DB Graves > Recent Status Updates

But what is clear is that being a male, heterosexual, wealthy, white, able-bodied man at the pinnacle of state or church power is not the regular profile of a witch. That's a witch hunter.

[1949]
Bereng wrote: .."The Government [of British Imperial controlled Basutoland] has found a trick by which the chiefs can be taken by surprise and killed under the pretext of law." He called it "genocide."

pg 244: "Christianity's focus on loving empathy"

[Nelson murder trial, 1928-29]
It was not just the old witchcraft beliefs of Europe that were on the rise. So too were the beliefs in Eastern, indigenous, and alternative Christian spiritualities, which also appealed to a deep human need for magic--and were also on trial.

..[M]any were horrified that modern-day [1929] Americans believed in witchcraft at all. The New York novelist Theda Kenyon wrote with astonishment of Nelson's murder: it "startled most of the country out of the complacent belief that witches were as dead as Macbeth, and left bankers and housewives and truck drivers shaking their heads in amazement."

[France, 1731]
Crowds gathered outside Marie-Catherine's cell, ...to show their support. They did not believe [she] had committed sacrilege or blasphemy or had lied, so why should she be executed? ...
With a mob running through the streets, Parlement was under great strain. ...They had to appear just, or revolution might follow.

Among many methods of bewitchment, blowing into a person's mouth could be a magical act. It was a flexible spell, depending on the intention of the blower: it might bewitch someone, or grant them occult powers. It could force unwilling people into an infatuation with their bewitcher or render them vulnerable to attack.

[Barbados ~1690s]
Some settlers were Catholics, Puritans, Quakers, or Jews. But increasingly the dominant religious culture as a severe Anglicanism. There were attacks on the Quakers and Jews, with greater accompanying oppression of enslaved people.

Although Arawak men had multiple wives, there was a balance of power in the extended household since husbands joined the extended families of their wives rather than the reverse. A husband became a subject of his wife's father, so daughters were prized as bringing new workers into the family.
Note to self: do more research about the logistics of this.

pg 63: Witch trials were not just misogynistic festivals of torture and hatred; they also directly facilitated the building of empire.

pg 93: In England, familiar spirits were thought to suck blood from witches with whom they'd made a Satanic pact, both as a sign of that agreement and as payment for doing harm. They would report their evil deeds to the witch and get as sip of blood as a reward.

In any case, I didn't know the answer. The story ended where it ended.

iii: "What was I talking about? Oh, right; the creative process and the questions people ask me about it. How do I do world-building? Fucked if I know. I've come up with an answer that sounds plausible, but is it really true? How do I know when a story is done? When the shape, arc, and trajectory have all brought the story to its end. There, does that help?"

i: "...I'm perpetually astounded I can complete anything at all."

i:"Readers often ask me questions that presume I write with some overarching plan. That I know what my themes, metaphors, and outcomes will be. There are writers who do write that way. Whereas my brain frequently resists linearity. I cobble together a messy first draft with scenes frequently written out of order and no plan for them in mind. Then I figure out as much of that stuff as I can subsequent revisions..."

So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.

This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned. Or if you're scarred, you're scarred. People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. ... Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love...

Happy birthday, little one and wise; you got there early, the easy way. The world knew you before you knew the world. The gods in their boyish, brutal games bore you like a torch, a firebrand, recklessly over the heavens, to the glance of the one God, fathomless and mild, dissolving you into the sheets.

We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home.

pg 60: ...meagre, baffling, and infuriating answers to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here?

pg 61: We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel's worth of sense into our days.

Purchased because I wanted to treat myself to an odd little book. Owner of the second-hand book shop said it was a good choice and that it had the most beautiful description of a dying moth I'd ever read.
He was correct.

While we spend more and more time looking at screens that watch us, we simultaneously get hung up on the idea of privacy. But this, too, is a con!
.... Privacy! Turning more inward! Watching movies in the privacy of your own home! Rejecting the collective experience of the movie theatre!
Collective experience fosters collective action! Privacy fosters privitization!

"Oh my god! We don't applaud the rich for the way they spend their money!"

"You can applaud the rich when they get a bunch of their rich friends on a yacht and sink it!"

the "hallowaris" or saints

James [VI in his portrait] looks like he's waiting to mug old ladies, which of course is one way of looking at witch trials.

26:[James VI] had to appoint caretaker officials..., including his cousin Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, whose chief skill hitherto had been killing other courtiers in duels.

27:These women..., had caused the sea storms that had afflicted Anna's fleet. It was thought they had done it by sending demons floating out to the ships in barrels, who attacked the hulls.

As a celibate monk, Heinrich knew little of the women he suspected. He imagined them shallow, vain creatures, seductive, untrustworthy, obsessed with sex and power. Like the incel culture that has grown up in our digital age, some medieval churchmen sought a way to blame women for their sexuality while simultaneously expressing their own fascination with it.
re: Heinrich Kramer, author of Mallues Maleficarum