"The ‘Mandela Effect’ is a curious, mysterious and fascinating phenomenon whose term was coined by Fiona Broome. It is the where masses of people clearly recall either a specific event in history or the name or spelling of an item as being a particular way, however all public historical records and other people contradict what you remember as being a fact.
It is like what all these people remember never actually happened, yet you are so sure that it did and you have clear memories of it. This leaves the people experiencing the anomalies as feeling completely perplexed, puzzled and even weirded out, like reality has changed.
What is interesting about this is that it is not just the odd person. In some cases it is thousands of people who share the same memory that contrasts current historical data or timelines.
There are literally people all over the world who are not related or connected to each other at all, that are collectively recalling the exact same historical information – yet all written information whether in books , newspapers or online sources of information contradict this. So it is not a sole, subjective experience – making it harder to disprove and debunk."
Source and Full Article
http://www.nataliakuna.com/the-mandela-effect--alternate-universes.html
Sunday, December 31, 2017
When people leave your life, let them. Don’t be phony to have any friends or family in your life, if you do this, you compromise the Life your really want and you affect your ability to receive the frequency to move to the Timeline, the “reality”, the “Earth, you really want at your highest and best.
Friday, December 29, 2017
Two Words stand out to me as the calmest place I have ever known, in every way and on every level you could ever imagine.~
I am dressed in thick jeans, layers of clothes, heavy socks, and big ol’ boots.
I have a thick wooly cap on. I am alone and walking in the woods, there are no homes around, no roads, no people playing talking or driving any motor vehicle. There is thick snow everywhere, boughs leaning heavily toward the ground, no tracks, no trail, no one.
The sky is clear soft luxuriously dreamy blue. It is 20 below zero. There are no squirrels about, no songbirds, no deer moving in the forest. I walk down into a bowl, a dip in the ground in the forest. And it profoundly occurs to me that I am so calm, so peaceful, so deeply relaxed.
A silent walk on a crisp winter day was peaceful already, however, once I walked into this bowl in the ground I was overwhelmed with not being overwhelmed.
The deep freezing cold, the heavy snow, the frozen dirt and rock, and silence became another level of peace. No electrical currents, no cell towers, no wind, no energy buzz at all.
A magnificent calm, a magical peace that neutralized all body pain, all fear programs, all mind chatter, future plans, past regrets, people’s version or opinions of me, and an array of thought, body feelings, energetic chatter, self doubt, self consciousness all neutralized.
I did not know that so much was happening in my human body, my emotion and energy until that moment when it was all magnificently peacefully neutralized.
As I dropped down into the bowl, it felt as if a sudden burst of a different reality. A quick or quantum if you will change. When my stomach relaxed I realized I was tensing it, realized that emotions food and subconscious thoughts were holding my stomach in knots, in contraction and I did not even know. My shoulders relaxed, yet I did not know I was tensing them. There was no buzz around me that I was use to feeling all the time and thought was part of me, and all things. I had no mind chatter, or emotional dance going on in my body or thought in any way. All parts of my existence was truly peaceful inside that forest bowl.
The profound difference in deep quite, cold, and no people or electricity is so truly amazing, it is what so many seek everyday and have no idea how to find that peace that can truly relax all parts of what they know to be their reality. Until you know that kind of calm, it is hard to understand that it could even exist in this “reality”.
I remembered the moment the rest of my life, I call it Majestic Silence.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
I am dressed in thick jeans, layers of clothes, heavy socks, and big ol’ boots.
I have a thick wooly cap on. I am alone and walking in the woods, there are no homes around, no roads, no people playing talking or driving any motor vehicle. There is thick snow everywhere, boughs leaning heavily toward the ground, no tracks, no trail, no one.
The sky is clear soft luxuriously dreamy blue. It is 20 below zero. There are no squirrels about, no songbirds, no deer moving in the forest. I walk down into a bowl, a dip in the ground in the forest. And it profoundly occurs to me that I am so calm, so peaceful, so deeply relaxed.
A silent walk on a crisp winter day was peaceful already, however, once I walked into this bowl in the ground I was overwhelmed with not being overwhelmed.
The deep freezing cold, the heavy snow, the frozen dirt and rock, and silence became another level of peace. No electrical currents, no cell towers, no wind, no energy buzz at all.
A magnificent calm, a magical peace that neutralized all body pain, all fear programs, all mind chatter, future plans, past regrets, people’s version or opinions of me, and an array of thought, body feelings, energetic chatter, self doubt, self consciousness all neutralized.
I did not know that so much was happening in my human body, my emotion and energy until that moment when it was all magnificently peacefully neutralized.
As I dropped down into the bowl, it felt as if a sudden burst of a different reality. A quick or quantum if you will change. When my stomach relaxed I realized I was tensing it, realized that emotions food and subconscious thoughts were holding my stomach in knots, in contraction and I did not even know. My shoulders relaxed, yet I did not know I was tensing them. There was no buzz around me that I was use to feeling all the time and thought was part of me, and all things. I had no mind chatter, or emotional dance going on in my body or thought in any way. All parts of my existence was truly peaceful inside that forest bowl.
The profound difference in deep quite, cold, and no people or electricity is so truly amazing, it is what so many seek everyday and have no idea how to find that peace that can truly relax all parts of what they know to be their reality. Until you know that kind of calm, it is hard to understand that it could even exist in this “reality”.
I remembered the moment the rest of my life, I call it Majestic Silence.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
"Women are revolting and supporting each other to expose this collusion. They are demanding systemic change. But those men in power will never give up power unless they are forced to do so."
“All men benefit from this gender hierarchy and these systems of oppression,” Alice Lee, the co-founder of Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, based in Vancouver, told me.
“Individual men collude in this oppression together, knowingly or unknowingly.
The public discussion has yet to acknowledge this. ‘Nice’ men, or ‘progressive’ men, are trying to ignore their own complicity. This makes it harder to institute real systemic change. "
"The powerful men engaging in sexual predation live in a rarified universe where they own everyone around themselves. They demand unquestioned obedience. They must be the center of attention. Their opinions alone count. Their feelings alone are important. "
"College fraternities are breeding grounds for sexual harassment and the objectification of women. The fraternities often ship their men-children straight into corporate offices and other institutions that wield power."
" It celebrates the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel remorse or guilt.
The higher one rises in the corporate hierarchy, the more power and money one amasses, the more these traits are pronounced and rewarded"
“This women’s action is pointing out the behavior of powerful men throughout the industrial West. Women are deciding to tell bosses, liberal institutions and managers this behavior has to stop. They are going public immediately. No one trusts the .. institutions, the owners or the managers to handle this.”
"“Part of this tactic is to say that whether you like it or not we are going to oppose this, whether we win or not we will oppose this, whether we get the proper results or not we will oppose this,” Lakeman said.
“This is spectacular. This is what it takes to make a difference. Collectively we seem to have agreed on whom to go after—the men who are holding economic, social and cultural power.
It is astounding how these guys are being selected. Sexual harassment is only one face of this. We hate these men for their profiteering, their representation of what it means to be a man, their abuses of power. And even the ‘good guys’ who slide into this behavior have to be shown up. It has to stop."
"The women’s revolt understands that our institutions, including those on the left, will not defend us. We must defend ourselves.
“We are looking at the end of the Roman Empire,” Lakeman said.
“We are looking at people grasping in all manner of disgusting ways for power. Women are looking for a way out. They are looking for a way to address some of this. We have been denied all the promised ways.
This is the result of 50 years of feminist work against violence.
Those who hold positions of corporate and political power are very nervous. They can’t control this. There is a genuine uprising, and no one can find the leader to shut it down.”
Source of Above Quotes
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/womens-revolt-targets-far-sexual-abuse/
Investigative Blogger Crystal L. Cox
“Individual men collude in this oppression together, knowingly or unknowingly.
The public discussion has yet to acknowledge this. ‘Nice’ men, or ‘progressive’ men, are trying to ignore their own complicity. This makes it harder to institute real systemic change. "
"The powerful men engaging in sexual predation live in a rarified universe where they own everyone around themselves. They demand unquestioned obedience. They must be the center of attention. Their opinions alone count. Their feelings alone are important. "
"College fraternities are breeding grounds for sexual harassment and the objectification of women. The fraternities often ship their men-children straight into corporate offices and other institutions that wield power."
" It celebrates the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and an inability to feel remorse or guilt.
The higher one rises in the corporate hierarchy, the more power and money one amasses, the more these traits are pronounced and rewarded"
“This women’s action is pointing out the behavior of powerful men throughout the industrial West. Women are deciding to tell bosses, liberal institutions and managers this behavior has to stop. They are going public immediately. No one trusts the .. institutions, the owners or the managers to handle this.”
"“Part of this tactic is to say that whether you like it or not we are going to oppose this, whether we win or not we will oppose this, whether we get the proper results or not we will oppose this,” Lakeman said.“This is spectacular. This is what it takes to make a difference. Collectively we seem to have agreed on whom to go after—the men who are holding economic, social and cultural power.
It is astounding how these guys are being selected. Sexual harassment is only one face of this. We hate these men for their profiteering, their representation of what it means to be a man, their abuses of power. And even the ‘good guys’ who slide into this behavior have to be shown up. It has to stop."
"The women’s revolt understands that our institutions, including those on the left, will not defend us. We must defend ourselves.
“We are looking at the end of the Roman Empire,” Lakeman said.
“We are looking at people grasping in all manner of disgusting ways for power. Women are looking for a way out. They are looking for a way to address some of this. We have been denied all the promised ways.
This is the result of 50 years of feminist work against violence.
Those who hold positions of corporate and political power are very nervous. They can’t control this. There is a genuine uprising, and no one can find the leader to shut it down.”
Source of Above Quotes
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/womens-revolt-targets-far-sexual-abuse/
Investigative Blogger Crystal L. Cox
I for one am loving the Roy Moore political race in Alabama.
For decades I have seen and known of pedophiia and molestation in my own family and well most families to some degree. Yet the “adults” don’t want to believe, don’t want to look it, and even if they do believe it or look at it they can’t seem to digest it so they turn a blind eye and even invite the abuser to holiday dinners and put them in social events with their victims and new victims. They don’t make a stand against the abuser and choose “Status Quo” no matter the pain to the victim or the enabling of the Cycle to Continue.
Their Blind Eye Enabling literally creates more victims in mass.
This Roy Moore race is showing in clear light that yes these people exist who know that someone is preying sexually on children and using the bible as some excuse as to it being ok.
As it is hard for those who don’t have this experience in their realm of reality to understand that there are “Adults” in MASS who know about sexual abuse and molestation in their family and community and they do nothing in order to protect their own way of life and peace of mind. Something I have NEVER done nor could ever do and thus became a target, as I have always stood for the victims of sexual assault, sexual and physical abuse, pedophilia and molestation.
Yes life is easier and there are more worldly “opportunities” available to us if we just shut up, walk away, keep silent. However, for me, that is the DARK using people as a way to stomp out the light and life force of the innocent, and for me personally I could not live with myself if I did nothing. Those who spoke out, their lives were changed, ruined some may say. And most often they were thought crazy and the abuser was protected and the victim left in the home of those abusing them. Most often the fight did not end in a better life for the victim.
Those Days are Gone.
The Light is Here. CALL THEM OUT.
STOP inviting them to DINNER to prey on victims.
STOP not believing.
The Roy Moore race is showing those who could not understand that people exist who YES know about sexual abuse but would rather control your right to choose, as in abortion and loving who you want, than to stand up against those who prey on children.
I am so delighted that the Roy Moore race is shedding a huge light on the abusers, and more important on those who enable them. As there are “bad guys” yes and “bad gals” who do very bad things to children. Children have no voice and are often not believed.
It is the “Good Guys and Gals” that have to speak up for them, stand up for them and NOT enable those who abuse children, prey on children, and make it some sort of “God” given right they have. The molesters only have a way to molest if the parents, aunts, uncles, friends, family, neighbors who KNOW do NOTHING, say NOTHING and give the abuser a clear path with no consequence.
Now people have to choose, do they really support pedophila and molestation?
The Roy Moore race puts the enablers in the SPOTLIGHT and I am so glad. The victims who have spent a lifetime in the DARK are now getting light. And the faces of the enablers and there reasons or justification is on full display in big media in mass.
Now we can see it all, examine it and decide what world we want to live in. The whole purpose of the TRUMP presidency is LIGHT. It is about shining a light on all that we don’t want, and bringing the molesters, the corrupt, the pedophiles and rapists, the controllers, the warmongers ALL to the Light. Transparency and Accountability.
The enablers are being forced to look within and face their own abuse and stand up to abusers for the last time, as we rid our world of the evils of sexual assault across the board and the darkest evil of all preying sexually on children and being enabled and protected by men and women around them, as well as clergy, and even blood family.
It is way past Enough is ENOUGH.
These folks that are supporting Roy Moore, they are showing their deepest secret of their own abuse or tolerance of abuse in their family and their community. If they judge Roy Moore then they will have to look within and heal their own soul, their bloodline and to STOP inviting the perverted abuser to family dinners.
Decades of rape and sexual assault on college campuses, and the sports jocks or men in general protected as if that’s just what men do. The rights of women have taken not only a back stage but a dark dungeon. Enabling Sexual Predators has been a way of life, those days are over. The Feminine Divine is rising.
The Darkness in our political system, our money system, our energy and oil system, our medicine and food; ALL of it is being brought to the LIGHT in clear view to understand, to witness, to see how “it’s always been” and why. And from there make CHANGES. And make Choices as to how we want it to be moving forward.
The Roy Moore Campaign is of the Light and indeed from God, but not against Gays and Abortion and in support of Pedophiles, sexual assaulters and child molesters, but instead to expose the darkest, most protected and enabled parts of our society so that we may truly CHOOSE the world we want, by first seeing clearly the world we are in. We must first ADMIT this is really happened and happening and then yes mourn, heal and face it.
No longer is hiding under the proverbial rug of Status Quo acceptable.
Stop Enabling Predators and if you Can’t or don’t believe they even exist in your inner circle then YOU will simply go down with the ship of darkness as it is immersed in loving light and sinking into non-existence in our high vibration, loving, safe, equal, empowering, free choice, world where we actually do get to say what happens to our body, from the second we are born we have rights. Rights to NOT be your play toy, to not be verbally or sexually harassed or abused by the adults around us. Leave Us Be. Don’t stand to take our rights to our own bodies from us. Speak up for Victims. I KNOW that you ALL know at Least ONE.
Sexual Predators, Sexual Assaulters, Entitled Men to a woman’ body and time, pedophiles and molesters are a lost cause, addicted to controlling abuse. They will either change or not, they really have to want to change to actually change.
However, the ENABLERS are not a lost cause and must STAND up with the VICTIMS to STOP giving Abusers places to freely ABUSE while at the same time torturing, tormenting and oppressing their victims.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
#RoyMoore #WomenRevolt #NewSexualRevolution #STOPtouchingMe #NotYourProperty #MyBody #StopPedophilia #StopMolestation #StopEnablingPredators #RemoveReplaceRepair
#RoYMooreCampaign #CollectiveResistance
I Love Trumps Bigoted Homophobic America.
The Dark is emboldened to come out into the light and HATE on full display. We can see them now. We can FULLY see what is on the inside, what is in their thoughts and inner world .Now they feel emboldened to speak their homophobic, racist hate. They are empowered to verbally and physically assault those of color, gays, lesbians, trans, and those women who think they need equal pay and rights to choose for their own body and life.
Now we CAN SEE THEM. And we, in mass, Can Stand up to THEM. The Light has arrived. Trump has brought the LIGHT. Now let’s clean house and remove the haters from our world, stand up to them, expose them. And Change the World. ~ Reverend Crystal Cox
The Dark is emboldened to come out into the light and HATE on full display. We can see them now. We can FULLY see what is on the inside, what is in their thoughts and inner world .Now they feel emboldened to speak their homophobic, racist hate. They are empowered to verbally and physically assault those of color, gays, lesbians, trans, and those women who think they need equal pay and rights to choose for their own body and life.
Now we CAN SEE THEM. And we, in mass, Can Stand up to THEM. The Light has arrived. Trump has brought the LIGHT. Now let’s clean house and remove the haters from our world, stand up to them, expose them. And Change the World. ~ Reverend Crystal Cox
I Love Trumps Bigoted Homophobic America.
The Dark is emboldened to come out into the light and HATE on full display. We can see them now. We can FULLY see what is on the inside, what is in their thoughts and inner world .Now they feel emboldened to speak their homophobic, racist hate. They are empowered to verbally and physically assault those of color, gays, lesbians, trans, and those women who think they need equal pay and rights to choose for their own body and life.
Now we CAN SEE THEM. And we, in masse, Can Stand up to THEM. The Light has arrived. Trump has brought the LIGHT. Now let’s clean house and remove the haters from our world, stand up to them, expose them. And Change the World. ~ Reverend Crystal Cox
The Dark is emboldened to come out into the light and HATE on full display. We can see them now. We can FULLY see what is on the inside, what is in their thoughts and inner world .Now they feel emboldened to speak their homophobic, racist hate. They are empowered to verbally and physically assault those of color, gays, lesbians, trans, and those women who think they need equal pay and rights to choose for their own body and life.
Now we CAN SEE THEM. And we, in masse, Can Stand up to THEM. The Light has arrived. Trump has brought the LIGHT. Now let’s clean house and remove the haters from our world, stand up to them, expose them. And Change the World. ~ Reverend Crystal Cox
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Newscasters Becoming the News and the Rise of the Feminine Divine.
It is interesting, the News Casters being removed for Sexual Assault that then become the News. It’s seems cannibalistic in a way. And you know that many of the newscasters themselves reporting on these guys have done the same or worse. It must be an odd sensation knowing what you have done while reporting on someone doing it.
The top tier DARK are falling and the next levels are in queue. The LIGHT is everywhere and there will soon be no DARK left. The Feminine Divine is Rising FRONT AND CENTER.
The old Paradigm of Sexual Authority used to Control Women and absorb their precious Sacred Divine is a Timeline that is rapidly coming to an end, as many timelines merge and collapse.
This has been horrifically happening for hundreds of years in time as we have known time to be. At one point and still in a big part today adult rape, the sexual energy theft was by pure aggressive and the sole, purely physical fact that men were stronger than women physically.
More modern days found women fighting back and many stronger physically and/or had modern day weapons of defense. Then instead of brute force in mass against women sexually it became power, authority be it a boss, cop, father, stepfather, mother, or anyone who has some kind of authority over you.
They use the leverage or let’s say ENTITLEMENT of “owning you” as our parents did, no other way to say it really as back then per say, they could do whatever they want to their children and even if the children told who would they tell and who would believe them?
A purely sexual biological act, and it comes with the TITLE to your body, your soul, your guilt and shame, your programs for their making, your human vehicle and your very life. What you eat, learned behavior, your view of the world, your opinion of yourself, your belief of a woman’s role, all becomes their version of you which was someone else’s version of them.
Yes many break out of that titlement, that born with ownership and habit of being controlled, but most have not. They live as adults still owned by the views, needs, lifestyle, beliefs, expectations, guilt trips, memories,ethics, morals and subjective perspectives of their parents. Who in a sense, were slave masters as you were, simply born unto them and then you were their pet in a way, in the cage of their subjective perspective and holding their lineage of belief, programming, habits and patterns firmly in place.
You are fed and your physical needs brought to you. You watch how love and life is to be through your “family”. You are not really encouraged to act, feel, believe a different way but instead expected to “play along” with the heteropatriarchal norm. The sexual entitlement and masterhood of home, intelligence and body of men over women is learned, taught, suggested, seen, and expected. It is also worshipped and ordained.
Most do not escape this parental ownership of arrogance and entitlement of their life by those who simply had sex and their “human vehicle” only, was created from this one biological act.
I believe we create our lessons and experiences here in some sort of plan before we are born. That said and holding true that I am the creator of my experience on some level, well we are born unto them out of a sexual excursion of some sort, could be love, could be rape, could be molestation.
They could have been in love, they were most likely to have been in lust. And well it was probably more like our Mothers being infatuated with some young guy, needing attention and love for that one moment in time, and choosing to have sex with some guy who really did not know her, respect her, like talking to her or was even actually her true friend but instead someone who simple wanted to have sex, to have that one brief moment in time be it an hour or a year or more.
Still odds are your birth father did not really know your Mother, know her interests, her truths, her hopes and dreams, or even her real beliefs. Odds are he did not ever really listen or respect her views on the world or ideas or even that she knew best in any area at all.
Odds are, especially if you are over 40, your Mother looked to your father for answers on things and was not respected as someone with intelligence and worth in totality. Or to even be taken serious. All of these programs, patterns of abuse and control and the heteropatriarchy in general was given to you in your DNA at birth, and learning of choice of thoughts creating reality, choosing what reality we want to believe or live in, choosing our morals, choosing who touches us and how, consciously choosing how we live our life, and walking our own version of ourself and not our parents or society, well that is lessons most are not aware exist.
Now all this sexual assault to sooth the lost boy male ego craving love and power insatiably is a program, most men could not help it and may have not have even noticed a choice point, they were simply born into the HeteroPatriarchy and they went along with the role of their father and the archetype of the man’s role in “those times” and timelines.
Universal law is changing all this now as men are seeing men fall from Grace and examining their own actions, of which most were not even aware it was abusive, controlling and of the dark. They were simply living the program given unto them as their own birthright per say.
We are born into this, and then we are owned. We are not adults when we are programmed and have no rights to our own choices in the society we were born into. Some magical made up age of 18 (Numerological Number 9), and we then get to have the rights to our body back, choose who were are around, have societal rights?
Possibly, possibly not as the programs run deep and we find jobs, bosses, friends, lovers who perpetuate the program as we believe that to be the way it is suppose to be. All of this having contributed to massive sexual assault as the patriarch is constantly trying to undo their own pain from being forced into that programming and it displays as assault, entitlement, and control over women in whatever way they can get it.
The agenda of regulating and controlling women’s bodies is the overarch per say of all of this. It is a way for the Heteropatriarchy to stay alive as it gasps for air with the rise of the feminine divine. If they can maintain “ownership” of woman by creating “laws” over women’s bodies then they keep this childhood programming in place until death, and then they can recreated it with birth again and the cycle continues.
This is ALL coming to a screeching halt as the sexual predators are outed and removed.
We were taken to dark rooms (rooms without a plethora of knowledge and a variant perspective) and we were programmed be it religion, a man’s role and entitlement, a woman’s place, a commandment, a way to raise our children, have our home or live our life and even programmed on who is the authority, who can license us, who can give us permission to be who we actually want to be and is true for ourselves.
They make laws about our body, our choices, our “world” and this is all crashing down as the LIGHT explodes the dark to the finest of grains and then it simply blows away to all parts of all universes to heal, to re-program, to feel and be love and to never again rule our consciousness, torment our soul, own our flesh and bone our human vehicle, keep us as debt slaves, rape and molest us, and use our emotions as their ravenous fuel to feed their own asphyxiation.
This “dark room” could be the family home, a bedroom, a shed, or it could be church, school, the park, the family dinner table, guilt or shame voiced “at us”, unwanted OPINIONS on who we are or who we should become based on the subjective perspective of the yapper.
It is more than sexual assault, it is constant opinions at you about you. It is a constant, “their version” of who you should be or their assumptions of who you are. These “dark rooms” per say are in point and place in society where you pretend to be some other version of you then you know yourself to be, in order to get or keep the approval of the heteropatriarchal society of which you were born into. You shine the light whereby you tell your Truth and you Out the Predators, the Dark Ones, the Entitled Controllers.
The “assault” makes itself known by way of watching you, of saying you are prettier if you smile, commenting on your looks as if their version of you is somehow more important than your own. Sexual Assault is the energy of all that controls you and keeps you in a program that prevent your authentic you actually creating and living in the reality you actually do consciously choose.
The brute force rape and entitlement to a woman’s body morphed into the power of money and being at the helm of some capitalistic economic model which is an illusion created out of their made up money loaned to you, debt, bank fees, taxes, licensing and so many more economic oppression programs to keep you controllable and keep you having to take the PURE sexual DISGUST and Venomous Leers, Oppressive Opinions, Exhaustive Banter, Antagonistic Arrogance played out as your need for the energy, the power, the survival force of money. Money that if you don’t lay down and take it per say, you will be the one asphyxiated.
Everywhere women go they are met with some man’s eyes that have a sense of “ENTITLEMENT” to their body, their smile, how they dress, what they are reading or listening to and well many men out there in public land seem to think they are the master and woman are the slave or the crop even perhaps. And often this actually comes natural to them as the habits of their ancestors. We are now at a Choice Point and the Male Divine is rising up to meet the Feminine Divine in a Grand Galactic Expression of Pure Love and Light.
The Archaic Days of Darkened Ol’ are crumbling to HeteroPatriarchy Ash.
The Feminine Divine is Truly Rising. Goddess Bless You.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
#MattLauer #RoyMoore #SexualAssault #Consent #Entitlement #DontTouchMe #DontEyeballMe #WomenAsChattel #HeteroPatriarchy #ProstituteArchetype #Pedophilia #SexualMolestion
Thursday, November 16, 2017
For me the whole moving timelines is an old hat. Yet there are others who have seen it in their physical reality for over a decade. Perhaps we have all seen it throughout our life in small ways and now it’s simply much grander. I do know that we are in a better world, a higher vibrating timeline that is clear. As we see Pedophilia and Molestations called out. We see corruption crumbling from the top down and many more clear, without a doubt signs that the Dark has been defeated and that the reality we are in is a much less dense reality and freedom, complete freedom from the dark is within site.
Then there are others who are new to the Mandela Effect and in that stage of discovery and perhaps fear or anger. When I first noticed I had shifted realities, there was not a lot of videos out there. I remember jumping on each one for the Mandela Effect at first and then on Parallel Realities, Quantum Jumping, Changing Timelines and then it all faded back into life as they say. And walking among those who have not seen it, yet changed forever because I have. My life has been that way all along anyway, always seeing something and feeling something different than the humans around me.
I know it has happened to me, I have no doubt that it has or what is actually going on and I have great faith in that. However, it tends to make my daily life feel a bit humdrum, or even radically on the other side of the scale and such pure magic that this version to is to out there for not just most of them but most all of them. I have never been one who needed approval of others. When I know something is happening as seen with my eyes for me personally, or seen psychically or I just know, well then I do. However, knowing that I moved to another world seemingly just like that, yet knowing it was thousands of years in the making, well it changes things. It makes me feel no permanence at all, and I was never one to be attached to the material world anyway. So after the Mandela Effect knowledge was clear well there is nothing more important than understanding how I changed timelines and to do it at will to a timeline of no pain, no money system, no oppression and complete actual freedom. So I have been studying that since then, and not like before, but with the mind that, Hey I can move to another physical world in an instant.
Before this I had already detached from my home, belongings, and all that held my life in some sort of particular belief, social standing, the whole whatia do for a living nonsense and well after that I detached even more, understanding that there is no physical. While at the same time feeling body pain, needing to manifest abundance for food, warmth and clothes.
The conundrum is obvious and the Faith in waiting for the tide to change as old timelines, realities and stories collapse, well that is the intermittent challenge. As I await, yet participate in a newer, higher vibrating timelines immerge. Having this faith yet at the same time wishing it to hurry up as my human body suffers. Then I head back into thought and healing and creating a higher vibrating thought pattern as I hold still unattached from all realities and awaiting the emergence of the Reality that is the highest possibility, probability for me personal, whoever I am in the grand scheme of universal things.
~Reverend Crystal Cox
After traveling to this dimension it became a bit of woe is me now what? I know I have moved realities, timeline and I understand what is happening with timelines collapsing and our ascension. However, it is still not “my world” per say. Thinking my way out of one version of life and into another is not that easy. Convincing my inner beliefs to be different so my reality moves is a process indeed. Saying the words are words, however we must change our belief system, that is so ingrained our our patterning. That takes the tides of TIME. Yet knowing in our heart of hearts that Time does not Exist.
Sometimes I sit in a seat inside my own head, body, existence and I watch myself say things, think things and I know they are not mine. I wonder in this if you have ever actually met me or if I have been able to move through the who’s of my mind and talk to you clearly as my core self of which I know me to be in my purest divinity.
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Investigative Blogger Crystal Cox was the FIRST to gain Equal Free Speech Rights for ALL Bloggers to that of Institutional Press Journalists.
It was ruled for the first time that a blogger is entitled to the same free speech protection as a journalist.
On 2014, blogger Crystal Cox accused Obsidian and Kevin D. Padrick of corrupt and fraudulent conduct. Although the court dismissed most of Cox's blog posts as opinion, it found one post to be more factual in its assertions (and, therefore, defamatory).
On 2014, blogger Crystal Cox accused Obsidian and Kevin D. Padrick of corrupt and fraudulent conduct. Although the court dismissed most of Cox's blog posts as opinion, it found one post to be more factual in its assertions (and, therefore, defamatory).
It was ruled for the first time,[17][18] by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,[19] that a blogger is entitled to the same free speech protection as a journalist and cannot be liable for defamation unless the blogger acted negligently.[20] In the decision, journalists and bloggers are equally protected under the First Amendment[17] because the "protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others' writings, or tried to get both sides of a story."[19]:11–12[21]
I, Crystal Cox was the FIRST, because I refused Settlements over and over. I wanted a precedent to FREE all Citizen Journalists, Investigative Bloggers and Whistleblowers
#DefamationCase #FreeSpeech #ConstitutionalLaw #CrystalCoxCase #Whistleblower #InvestigativeBlogger #Ant-Slapp #CitizenJournalist #FirstAmendment #Defamation #DefamationLawsuit
When I First Spoke to Marc Randazza he said that the Big Media had a Monopoly on Free Speech and there was Not Much I Could Do about it. Guess I Proved First Amendment Attorney Marc Randazza VERY Wrong.
Sunday, October 29, 2017
I Do NOT Worship a Flag nor Sing Joy to songs of Bombs Bursting in Air and Rockets Red Glare. Bombs have been used to kill, torture, terrorize and are NOT tools of Freedom. The “Anthem” is a War Cry, the U.S Flag is a Symbol of Slaughtering the Native Americans, Oppressing pretty much EVERY country around the World on behalf of and of benefit to the Corporation of the United States. The Flag is NOT a representation of Freedom nor is the words of the Anthem. I do not worship False Gods such as a Flag and a Song. America is NOT the Land of the Free and is nowhere near being a so called “Christian Nation”.
There is no “My Country”. We are all Global Citizens coming from varying countries around the world and that is just our status while we are alive in human bodies. When we die we go elsewhere and Country, Borders, Oppression as such does not Exist.
The whole in God we Trust thing is a farce, it is a motto yes but not a reality they pursue or even really fully honestly allow. Why is GOD only for the American Flag winning that war any war, the American flag flying while bombs are shedding the blood of other God’s People.
The arrogance and war mongering of the American Flag is not something I have ever loved, saluted, respected or worship nor is the National Anthem. I have, in the past, in school or other places been actually FORCED to salute this false God of War and Oppression, but in my heart I sand a different song and prayed for the Light to come to Earth and stop the Bombs Bursting in air and shedding blood from shore to shore.
America is not the land of the Free, we are not even free to use God given plants as medicine, we are not free to use free energy, we are NOT Free regarding thousands upon thousands of reasons. Those who believe America is the Land of the FREE, are Asleep. Wake Up. Wake Up. Remember who you really Are.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
I am a Global Citizen, a Universal Citizen, no COUNTRY owns me.
The United States of America Corporation abducted my Citizenship Rights. My ancestors are from Northern Ireland and the Uk on one side and Russia on the other. Yet I am deemed a U.S citizen because I was born here? Why? The U.S corporation does not own me, they abducted me. And you unless you are Native American. And with those in America before it was allegedly discovered, well they had no rights at all and are still persecuted, after a massive slaughter of their ancestors. This U.S is NOT the land of the Free. There is so many levels to our NOT Free in America, and yet over and over the U.S claims to be so righteous and promoting Freedom. The U.S corporation and it’s military was NEVER about promoting Freedom. Why is the U.S in every country of the world oppressing people? They are not here oppressing us as American “Citizens”. Our government is there oppressing them. Remember. Wake Up. Remember who you are in the Galactic sense of it all, your true oversoul higher consciousness version of YOU.
I protest Citizenship anywhere. It makes no sense, we are from all over. And here in the U.S that most call America, well we are not from here yet we are restricted to travel to other countries freely, even the ones our ancestors came here from. Open Borders is a Civil Right. Accountability on an Individual Level is Key. Transparency is the road to getting there.
I Object to the Corporation of the United States owning me, trading my rights on the market, forcing citizenship at my birth and oppressing the WORLD in my name as an abductee forced to be a citizen of ONE COUNTRY when my ancestors are from many, and my oversoul, my true essence is multi-dimensional and has no word or expression for the term COUNTRY.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
I protest Citizenship anywhere. It makes no sense, we are from all over. And here in the U.S that most call America, well we are not from here yet we are restricted to travel to other countries freely, even the ones our ancestors came here from. Open Borders is a Civil Right. Accountability on an Individual Level is Key. Transparency is the road to getting there.
I Object to the Corporation of the United States owning me, trading my rights on the market, forcing citizenship at my birth and oppressing the WORLD in my name as an abductee forced to be a citizen of ONE COUNTRY when my ancestors are from many, and my oversoul, my true essence is multi-dimensional and has no word or expression for the term COUNTRY.
~ Reverend Crystal Cox
Friday, October 13, 2017
The Story of Biddy Early: Ireland’s Most Famous Witch and Faery Friend
"“There is a country called Tír-na-n-Og, which means the Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it; neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it… According to many stories, Tír-na-n-Og is the favourite dwelling of the fairies…”
– W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
“Mrs. Sheridan, as I call her, was wrinkled and half blind, and had gone barefoot through her lifetime… She had never been to school she told me, because her father could not pay the penny a week it would have cost. She had never travelled many miles from the parish of her birth, and I am sure had never seen pictures except the sacred ones on chapel walls…
She had never heard of the great mystic Jacob Behman, and yet when an unearthly visitor told her the country of youth is not far from the place where we live, she had come near to his root idea that ‘the world standeth in Heaven and Heaven in the World, and are in one another as day and night.'”
–Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
In Ireland the Church has raised its monasteries atop the sacred groves and springs which, in their virgin state, long served as temples for the Irish. But by most accounts, the Irish minded little. Perhaps they thought one god is as good as another–Brigid might as well be the Blessed Mary, I suppose. Or perhaps their hopes for keeping their old faith—like so many hopes in the Isle’s history—hinged on a battle that was fatefully lost.
As St. Patrick walked about the countryside, it’s told, spreading the Gospels throughout the Emerald Isle, he met mostly the gentle hospitality of the Irish peasantry, with their willing ear for lore of all kinds, their love of things bright and grand in spirit, and their warm fires of peat and twigs.
But one Druid saw that his whole order and the fate of the Irish was threatened by this new mission from Rome, and so challenged the Saint to a battle of magic and power. They met in an open field where billowing clouds traversed across the sun.
The Druid began the battle by rising into the air high above the meadow, until all who watched had to squint into the sun to see him any longer. St. Patrick ended it by uttering a few words, with which the Druid faltered, and fell from the light of the sun. His body was broken on the stones below, and his blood joined in with the clover.
Although the Church had its way with abbeys and crosses, some traditions refused to die. From the very first the Christian priests abhorred any talk of the faery—the fair people—that invisible race of sometimes helpful, sometimes wicked folk who had blessed the Irish with miracles and cursed them with tragedy since before anyone’s greatest grandmother could recall.
“Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin. In dreams we go among them, and play with them, and combat with them,” wrote Yeats of the faeries.
Although the priests told all to not believe in such pagan nonsense, they themselves were the most afraid to go about at night time where a troop of faeries might be traveling from their cave to the sea, or from their hawthorn tree to the fields below, or simply dancing to their heavenly music from twilight to dawn in a circle of moss-covered stones.
And though the priests forbade it, their words alone could not hinder the fair people from sometimes bestowing on mortals certain gifts—the sight of things far away, the power to heal and root out evil, or a music so divine that maidens would dance off their toes for the joy of it, or die slowly pining away for it.
Though the gift of flowering music wasn’t bestowed on the red-haired lass named Biddy Early, no one doubted that she had been touched with the gifts of foresight and healing. She has since earned the title of Ireland’s most famous witch.
How her power came to her no one knows. Some say her first husband (she had at least three and outlived them all) came to her after he died and told her secrets which gave her the power. Others say she was a seer from birth. Terry Glavin of Lost Magazine wrote, “When Biddy was a girl she spent a great deal of time talking to herself, in places where the blackthorn grows, places like the rath in Jack Brian’s field beside the farm at Coolreagh. It’s one of those overgrown stone circles where people used to see faint lights dancing on certain nights of the year.”
Some say that it was her son, who was coveted by the faery for his skill at the game of hurley. Yeats once wrote, “The people of faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal.” The boy was an astounding player, able to leap like a deer and dodge like a rabbit.
That’s why they say when he was eight the faery took him away (which is the way of saying to their land, a place of everlasting youth, leaving the living to mourn over the lifeless body left behind like so many rags forgotten).
It is said the boy returned to Biddy in her grief and granted her a little blue bottle with which to make her living. Biddy, they say, would shake this little bottle and see inside a vision that would answer any matter brought before her. She never charged any money for her services (as is the custom the world over with shamans and healers), but would sometimes take a little bread or tea, or more often whiskey (the abundance of which they say lead to the death of all her husbands).
According to a little girl whose mother inherited Biddy’s cabin, “She was as good, and better, to the poor as to the rich. Any poor person passing the road, she’d call in and give a cup of tea or a glass of whiskey to, and bread and what they wanted.”
Little is known of Biddy’s early years. She was born to a poor farming family in County Clare in 1798. “That was the year of the Croppies,” writes Glavin. “Seamus Heaney wrote a great poem about it. The peasants filled the pockets of their greatcoats with barley, to feed themselves on the run, and they made their final stand at Vinegar Hill, shaking scythes at cannon. They fell in the thousands, and they buried us without shroud or coffin, and in August the barley grew up out of the grave.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that with a tragedy such as the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798 comes a blessing to the people, and Biddy was certainly that. She had a little shed in which she would go and consult the faeries, working miraculous cures and telling the future of any who would come and seek her help. She made many cures with little bottles of potion and prayers and holy water.
Often she would warn someone she had given a cure to that they should mind the bottle when crossing such a bridge, or that it would break by such a gate, or that they should not come to any door but their own or they should lose it. And she was always right.
Daniel Curtin told Lady Gregory a story of both her healing and foresight, “There’s not a man in this countryside over forty year old that hasn’t been with her some time or other. There’s a man living in that house over there was sick one time, and he went to her, and she cured him, but says she, ‘You’ll have to lose something, and don’t fret after it.’ So he had a grey mare and she was going to foal, and one morning when he went out he saw that the foal was born, and was lying dead by the side of the wall. So he remembered what she said to him and he didn’t fret.”
As the Tarot deck includes cards of ill-fate, so Biddy’s tidings were not always happy, and the will of the faery is not always kind to the earthly folk. “There was a woman, Mrs. Leary,” Mrs. Sheridan told Lady Gregory, “had something wrong with her, and she went to Biddy Early. And nothing would do her but to bring my son along with her, and I was vexed… When Biddy Early saw him she said, ‘You’ll travel far, but wherever you go you’ll not escape them.’
The woman he went up with died about six months after, but he went to America, and he wasn’t long there when what was said came true, and he died. They followed him as far as he went.” The faeries, that is.
Now, the priests loathed Biddy and often brought fire and brimstone down on anyone seeking her help. A blacksmith told Lady Gregory, “The priests were against her and used to be taking the cloaks and the baskets from the country people to keep them back from going to her.” They even once attempted to put her on trial for witchcraft (she was the last in all of Ireland to be accused in court), but at the last minute all of the witnesses refused to testify.
Many stories are told of how she hexed a priest’s horse as her rode past her house (he had been whipping those on the road to see her) by having it run into the middle of the nearby river and refuse to go either backward or forward.
She got out of another stitch with the authorities when an eviction notice was served. The night of its execution, she was told by the faery (some say it was her dead husband) to tell the sheriffs, “Stay where you are,” when they came a-knocking. She did just that, and all four were stuck to their spot in the road as if their feet were encased in stone. After two hours she said, “Be away then!” and the enchantment was released. They never again brought ill will to the stout woman’s door.
Besides curing all manner of sick folk and cattle (a lost foul or a sour milking cow could mean destitution for a family), she would also trace the source of harmful magic and give the ailing a cure. Sometimes it was a thornbush planted in a faery road which was causing cattle to fall sick. Sometimes it was a curse of jealousy or ill-will wrought in the mind of someone who may not even know they had the power to do harm. This is a common theme in the Evil Eye lore. A certain Mrs. Crone, interviewed by Lady Gregory relates a tale about her healing by Biddy:
“I was myself digging potatoes out in that field beyond, and a woman passed by the road, but I heard her say nothing, but a pain came on my head and I fell down, and I had to go to my bed for three weeks. My mother went then to Biddy Early. Did you ever hear of her? And she looked in the blue bottle she had, and she said my name. And she saw me standing before her, and knew all about me and said, ‘Your daughter was digging potatoes with her husband in the field, and a woman passed by and she said, ‘It is as good herself is with a spade as the man,’’ for I was a young woman at the time. She gave my mother a bottle for me, and I took three drinks of it in the bed, and then I got up as well as I was before.”
A popular form of evil spell in Ireland was the use of a dead man’s hand (the infamous Hand of Glory, used the world over for all types of theft and deceit) to steal the butter right from the churn, or milk right from the cow. Biddy would find the culprit and stop the theft. (A popular way of doing this was for the inflicted family to put red hot coals beneath their churn, at which point the thieving conjurer would run up to the cottage in a terrible ruckus, screaming that they were being burned alive.)
This practice is further evidence of Biddy’s shamanic nature, as in most ancient cultures there are two types of magic workers—the good and the evil. The evil always work for their own benefit, seeking wealth and glory at the cost of others. Envy is their heart’s affliction, and that void is never filled.
The favorite trick of a greedy shaman is to bewitch unsuspecting folk with sickness to cause them to seek the enchanter’s help, at which point they would simply remove their own curse and collect the bounty. This is one reason that good shamans never accept money for their services, and are obliged to be generous with what they have and humble with what they don’t. Otherwise they might be accused of seeking wealth at the expense of others’ suffering.
It’s a shame that the Church failed to recognize this distinction, and early on put the black mark of witch on all those wise men and women who used the herbs of the mountains and valleys, as well as the prayers and visions through which the spirits guided them, to cure the ill and attempt to bring a heavenly grace into the earthly realm—a task which we all may hope is still not in vain. Lady Gregory recorded the words of a Mr. McCabe: “The priests were against her, but they were wrong. How could that be evil doing that was all charity and kindness and healing?”
Biddy’s old cottage is in ruins now, the stone walls broken and the thatched roof caved in. But when Terry Glavin visited its remains not so long ago, he found that not everyone had forgotten this miraculous woman. “Someone had draped a pretty red kerchief over a hole in a stone wall where a window had been. On the sill, in the nettles and the moss, there were offerings of the sort that people used to leave at saints’ wells. There was a pen, a little bottle, some coins, a package of stamps, and a ribbon.” Such tokens are important in humble folk traditions.
A few simple pins in a bottle were thought to keep evil spirits away. A coin thrown into a sacred spring brought good fortune, and even today a hopeful seeker might cast a penny into a wishing well. Biddy herself worked untold miracles with nothing but a little blue bottle (and their help, of course).
The emblems of this healthy and humble faery faith are not of golden rings and grand cathedrals, but of butter and bread, thimbles and tea. “Lay not up your treasures,” as they say. That’s something to keep in mind as both the pomp of the picking of the Pope (say that three times fast) and the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day cross our path this spring.
Source
http://weekinweird.com/2013/03/20/biddy-early-irelands-famous-witch-faery-friend/
– W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
“Mrs. Sheridan, as I call her, was wrinkled and half blind, and had gone barefoot through her lifetime… She had never been to school she told me, because her father could not pay the penny a week it would have cost. She had never travelled many miles from the parish of her birth, and I am sure had never seen pictures except the sacred ones on chapel walls…
She had never heard of the great mystic Jacob Behman, and yet when an unearthly visitor told her the country of youth is not far from the place where we live, she had come near to his root idea that ‘the world standeth in Heaven and Heaven in the World, and are in one another as day and night.'”
–Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
In Ireland the Church has raised its monasteries atop the sacred groves and springs which, in their virgin state, long served as temples for the Irish. But by most accounts, the Irish minded little. Perhaps they thought one god is as good as another–Brigid might as well be the Blessed Mary, I suppose. Or perhaps their hopes for keeping their old faith—like so many hopes in the Isle’s history—hinged on a battle that was fatefully lost.
As St. Patrick walked about the countryside, it’s told, spreading the Gospels throughout the Emerald Isle, he met mostly the gentle hospitality of the Irish peasantry, with their willing ear for lore of all kinds, their love of things bright and grand in spirit, and their warm fires of peat and twigs.
But one Druid saw that his whole order and the fate of the Irish was threatened by this new mission from Rome, and so challenged the Saint to a battle of magic and power. They met in an open field where billowing clouds traversed across the sun.
The Druid began the battle by rising into the air high above the meadow, until all who watched had to squint into the sun to see him any longer. St. Patrick ended it by uttering a few words, with which the Druid faltered, and fell from the light of the sun. His body was broken on the stones below, and his blood joined in with the clover.
Although the Church had its way with abbeys and crosses, some traditions refused to die. From the very first the Christian priests abhorred any talk of the faery—the fair people—that invisible race of sometimes helpful, sometimes wicked folk who had blessed the Irish with miracles and cursed them with tragedy since before anyone’s greatest grandmother could recall.
“Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no inherent form but change according to whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin. In dreams we go among them, and play with them, and combat with them,” wrote Yeats of the faeries.
Although the priests told all to not believe in such pagan nonsense, they themselves were the most afraid to go about at night time where a troop of faeries might be traveling from their cave to the sea, or from their hawthorn tree to the fields below, or simply dancing to their heavenly music from twilight to dawn in a circle of moss-covered stones.
And though the priests forbade it, their words alone could not hinder the fair people from sometimes bestowing on mortals certain gifts—the sight of things far away, the power to heal and root out evil, or a music so divine that maidens would dance off their toes for the joy of it, or die slowly pining away for it.
Though the gift of flowering music wasn’t bestowed on the red-haired lass named Biddy Early, no one doubted that she had been touched with the gifts of foresight and healing. She has since earned the title of Ireland’s most famous witch.
How her power came to her no one knows. Some say her first husband (she had at least three and outlived them all) came to her after he died and told her secrets which gave her the power. Others say she was a seer from birth. Terry Glavin of Lost Magazine wrote, “When Biddy was a girl she spent a great deal of time talking to herself, in places where the blackthorn grows, places like the rath in Jack Brian’s field beside the farm at Coolreagh. It’s one of those overgrown stone circles where people used to see faint lights dancing on certain nights of the year.”
Some say that it was her son, who was coveted by the faery for his skill at the game of hurley. Yeats once wrote, “The people of faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal.” The boy was an astounding player, able to leap like a deer and dodge like a rabbit.
That’s why they say when he was eight the faery took him away (which is the way of saying to their land, a place of everlasting youth, leaving the living to mourn over the lifeless body left behind like so many rags forgotten).
It is said the boy returned to Biddy in her grief and granted her a little blue bottle with which to make her living. Biddy, they say, would shake this little bottle and see inside a vision that would answer any matter brought before her. She never charged any money for her services (as is the custom the world over with shamans and healers), but would sometimes take a little bread or tea, or more often whiskey (the abundance of which they say lead to the death of all her husbands).
According to a little girl whose mother inherited Biddy’s cabin, “She was as good, and better, to the poor as to the rich. Any poor person passing the road, she’d call in and give a cup of tea or a glass of whiskey to, and bread and what they wanted.”
Little is known of Biddy’s early years. She was born to a poor farming family in County Clare in 1798. “That was the year of the Croppies,” writes Glavin. “Seamus Heaney wrote a great poem about it. The peasants filled the pockets of their greatcoats with barley, to feed themselves on the run, and they made their final stand at Vinegar Hill, shaking scythes at cannon. They fell in the thousands, and they buried us without shroud or coffin, and in August the barley grew up out of the grave.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that with a tragedy such as the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798 comes a blessing to the people, and Biddy was certainly that. She had a little shed in which she would go and consult the faeries, working miraculous cures and telling the future of any who would come and seek her help. She made many cures with little bottles of potion and prayers and holy water.
Often she would warn someone she had given a cure to that they should mind the bottle when crossing such a bridge, or that it would break by such a gate, or that they should not come to any door but their own or they should lose it. And she was always right.
Daniel Curtin told Lady Gregory a story of both her healing and foresight, “There’s not a man in this countryside over forty year old that hasn’t been with her some time or other. There’s a man living in that house over there was sick one time, and he went to her, and she cured him, but says she, ‘You’ll have to lose something, and don’t fret after it.’ So he had a grey mare and she was going to foal, and one morning when he went out he saw that the foal was born, and was lying dead by the side of the wall. So he remembered what she said to him and he didn’t fret.”
As the Tarot deck includes cards of ill-fate, so Biddy’s tidings were not always happy, and the will of the faery is not always kind to the earthly folk. “There was a woman, Mrs. Leary,” Mrs. Sheridan told Lady Gregory, “had something wrong with her, and she went to Biddy Early. And nothing would do her but to bring my son along with her, and I was vexed… When Biddy Early saw him she said, ‘You’ll travel far, but wherever you go you’ll not escape them.’
The woman he went up with died about six months after, but he went to America, and he wasn’t long there when what was said came true, and he died. They followed him as far as he went.” The faeries, that is.
Now, the priests loathed Biddy and often brought fire and brimstone down on anyone seeking her help. A blacksmith told Lady Gregory, “The priests were against her and used to be taking the cloaks and the baskets from the country people to keep them back from going to her.” They even once attempted to put her on trial for witchcraft (she was the last in all of Ireland to be accused in court), but at the last minute all of the witnesses refused to testify.
Many stories are told of how she hexed a priest’s horse as her rode past her house (he had been whipping those on the road to see her) by having it run into the middle of the nearby river and refuse to go either backward or forward.
She got out of another stitch with the authorities when an eviction notice was served. The night of its execution, she was told by the faery (some say it was her dead husband) to tell the sheriffs, “Stay where you are,” when they came a-knocking. She did just that, and all four were stuck to their spot in the road as if their feet were encased in stone. After two hours she said, “Be away then!” and the enchantment was released. They never again brought ill will to the stout woman’s door.
Besides curing all manner of sick folk and cattle (a lost foul or a sour milking cow could mean destitution for a family), she would also trace the source of harmful magic and give the ailing a cure. Sometimes it was a thornbush planted in a faery road which was causing cattle to fall sick. Sometimes it was a curse of jealousy or ill-will wrought in the mind of someone who may not even know they had the power to do harm. This is a common theme in the Evil Eye lore. A certain Mrs. Crone, interviewed by Lady Gregory relates a tale about her healing by Biddy:
“I was myself digging potatoes out in that field beyond, and a woman passed by the road, but I heard her say nothing, but a pain came on my head and I fell down, and I had to go to my bed for three weeks. My mother went then to Biddy Early. Did you ever hear of her? And she looked in the blue bottle she had, and she said my name. And she saw me standing before her, and knew all about me and said, ‘Your daughter was digging potatoes with her husband in the field, and a woman passed by and she said, ‘It is as good herself is with a spade as the man,’’ for I was a young woman at the time. She gave my mother a bottle for me, and I took three drinks of it in the bed, and then I got up as well as I was before.”
A popular form of evil spell in Ireland was the use of a dead man’s hand (the infamous Hand of Glory, used the world over for all types of theft and deceit) to steal the butter right from the churn, or milk right from the cow. Biddy would find the culprit and stop the theft. (A popular way of doing this was for the inflicted family to put red hot coals beneath their churn, at which point the thieving conjurer would run up to the cottage in a terrible ruckus, screaming that they were being burned alive.)
This practice is further evidence of Biddy’s shamanic nature, as in most ancient cultures there are two types of magic workers—the good and the evil. The evil always work for their own benefit, seeking wealth and glory at the cost of others. Envy is their heart’s affliction, and that void is never filled.
The favorite trick of a greedy shaman is to bewitch unsuspecting folk with sickness to cause them to seek the enchanter’s help, at which point they would simply remove their own curse and collect the bounty. This is one reason that good shamans never accept money for their services, and are obliged to be generous with what they have and humble with what they don’t. Otherwise they might be accused of seeking wealth at the expense of others’ suffering.
It’s a shame that the Church failed to recognize this distinction, and early on put the black mark of witch on all those wise men and women who used the herbs of the mountains and valleys, as well as the prayers and visions through which the spirits guided them, to cure the ill and attempt to bring a heavenly grace into the earthly realm—a task which we all may hope is still not in vain. Lady Gregory recorded the words of a Mr. McCabe: “The priests were against her, but they were wrong. How could that be evil doing that was all charity and kindness and healing?”
Biddy’s old cottage is in ruins now, the stone walls broken and the thatched roof caved in. But when Terry Glavin visited its remains not so long ago, he found that not everyone had forgotten this miraculous woman. “Someone had draped a pretty red kerchief over a hole in a stone wall where a window had been. On the sill, in the nettles and the moss, there were offerings of the sort that people used to leave at saints’ wells. There was a pen, a little bottle, some coins, a package of stamps, and a ribbon.” Such tokens are important in humble folk traditions.
A few simple pins in a bottle were thought to keep evil spirits away. A coin thrown into a sacred spring brought good fortune, and even today a hopeful seeker might cast a penny into a wishing well. Biddy herself worked untold miracles with nothing but a little blue bottle (and their help, of course).
The emblems of this healthy and humble faery faith are not of golden rings and grand cathedrals, but of butter and bread, thimbles and tea. “Lay not up your treasures,” as they say. That’s something to keep in mind as both the pomp of the picking of the Pope (say that three times fast) and the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day cross our path this spring.
Source
http://weekinweird.com/2013/03/20/biddy-early-irelands-famous-witch-faery-friend/
Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland
"The first rigorous academic overview of witchcraft in Ireland, this publication is a very welcome addition to a growing corpus of scholarship on this relatively neglected aspect of Irish social and cultural history. For decades, St John D. Seymour’s Irish Witchcraft and Demonology (1) was the only academic text on the subject available to researchers.
Since the early 1970s the handful of scholars who have delved into research in this field have been mainly concerned with ascertaining why there was so little witch-hunting in Ireland, though significant case studies of Irish witchcraft trials, such as that of Florence Newton in Cork (1661) and the Islandmagee witches in Antrim (1711) have appeared since the early 2000s, lending greater depth to the analysis.
From the late 1990s, Raymond Gillespie’s work in mapping the magical, moral world of early modern Irish people has deepened our understanding of how witchcraft, ghosts, divination, prophesies and astrology and other forms of supernatural intervention in earthly affairs constituted an essential part of both Catholic and Protestant popular religion in Ireland.
Similarly, it has only been in recent decades that the non-Christian supernatural as part of popular religion alongside official Catholic doctrine in late 18th and 19th-century Ireland has been explored, with current historiography remaining largely silent on Protestant witchcraft belief during that period. In the context of this emerging scholarship,
Ronald Hutton and Andrew Sneddon have led the way in exploring the nature of early modern Irish witchcraft belief and the ways in which this differed from beliefs in the British Isles and continental Europe. This is Sneddon’s third book on the subject. While the central focus is on the period between the passing of the 1586 Witchcraft Act and its repeal in 1821, witchcraft and magic during the late medieval era and the 19th and early 20th centuries are also covered.
By examining these phenomena over such a lengthy period, he has made a very significant contribution towards advancing scholarship which traverses the usual chronological and conceptual boundaries imposed on Ireland’s past by historians, charting change and continuity over the centuries. The author’s deep understanding of his subject, his keen awareness of the nature of witchcraft and magic throughout the British Isles, his mastery of historiography, his familiarity with relevant source material and record compensation, and his adeptness in developing a methodology suited to the Irish context have resulted in an original, systematic study which goes a long way in addressing a significant lacuna in Irish historiography.
Sneddon is to be commended on producing a work of such substance notwithstanding the serious limitations imposed by a dearth of source material. In his introduction, he explains to those not familiar with the sorry history of archival collections in Ireland that combined with the destruction of records during the 17th and early 18th centuries, almost all Irish administrative and criminal manuscripts relating to the main criminal courts of Quarter Sessions, Assizes and court of King’s Bench) down to the mid-18th century are now lost, together with probate material and Church of Ireland parish and institutional records. Consequently, as another Irish historian Neal Garnham has observed, Irish historians have no choice but to reply on ‘aggregations of examples drawn from the contemporary press, or the wealth of anecdotal evidence contained in the private papers of prominent individuals’ (quoted p. 1).
To his credit, Sneddon has mined an extensive range of new, under used and under analysed primary sources ranging from church record, private correspondence, depositions, newspapers, periodical, printed pamphlets and books to ballads and almanacs, and woven highly fragmented material into a coherent, original narrative that is solidly grounded in archival evidence. His extensive endnotes and select bibliography serve as excellent starting points for further reading and research in this field.
The book also makes an original contribution in a number of other important respects. Because Sneddon’s approach is informed by recent developments in the study of European witchcraft and popular magic, this study veers away from representing the Irish experience as particularly exceptional. As befits a volume in this series edited by Jonathan Barry,
Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies which aims to illuminate lesser known or little studies aspects of the history of witchcraft and magic and to explore their relevance and influence from the medieval to the modern period, the interpretative framework for this study of witchcraft and magic in Ireland is the British Isles in particular, with Sneddon constantly comparing beliefs and practices in Ireland with those in England, Scotland and Wales. This is an especially strong feature of the study.
His analysis of belief in witchcraft and popular magic within the three main religious denominations (Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian) is another innovative feature of this work. Sneddon also breaks new ground by examining, for the first time, both harmful magic and its beneficial counterpart together, highlighting how cunning-folk or commercial, magical practitioners were recognised as part of both Catholic and Protestant popular culture in early modern and modern Ireland, just as they were in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe.
Sneddon states explicitly that this book is ‘by no means comprehensive but breaks the hard ground of the academic study of Irish witchcraft, lays a foundation upon which future studies can be built, and dispels the myth that witchcraft and popular magic were not an important part of Protestant and Catholic culture well into the modern era’ (pp. 3–4). The book is very well structured, comprising seven thematic chapters which follow a logical sequence.
Chapter one explores the nature of witchcraft belief beliefs across denominational and socio-cultural groups in early modern Ireland, offering a nuanced, contextualised overview of the very specific nature of Irish beliefs in magic and witchcraft. Presenting a different approach to interpretation of Irish witchcraft beliefs from those offered by Raymond Gillespie, Elewyn C. Lapoint and Ronald Hutton, and drawing heavily on scholarship on beliefs in contemporary England and Scotland, Sneddon argues that belief in potentially harmful magic, especially love magic, had a longer lineage in Ireland, ante-dating the 12th-century Anglo-Norman colonisation.
He also claims that the female butter-stealing witch was not, as existing historiography contends, a corrupt version of the malefic/demonic figure found in continental Europe but a distinct part of Gaelic Irish culture that dated from at least the early medieval era. Chapter two provides a brief overview of witchcraft legislation and legal administration in early modern Ireland, set within the comparative framework of the British Isles, with specific emphasis on the Irish witchcraft statute of 1586 which, as Sneddon points out, has hitherto tended to be cited rather than studied. He concludes that although almost identical to the 1563 English statute, the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act was part of a grander programme for conquest and consolidation of Elizabethan power in Ireland. The following two chapters examine how civil and ecclesiastical authorities interpreted the 1586 Act and the degree to which they punished practitioners of magic, be they harmful witches or benign cunning-folk.
Chapter three concentrates on cunning-folk whom Sneddon identifies as ‘a recognised, cross-denominational cultural phenomenon in early modern Ireland’ (p. 36). He concludes that such men and women specialised in three activities (finding lost goods or treasure, diagnosis and curing of witchcraft, and, in Gaelic Irish and Catholic regions, protection again fair attacks on livestock and humans) and that notwithstanding the illegality of popular magic, there is no evidence of any concerted drive by the civil authorities to suppress it. Furthermore, he argues, opposition to cunning-folk was expressed in Ireland in the same way as it was by demonologists in Europe and England. Chapter four tackles the question of why prosecution and execution rates for witchcraft in Ireland were so low compared with England, Scotland and continental Europe.
Sneddon is especially thoughtful in his engagement with explanations advanced by historians, notably Raymond Gillespie and Elwyn Lapoint, and while he is at pains to emphasise the limitations imposed by the dearth of sources, he makes excellent use of archival examples, particularly the 1641 Rising Depositions (Trinity College Dublin) and Presbyterian session minutes to offer some fresh insights into this complex phenomenon. Sneddon contends that although by the mid-17th century accusations of malefic, demonic witchcraft were being made by and against Presbyterian and Church of Ireland settlers, during the disturbances of the 1640s prosecutions rates were low owing to ‘serendipity, informal arbitration, execution, and imprisonment without trial’ (p. 61). Furthermore, he asserts, the Catholic majority did not make formal accusations of malefic witchcraft while the Protestant only did so late in the 17th century.
Chapter five focuses on witchcraft trials and demonic possession in Ireland. It begins by setting the record straight on what ought to be regarded as witchcraft trials, revising downwards the numbers identified by earlier scholars to a total of four recorded trials and one execution. After an overview of demonic possession in Britain and Ireland, Sneddon presents detailed analyses of two well-documented trials, the first in Youghal (1661) and the second in Islandmagee, County Antrim (1711) and affords cursory attention to the prosecution of Irish women for witchcraft abroad – in Scotland during wide scale witch-hunts (1590s, 1670s) and in America during the 1680s.
The focus then shifts to witchcraft in modern Ireland, with an exploration of popular belief in witchcraft in Protestant and Catholic communities after the witch trials, from the early 18th century onwards. Using public discourse, parliamentary and court records, as well as folklore sources, Sneddon traced the decline in educated belief in magic and witchcraft, and examines the attitude of the judicial authorities to cases involving witchcraft before and after repeal of the Irish Witchcraft Act in 1821.
This is done within the context of a wide ranging sketch of the decline, decriminalisation and legislative repeal in other countries in the British Isles and continental Europe. Sneddon argues that while the ‘Catholic clerical elite, in the eighteenth century at least, condemned many popular folk beliefs considered superstitious, traditional malefic, demonic witchcraft was still regarded as orthodox, along with various forms of the miraculous’ (p. 122).
He stresses how in contrast to Catholic Ireland, little research has been undertaken on magic or witchcraft in Irish Protestant communities during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In this context, his finding that witchcraft scepticism in public discourse was voiced by growing numbers of Irish Protestants post-1750 breaks new ground in deepening our understanding of denominational differences about witchcraft. Sneddon argues plausibly that this trend towards scepticism, combined with the legal authorities brushing aside allegations of witchcraft, marginalised belief in magic and witchcraft within educated culture to the point that the Irish Witchcraft Act ‘slipped quietly from the statute book in 1821’ (p. 123).
In the concluding chapter he contends that cunning-folk, who are widely recognised as having been part of popular culture in early modern society, continued to serve both Catholic and Protestant communities in Ireland as late as the 20th century. Having highlighted how other magical practitioners (namely fortune-tellers and magical healers) differed from cunning-folk, Sneddon combines case studies of individual practitioners, contemporary clerical reactions and newspaper reports to construct a picture of what cunning-folk did, who sought their assistance, and how they were deal with by the authorities once complaints were made against them.
Sneddon contends that from the mid-19th century, popular recourse to cunning-folk declined as legal action was taken against them by clients, usually for theft or obtaining money under false pretences, and at this trend was facilitated by changes in policing and legal administration. In addition, Sneddon highlights the contribution of both the Catholic and Presbyterian hierarchies who, on spiritual and religious grounds, warned their faithful against having any dealings with cunning-folk.
On reaching the end of this original, scholarly book, the reader will have gained an excellent, fresh insight into the nature of beliefs about magic and witchcraft in Ireland, and the various ways in which these both conformed to and differed from beliefs in the British Isles and continental Europe throughout this period. It is, therefore, extremely suitable as a textbook for university students and is likely to be the main scholarly work on this subject for several years to come."
Source
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1946
Since the early 1970s the handful of scholars who have delved into research in this field have been mainly concerned with ascertaining why there was so little witch-hunting in Ireland, though significant case studies of Irish witchcraft trials, such as that of Florence Newton in Cork (1661) and the Islandmagee witches in Antrim (1711) have appeared since the early 2000s, lending greater depth to the analysis.
From the late 1990s, Raymond Gillespie’s work in mapping the magical, moral world of early modern Irish people has deepened our understanding of how witchcraft, ghosts, divination, prophesies and astrology and other forms of supernatural intervention in earthly affairs constituted an essential part of both Catholic and Protestant popular religion in Ireland.
Similarly, it has only been in recent decades that the non-Christian supernatural as part of popular religion alongside official Catholic doctrine in late 18th and 19th-century Ireland has been explored, with current historiography remaining largely silent on Protestant witchcraft belief during that period. In the context of this emerging scholarship,
Ronald Hutton and Andrew Sneddon have led the way in exploring the nature of early modern Irish witchcraft belief and the ways in which this differed from beliefs in the British Isles and continental Europe. This is Sneddon’s third book on the subject. While the central focus is on the period between the passing of the 1586 Witchcraft Act and its repeal in 1821, witchcraft and magic during the late medieval era and the 19th and early 20th centuries are also covered.
By examining these phenomena over such a lengthy period, he has made a very significant contribution towards advancing scholarship which traverses the usual chronological and conceptual boundaries imposed on Ireland’s past by historians, charting change and continuity over the centuries. The author’s deep understanding of his subject, his keen awareness of the nature of witchcraft and magic throughout the British Isles, his mastery of historiography, his familiarity with relevant source material and record compensation, and his adeptness in developing a methodology suited to the Irish context have resulted in an original, systematic study which goes a long way in addressing a significant lacuna in Irish historiography.
Sneddon is to be commended on producing a work of such substance notwithstanding the serious limitations imposed by a dearth of source material. In his introduction, he explains to those not familiar with the sorry history of archival collections in Ireland that combined with the destruction of records during the 17th and early 18th centuries, almost all Irish administrative and criminal manuscripts relating to the main criminal courts of Quarter Sessions, Assizes and court of King’s Bench) down to the mid-18th century are now lost, together with probate material and Church of Ireland parish and institutional records. Consequently, as another Irish historian Neal Garnham has observed, Irish historians have no choice but to reply on ‘aggregations of examples drawn from the contemporary press, or the wealth of anecdotal evidence contained in the private papers of prominent individuals’ (quoted p. 1).
To his credit, Sneddon has mined an extensive range of new, under used and under analysed primary sources ranging from church record, private correspondence, depositions, newspapers, periodical, printed pamphlets and books to ballads and almanacs, and woven highly fragmented material into a coherent, original narrative that is solidly grounded in archival evidence. His extensive endnotes and select bibliography serve as excellent starting points for further reading and research in this field.
The book also makes an original contribution in a number of other important respects. Because Sneddon’s approach is informed by recent developments in the study of European witchcraft and popular magic, this study veers away from representing the Irish experience as particularly exceptional. As befits a volume in this series edited by Jonathan Barry,
Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies which aims to illuminate lesser known or little studies aspects of the history of witchcraft and magic and to explore their relevance and influence from the medieval to the modern period, the interpretative framework for this study of witchcraft and magic in Ireland is the British Isles in particular, with Sneddon constantly comparing beliefs and practices in Ireland with those in England, Scotland and Wales. This is an especially strong feature of the study.
His analysis of belief in witchcraft and popular magic within the three main religious denominations (Catholic, Church of Ireland, and Presbyterian) is another innovative feature of this work. Sneddon also breaks new ground by examining, for the first time, both harmful magic and its beneficial counterpart together, highlighting how cunning-folk or commercial, magical practitioners were recognised as part of both Catholic and Protestant popular culture in early modern and modern Ireland, just as they were in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe.
Sneddon states explicitly that this book is ‘by no means comprehensive but breaks the hard ground of the academic study of Irish witchcraft, lays a foundation upon which future studies can be built, and dispels the myth that witchcraft and popular magic were not an important part of Protestant and Catholic culture well into the modern era’ (pp. 3–4). The book is very well structured, comprising seven thematic chapters which follow a logical sequence.
Chapter one explores the nature of witchcraft belief beliefs across denominational and socio-cultural groups in early modern Ireland, offering a nuanced, contextualised overview of the very specific nature of Irish beliefs in magic and witchcraft. Presenting a different approach to interpretation of Irish witchcraft beliefs from those offered by Raymond Gillespie, Elewyn C. Lapoint and Ronald Hutton, and drawing heavily on scholarship on beliefs in contemporary England and Scotland, Sneddon argues that belief in potentially harmful magic, especially love magic, had a longer lineage in Ireland, ante-dating the 12th-century Anglo-Norman colonisation.
He also claims that the female butter-stealing witch was not, as existing historiography contends, a corrupt version of the malefic/demonic figure found in continental Europe but a distinct part of Gaelic Irish culture that dated from at least the early medieval era. Chapter two provides a brief overview of witchcraft legislation and legal administration in early modern Ireland, set within the comparative framework of the British Isles, with specific emphasis on the Irish witchcraft statute of 1586 which, as Sneddon points out, has hitherto tended to be cited rather than studied. He concludes that although almost identical to the 1563 English statute, the 1586 Irish Witchcraft Act was part of a grander programme for conquest and consolidation of Elizabethan power in Ireland. The following two chapters examine how civil and ecclesiastical authorities interpreted the 1586 Act and the degree to which they punished practitioners of magic, be they harmful witches or benign cunning-folk.
Chapter three concentrates on cunning-folk whom Sneddon identifies as ‘a recognised, cross-denominational cultural phenomenon in early modern Ireland’ (p. 36). He concludes that such men and women specialised in three activities (finding lost goods or treasure, diagnosis and curing of witchcraft, and, in Gaelic Irish and Catholic regions, protection again fair attacks on livestock and humans) and that notwithstanding the illegality of popular magic, there is no evidence of any concerted drive by the civil authorities to suppress it. Furthermore, he argues, opposition to cunning-folk was expressed in Ireland in the same way as it was by demonologists in Europe and England. Chapter four tackles the question of why prosecution and execution rates for witchcraft in Ireland were so low compared with England, Scotland and continental Europe.
Sneddon is especially thoughtful in his engagement with explanations advanced by historians, notably Raymond Gillespie and Elwyn Lapoint, and while he is at pains to emphasise the limitations imposed by the dearth of sources, he makes excellent use of archival examples, particularly the 1641 Rising Depositions (Trinity College Dublin) and Presbyterian session minutes to offer some fresh insights into this complex phenomenon. Sneddon contends that although by the mid-17th century accusations of malefic, demonic witchcraft were being made by and against Presbyterian and Church of Ireland settlers, during the disturbances of the 1640s prosecutions rates were low owing to ‘serendipity, informal arbitration, execution, and imprisonment without trial’ (p. 61). Furthermore, he asserts, the Catholic majority did not make formal accusations of malefic witchcraft while the Protestant only did so late in the 17th century.
Chapter five focuses on witchcraft trials and demonic possession in Ireland. It begins by setting the record straight on what ought to be regarded as witchcraft trials, revising downwards the numbers identified by earlier scholars to a total of four recorded trials and one execution. After an overview of demonic possession in Britain and Ireland, Sneddon presents detailed analyses of two well-documented trials, the first in Youghal (1661) and the second in Islandmagee, County Antrim (1711) and affords cursory attention to the prosecution of Irish women for witchcraft abroad – in Scotland during wide scale witch-hunts (1590s, 1670s) and in America during the 1680s.
The focus then shifts to witchcraft in modern Ireland, with an exploration of popular belief in witchcraft in Protestant and Catholic communities after the witch trials, from the early 18th century onwards. Using public discourse, parliamentary and court records, as well as folklore sources, Sneddon traced the decline in educated belief in magic and witchcraft, and examines the attitude of the judicial authorities to cases involving witchcraft before and after repeal of the Irish Witchcraft Act in 1821.
This is done within the context of a wide ranging sketch of the decline, decriminalisation and legislative repeal in other countries in the British Isles and continental Europe. Sneddon argues that while the ‘Catholic clerical elite, in the eighteenth century at least, condemned many popular folk beliefs considered superstitious, traditional malefic, demonic witchcraft was still regarded as orthodox, along with various forms of the miraculous’ (p. 122).
He stresses how in contrast to Catholic Ireland, little research has been undertaken on magic or witchcraft in Irish Protestant communities during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In this context, his finding that witchcraft scepticism in public discourse was voiced by growing numbers of Irish Protestants post-1750 breaks new ground in deepening our understanding of denominational differences about witchcraft. Sneddon argues plausibly that this trend towards scepticism, combined with the legal authorities brushing aside allegations of witchcraft, marginalised belief in magic and witchcraft within educated culture to the point that the Irish Witchcraft Act ‘slipped quietly from the statute book in 1821’ (p. 123).
In the concluding chapter he contends that cunning-folk, who are widely recognised as having been part of popular culture in early modern society, continued to serve both Catholic and Protestant communities in Ireland as late as the 20th century. Having highlighted how other magical practitioners (namely fortune-tellers and magical healers) differed from cunning-folk, Sneddon combines case studies of individual practitioners, contemporary clerical reactions and newspaper reports to construct a picture of what cunning-folk did, who sought their assistance, and how they were deal with by the authorities once complaints were made against them.
Sneddon contends that from the mid-19th century, popular recourse to cunning-folk declined as legal action was taken against them by clients, usually for theft or obtaining money under false pretences, and at this trend was facilitated by changes in policing and legal administration. In addition, Sneddon highlights the contribution of both the Catholic and Presbyterian hierarchies who, on spiritual and religious grounds, warned their faithful against having any dealings with cunning-folk.
On reaching the end of this original, scholarly book, the reader will have gained an excellent, fresh insight into the nature of beliefs about magic and witchcraft in Ireland, and the various ways in which these both conformed to and differed from beliefs in the British Isles and continental Europe throughout this period. It is, therefore, extremely suitable as a textbook for university students and is likely to be the main scholarly work on this subject for several years to come."
Source
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1946
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)