#sabba

O Yule é uma comemoração dentro dos oito sabbat presentes na Roda do Ano. Ele marca a data que se inicia o solstício de inverno. Ele é celebrado na Roda Sul e Mista entre os dias 20 e 21 de Junho, enquanto que na Roda Norte a data muda para se alinhar com a região e acontece entre os dias 20 e 21 de Dezembro.

            Este sabbat representa o nascimento do Deus cornífero e o momento em que ele é acalentado pela deusa mãe. Nessa data, a deusa é representada como a portadora da criança da promessa, e após o seu descanso, voltará dando luz e conforto à todos.

            De acordo com a astronomia, o solstício de inverno começa a partir da noite mais longa do ano. É o ponto onde o sol está o mais afastado possível do nosso hemisfério. Consequentemente, nós teremos menos horas de luz e mais horas de escuridão. Por isso, é o dia mais curto e a noite mais longa do ano.

Como nós temos o movimento de translação da terra ao redor do sol, essa data tem uma pequena variação de ano pra ano.

            Essa data tem origem nos povos nórdicos. O nome Yule tem origem no norueguês arcaico "Yjul" que significa roda. Podendo a roda significar a roda do ano, a roda solar ou até mesmo a roda da vida.

            Esse Sabbat vem logo depois das últimas três colheitas da roda do ano. Passamos pela colheita e pelas sementes no sabbat de Lughnasadh, passamos pela colheita das frutas no sabbat de Mabon e passamos pela última colheita, a colheita dos vegetais ou colheita de sangue no sabbat de samhain. Como no Yule nós já entramos no inverno, acabaram-se as colheitas.

            Nas crenças antigas, acreditavam-se que este momento da noite mais longa do ano era o momento no qual a terra e a natureza iria descansar, pois este sabbat vem logo após o Samhain e logo após as almas serem liberadas e agora a deusa está mergulhada em um sono profundo. Isso significa que a partir daquele momento, a natureza estaria em um momento onde ela perderia a sua fertilidade.

            Sem o poder de fertilidade, as plantas precisam da fonte da terra e do poder do sol para poder crescer, assim como aconteceu em Lughnasadh, em Lammas e em Samhain. As plantas precisam desse casamento entre a terra e o sol, mas com o sol se afastando e a terra adormecendo, a falta da segurança e do calor trazia um medo e um desconforto muito grande para estes povos.

            Para esses povos, caso eles não fizessem nada para participar desse processo, eles achavam que a terra nunca mais iria acordar. Então, naquela época, também dependia de nós para ajudar nessa batalha da vida e da morte. A humanidade também tinha uma participação nesse processo. Para eles, a cor branca era uma cor ameaçadora, pois era a cor da neve que significava morte.

            Com o passar dos anos, o Sabbat começou a ser comemorado depois da ída do inverno, pois significava que a noite tinha finalmente terminado e as coisas voltariam a ser como era antes.

            O intuito da comemoração desse sabbat é celebrar as forças da natureza e o deus cornífero para ajudar no nascimento da luz e pedir que a mãe natureza faça o renascimento do sol.

            Nesse sabbat são comemorados a união familiar e o amor, pois era no inverno que as famílias se encontravam mais unidos em volta da fogueira e consequentemente permaneciam mais tempo juntos.

            Esse Sabbat representa o tempo da esperança, pois a partir do final da noite mais longa do ano, a escuridão iria se cessar.

            A árvore de Yule representa a árvore da vida. Ela é adornada com ornamentos naturais (bagas, pinhas e frutas), símbolos sagrados para os deuses. Esse costume veio do antigo povo pagão, onde as famílias traziam uma árvore verde para dentro de casa ou então sentavam em volta de uma árvore que sobreviveu sem suas folhas durante o inverno e decoravam seus galhos com enfeites. Os espíritos da natureza eram presenteados e as pessoas pediam aos elementais que as mantivessem tão lindos e fortes como a árvore que recebia seus enfeites.

            Durante as comemorações desse sabbat, existiam jeitos específicos de comemorar este sabbat:

Grandes fogueiras são ateadas fogo para homenagear o nascimento do novo deus, a criança da promessa, podendo substituir a fogueira por atear fogo ao caldeirão;

Velas vermelhas eram espalhadas por todo lugar aonde esta cerimonia era realizada;

Também era comum decorar a árvore no qual sobreviveu à esse tempo ou à um pinheiro conhecida (Árvore de Yule);

As pessoas dançavam e cantavam ao redor da árvore, fazendo assim suas invocações e mostrando admiração pelo espírito da árvore;

O altar pode ser enfeitado com azevinhos, folhas de figueira, ciprestes e com incensos naturais apropriados para a data, como: incensos de canela, cravo, louro, alecrim, gengibre, entre outros;

São feitos feitiços de prosperidade, limpeza e renascimento pessoal;

Receitas podem ser feitas, como: bolo de frutas, Yule log, pães recheados, vinho, quentão, sidra de maçã, chocolate quente, nozes e frutas secas como parte das celebrações. 

- Uma grande tora é queimada como símbolo da luz e proteção, representando o sol que retorna;

Guirlandas:

Feitas com azevinho e visco, símbolos de hospitalidade e proteção contra maus espírito;

Azevinho:

Folhas verdes e bagas vermelhas simbolizam a esperança, a fertilidade e a proteção e era colocado em portais pela casa para evitar a entrada de maus espíritos no ambiente;

Cores:

Sabba Aquamarine and Peruvian Blue Opal Earring

Christian Louboutin The Noirs Nail Polish In "Lady Page"

[TN: This article will break the Introduction to Stregoneria series for a second, but I believe it’s important to set things into perspective about both Witchcraft and this blog. My goal is to put out content, translated or redacted by me, in order to give people the correct historical information. I see a lot people on TikTok messing with things they don’t know, appropriating and distorting practices and cultures and profiting off of it. The only focus of this blog is the practice and the history behind it, I don’t want to “put people down”, I want to make the information available so you won’t hurt yourselves.

Also, I do not support fa***sm, na**sm or any other movement/ideology that oppresses and discriminates people. I’m specifiying this because I’ve received an anonymous ask about it and it kind of hurt just reading it. I hope this will clarify things and make whoever asked me that more confortable with my blog and my content. I’m a history nerd Strega, nothing more.

This article will be a translation, synthesis and re-elaboration of the following articles

https://tradizioneitaliana.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/medievalismo-religioso-stregheria-wicca-e-storia/

https://medievaleggiando.it/la-legittimazione-storica-della-wicca-margaret-murray-e-la-manipolazione-delle-fonti/

https://medievaleggiando.it/il-vangelo-delle-streghe-e-linizio-della-wicca-il-fascino-di-un-falso-storico/

The first being a rectification of the two that follow.

This article will be divided in two parts because it’s way too long to read and to translate, i’m drained af]

THE DEBUNKING OF MURRAY

Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963) was a British Anthropologist and Egyptologist, well known in the academic environment for her contributions in the studies of folklore. Even if she was very criticized and her reputation as an historian was poor, her work became popular bestsellers from 1940 onward.

The most well-known and controversial one is “The Witch-Cult in the Western Europe” published in 1921. In this book, Murray alleges that there was some sort of secret model of pagan resistance to Christianity spreaded all across Europe, and that the witches’ hunt and the proof presented to the trials were an attempt to eliminate a rival cult.

This book was clearly influenced by “Satanism and Witchcraft” by Jules Michelet, that alleged that Medieval Witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism and the Roman Catholic church, that took the form of a secret religion inspired by paganism and organized mainly by women.

To support her narrative, Murray chooses to analyze some of the trials that took place during the great hunt and employs 15 primary sources, mostly British or Scottish (not paneuropean, or sources from the european continent), that describe famous trials. Murray’s analysis of the Somerset Trials in 1664 offer a good example of her work ethics; quoting the testimony of Elizabeth Styles:

“At their meeting they have usually Wine or good Beer, Cakes, Meat or the like. They eat and drink really when they meet in their bodies, dance also and have Musick. The Man in black sits at the higher end, and Anne Bishop usually next him. He useth some words before meat, and none after, his voice is audible, but very low.”

Murray conveniently seems to “forget” to quote the immediately preceding phrase:

”That at every meeting before the Spirit vanisheth away, he appoints the next meeting place and time, and at his departure there is a foul smell.”

Other details offered by Styles are omitted, like when she alleges that the Devil presented to her in the shape of a dog or a cat or a fly, that the Devil offered her followers an oinment to use on their heads and wrists that made it possible to move them from a place to another. Or that sometimes the reunion involved only the spirits of the witches, while their bodies stayed at home.

Murray was fully aware of the fantasy element in the testimonies she included in her books, but she was able, by deliberately manipulating historical sources, to make people believe the fake narrative that a Medieval religion of witches with covens, rites and their own beliefs that relentlessy opposed Christianity really existed.

In her “The God of the Witches”, published in 1933 and clearly written for a commercial audience, she further broadened the scope of her claims on the witches’ cult. In this book, she alleges that until the C17th BCE the there was a religion, older than Christianity, that kept existing in all of Western Europe. Said religion, was focused on the worship of a two-faced horned god, known to the Romans ad Diano; this god presided the witches’ gathering and was mistaken by the Inquisition of the Devil, conclusion that made them associate witchcraft with a satanic cult.

Murray claims the existence of a *specific* non-christian organized cult spread all across Europe that worshipped Diano and relentlessly opposed the Roman Catholic church, but the sources she quotes are late and recount the flattening of the various “pagan” cults to the assimilation with the christian Devil, operated by the Church.

In fact, the Devil that the trials report on, depending on the religion, overlapped with different figures: in British and Scottish traditions the Devil was the result of the demonization of the King of Elphame. In the Basque country, the Devil substituted Mari. In Northern Italy it overlapped with the Donna del Buon Gioco. This means that the “Northern Italian Devil” is different from the “British Devil” and the “Basque Devil”.

This “Devil” is a figure that flattens everything and overlapped and substituted so many different figures, depending on the religion and the figure it ended up overlapping with.

Therefore, Murray’s narrative of a paneuropean cult of the Horned God stems from the analysis of late sources and to the false equivalence of the Devil that presided the Ludus (Sabba) in Scotland (where he masks the King of Elphame) and the Devil of other countries (where he masks other entities).

Since the Devil isn’t the same entity in all of Europe, the narrative of a counter-christianity organized paneuropean cult of prehistoric origin falls too. Instead, what we’re dealing with are Medieval, non-christian rielaborations of different remainders of the Religions of the Gentiles that survived in the Christian age and were absorbed in the legend of the Faery Procession/Procession of the Dominae Nocturnae first, and the legend of the Ludus (Sabba) later.

The following quote by Ronald Hutton, English historian who specialises in Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism and professor at the University of Bristol, confirms this:

“Over a quarter of a century ago, I adopted the expression “Pagan survivals” to describe elements of ancient Pagan culture that had persisted in later Christian societies. In doing so, I was drawing a distinction between such survivals, of which there seemed to be many, and “surviving Paganism”; that is the continued self-conscious practice of the older religions, of which there seemed to be none. This point was worth making because even in the 1980s, there was a persisting belief, based on outdated academic texts, that Paganism had survived as a living force among the common people in much of medieval Europe: it was widespread in other scholarly disciplines than history, let alone among the general public. My formula and approach was adopted by other authors in the 1990s. During that decade, however, a reaction set in against it among historians who preferred to stress the comprehensive Christianization of medieval European societies and to relegate elements that had hither to been identifed as of pagan origin to categories of religiously neutral folklore or of lay Christianity. Some emphasized that the undoubted tendency of some Christians at the time to condemn such beliefs and practices as pagan was a hallmark of a highly atypical, reforming, intolerant and evangelical strain of churchman. Michael’s system of classification, in this volume, may be said to take its place in this, apparently now dominant, set of scholarly attitudes. Revisiting the issue myself, I am inclined to meet it halfway. I am startingto agree that to speak of aspects of medieval culture as “Pagan” might indeed be misleading and inadequate. Moreover, it would be especially inappropriate to characterize fgures such as the lady of the night rides, the fairy queen or the Cailleach as “Pagan survivals” when they seem like medieval or post-medieval creations. However, I have equal diffculty in describing them simply and straightforwardly as “Christian” because of their total lack of reference to any aspect of Christianity, including theology, cosmology, scripture and liturgy; all of them would indeed fit far more comfortably into a Pagan world-picture. […] It may be that the old polarized labels are becoming inadequate to describe a medieval and early modern religious and quasi-religious world that is coming to seem even more complex, exciting and interesting than it had seemed to be before.”

Also Michael Ostling, religious studies scholar focusing on the history, historiography, and representation of witches and witchcraft, confirms this in Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: “Small Gods” at the Margin of Christendom, published in 2018.

“Christians encompass aspects of their prior paganism both by inversion and revaluation. But where traditional spirits remain salient to a Christianized culture in encompassed or inverted form, their ongoing reality ought not to be counted by scholars as a pagan survival—though it is likely to be so construed by Christians themselves. Such “surviving” spirits are not just marginalized or diabolized pagan remnants, they are continually re-performed, recreated through Christian ritual and Christian discourse. We find such re-creation of the small gods throughout Christian history, and throughout this volume: when the Urapmin drive out the motobil by the power of the Holy Spirit, when Andean people frame their propitiation of the yawlu with devotion to the Christian God, when Mami Water appears primarily as a trope of Pentecostal deliverance ministry, when thirteenth-century Frenchwomen see, in an unoffcial Christian saint, their best hope of negotiating the return of their stolen babies from the follets, when the brownie and Robin Goodfellow appear in prayers of protection against them, in assertions of their diabolical status, or in tolerant mention of superstitious old wives who stillbelieve in such “harmless devils,” when cunningwomen insist that they only use “good devils” or that the fairies who facilitate their divination have no fear of the cross, this is because the beings involved have succeeded in taking up a niche within Christian discourse. The “good people” have not departed, have not been driven out by the sound of church-bells or the smell of gasoline. There are no pagan survivals: small gods are Christian creations with which to think the limits of Christianity.”

In essence, Murray’s version of events that describes Paganism as an anti-church, anti-society isn’t backed by any historical evidence.

Sources:

https://tradizioneitaliana.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/medievalismo-religioso-stregheria-wicca-e-storia/

https://medievaleggiando.it/la-legittimazione-storica-della-wicca-margaret-murray-e-la-manipolazione-delle-fonti/

https://medievaleggiando.it/il-vangelo-delle-streghe-e-linizio-della-wicca-il-fascino-di-un-falso-storico/

La persecuzione delle streghe fu un femminicidio di massa – 3a Parte

Foto copertina: Roberto G. “Se sei una donna e osi guardare in te stessa, sei una strega”. – W.I.T.C.H. Le streghe e il Diavolo Ad un certo punto tutte le divinità pagane locali divennero demoni (ad eccezione di Diana). I demonologi e il clero che non capivano l’autonomia delle donne, le sottomisero ad un’altra autorità maschile, quella del Diavolo. C’è chi dice che le streghe venerassero nei…