrinkled skin and withered dugs, dancing on the beautiful body of her immortal husband, Shiva. The Indonesian Rangda has “tangled black hair, long fingernails, pendulous breasts”, and a “flowing tongue between terrible fangs”. The old woman gradually turns into a ravening animal preying on the young and vulnerable. In many societies she is suspected of digging up the bodies of her victims and eating them.
The enchantress in Rapunzel (ALAMY)
In most pre-industrial societies, the woman who outlived her husband was in trouble, especially if she had no surviving children. Even when she did, she often had no claim upon those children, who may have inherited everything her husband had to leave. Until relatively recently, a British widow could be turned out of her home by her husband’s heirs, and left to find a living the best way she could. One way she could survive was by setting herself up as a wise woman, working on the credulity of her neighbours who would pay her for spells and potions. She might charm away your warts, or tell you how to see in a mirror the face of the man you were to marry or show you how to make a man impotent by blowing on a knotted string. Some of her remedies were effective; she might be able to tell you how to ease the pains of teething or what herbs to decoct to drive worms out of young animals. She might even give you potions of her own making. If they worked, good; if they didn’t, and the patients died, the “witch” was in immediate danger.
The wise woman lived on a knife-edge. If the cry went up that she was responsible for miscarriages and infertility, whether in women or cattle, her neighbours were likely to lay violent hands upon her. The limits on her power were obvious, but she did have power. People did seek her out, did beg her for help and did cross her palm with silver. From being a mere wife and mother she had become a self-governing visionary, straddling the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit, interpreting fate, determining luck, making things happen. Her chief instrument was imagination, her own and other people’s. It would be imagination too that was her undoing.
A woman being 'dunked’ (ALAMY)
A woman who has lived all her life for other people, only to find herself cast off and left to fend for herself despite the infirmities of age, is bound to harbour malice. The wise woman did wish ill to others and curse them in her heart, and so she felt guilty. She did utter threats and dire predictions, which was fine as long as the disasters she predicted didn’t come to pass. If they did, her guilt intensified and, poor soul, she declared it.
The first enactments of the Christian church were not against witchcraft, but against the persecution of witches. The attribution of occult powers to anyone but God or the devil was a superstition which the church fathers were determined to eradicate. Belief in witches is rather older than monotheistic religion; despite the churchmen’s best efforts, witches continued to declare themselves – and to invite brutal retribution.
Witches, being for the most part solitary, lived with companion animals, most often cats. As late as the 19th century the sight of an old woman collecting food from the hedgerows with her cat wreathing itself around her tattered skirts was enough to send children home howling. And yet there was a whole race of saints who understood the language of birds and beasts. St Bee was fed by seabirds. St Gertrude let mice dance upon her spindle. The lions sent to kill St Thecla in the amphitheatre sat down and licked her feet. St Martha tamed a dragon and led him about on a leash made of her girdle. When a hare fleeing from the hounds of the seventh-century Prince of Powys hid under the cloak of Melangell, the prince gave her the valley for a nunnery.
The muddling together of female saints with witches comes to its apogee in the ongoing tradition of St Wealdburg, the ninth-century English missionary, the eve of whose canonisation day, May 1, is still celebrated as Walpurgisnacht, the witches’ sabbath, all over northern Europe. How an elderly veiled abbess morphed into a naked woman on a broomstick is a story worth telling; an intrinsic part of it is Wealdburg’s unnatural ability to read and write Latin. Female literacy was as frightening for the church in preliterate Europe as it is for the Taliban today. One strand in the iconography of witchcraft depicts them as bare-breasted women with pens in their left hands, surrounded by every species of nocturnal animal.
Closeness between women and other creatures has always disturbed their masters. The association is in part traditional and unavoidable, because, while men hunted and killed animals, women reared them. They treated their animals for ailments, doing their best to keep them alive and healthy. So sharp was the contrast between the attitudes of men and women towards these lesser orders of creation that women left it to men to kill the animals they reared. It was only to be expected, then, that women would reject the sociobiological explanation of evolution, and begin to investigate altruism as equal in importance to the selfishness of the gene. Eco-feminism is probably the modern equivalent of witchcraft in its openness to the idea of a confederacy between humans and other animals. This notion has been adopted in various mystical forms by the group of religions now called Wicca, but it has solid scientific grounds as well.
Patricia Crowther, an early promoter of Wicca (CHANNEL 4)
Second-wave feminists are to be found wherever animal rights are being defended. Feminists struggle to keep beached whales and dolphins alive and shepherd them back to deep water, throw themselves under the wheels of lorries taking weanling calves to slaughter in mainland Europe, blockade ships transporting Australian sheep to be butchered in the Middle East. The women who turned up at the US army base at Greenham Common on September 5 1981 called themselves “Women for Life on Earth”. They would be there for 19 years.
At the beginning of this year, the great physicist Stephen Hawking told the world that the Earth has only 1,000 years left – within a millennium, he said, global warming or nuclear holocaust will have made Earth uninhabitable and if humans are to survive, they must colonise space. You don’t have to believe in Gaia or that the Earth is female or that all life forms are holy to be struck by his dreadful insouciance. You don’t have to resort to mysticism – biology is enough to give you a clue that this callousness, this indifference to biodiversity is appalling.
Our understanding of Earth is patchy and prejudiced. We don’t know how herrings school or how birds fly in vast synchronised flocks. We no sooner figured out competition than we used it to explain everything, and then we turned out to be wrong. We don’t even understand sheep and we have lived with them and off them for thousands of years. The inter-relationships of the billions of life forms on this planet are crucial to our survival, and yet every month brings as many extinctions as would have taken a millennium before industrialisation.
We are only at the beginning of understanding the interconnectedness of everything on planet Earth. We know now that most plants depend on associated soil fungi for access to nutrients; trees will not thrive without the complex web of organisms that developed with them, of which possibly the most important are the mycorrhizae. Fell the forest, expose the soil to sun and rain and frost, and the mycorrhizae will disappear. You can’t then decide to restore the forest, because the trees are not even half the story. Without the planetary patina, the interacting, co-operating masses of DNA in so many different forms, we cannot really colonise another planet. We wouldn’t be able to make soil or grow anything. We would need the galaxy of organisms that are the growing medium of most vegetation. We would need moulds and microbes. A planet is not populated from the top down but from the bottom up, from the planetary patina to “the diapason closing full in man”, as John Dryden wrote in his A Song for St Cecilia’s Day.
Hallowe’en is the time when we celebrate the netherworld, by which is usually meant the world of the dead, the underworld. We like to frighten ourselves and each other by inventing spooky stuff – zombies, ghosts: all unconvincing, which is partly why we do it.
By being pretend-frightened of fictions, we can shrug off real threats. It might be fun to pretend to be frightened by plastic creepy-crawlies; but we should be frightened for real creepy-crawlies.
When the sharks are disappearing from the seas and the ice caps are melting, it is time to be frightened. When today’s witches try to scare you, they mean it. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
In short, is this thread trying to be clever and show a rule that you feel is ridiculous?
The persecution of witches often involved brutal interrogation methods, such as torture, to extract confessions. This led to a cycle of accusation and torture, as those who confessed under duress would then implicate others, resulting in even more arrests and trials. In some cases, those accused of witchcraft were subjected to public trials and executions, such as being burned at the stake. The severity of punishments varied depending on the region and the specific time period. Many innocent people, particularly women, suffered greatly during this period of mass hysteria. The witch trials were often rooted in misogyny and the need to control women's behavior and sexuality. Women who defied societal norms or held unconventional beliefs were especially vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft. The witchcraft bludgeon eventually began to decline as skepticism and rational thinking gained prominence. Enlightenment ideals and scientific advancements in the 18th century contributed to a shift in attitudes towards witchcraft, leading to the eventual recognition that the persecution of witches was based on superstition and ignorance rather than actual evidence. Although the witchcraft bludgeon is a troubling and dark chapter in history, it serves as a reminder of the dangers of mass hysteria and the importance of valuing reason, evidence, and justice in society. The persecution of alleged witches had far-reaching consequences and left a lasting impact on the lives of countless individuals who were unfairly targeted and persecuted..
Reviews for "The Witchcraft Bludgeon: Exploring Different Practices"
1. Sarah - 2 out of 5 stars - I was so excited to read "The Witchcraft Bludgeon" based on all the hype and positive reviews. However, I was incredibly disappointed. The plot was confusing and disjointed, making it difficult to follow the story. The characters were underdeveloped and lacked depth, making it hard for me to connect or care about their fates. The writing style felt forced and at times, pretentious. Overall, it was a letdown and I wouldn't recommend it to others.
2. John - 1 out of 5 stars - "The Witchcraft Bludgeon" was an absolute disaster. The story lacked coherence and failed to engage me from start to finish. The pacing was incredibly slow, and the author seemed more interested in throwing in unnecessary descriptions and tangents rather than advancing the plot. The characters were nothing more than caricatures with no real depth or growth. It was a slog to get through and left me feeling unsatisfied and frustrated. Save your time and skip this one.
3. Emma - 2 out of 5 stars - I couldn't get into "The Witchcraft Bludgeon" no matter how hard I tried. The writing style was cumbersome and filled with unnecessary details that added nothing to the overall story. The plot was convoluted and lacked a clear direction, making it difficult to understand what was happening. The characters felt one-dimensional and their actions often felt forced or unrealistic. I found myself bored and disinterested throughout the entire book. It simply didn't live up to the hype for me.
4. Michael - 3 out of 5 stars - I had high expectations for "The Witchcraft Bludgeon", but it fell short in several areas. The pacing was inconsistent, with some parts dragging on while others felt rushed and poorly developed. The dialogue was often stilted and unnatural, making it difficult to connect with the characters. Additionally, the ending felt abrupt and left several loose ends unresolved. While there were some interesting concepts explored, the execution left much to be desired. It was an average read at best.